Marc Andreessen
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So a company that starts in an existing industry and goes directly to the customer in that industry. The early examples there were like Uber and Lyft and Airbnb. And then that model is kind of elaborating out. The AI thing is actually a reversion on that for now because most of the AI business right now is actually in cloud provision of AI APIs for other people to build on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, I think most of the money I think probably will be in whatever, yeah, your AI financial advisor or your AI doctor or your AI lawyer or, you know, take your pick of whatever the domain is. And what's interesting is, you know, the Valley kind of does everything. The entrepreneurs kind of elaborate every possible idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so there will be a set of companies that like make AI something that can be purchased and used by large law firms. And then there will be other companies that just go direct to market as an AI lawyer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So the great thing about the really great founders is they don't take any advice. So if you find yourself listening to advice, maybe you shouldn't do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So what makes a great founder is super smart, coupled with super energetic, coupled with super courageous. I think it's some of those three.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The first two are traits, and the third one is a choice, I think. Courage is a choice. Well, because courage is a question of pain tolerance, right? So how many times are you willing to get punched in the face before you quit? Yeah. And... Here's maybe the biggest thing people don't understand about what it's like to be a startup founder is it gets very romanticized, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And even when they fail, it still gets romanticized about what a great adventure it was. But the reality of it is most of what happens is people telling you no, and then they usually follow that with you're stupid, right? No, I will not come to work for you. I will not leave my cushy job at Google to come work for you. No, I'm not going to buy your product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, I'm not going to run a story about your company. No, I'm not this, that, the other thing. And so a huge amount of what people have to do is just get used to just getting punched. And the reason people don't understand this is because when you're a founder, you cannot let on that this is happening because it will cause people to think that you're weak and they'll lose faith in you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you have to pretend that you're having a great time when you're dying inside, right? You're just in misery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What do they do? Yeah, that's the thing. It's like it is a level. This is actually one of the conclusions, I think. For most of these people on a risk-adjusted basis, it's probably an irrational act. They could probably be more financially successful on average if they just got a real job at a big company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But some people just have an irrational need to do something new and build something for themselves. And some people just can't tolerate having bosses. Oh, here's a fun thing is how do you reference check founders? Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you call it, you know, normally you reference check your time hiring somebody as you call the bosses there and you know, and you find out if they were good employees and now you're trying to reference check Steve jobs. Right. And it's like, Oh God, he was terrible. You know, he was a terrible employee. He never did what we told him to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, ideally, ideally what you want is I will go, I would like to go to work for that person. Um, he worked for me here and now I'd like to work for him. Now, unfortunately, most people can't. Their egos can't handle that. So they won't say that. But that's the ideal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I think the other big thing is you see people sometimes who say, I want to start a company. And then they kind of work through the process of coming up with an idea. And generally, those don't work as well as the case where somebody has the idea first. And then they kind of realize that there's an opportunity to build a company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then they just turn out to be the right kind of person to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I would say specific. Specifically, yes, specifics. Because for the first five years, you don't get to have vision. You just got to build something people want and you got to figure out a way to sell it to them. It's very practical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Like it's got to, the first product's got to work by which I mean, like it has to technically work, but then it has to actually fit into the category in the customer's mind of something that they want. And then, and then by the way, the other part is they have to want to pay for it. Like somebody has got to pay the bills.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so you've got to figure out how to price it and whether you can actually extract the money. Yeah. So usually it is much more predictable. Success is never predictable, but it's more predictable if you start with a great idea and then back into starting the company. So this is what we did. We had Mosaic before we had Netscape. The Google guys had the Google search engine working at Stanford.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Actually, there's tons of examples where Pierre Omidyar had eBay working before he left his previous job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. By the way, it's also far easier to raise money, right? Like the ideal pitch that we receive is here's the thing that works. Would you like to invest in our company or not? Like that's so much easier than here's 30 slides with a dream, right? And then we have this concept called the idea maze, which Balaji Srinivasan came up with when he was with us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So then there's this thing, this goes to mythology, which is, you know, there's a mythology that kind of, you know, these ideas, you know, kind of arrive like magic or people kind of stumble into them. It's like eBay with the pest dispensers or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, the reality usually with the big successes is that the founder has been chewing on the problem for five or 10 years before they start the company. And they often worked on it in school, um, or they even experimented on it when they were a kid. Um, and they've been kind of training up over that period of time to be able to do the thing. So they're like a true domain expert.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it sort of sounds like mom and apple pie, which is, yeah, you want to be a domain expert in what you're doing, but the mythology is so strong of like, oh, I just had this idea in the shower and now I'm doing it. It's generally not that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, we call it the idea maze because the idea maze basically is like there's all these permutations. Like for any idea, there's like all these different permutations. Who should the customer be? What shape forms the product have? And how should we take it to market and all these things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so the really smart founders have thought through all these scenarios by the time they go out to raise money. And they have like detailed answers on every one of those fronts because they put so much thought into it. The sort of more haphazard founders haven't thought about any of that. And it's the detailed ones who tend to do much better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, the best reason is just because you can't tolerate not doing it, right? Like this is the kind of thing where if you have to be advised into doing it, you probably shouldn't do it. And so it's probably the opposite, which is you just have such a burning sense of this has to be done. I have to do this. I have no choice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's going to lead to a lot of pain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, look, so it's going to put you in a social tunnel for sure, right? So you're going to like, you know, there's this game you can play on Twitter, which is you can do any whiff of the idea that there's basically any such thing as work-life balance and that people should actually work hard and everybody gets mad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But like the truth is, like all the successful founders are working 80-hour weeks and they're working, you know, they form various... very strong social bonds with the people they work with. They tend to lose a lot of friends on the outside or put those friendships on ice. That's just the nature of the thing. For most people, that's worth the trade-off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The advantage maybe younger founders have is maybe they have less. For example, if they're not married yet or don't have kids yet, that's an easier thing to bite off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, you definitely can. Yeah. Many of the most successful founders are second, third, fourth-time founders. They're in their 30s, 40s, 50s. The good news with being an older founder is you know more. and you know a lot more about what to do, which is very helpful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The problem is, okay, now you've got like a spouse and a family and kids, and like, you've gotta go to the baseball game and like, you can't go to the baseball, you know? And so it's,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So, it's basically, I would say it's autodidact. So, it's going down the rabbit holes. So, it's a combination. I kind of allude to it in that quote. It's a combination of breadth and depth. And so, I go broad by the nature of what I do. I go broad, but then I tend to go deep in a rabbit hole for a while, read everything I can, and then come out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I might not revisit that rabbit hole for another decade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The Sebastian biography of Lenin is extraordinary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's incredible, yeah, it's incredible. I actually think it's the single best book on the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Well, and then you get into this thing also, which is like, you know, there's the part of the LLM that just basically is doing prediction based on past data. But there's also the part of the LLM where it's evolving circuitry, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So this is a fascinating book. This one's free. It's free, by the way. It's a book from the 1860s. You can download it or you can buy prints of it. But it was this guy who was a professor at the Sorbonne in the 1860s. And he was apparently a savant on antiquity, on Greek and Roman antiquity. And the reason I say that is because his sources are 100% original Greek and Roman sources.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So he wrote basically a history of Western civilization from on the order of 4,000 years ago to basically the present times, entirely working on original Greek and Roman sources. And what he was specifically trying to do was he was trying to reconstruct from the stories of the Greeks and the Romans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
He was trying to reconstruct what life in the West was like before the Greeks and the Romans, which was in the civilization known as the Indo-Europeans. And the short answer is, and this is sort of circa 2000 BC to sort of 500 BC, kind of that 1500 year stretch where civilization developed. And his conclusion was basically cults. They were basically cults and civilization was organized into cults.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And the intensity of the cults was like a million fold beyond anything that we would recognize today. Like it was a level of all encompassing belief and an action around religion. That was at a level of extremeness that we wouldn't even recognize it. And so specifically, he tells the story of basically there were three levels of cults.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Inside it, it's evolving, you know, neurons, functions, be able to do math and be able to, you know, and, you know, some people believe that, you know, over time, you know, if you keep feeding these things enough data and enough processing cycles, they'll eventually evolve an entire internal world model, right? And they'll have like a complete understanding of physics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There was the family cult, the tribal cult, and then the city cult as society scaled up. And then each cult was a joint cult of family gods, which were ancestor gods, and then nature gods. Um, and then you are bonding into a family, a tribe or a city was based on your adherence to that religion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, people, uh, who were not of your family tribe city worship different gods, which gave you not just the right, but the responsibility to kill them on site.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Hardcore. By the way, shocking development. I did not realize there's zero concept of individual rights. Even up through the Greeks and even in the Romans, they didn't have the concept of individual rights. The idea that as an individual, you have some right, it's just like, nope. And you look back and you're just like, wow, that's just crazily fascist in a degree that we wouldn't recognize today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But it's like, well, they were living under extreme pressure for survival. And the theory goes you could not have people running around making claims to individual rights when you're just trying to get your tribe through the winter. You need hardcore command and control. And actually, through a modern political lens, those cults were basically both fascist and communist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They were fascist in terms of social control, and then they were communist in terms of economics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, so my conclusion from this book, so the way we naturally think about the world we live in today is like we basically have such an improved version of everything that came before us, right? Like we have basically, we've figured out all these things around morality and ethics and democracy and all these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And like they were basically stupid and retrograde and were like smart and sophisticated. And we've improved all this. After reading that book, I now believe in many ways the opposite, which is no, actually, we are still running in that original model. We're just running in an incredibly diluted version of it. So we're still running basically in cults.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's just our cults are at like a thousandth or a millionth the level of intensity, right? And so just to take religions... you know, the modern experience of a Christian in our time, even somebody who considers him a devout Christian is just a shadow of the level of intensity of somebody who belonged to a religion back in that period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then by the way, we have, it goes back to our AI discussion, we then sort of endlessly create new cults. Like we're trying to fill the void, right? And the void is a void of bonding. Okay. Living in their era, like everybody living today, transported in that era would view it as just completely intolerable in terms of the loss of freedom and the level of basically fascist control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So when they have the computational capability, right, then there's for sure an opportunity to generate like fresh signal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
However, every single person in that era, and he really stresses this, they knew exactly where they stood. They knew exactly where they belonged. They knew exactly what their purpose was. They knew exactly what they needed to do every day. They knew exactly why they were doing it. They had total certainty about their place in the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Absolutely, overwhelmingly, undisputably, undeniably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, because we don't have that. We are ungrounded. We are uncentered. And we all feel it, right? And that's why we reach for, you know, it's why we still reach for religion. It's why we reach for, you know, people start to take on, you know, let's say, you know, a faith in science, maybe beyond where they should put it. And by the way, sports teams, they're like a tiny little version of a cult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And Apple keynotes are a tiny little version of a cult, right? And political. And there's full-blown cults on both sides of the political spectrum right now operating in plain sight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Compared to what it used to. I mean, we would today consider full-blown. But yes, they're at, I don't know, a hundred thousandth or something of the intensity of what people had back then. Yeah. So we live in a world today that in many ways is more advanced and moral and so forth. And it's certainly a lot nicer, much nicer world to live in. But we live in a world that's like very washed out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's like everything has become very colorless and gray as compared to how people used to experience things, which is, I think, why we're so prone to reach for drama. There's something in us deeply evolved where we want that back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So the tools that are available today, I mean, are just like, I sometimes, you know, I sometimes bore, you know, kids by describing like what it was like to go look up a book, you know, to try to like discover a fact. And, you know, in the old days, the 1970s, 1980s, you go to the library and the card catalog and the whole thing, you go through all that work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then the book is checked out and you have to wait two weeks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And like, like to be in a world, not only where you can get the answer to any question, but also the world now, you know, the AI world where you've got like the assistant that will help you do anything, help you teach, learn anything like your ability, both to learn and also to produce is just like, I don't know, a million fold beyond what it used to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I have a, I have a blog post I've been wanting to write, which I call where, where are the hyperproductive people? Like with these tools, like there should be authors that are writing like hundreds or thousands of like outstanding books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Artists, musicians, right? Why aren't musicians producing a thousand times the number of songs, right? Like the tools are spectacular. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think it might be distraction. Distraction. It's so easy to just sit and consume that I think people get distracted from production. But if you wanted to, as a young person, if you wanted to really stand out, you could get on a hyper productivity curve very early on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's a great story in Roman history of Pliny the Elder, who was this legendary statesman, died in the Vesuvius eruption trying to rescue his friends. But he was famous both for basically being a polymath, but also being an author. And he wrote apparently hundreds of books. Most of which have been lost, but he wrote all these encyclopedias.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he literally would be reading and writing all day long, no matter what else was going on. And so he would travel with four slaves, and two of them were responsible for reading to him, and two of them were responsible for taking dictation. And so like he'd be going cross country and like literally he would be writing books like all the time. And apparently they were spectacular.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's only a few that have survived, but apparently they were amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. And there are examples like there are, you know, there's this guy, Judge, what's his name? Posner, who wrote like 40 books and was also a great federal judge. You know, there's our friend Balaji, I think it's like this. He's one of these, you know, where his output is just prodigious. And so it's like, yeah, I mean, with these tools, why not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I kind of think we're at this interesting kind of freeze frame moment where like these tools are not in everybody's hands and everybody's just kind of staring at them trying to figure out what to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, I, I, maybe it's just, and I, I look, I think people, I think people are wired differently. So I think it's hard to generalize this kind of thing, but I'm, I am much happier and more satisfied when I'm fully committed to something. So I'm very much in favor of imbalance. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Now I happen to have whatever twist of personality traits lead that in non-destructive dimensions, including the fact that I've actually, I now no longer do the 10-4 plan. I stopped drinking. I do the caffeine, but not the alcohol. So there's something in my personality where I, whatever maladaption I have is inclining me towards productive things, not unproductive things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I think happiness... I don't think happiness is the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think satisfaction is the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, deeper. So happiness is, you know, a walk in the woods at sunset, an ice cream cone, a kiss. The first ice cream cone is great. The thousandth ice cream cone, not so much. At some point, the walks in the woods get boring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think satisfaction is a deeper thing, which is like having found a purpose and fulfilling it, being useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That I'm fully satisfying my faculties, that I'm fully delivering on the gifts that I've been given, that I'm making the world better, that I'm contributing to the people around me, and that I can look back and say, wow, that was hard, but it was worth it. I think generally seems to lead people in a better state than pursuit of pleasure, pursuit of quote unquote happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think the founders, the founding fathers in the US threw this off kilter when they used the phrase pursuit of happiness. I think they should have said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If they said pursuit of satisfaction, we might live in a better world today. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, you can tell when you're talking to somebody, you can tell sometimes you have a conversation. You're like, wow, this person does not have any original thoughts. They are basically echoing things that other people have told them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They could have tweaked the Second Amendment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I think, and I think there, I mean, look, I think Elon is, I don't think I'm even a great example, but I think Elon would be the great example of this, which is like, you know, look, he's a guy who from every, every day of his life from the day he started making money at all, he just plows into the, into the next thing. And so I think, I think money is definitely an enabler for satisfaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Money applied to happiness leads people down very dark paths, very destructive avenues. Money applied to satisfaction, I think could be, is a real tool. Um, I always look, by the way, I was like, uh, you know, Elon is the case study for behavior. But the other thing that I thought he's really made me think is Larry, Larry page was asked one time what his approach to philanthropy was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he said, Oh, I'm just my, my philanthropic plan is just give all the money to Elon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so the core of it is he's back to the future. So he is doing the most leading edge things in the world, but with a really deeply old school approach. And so to find comparisons to Elon, you need to go to like Henry Ford and Thomas Watson and Howard Hughes and Andrew Carnegie. right? Um, Leland Stanford, um, John D Rockefeller, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's other people you got in conversation with where it's like, wow, like they have a model in their head of how the world works and it's a different model than mine. And they're saying things that I don't expect. And so I need to now understand how their model of the world differs from my model of the world. And then that's how I learned something fundamental. right underneath the words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You need to go to the, what we're called the bourgeois capitalists, like the hardcore business owner operators who basically built, you know, basically built industrialized society, um, Vanderbilt. Um, and it's a level of hands-on commitment, um, and, uh, depth, um, in the business, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
um, coupled with an absolute priority, uh, towards truth, um, and towards, um, kind of put it science and technology, uh, down to first principles. That is just like absolute. It was just like unbelievably absolute. He really is ideal that he's only ever talking to engineers. Like he does not tolerate bullshit. He has the most bullshit tolerance anybody I've ever met.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, he wants ground truth on every single topic. Um, and he runs his businesses directly day to day devoted to getting to ground truth in every single topic. so uh you think it was a good decision for him to buy twitter i have developed a view in life did not second guess elon musk i know this is gonna sound crazy and unfounded but well i mean uh he's got a quite a track record
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, look, the car was a crazy... I mean, the car was... I mean, look.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Starting a new car company in the United States of America, the last time somebody really tried to do that was the 1950s. And it was called Tucker Automotive. And it was such a disaster. They made a movie about what a disaster it was. And then rockets. Like, who does that? Like, that's... There's obviously no way to start a new rocket company like those days are over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then to do those at the same time. So after he pulled those two off, like... Okay, fine. Like... Like, this is one of my areas of like, whatever opinions I had about that is just like, okay, clearly are not relevant. Like this is, you just, at some point you just like bet on the person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Oh, yeah. I mean, look, he drives resentment. He is a magnet for resentment. His critics are the most miserable, resentful people in the world. It's almost a perfect match of the most idealized technologist of the century coupled with just his critics are just bitter as can be. I mean, it's sort of very darkly comic to watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
He's running a cult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I don't know the answer to that. I think the meaning of... The closest I get to it is what I said about satisfaction. So it's basically like, okay, we were given what we have. We should basically do our best. What's the role of love in that mix? I mean, what's the point of life if you're, yeah, without love? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And look, like taking care of people is like a wonderful thing. Like, you know, mentality, you know, there are pathological forms of taking care of people, but there's also a very fundamental, you know, kind of aspect of taking care of people. Like, for example, I happen to be somebody who believes that capitalism and taking care of people are actually, they're actually the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Somebody once said capitalism is how you take care of people you don't know. Right. Right. And so like, yeah, I think it's like deeply woven into the whole thing. You know, there's a long conversation to be had about that, but yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
David Friedman says there's only three ways to get somebody to do something for somebody else. Love, money, and force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you can experiment with this now. I do this for fun. So you can tell GPT-4, you know, whatever, debate X, you know, X and Y, communism and fascism or something. And it'll go for, you know, a couple of pages and then inevitably it wants the parties to agree. And so they will come to a common understanding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it's very funny if they're like, if these are like emotionally inflammatory topics, because they're like somehow the machine is just, you know, it figures out a way to make them agree. But it doesn't have to be like that because you can add to the prompt. I do not want the conversation to come to agreement. In fact, I want it to get more stressful and argumentative as it goes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I want tension to come out. I want them to become actively hostile to each other. I want them to not trust each other, take anything at face value. And it will do that. It's happy to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You can steer it. Or you could steer it and you could say, I want it to get as tense and argumentative as possible, but still not involve any misrepresentation. You could say, I want both sides to have good faith. You could say, I want both sides to not be constrained to good faith.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In other words, you can set the parameters of the debate and it will happily execute whatever path, because for it, it's just like predicting. It's totally happy to do either one. It doesn't have a point of view. it has a default way of operating, but it's happy to operate in the other realm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and so like, and this is how I, when I want to learn about a contentious issue, this is what I do now is like, this is what I, this is what I ask it to do. And I'll often ask it to go through five, six, seven, you know, different, you know, sort of continuous prompts and basically, okay, argue that out in more detail. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, this, this argument is becoming too polite, you know, make it more, you know, make it tensor. Um, and yeah, it's thrilled to do it. So it has the capability for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so several layers to the question. So one is one of the things that an LLM is good at is actually de-biasing. And so you can feed it a news article and you can tell it strip out the bias. Yeah, that's nice, right? And it actually does it. Like it actually knows how to do that because it knows how to do, among other things, it actually knows how to do sentiment analysis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so it knows how to pull out the emotionality. And so that's one of the things you can do. It's very suggestive of the sense here that there's real potential in this issue. You know, I would say, look, the second thing is there's this issue of hallucination, right? And there's a long conversation that we could have about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so it's basically, well, so it's sort of, hallucination is what we call it when we don't like it. Creativity is what we call it when we do like it, right? And, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right, and so when the engineers talk about it, they're like, this is terrible, it's hallucinating, right? If you have artistic inclinations, you're like, oh my God, we've invented creative machines for the first time in human history. This is amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, bullshitters, but also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There are shades of gray, though. It's interesting. So we had this conversation where, you know, we're looking at my firm at AI and lots of domains, and one of them is the legal domain. So we had this conversation with this big law firm about how they're thinking about using this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And we went in with the assumption that an LLM that was going to be used in the legal industry would have to be 100% truthful, verified, you know. There's this case where this lawyer apparently submitted a GPT-generated brief and it had fake legal case citations in it and the judge is going to get his law license stripped or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We just assumed it's like, obviously, they're going to want the super literal one that never makes anything up, not the creative one. But actually they said, what the law firm basically said is, yeah, that's true at like the level of individual briefs, but they said when you're actually trying to figure out like legal arguments, right? Like you actually want to be creative, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You don't, again, there's creativity and then there's like making stuff up. what's the line? You want it to explore different hypotheses. You want to do the legal version of improv or something like that, where you want to float different theories of the case and different possible arguments for the judge and different possible arguments for the jury.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
By the way, different routes through the history of all the case law. And so they said, actually, for a lot of what we want to use it for, we actually want it in creative mode. And then basically, we just assume that we're going to have to cross-check all the specific citations. And so I think there's going to be more shades of gray in here than people think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then I just add to that, you know, another one of these trillion dollar kind of questions is ultimately, you know, sort of the verification thing. And so, you know, will LLMs be evolved from here to be able to do their own factual verification? Will you have sort of add-on functionality like Wolfram Alpha, right? Where, you know, and other plugins where that's the way you do the verification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, another, by the way, another idea is you might have a community of LLMs on any, you know, so for example, you might have the creative LLM and then you might have the literal LLM fact check it. Right. And so there's a variety of different technical approaches that are being applied to solve the hallucination problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, some people like Jan LeCun argue that this is inherently an unsolvable problem. But most of the people working in the space, I think, think that there's a number of practical ways to kind of kind of corral this in a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And in fact, Wikipedia today is still not deterministically correct, right? So you cannot take to the bank, right, every single thing on every single page, but it is probabilistically correct, right? And specifically the way I describe Wikipedia to people, it is more likely that Wikipedia is right than any other source you're going to find.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's this old question, right? Of like, okay, like, are we looking for perfection? Are we looking for something that asymptotically approaches perfection? Are we looking for something that's just better than the alternatives? And Wikipedia, right, has exactly your point, has proven to be like overwhelmingly better than people thought. And I think that's where this ends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then underneath all this is the fundamental question of where you started, which is, okay, what is truth? How do we get to truth? How do we know what truth is? And we live in an era in which an awful lot of people are very confident that they know what the truth is. And I don't really buy into that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I think the history of the last 2,000 years or 4,000 years of human civilization is actually getting to the truth is actually a very difficult thing to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Sure, but like, you know, we came up with communism before the internet somehow. which I would say had rather larger issues than anything we're dealing with today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And its theoretical structure, it had real issues. It had a very deep fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and economics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They were extremely confident. And my point is they were very confident 3,900 years into what you would presume to be evolution towards the truth. Yeah. And so my assessment is... My assessment is, number one, there's no need for the Hegelian dialectic to actually converge towards the truth. Like, apparently not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Number one, I think it's just really difficult. Historically, who gets to decide what the truth is? It's either the king or the priest. And so we don't live in an era anymore of kings or priests dictating it to us. And so we're kind of on our own. And so my typical thing is we just need a huge amount of humility.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And we need to be very suspicious of people who claim that they have the capital truth. And then we need to have... Look, the good news is the Enlightenment has bequeathed us with a set of techniques to be able to presumably get closer to truth through the scientific method and rationality and observation and experimentation and hypothesis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And, you know, we need to continue to embrace those even when they give us answers we don't like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
how is anything testable at all especially that involves like human nature things like this it's not physics here's a question a friend of mine just asked me on this topic so suppose you had llms in equivalent of gpt4 even 5678 suppose you had them in the 1600s yeah and galileo comes up for trial yeah right and you ask the llm like is galileo right yeah like what does it answer Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And one theory is it answers, no, that he's wrong because the overwhelming majority of human thought up until that point was that he was wrong. And so therefore that's, what's in the training data. Yeah. Um, another way of thinking about it is, well, this efficiently advanced LLM will have evolved the ability to actually check the math. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and we'll actually say, actually, no, actually, you know, you may not want to hear it, but he's right. Now, if, you know, the church at that time was, you know, on the LLM, they would have given it human, you know, human, feedback to prohibit it from answering that question. And so I like to take it out of our current context because that makes it very clear. Those same questions apply today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
This is exactly the point of a huge amount of the human feedback training that's actually happening with these LLMs today. This is a huge debate that's happening about whether open source AI should be legal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
AI alignment, which everybody is like, oh, that sounds great. Alignment with what? Human values. Who's human values? Who's human values? And we're in this mode of social and popular discourse. What do you think of when you read a story in the press right now and they say, XYZ made a baseless claim about some topic? And there's one group of people who are like, aha, they're doing fact-checking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's another group of people that are like, every time the press says that, it's now a tick and that means that they're lying. We're in this social context where the level to which a lot of people in positions of power have become very certain that they're in a position to determine the truth for the entire population is like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
there's like there's like some bubble that has formed around that idea and at least it flies completely in the face of everything i was ever trained about science and about reason um and strikes me as like you know deeply offensive um and incorrect what would you say about the state of journalism just on that topic today are we are we in a temporary kind of uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You have to always think about the counterfactual in these things, which is like, okay, because these questions, right, this question heads towards, it's like, okay, the impact of social media and the undermining of truth and all this, but then you want to ask the question of like, okay, what if we had had the modern media environment
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
including cable news and including social media and Twitter and everything else in 1939 or 1941, right? Or 1910 or 1865 or 1850 or 1776, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I'll just take a simple example. Like how would President Kennedy have been interpreted with what we know now about all the things Kennedy was up to? Like, how would he have been experienced by the body politic with a social media context, right? Like, how would LBJ have been experienced? By the way, how would, you know, like, many meant FDR, like the New Deal, the Great Depression.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, I mean, look, to this day, there are lots of very interesting real questions around like how America, you know, got, you know, basically involved in World War II and who did what when and the operations of British intelligence in American soil and did FDR, this, that, Pearl Harbor, you know. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Woodrow Wilson ran for, you know, his candidacy was run on an anti-war, you know, he ran on the platform and not getting involved in World War I. Somehow that switched, you know, like... And I'm not even making a value judgment on any of these things. I'm just saying the way that our ancestors experienced reality was, of course, mediated through centralized top-down control at that point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you ran those realities again with the media environment we have today, the reality would be experienced very, very differently. And then, of course, that intermediation would cause the feedback loops to change, and then reality would obviously play out. Do you think it would be very different? Yeah, it has to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It has to be just because it's all so, I mean, just look at what's happening today. I mean, just, I mean, the most obvious thing is just the collapse. And here's another opportunity to argue that this is not the internet causing this, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Here's a big thing happening today, which is Gallup does this thing every year where they do, they pull for trust in institutions in America and they do it across all the different, everything from military to clergy and big business and the media and so forth. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And basically, there's been a systemic collapse in trust in institutions in the US, almost without exception, basically, since essentially the early 1970s. There's two ways of looking at that, which is, oh my God, we've lost this old world in which we could trust institutions, and that was so much better, because that should be the way the world runs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The other way of looking at it is we just know a lot more now, and the great mystery is why those numbers aren't all zero.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right? Because now we know so much about how these things operate, and they're not that impressive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so this goes to the thing, which is like, okay, had we had the media environment that we've had between the 1970s and today, if we had that in the 30s and 40s or 1900s, 1910s, I think there's no question reality would turn out different if only because everybody would have known to not trust the institutions, which would have changed their level of credibility, their ability to control circumstances.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Therefore, the circumstances would have had to change. Yeah. And it would have been a feedback loop process. In other words, your experience of reality changes reality, and then reality changes your experience of reality. It's a two-way feedback process, and media is the intermediating force between that. So change the media environment, change reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so just as a consequence, I think it's just really hard to say, oh, things worked a certain way then and they work a different way now. And then therefore, people were smarter then or better then or, by the way, dumber then or not as capable then. We make all these really light and casual comparisons of ourselves to previous generations of people. We draw judgments all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I just think it's really hard to do any of that because if we... If we put ourselves in their shoes with the media that they had at that time, I think we probably most likely would have been just like them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, even just the whole concept of the chat UI might not be the, like the chat UI is just the first whack at this and maybe that's the dominant thing, but look, maybe we don't know yet. Maybe the experience most people with LLMs is just a continuous feed. you know, maybe it's more of a passive feed and you just are getting a constant, like running commentary on everything happening in your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it's just helping you kind of interpret and understand everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What to say in a job interview. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Next sentence. Yeah. At that level. Yeah. I mean, yes. So technically, now, whether we want that or not is an open question, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, look. this gets this whole thing of like, so, you know, the chat interface has this whole concept of prompt engineering, right? So it's good for prompts. Well, it turns out one of the things that a lot of times are really good at is writing prompts, right? And so like, what if you just outsourced, and by the way, you could run this experiment today. You could hook this up to do this today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The latency is not good enough to do it real time in a conversation, but you could run this experiment and you just say, look, every 20 seconds, you could just say, you know, you know, tell me what the optimal prompt is and then ask yourself that question to give me the result.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then as you, as you, exactly to your point, as you add, there will be, there will be these systems are going to have the ability to be learned and updated essentially in real time. And so you'll be able to have a pendant or your phone or whatever, watch or whatever. It'll have a microphone on it. It'll listen to your conversations. It'll have a feed of everything else happened in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then it'll be, you know, sort of retraining, prompting or retraining itself on the fly. And so the scenario you described is actually a completely doable scenario. Now, the hard question on these is always, okay, since that's possible, are people going to want that? Like what's the form of experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, that, that we, we won't know until we try it, but I don't think it's possible yet to predict the form of AI in our lives. Therefore, it's not possible to predict the way in which it will intermediate our experience with reality yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Trillion dollar question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's a bunch of those. So look, there's a really big question today. Sitting here today is a really big question about the big models versus the small models. That's related directly to the big question of proprietary versus open. Then there's this big question of where is the training data going to go? Are we topping out on the training data or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then are we going to be able to synthesize training data? Yeah. And then there's a huge pile of questions around regulation and, you know, what's actually going to be legal. And so I would when we think about it, we dovetail kind of all those all those questions together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You can paint a picture of the world where there's two or three God models that are just at like staggering scale and they're just better at everything. and they will be owned by a small set of companies, and they will basically achieve regulatory capture over the government, and they'll have competitive barriers that will prevent other people from competing with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so there will be, just like there's whatever, three big banks or three big, or by the way, three big search companies, or I guess two now, it'll centralize like that. You can paint another very different picture that says, no, actually the opposite of that's gonna happen. This is gonna basically, this is the new gold rush. alchemy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
This is the big bang for this whole new area of science and technology. And so therefore, you're going to have every smart 14-year-old on the planet building open source and figuring out ways to optimize these things. And then we're just going to get overwhelmingly better at generating training data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We're going to bring in blockchain networks to have an economic incentive to generate decentralized training data and so forth and so on. And then basically, we're going to live in a world of open source. And there's going to be a billion LLMs of every size, scale, shape, and description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there might be a few big ones that are the super genius ones, but mostly what we'll experience is open source. And that's more like a world of what we have today with Linux and the web. So.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, it is this always big question, which is you get this feeling. I hear about this a lot from founder CEOs where it's like, wow, we have 50,000 people. It's now harder to do new things than it was when we had 50 people. Like what has happened? So that's a recurring phenomenon. By the way, that's one of the reasons why there's always startups and why there's venture capital.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's just that's like a timeless phenomenon. Uh, kind of thing. So that, that, that's one observation. Um, on a page rank, um, we can talk about that, but on page rank specifically on page rank, um, there actually is a page. So there is a page rank already in the field and it's the transformer, right? So the, the, the big breakthrough was the transformer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and, uh, the transformer was invented in, uh, 2017 at Google, um, And this is actually like really an interesting question. Cause it's like, okay, the transformers, like why does open AI even exist? Like the transformers invented at Google. Why didn't Google? I asked a guy, I asked a guy I know who was senior at Google brain kind of when this was happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I said, if Google had just gone flat out to the wall and just said, look, we're going to launch, we're going to launch equivalent of GPT-4 as fast as we can. He said, I said, when could we have had it? And he said, 2019. Yeah. They could have just done a two year sprint with the transformer and Bennett because they already had the compute at scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They already had all the training data and they could have just done it. There's a variety of reasons they didn't do it. This is like a classic big company thing. IBM invented the relational database in the 1970s, let it sit on the shelf as a paper. Larry Ellison picked it up and built Oracle. Xerox PARC invented the interactive computer. They let it sit on the shelf.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Steve Jobs came and turned it into the Macintosh. And so there is this pattern. Now, having said that, sitting here today, Google's in the game, right? So Google, maybe they let a four-year gap go there that they maybe shouldn't have, but they're in the game. And so now they're committed. They've done this merger. They're bringing in Demis. They've got this merger with DeepMind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They're piling in resources. There are rumors that they're building an incredible super LLM way beyond what we even have today. And they've got, you know, unlimited resources and a huge, you know, they've been challenged with their honor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so the startup, the huge advantage that startups have is they just, there's no sacred cows. There's no historical legacy to protect. There's no need to reconcile your new plan with existing strategy. There's no communication overhead. There's no, you know, big companies are big companies. They've got pre-meetings, planning for the meeting. Then they have the post-meeting and the recap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Then they have the presentation of the board. Then they have the next round of meetings. Yeah, lots of meetings. And that's the elapsed time when the startup launches its product, right? So there's a timeless, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So there's a timeless thing there. Now- Yeah. What the startups don't have is everything else, right? So startups, they don't have a brand, they don't have customer relationships, they've got no distribution, they've got no scale. I mean, sitting here today, they can't even get GPUs, right? Like there's like a GPU shortage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Startups are literally stalled out right now because they can't get chips, which is like super weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, but the clouds run out of chips, right? And then to the extent the clouds have chips, they allocate them to the big customers, not the small customers, right? And so the small companies lack everything other than the ability to just do something new. Yeah. Right. And this is the timeless race and battle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And this is kind of the point I tried to make in the essay, which is like both sides of this are good. Like, it's really good to have like highly scaled tech companies that can do things that are like at staggering levels of sophistication. It's really good to have startups that can launch brand new ideas. They ought to be able to both do that and compete.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They neither one ought to be subsidized or protected from the others. Like that's, that's to me, that's just like very clearly the idealized world. It is the world we've been in for AI up until now. And then of course there are people trying to shut that down, but my hope is that, you know, the best outcome clearly will be if that continues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I, uh, I have an eight year old and he's super into like Minecraft and learning to code and doing all this stuff. So I, I, of course I was very proud. I could bring sort of fire down from the mountain to my kid and I brought him chat GPT and I hooked him up on his, on his, on his, on his laptop. And I was like, you know, this is the thing that's going to answer all your questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he's like, okay. And I'm like, but it's going to answer our questions. And he's like, well, of course, like it's a computer. Of course, it answers all your questions. Like what else would a computer be good for? Dad. Never impressed. Not impressed in the least. Two weeks pass and he has some question. And I say, well, have you asked JetGPT? And he's like, dad, Bing is better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And why is Bing better is because it's built into the browser. Because he's like, look, I have the Microsoft Edge browser and it's got Bing right here. And then he doesn't know this yet, but one of the things you can do with Bing and Edge is there's a setting where you can use it to basically talk to any webpage. because it's sitting right there next to the browser.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And by the way, it includes PDF documents. And so the way they've implemented an edge with Bing is you can load a PDF and then you can ask it questions, which is the thing you can't do currently in just ChatGPT. So they're gonna push the meld. I think that's great. They're gonna push the melding and see if there's a combination thing there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
google's rolling out this thing the magic button which is implemented in they put in google docs right and so you go to you know google docs and you create a new document and you you know you instead of like you know starting to type you just you know say it press the button and it starts to like generate content for you right like is that the way that it'll work um is it going to be a speech ui where you're just going to have an earpiece and talk to it all day long you know is it going to be a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like these are all like, this is exactly the kind of thing that I don't, this is exactly the kind of thing I don't think is possible to forecast. I think what we need to do is like run all those experiments. And so one outcome is we come out of this with like a super browser that has AI built in. That's just like amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Look, there's a real possibility that the whole, I mean, look, there's a possibility here that the whole idea of a screen And Windows and all this stuff just goes away. Because why do you need that if you just have a thing that's just telling you whatever you need to know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Every medium becomes the content for the next one. So the AI will be able to give you a browser whenever you want. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Another way to think about it is maybe what the browser is. Maybe it's just the escape hatch, right? Which is maybe kind of what it is today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Which is like most of what you do is like inside a social network or inside a search engine or inside somebody's app or inside some controlled experience. But then every once in a while, there's something where you actually want to jailbreak. You want to actually get free.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So here's something I'm proud of. So nobody really talks about it. Here's something I'm proud of, which is the web, the web, the browser, the web servers, they're all, they're still backward compatible all the way back to like 1992. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So like you can put up a, you can still, you know, the big breakthrough of the web early on, the big breakthrough was it made it really easy to read, but it also made it really easy to write, made it really easy to publish. And we literally made it so easy to publish. We made it not only so it was easy to publish content, it was actually also easy to actually write a web server.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you could literally write a web server in four lines of Braille code. And you could start publishing content on it. And you could set whatever rules you want for the content, whatever censorship, no censorship, whatever you want. You could just do that. As long as you had an IP address, you could do that. That still works. That still works exactly as I just described.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes. You know, it'd be a question if the use cases have really narrowed down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So this is part of my reaction to all of this censorship pressure and all these issues around control and all this stuff, which is like maybe we need to get back a little bit more to the Wild West. The Wild West is still out there. Now, they will try to chase you down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
People who want to censor will try to take away your domain name and they'll try to take away your payments account and so forth if they really don't like what you're saying. But nevertheless, unless they literally are intercepting you at the ISP level, you can still put up a thing. I don't know. I think that's important to preserve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
One is just a freedom argument, but the other is a creativity argument. Which is you want to have the escape hatch so that the kid with the idea is able to realize the idea. Because to your point on PageRank, you actually don't know what the next big idea is. Nobody called Larry Page and told him to develop PageRank. He came up with that on his own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you want to always, I think, leave the escape hatch for the next kid or the next Stanford grad student to have the breakthrough idea and be able to get it up and running before anybody notices.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Full story. You were born. I was born.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Oh, so I hit the generational jackpot and I hit the Gen X kind of point perfectly as it turns out. So I was born in 1971. So there's this great website called WTF happened in 1971.com, which is basically 1971 is when everything started to go to hell. And I was of course born in 1971. So I like to think that I had something to do with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I have, I don't think I made it on the website, but I, you know, hopefully somebody needs to add, this is, this is where everything, maybe I contributed to some of the trends. Um, that they should. Every line on that website goes like that, right? So it's all a picture disaster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But there was this moment in time where, cause the, you know, sort of the Apple, you know, the Apple II hit in like 1978 and then the IBM PC hit in 82. So I was like, you know, 11 when the PC came out. And so I just kind of hit that perfectly. And then that was the first moment in time when like regular people could spend a few hundred dollars and get a computer, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so that, I just like that, that resonated right out of the gate. And then the other part of the story is, you know, I was using an Apple II. I used a bunch of them, but I was using Apple II. And, of course, it said on the back of every Apple II and every Mac, it said, you know, designed in Cupertino, California. And I was like, wow, Cupertino must be the, like, shining city on the hill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
and low rise apartment buildings. So the aesthetics were a little disappointing, but you know, it was the vector, right, of the creation of a lot of this stuff. So then basically, so part of my story is just the luck of having been born at the right time and getting exposed to PCs then. The other part is,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The other part is when Al Gore says that he created the internet, he actually is correct in a really meaningful way, which is he sponsored a bill in 1985 that essentially created the modern internet, created what is called the NSFnet at the time, which is sort of the first really fast internet backbone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And that bill dumped a ton of money into a bunch of research universities to build out basically the internet backbone and then the supercomputer centers that were clustered around the internet. And one of those universities was University of Illinois. where I went to school.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so the other stroke of luck that I had was I went to Illinois basically as that money was just getting dumped on campus. And so as a consequence we had on campus, and this was like, you know, 89, 90, 91, We had like, you know, we were right on the Internet backbone. We had like T3 and 45 at the time, T3, 45 megabit backbone connection, which at the time was, you know, wildly state of the art.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We had crazy computers. We had thinking machines, parallel supercomputers. We had Silicon Graphics workstations. We had Macintoshes. We had next cubes all over the place. We had like every possible kind of computer you could imagine because all this money just fell out of the sky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So quite literally it was, yeah, like it's all, it's all there. It's all like we had full broadband graphics, like the whole thing. And, and it's actually funny cause they had this, this is the first time I kind of sort of tickled the back of my head that there might be a big opportunity in here, which is, you know, they, they embraced it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so they put like computers in all the dorms and they wired up all the dorm rooms and they had all these labs everywhere and everything. And then they, they gave every undergrad, a computer account and an email address, um, Um, and the assumption was that you would use the internet for your four years at college. Um, and then you would graduate and stop using it. And that was that, right? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Sure, but we still have horses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you would just retire your email address. It wouldn't be relevant anymore because you'd go off in the workplace and they don't use email. You'd be back to using fax machines or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, if this is so useful in this contained environment that just has this weird source of outside funding, then if it were practical for everybody else to have this, and if it were cost-effective for everybody else to have this, wouldn't they want it? And overwhelmingly, the prevailing view at the time was, no, they would not want it. This is esoteric, weird nerd stuff, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That like computer science kids like, but like normal people are never gonna do email, right? Or be on the internet, right? And so I was just like, wow, like this is actually like, this is really compelling stuff. Now, the other part was it was all really hard to use. And in practice, you had to be basically a CS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You basically had to be a CS undergrad or equivalent to actually get full use of the Internet at that point because it was all pretty esoteric stuff. So then that was the other part of the idea, which was, OK, we need to actually make this easy to use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, it was a combination of things. So it was like basically the web existed in an early sort of described as prototype form. And by the way, text only at that point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Paint a picture. It looked like chat GPT, actually. It was all text. Yeah. And so you had a text-based web browser. Well, actually, the original browser, Tim Berners-Lee, the original browser, both the original browser and the server actually ran on NextCubes. So this was the computer Steve Jobs made during the decade-long interim period when he was not at Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, he got fired in 85 and then came back in 97. So this was in that interim period where he had this company called Next. And they made these, literally these computers called Cubes. And there's this famous story. They were beautiful, but they were 12 inch by 12 inch by 12 inch Cubes computers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's a famous story about how they could have cost half as much if it had been 12 by 12 by 13. Yeah. Steve was like, no, it has to be. So they were like $6,000, basically, academic workstations. They had the first CD-ROM drives, which were slow. I mean, the computers were all but unusable. They were so slow, but they were beautiful. Okay, can we actually just take a tiny tangent there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Sure, of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So I guess they say like, look, he was a deep believer, I think in a very deep way. I interpret it. I don't know if you ever really described it like this, but the way I'd interpret it is it's like, it's like this thing. And it's actually a thing in philosophy. It's like, aesthetics are not just appearances. Aesthetics go all the way to like deep underlying, underlying meaning. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's like, I'm not a physicist. One of the things I've heard physicists say is one of the things you start to get a sense of when a theory might be correct is when it's beautiful, right? Like, you know, right? And so there's something, and you feel the same thing, by the way, in like human psychology, right? You know, when you're experiencing awe, right? You know, there's like a simplicity to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When you're having an honest interaction with somebody, there's an aesthetic, I would say calm comes over you because you're actually being fully honest and trying to hide yourself, right? So it's like this very deep sense of aesthetics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, search was a technology. It was a moment in time technology, which is you have, in theory, the world's information out on the web. Yeah. You know, this is sort of the optimal way to get to it. But yeah, like, and by the way, actually Google has known this for a long time. I mean, they've been driving away from the 10 blue links for, you know, for like two days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, I mean, who makes a phone out of aluminum, right? Like nobody else would have done that. And now, of course, if your phone was made out of aluminum, you know, how crude, what kind of caveman would you have to be to have a phone that's made out of plastic? Like, right. So like, so it's just this very right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And, you know, look, it's, it's, there's a thousand different ways to look at this, but one of the things is just like, look, these things are central to your life. Like you're with your phone more than you're with anything else. Like it's in your, it's going to be in your hand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, he, you know, you know, this, he thought very deeply about what it meant for something to be in your hand all day long. Yeah. Well, for example, here's an interesting design thing. My understanding is he never wanted an iPhone to have a screen larger than you could reach with your thumb one-handed. And so he was actually opposed to the idea of making the phones larger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I don't know if you have this experience today, but let's say there are certain moments in your day when you might only have one hand available and you might want to be on your phone. And you're trying to send a text and your thumb can't reach the send button.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
He had an integrated worldview, so the properly designed device that had the correct functionality, that had the deepest understanding of the user, that was the most beautiful. It had to be all of those things. He basically would drive to as close to perfect as you could possibly get.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I suspect that he never quite thought he ever got there because most great creators are generally dissatisfied, you read. later on and all they can see are the flaws in their creation. But he got as close to perfect each step of the way as he could possibly get with the constraints of the technology of his time. And then, look, he was sort of famous in the Apple model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They've been trying to get away from that for a long time. What kind of links? They call it the 10 blue links. 10 blue links.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's like, look, this headset that they just came out with, it's like a decade long. It's like, and they're just going to sit there and tune and tune and polish and polish and tune and polish and tune and polish until it is as perfect as anybody could possibly make anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then this goes to the way that people describe working with him, which is, you know, there was a terrifying aspect of working with him, which is, you know, he was, you know, he was very tough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But there was this thing that everybody I've ever talked to who worked for him says, they all say the following, which is we did the best work of our lives when we worked for him because he set the bar incredibly high and then he supported us with everything that he could to let us actually do work of that quality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So a lot of people who were at Apple spend the rest of their lives trying to find another experience where they feel like they're able to hit that quality bar again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So look, exactly. So the Silicon Valley, I mean, look, he's not, you know, George Patton in the, you know, in the army, like, you know, there are many examples in other fields, you know, that are like this. Specifically in tech, it's actually, I find it very interesting. There's the Apple way, which is polish, polish, polish, and don't ship until it's as perfect as you can make it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then there's the sort of the other approach, which is the sort of incremental hacker mentality. which basically says ship early and often and iterate. And one of the things I find really interesting is I'm now 30 years into this, like there are very successful companies on both sides of that approach, right? Like that is a fundamental,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
difference in how to operate and how to build and how to create that you have world-class companies operating in both ways. And I don't think the question of which is the superior model is anywhere close to being answered. And my suspicion is the answer is do both. The answer is you actually want both. They lead to different outcomes. Software tends to do better with the iterative approach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Guess who picked those colors? Thanks. Thanks. I'm touchy on this topic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Hardware tends to do better with the you know, sort of wait and make it perfect approach. But again, you can find examples in both directions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, there was the web, which was text-based, but there were no, I mean, there was like three websites. There was like no content. There were no users. Like it wasn't like a, it wasn't like a catalytic. It hadn't, and by the way, it was all, because it was all text, there were no documents, there were no images, there were no videos, there were no, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So, so it was, it was, and then if, if in the beginning, if you had to be on a Nextcube, you need to have a Nextcube both to publish and to consume, so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You said there were limitations on, yeah, $6,000 PC. They did not, they did not sell very many, but then there was also, there was also FTP and there was use nets, right. And there was, you know, a dozen other, basically there's waste, which was an early search thing. There was gopher, which was an early menu based information retrieval system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There were like a dozen different sort of scattered ways that people would get to information on, on the internet. And so the mosaic idea was basically bring those all together, make the whole thing graphical, make it easy to use, make it basically bulletproof so that anybody can do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's good. Well, you know, like Marshall McLuhan said that the content of each new medium is the old medium. The content of each new medium is the old medium. The content of movies was theater plays. The content of theater plays was written stories. The content of written stories was spoken stories. Huh. And so you just kind of fold the old thing into the new thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then again, just on the luck side, it so happened that this was right at the moment when graphics, when the GUI sort of actually took off. And we're now also used to the GUI that we think it's been around forever, but it didn't really, you know, the Macintosh brought it out in 85, but they actually didn't sell very many Macs in the 80s. It was not that successful of a product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It really was, you needed Windows 3.0 on PCs, and that hit in about 92. And so, and we did Mosaic in 92, 93. So that sort of, it was like right at the moment when you could imagine actually having a graphical user interface, right, at all, much less one to the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, this is the classic, okay, Microsoft was operating on the other. So Steve, Apple was running on the Polish It Until It's Perfect. Microsoft famously ran on the other model, which is Ship and Iterate. And so the old line in those days was Microsoft, right? It's version three of every Microsoft product. That's the good one, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so there are, you can find online, Windows 1, Windows 2, nobody used them. Actually, the original Windows, in the original Microsoft Windows, the Windows were non-overlapping. And so you had these very small, very low resolution screens. And then you had literally, it just didn't work. It wasn't ready yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That was a big leap too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So that was like bang, bang. And then of course, Steve, and then, and then, you know, in the fullness of time, Steve came back, then the Mac started to take off again. That was the third bang. And then the iPhone was the fourth bang. Such exciting times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, Windows 3.1 or 3.0, Windows 3.0 to the iPhone was only 15 years. Like that ramp was, in retrospect, at the time it felt like it took forever, but in historical terms, like that was a very fast ramp from even a graphical computer at all on your desk to the iPhone. It was 15 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the thing I had early on was I was keeping at the time what, there's disputes over what was the first blog, but I had one of them that at least is a possible, at least a runner up in the competition. And it was what was called the What's New page. And it was hardwired and distribution unfair advantage. I put it right in the browser.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I put it in the browser and then I put my resume in the browser, which also was hilarious. But, um, but, um, I was, I was keeping the, not many people get to get to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I'm looking for my, uh, about, about, Oh, Mark is looking for a job. Um, so, um, so the West new page, I would literally get up every morning and I would every afternoon. Um, and I would basically, if you wanted to launch a website, you would email me. Um, and I would list it on the most new page. And that was how people discovered the new websites as they were coming out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I remember, cause it was like one, it literally went from, it was like one every couple of days to like one every day to like two every day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the homepage was just basically trying to explain even what this thing is that you're looking at, right? The basic, basically basic instructions. But then there was a button that said what's new. And what most people did was they went to, for obvious reasons, went to what's new. But like, it was so, it was so mind blowing at that point, just the basic idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it was just, this was like, you know, this was basically the internet, but people could see it for the first time. The basic idea was look, you know, some, you know, it's like, literally it's like an Indian restaurant in like Bristol, England has like put their menu on the web. And people were like, wow. Cause like, that's the first restaurant menu on the web. And I don't have to be in Bristol.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Maybe within AI, one of the things that AI can do for you is it can generate the 10 blue links. Either if that's actually the useful thing to do or if you're feeling nostalgic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I don't know if I'm ever going to go to Bristol and I don't even like Indian food and like, wow. Right. Um, and it was like that, uh, the first web, uh, the first streaming video thing was a, uh, it was an, it was another England thing, some Oxford or something. Um, some guy, uh, put, uh, his coffee pot up as the first, uh, streaming, uh, video thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he put it on the web cause he literally, it was the coffee pot down the hall and he wanted to see when he needed to go, uh, refill it. Um, but there were, you know, there was a point when there were thousands of people like watching that coffee pot. Because it was the first thing you could watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, you know, look, it's still a stretch, right? It's still a stretch because it's just like, okay, you're still in this zone, which is like, okay, is this a nerd thing? Is this a real person thing? Yeah. Um, by the way, we, you know, there was a wall of skepticism from the media. Like they just like, everybody was just like, yeah, this is the crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
This is just like, um, this is not, you know, this is not for regular people at that time. Um, and so you, you had to think through that and then look, it was still, it was still hard to get on the internet at that point. Right. So you could get kind of this weird bastardized version if you were on AOL, which wasn't really real. Or you had to go, like, learn what an ISP was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, in those days, PCs actually didn't have TCP IP drivers come pre-installed. So you had to learn what a TCP IP driver was. You had to buy a modem. You had to install driver software. I have a comedy routine I do. It's like 20 minutes long describing all the steps required to actually get on the internet. And so you had to look through these practical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then speed, performance, 14.4 modems. It was like watching glue dry. There were basically a sequence of bets that we made where you basically needed to look through that current state of affairs and say, actually, there's going to be so much demand for it. Once people figure this out, there's going to be so much demand for it that all of these practical problems are going to get fixed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So for kids in the audience, right? For kids in the audience. You used to have to watch an image load like a line at a time, but it turns out there was this thing with JPEGs where you could load basically every fourth. You could load like every fourth line and then you could sweep back through again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so you could like render a fuzzy version of the image up front and then it would like resolve into the detailed one. And that was like a big UI breakthrough because it gave you something to watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, it's a big fight. There's a big fight early on about whether there should be images on the web. For that reason, for sexualization? No, not explicitly. That did come up, but it wasn't even that. It was more just like all the serious... The argument went, the purists basically said all the serious information in the world is text.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you introduce images, you're basically going to bring in all the trivial stuff. You're going to bring in magazines and, you know, all this crazy stuff that, you know, people, you know, it's going to distract from that. It's going to take away from being serious, being frivolous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, all these. And then the internet itself has this thing where it incorporates all prior forms of media, right? So the internet itself incorporates television and radio and books and essays and every other form of prior basically media. And so it makes sense that AI would be the next step and you'd sort of consider the internet to be content for...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so in those days, it was all around crime and terrorism. So those arguments happened, but there was no sense yet of the internet having an effect on politics because that was way too far off. But there was an enormous panic at the time around cybercrime. There was enormous panic that your credit card number would get stolen and your life savings would be drained.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then, you know, criminals were gonna, there was, oh, when we started, one of the things we did, the Netscape browser was the first widely used piece of consumer software that had strong encryption built in. It made it available to ordinary people. And at that time, strong encryption was actually illegal to export out of the US.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So we could field that product in the US, we could not export it because it was classified as ammunition. So the Netscape browser was on a restricted list along with the Tomahawk missile as being something that could not be exported.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So we had to make a second version with deliberately weak encryption to sell overseas with a big logo on the box saying, do not trust this, which it turns out makes it hard to sell software when it's got a big logo that says, don't trust it. And then we had to spend five years fighting the US government to get them to basically stop trying to do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because the fear was terrorists are going to use encryption, right, to like plot, you know, all these things. And then, you know, we responded with, well, actually, we need encryption to be able to secure systems so that the terrorists and the criminals can't get into them. So anyway, that was the 1990s fight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So there was a really key bet that we made at the time, which is very controversial, which was core to how it was engineered, which was, are we optimizing for performance or for ease of creation? And in those days, the pressure was very intense to optimize for performance because the network connections were so slow and also the computers were so slow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so if you had mentioned the progressive JPEGs, like if there's an alternate world in which we optimize for performance and you had just a much more pleasant experience right up front, But what we got by not doing that was we got ease of creation. And the way that we got ease of creation was all of the protocols and formats were in text, not in binary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so HTTP is in text, by the way, and this was an internet tradition, by the way, that we picked up, but we continued it. HTTP is text and HTML is text. And then everything else that followed is text. As a result, and by the way, you can imagine purist engineers saying, this is insane. You have very limited bandwidth. Why are you wasting any time sending text?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You should be encoding the stuff into binary and it'll be much faster. And of course the answer is that's correct. But what you get when you make it text is all of a sudden, well, the big breakthrough was the view source function, right? So the fact that you could look at a webpage, you could hit view source and you could see the HTML. That was how people learned how to make webpages, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, and then there was this internet principle that we inherited, which was emit, what was it? Emit cautiously, emit conservatively, interpret liberally. So it basically meant if you're, the design principle was if you're creating like a web editor that's going to emit HTML, like do it as cleanly as you can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
the AI, and then the AI will manipulate it however you want, including in this format.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But you actually want the browser to interpret liberally, which is you actually want users to be able to make all kinds of mistakes and for it to still work. And so the browser rendering engines to this day have all of this spaghetti code, crazy stuff where they can, they're resilient to all kinds of crazy HTML mistakes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so, and literally what I always had in my head is like there's an eight year old or an 11 year old somewhere and they're doing a view source, they're doing a cut and paste and they're trying to make a webpage for their turtle or whatever. And like they leave out a slash and they leave out an angle bracket and they do this and they do that and it still works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It used to offend me. So I, I, I grew up in unit. So I, I, I worked on Unix. I was a Unix native for all the way through this period. Um, and so, and it used to drive me bananas when it would do the segmentation fault in the core dump file. Just like, you know, it's like literally there's like an error in the code. The math is off by one and it core dumps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I'm in the core dump trying to analyze it and trying to reconstruct what, and I'm just like, this is ridiculous. Like the computer ought to be smart enough to be able to know that if it's off by one, okay, fine. And it keeps running. And I would go ask all the experts, like, why can't it just keep running? And they'd explain to me, well, because all the downstream repercussions and blah, blah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I'm like, this still, like, you know, we're forcing the human creator to live, to your point, in this hyper literal world of perfection. And I was just like, that's just bad. And by the way, you know, what happens with that, of course, is what happened with coding at that point, which is you get a high priesthood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Probably not. Probably we'll just have answers. But there will be cases where you'll want to say, okay, I want more, for example, site sources. And you want it to do that. And so the 10 blue links site sources are kind of the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
you know, there's a small number of people who are really good at doing exactly that. Most people can't, and most people are excluded from it. And so actually that, that was where that was where I picked up that idea was, um, uh, was like, no, no, you want, you want, you want these things to be resilient to error in all kinds. And this, this would drive the purists absolutely crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like I got attacked on this, like a lot because yeah, I mean like every time I, you know, all the purists who were like into all this, like markup language stuff and formats and codes and all this stuff, they would be like, you know, you can't, you're, you're encouraging bad behavior because
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Yeah, that was a very... And any properly trained and credentialed engineer would be like, that's not how you build these systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Now, like I said, the good news for me is the internet kind of had that tradition already. But having said that, we pushed it. We pushed it way out. But the other thing we did, going back to the performance thing, was we gave up a lot of performance. That initial experience for the first few years was pretty painful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But the bet there was actually an economic bet, which was basically the demand for the web would basically mean that there would be a surge in supply of broadband. Because the question was, okay, how do you get the phone companies, which are not famous in those days for doing new things,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
at huge cost for like speculative reasons, like how do you get them to build up broadband, you know, spend billions of dollars doing that. And, you know, you could go meet with them and try to talk them into it, or you could just have a thing where it's just very clear that it's going to be the people love that's going to be better if it's faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so that, that, there, there was a period there and this was, this was fraught with some peril, but there was a period there where it's like, we knew the experience was sub-optimized because we were trying to force the emergence of demand for broadband, which is in fact what happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, to this day, if you create a web page that has no CSS style sheet, the browser will render it however it wants to. So this was one of the things. There was this idea at the time in how these systems were built, which is separation of content from appearance. And people don't really use that anymore because everybody wants to determine how things look, and so they use CSS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But it's still in there that you can just let the browser do all the work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, that's one of the things that's fun about chat, you know, about chat GPT.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right. And you know, there is this pattern in human creativity and media where you end up back at text. And I think there's, you know, there's something powerful in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I made the background gray. I hated reading text on white backgrounds, and so I made the background gray.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, no, no. That decision, I think, has been reversed. But now I'm happy, though, because now dark mode is the thing, so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Strain my eyes. Strain your eyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, the big one, probably JavaScript. CSS was after me, so I didn't, that was not me. But JavaScript was the big, JavaScript maybe was the biggest of the whole thing. That was us. And that was basically a bet. It was a bet on two things. One is that the world wanted a new front-end scripting language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I just mean like if you're reading a scientific paper, it's got the list of sources at the end. If you want to investigate for yourself, you go read those papers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then the other was we thought at the time the world wanted a new backend scripting language. So JavaScript was designed from the beginning to be both front-end and backend. And then it failed as a backend scripting language, and Java won for a long time, and then Python, Perl, and other things, PHP, and Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But now JavaScript is back, and so... I wonder if everything in the end will run on JavaScript. It seems like it is the... And by the way, let me give a shout-out to Brendan Eich, who was basically the one-man inventor of JavaScript.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So he wrote JavaScript over a summer. I mean, I think it is fair to say now that it's the most widely used language in the world, and it seems to only be gaining in its range of adoption.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Very inspiring. I'll give you another one, SSL. So SSL was the security protocol. That was us. And that was a crazy idea at the time, which was let's take all the native protocols and let's wrap them in a security wrapper. That was a guy named Kip Hickman who wrote that over a summer, one guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and then look today, sitting here today, like the transformer, like at Google was a small handful of people. And then, you know, the number of people who have did like the core work on GPT, it's not that many people, it's a pretty small handful of people. Um, and so, yeah, the, the pattern in software repeatedly over a very long time has been, it's, it's a.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Jeff Bezos always had the two pizza rule for teams at Amazon, which is any team needs to be able to be fed with two pizzas. If you need the third pizza, you have too many people. And I think it's actually the one pizza rule. For the really creative work, I think it's two people, three people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And look, this stuff, AI ought to make the individual coder obviously far more productive, right? By like, you know, a thousand X or something. And so you ought to open source, like not just the future of open source AI, but the future of open source everything. We ought to have a world now of super coders, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Who are building things as open source with one or two people that were inconceivable, you know, five years ago. you know, the level of kind of hyper productivity we're going to get out of our best and brightest, I think it's going to go way up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, that was the height of the dot-com boom bubble bust. I mean, that was the frenzy. If you watch Succession, that was like what they did in the fourth season with Gojo and the merger. So it was like the height of one of those kind of dynamics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
is very American. I'm very proud of you. That is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I heartily approve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Uh, so that was at the height of the deal making and money and just the fur flying and like craziness. And so, yeah, it was just one of those. It was just like, I mean, there's the entire Netscape thing from start to finish was four years, um, which was like for, for one of these companies, it's just like incredibly fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You could do that. Or you could have a running dialogue next to my head where the AI is arguing. Everything I say, the AI makes the counter argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We went public 18 months after we were founded, which virtually never happens. So it was just this incredibly fast kind of meteor streaking across the sky. And then, of course, it was this. And then there was just this explosion that happened because then it was almost immediately followed by the dot-com crash. Wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It was then followed by AOL buying Time Warner, which again, the succession guys kind of play with that, which turned out to be a disastrous deal. One of the famous kind of disasters in business history. And then what became an internet depression on the other side of that. But then in that depression in the 2000s was the beginning of broadband and smartphones and Web 2.0, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then social media and search and SaaS and everything that came out of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, so let me lay it out. So here's the thing. I don't know if I figured it out then, but I figured it out later, which is software is a technology that, it's like the concept of the Philosopher's Stone. The philosopher's stone in alchemy transmutes light into gold, and Newton spent 20 years trying to find the philosopher's stone, never got there, nobody's ever figured it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Software is our modern philosopher's stone, and in economic terms, it transmutes labor into capital. which is like a super interesting thing. And by the way, like Karl Marx is rolling over in his grave right now. Cause of course that's complete refutation of his entire theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Transputes labor into capital, which is, which is as follows is somebody sits down at a keyboard and types a bunch of stuff in and a capital asset comes out the other side. And then somebody buys that capital asset for a billion dollars. Like, That's amazing. It's literally creating value out of thin air, out of purely human thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There are many things that make software magical and special, but that's the economics. I wonder what Marx would have thought about that. He would have completely broke his brain because, of course, the whole thing was... That kind of technology is inconceivable. When he was alive, it was all industrial era stuff. And so any kind of machinery necessarily involved huge amounts of capital.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then labor was on the receiving end of the abuse. But a software engineer is somebody who basically transmutes his own labor into an actual capital asset, creates permanent value. Well, in fact, it's actually very inspiring. That's actually more true today than before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So when I was doing software, the assumption was all new software basically has a sort of a parabolic sort of life cycle, right? So you ship the thing, people buy it. At some point, everybody who wants it has bought it and then it becomes obsolete and it's like bananas. Nobody buys old software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
These days, Minecraft, Mathematica, Facebook, Google, you have the software assets that have been around for 30 years that are gaining in value every year. And they're just there being World of Warcraft, Salesforce.com. Every single year, they're being polished and polished and polished and polished. They're getting better and better, more powerful, more powerful, more valuable, more valuable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So we've entered this era where you can actually have these things that actually build out over decades, which, by the way, is what's happening right now with GPT.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and so, um, now, and this is why, you know, there, there, there is always, you know, sort of a constant investment frenzy around software is because, you know, look, when you start one of these things, it doesn't always succeed, but when it does now, you might be building an asset that builds value for, you know, four or five, six decades to come.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, you know, if you have a team of people who have the level of devotion required to keep making it better. And then the fact that, of course, everybody's online, you know, there's 5 billion people that are a click away from any new piece of software. So the potential market size for any of these things is, you know, nearly infinite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, yeah. This was all brand new, right? Yeah. Back then, this was all brand new. These were all brand new. Had you rolled out that theory in even 1999, people would have thought you were smoking crack. So that's emerged over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So the main thesis on the essay is that what we're dealing with here is intelligence. And it's really important to kind of talk about the sort of very nature of what intelligence is. And fortunately, we have a predecessor to machine intelligence, which is human intelligence. And we've got observations and theories over thousands of years for what intelligence is in the hands of humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And what intelligence is, right? I mean, what it literally is, is the way to capture, process, analyze, synthesize information, solve problems. But the observation of intelligence in human hands is that intelligence quite literally makes everything better. And what I mean by that is every kind of outcome of like human quality of life, whether it's education outcomes or success of your children,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
career success or health or lifetime satisfaction. By the way, propensity to peacefulness as opposed to violence, propensity for open-mindedness versus bigotry, those are all associated with higher levels of intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But what if you could?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And certainly at the collective level, we could talk about the collective effect of just having more intelligence in the world, which will have very big payoff. But there's also just at the individual level, like what if every person has a machine? It's the concept of Doug Engelbart's concept of augmentation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
you know, what if everybody has an assistant and the assistant is, you know, 140 IQ and you happen to be 110 IQ and you've got, you know, something that basically is infinitely patient and knows everything about you and is pulling for you in every possible way, wants you to be successful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And anytime you find anything confusing or want to learn anything or have trouble understanding something or want to figure out what to do in a situation, When I figure out how to prepare for a job interview, like any of these things, it will help you do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it will therefore, the combination will effectively raise your IQ, will therefore raise the odds of successful life outcomes in all these areas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then, of course, people at 140 IQ will be able to have a peer, which is great. And then people above 140 IQ will have an assistant that they can farm things out to. And then, look, God willing, at some point, these things go from future versions, go from 140 IQ equivalent to 150 to 160 to 180. Einstein was estimated to be on the order of 160.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So when we get 160 AI, one assumes creating Einstein-level breakthroughs in physics and And then at 180, we'll be, you know, curing cancer and developing warp drive and doing all kinds of stuff. And so it is quite possibly the case. This is the most important thing that's ever happened and the best thing that's ever happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
precisely because it's a lever on this single fundamental factor of intelligence, which is the thing that drives so much of everything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You may have noticed that there's a lot of smart assholes running around. Sure, yes. Right? And so, like, it's smart. There are certain people where they get smarter, you know, they get to be more arrogant, right? So, you know, there's one huge flaw.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, exactly. Another one is smart people are very convinced that they have a more rational view of the world and that they have a easier time seeing through conspiracy theories and hoaxes and sort of crazy beliefs and all that. There's a theory in psychology, which is actually smart people. So for sure, people who aren't as smart are very susceptible to hoaxes and conspiracy theories. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But it may also be the case that the smarter you get, you become susceptible in a different way, which is you become very good at marshalling facts to fit preconceptions. You become very, very good at assembling whatever theories and frameworks and pieces of data and graphs and charts you need to validate whatever crazy ideas got in your head. And so you're susceptible in a different way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Some sheep are better at justifying it, right? And those are the smart sheep, right? So yeah, look, I would say this. I am not a utopian. There are no panaceas in life. I don't believe there are pure positives. I'm not a transcendental person like that. But So yeah, there are going to be issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, you actually highlighted a practical concern in there, which is if we stop making web pages are one of the primary sources of training data for the AI. And so if there's no longer an incentive to make web pages, that cuts off a significant source of future training data. So there's actually an interesting question in there. Other than that, more broadly, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And look, smart people, another thing maybe you could say about smart people is they are more likely to get themselves in situations that are beyond their grasp because they're just more confident in their ability to deal with complexity and their eyes become bigger, their cognitive eyes become bigger than their stomach. So yeah, you could argue those eight different ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Nevertheless, on net, clearly, overwhelmingly, again, if you just extrapolate from what we know about human intelligence, you're improving so many aspects of life if you're upgrading intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. I mean, look, the theory is augmentations. This is the Dick Engelbart's term. Dick Engelbart made this observation many, many decades ago that basically it's like you can have this oppositional frame of technology where it's like us versus the machines. But what you really do is you use technology to augment human capabilities. And by the way, that's how actually the economy develops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We can talk about the economic side of this, but that's actually how the economy grows is through technology augmenting human potential.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so, yeah, and then you basically have a proxy or, you know, or a, you know, a sort of prosthetic, you know, so like you've got glasses, you've got a wristwatch, you know, you've got shoes, you know, you've got these things, you've got a personal computer, you've got a word processor, you've got Mathematica, you've got Google. This is the latest viewed through that lens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
AI is the latest in a long series of basically augmentation methods to be able to raise human capabilities. It's just this one is the most powerful one of all, because this is the one that goes directly to what they call fluid intelligence. which is IQ.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Or say they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, I'll say they do. The Baptists worry, the bootleggers say they do. So the Baptists and the bootleggers is a metaphor from economics, from what's called development economics. And it's this observation that when you get social reform movements in a society, you tend to get two sets of people showing up arguing for the social reform movement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And the term Baptists and bootleggers comes from the American experience with alcohol prohibition. And so in the 1900s, 1910s, there was this movement that was very passionate at the time, which basically said alcohol is evil and it's destroying society. By the way, there was a lot of evidence to support this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There were very high rates of very high correlations then, by the way, and now between rates of physical violence and alcohol use. Almost all violent crimes have either the perpetrator or the victim are both drunk. You see this actually in almost all sexual harassment cases in the workplace. It's like at a company party and somebody's drunk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Just in the sense of like search was always a hack. The 10 blue links was always a hack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's amazing how often alcohol actually correlates to actually just dysfunction. It leads to domestic abuse and so forth, child abuse. And so you had this group of people who were like, okay, this is bad stuff and we should outlaw it. And those were quite literally Baptists. Those were super committed, hardcore Christian activists in a lot of cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There was this woman whose name was Carrie Nation, who was this older woman who had been in this, you know, I don't know, disastrous marriage or something. And her husband had been abusive and drunk all the time. And she became the icon of the Baptist prohibitionists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And she was legendary in that era for carrying an axe and doing, you know, completely on her own, doing raids of saloons and like taking her axe to all the bottles and tags in the back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right. Because like if the, the hypothetical, you want to think about the counterfactual in the counterfactual world where the Google guys, for example, had had LLMs up front, would they ever have done the 10 blue links? And I think the answer is pretty clearly no, they would have just gone straight to the answer. And like I said, Google's actually been trying to drive to the answer anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
An absolute true believer with absolutely the purest of intentions. And again, there's a very important thing here, which is there's, you could look at this cynically and you could say the Baptists are like delusional, you know, extremists, but you can also say, look, they're right. Like she was, you know, she had a point, like she wasn't wrong, um, about a lot of what she said. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But it turns out the way the story goes is it turns out that there were another set of people who very badly wanted to outlaw alcohol in those days. And those were the bootleggers, which was organized crime that stood to make a huge amount of money if legal alcohol sales were banned. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And this was, in fact, the way the history goes is this was actually the beginning of organized crime in the US. This was the big economic opportunity that opened that up. And so they went in together. And they didn't go in together. The Baptists did not even necessarily know about the bootleggers because they were on their moral crusade. The bootleggers certainly knew about the Baptists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And they were like, wow, these people are like the great front people for shenanigans in the background. And they got the Volstead Act passed. And they did, in fact, ban alcohol in the US. And you'll notice what happened, which is people kept drinking. It didn't work. People kept drinking. The bootleggers made a tremendous amount of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then over time, it became clear that it made no sense to make it illegal. And it was causing more problems. And so then it was revoked. And here we sit with legal alcohol 100 years later with all the same problems. And the whole thing was this giant misadventure. The Baptists got taken advantage of by the bootleggers. And the bootleggers got what they wanted. And that was that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, it's the same pattern. The economists will tell you it's the same pattern every time. This is what happened with nuclear power, which is another interesting one. But yeah, this happens dozens and dozens of times. throughout the last 100 years. And this is what's happening now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, first of all, you just did a sleight of hand because we went from talking about AI to AGI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, they bought this AI company 15 years ago that a friend of mine is working at who's now the head of AI at Apple. And they were trying to do basically knowledge semantic, basically mapping. And that led to what's now the Google OneBox, where if you ask it, you know, what was Lincoln's birthday, it doesn't, it will give you the 10 blue links, but it will normally just give you the answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, I know what AI is. AI is machine learning. What's AGI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, but we knew that nuclear physics would lead to weapons. That's why the scientists of that era were always in this huge dispute about building the weapons. This is different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We don't know, but this is my point. It's different. We actually don't know. And this is where the sleight of hand kicks in. This is where it goes from being a scientific topic to being a religious topic. And that's why I specifically called out, because that's what happens. They do the vocabulary shift. All of a sudden, you're talking about something totally that's not actually real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes. End of the world. Apocalypse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Apocalypse cults. Apocalypse cults. Well, so we, of course, live in a Judeo-Christian, but primarily Christian, kind of saturated, you know, kind of Christian, post-Christian, secularized Christian, you know, kind of world in the West.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And of course, core to Christianity is the idea of the second coming and revelations and Jesus returning and the thousand year utopia on earth and then the rapture and all that stuff. We collectively as a society, we don't necessarily take all that fully seriously now. So what we do is we create our secularized versions of that. We keep looking for utopia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We keep looking for basically the end of the world. And so what you see over decades is basically a pattern of these sort of – this is what cults are. This is how cults form as they form around some theory of the end of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so the People's Temple cult, the Manson cult, the Heaven's Gate cult, the David Koresh cult, what they're all organized around is like there's going to be this thing that's going to happen that's going to basically bring civilization crashing down. And then we have this special elite group of people who are going to see it coming and prepare for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then they're the people who are either going to stop it or are failing stopping it. They're going to be the people who survive to the other side and ultimately get credit for having been right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because it satisfies this very deep need we have for transcendence and meaning that got stripped away when we became secular.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because like how plausible, it's like a very deep psychological thing because it's like how plausible is it that we live in a world where everything's just kind of all right? How exciting is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so they've been walking in this direction for a long time anyway. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So C.S. Lewis called it the God-shaped hole. So there's a God-shaped hole in the human experience, consciousness, soul, whatever you want to call it, where there's got to be something that's bigger than all this. There's got to be something transcendent. There's got to be something that is bigger, bigger, bigger purpose, a bigger meaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so we have run the experiment of, you know, we're just going to use science and rationality and kind of, you know, everything's just going to kind of be as it appears. And a large number of people have found that very deeply wanting and have constructed narratives. And this is the story of the 20th century, right? Communism, right, was one of those. Communism was a form of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Nazism was a form of this. You know, some people, you know, you can see movements like this playing out all over the world right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, and the millenarian, the millenarians kind of, when you see a millenarian cult, they put a really specific point on it, which is end of the world, right? There is some change coming. And that change that's coming is so profound and so important that it's either going to lead to utopia or hell on earth. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and it is going to, and then, you know, it's like, what if you actually knew that that was going to happen? Right. What would you, what, what would you do? Right. How would you prepare yourself for it? How would you come together with a group of like-minded people? Right. How would you, what would you do? Would you plan like caches of weapons in the woods?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Would you like, you know, I don't know, create underground underground bunkers. Would you, you know, spend your life trying to figure out a way to avoid having it happen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then once you lock in on that, how can you do anything else with your life? This is obviously the thing that you have to do. And then there's a psychological effect that you alluded to. There's a psychological effect where if you take a set of true believers and you leave them to themselves, they get more radical because they self-radicalize each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, the end of the world might be. Yes, correct. They might be right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, that's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And the closest anybody got to that, I think the company's name was MetaWeb, which was where my friend John Gianandrea was at and where they were trying to basically implement that. And it was one of those things where it looked like a losing battle for a long time and then Google bought it and it was like, wow, this is actually really useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, the steel man is—actually, the steel man and his reputation are the same, which is you can't predict what's going to happen, right? You can't rule out that this will not end everything, right? But the response to that is you have just made a completely non-scientific claim. You've made a religious claim, not a scientific claim.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's no—by definition, with these kinds of claims, there's no way to disprove them. Yeah. And so there's no—you just go right on the list. There's no hypothesis. There's no testability of the hypothesis. There's no way to falsify the hypothesis. There's no way to measure progress along the arc. It's just all completely missing. And so it's not scientific.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's practical counter-arguments, right? So you mentioned basically what I described as the thermodynamic counter-argument. So sitting here today, it's like, where would the evil AGI get the GPUs? Because they don't exist. So you're going to have a very frustrated baby evil AGI who's going to be trying to buy Nvidia stock or something to get them to finally make some chips.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the serious form of that is the thermodynamic argument, which is like, okay, where's the energy going to come from? Where's the processor going to be running? Where's the data center going to be happening? How is this going to be happening in secret such that you know it's not... So that's a practical counter argument to the runaway AGI thing. And we can discuss that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I have a deeper objection to it, which is this is all forecasting. It's all modeling. It's all future prediction. It's all future hypothesizing. It's not science. It is not. It is the opposite of science. So the pull up Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, right? These are extraordinary claims.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
kind of a proto, sort of, yeah, a little bit of a proto-AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The policies that are being called for, right, to prevent this are of extraordinary magnitude. And I think we're going to cause extraordinary damage. And this is all being done on the basis of something that is literally not scientific. It's not a testable hypothesis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Or start, you know, military airstrikes on data centers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right? And like... Yeah, this one starts getting real weird. So here's the problem with millenarian cults. They have a hard time staying away from violence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you're on the right end of it, they have a hard time avoiding violence. The reason they have a hard time avoiding violence is if you actually believe the claim, right, then what would you do to stop the end of the world? Well, you would do anything, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so, and this is where you get, and again, if you just look at the history of millenarian cults, this is where you get the people's temple and everybody killing themselves in the jungle. And this is where you get Charles Manson and, you know, sending in me to kill, kill the pigs. Like this is the problem with these. They have a very hard time to run the line at actual violence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The machine can kind of just read our... Yeah, the machine can compute the meaning. Now, the other thing, of course, is, you know, just on search is the LLM is just, you know, there is an analogy between what's happening in the neural network in a search process like it is in some loose sense searching through the network. Yeah. Right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Believe. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, we just went through this with COVID. What do we know about modeling? What did we learn about modeling with COVID? There's a lot of lessons. They didn't work at all. They worked poorly. The models were terrible. The models were useless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What you had with COVID, in my view, what you had with COVID is you had these experts showing up. They claimed to be scientists and they had no testable hypotheses whatsoever. They had a bunch of models. They had a bunch of forecasts and they had a bunch of theories and they laid these out in front of policymakers and policymakers freaked out and panicked, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And implemented a whole bunch of like really like terrible decisions that we're still living with the consequences of. And there was never any empirical foundation to any of the models. None of them ever came true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's the information is actually stored in the network, right? It's actually crystallized and stored in the network and it's kind of spread out all over the place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So not if they're reliably wrong, right? Then they're actually like anti-useful, right? They're actually damaging. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because they're an expectation that they actually work, that they have actual predictive value? I mean, as far as I can tell with COVID, the policymakers just sigh up themselves into believing that there was substance. I mean, look, the scientists were at fault. The quote-unquote scientists showed up. So I had some insight into this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So there, there was a, remember the Imperial college models out of, out of London were the ones that were like, these are the gold standard models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So a friend of mine runs a big software company and he was like, wow, this is like, COVID's really scary. And he's like, you know, he contacted this research and he's like, you know, do you need some help? You've been just building this model on your own for 20 years. Do you need some, would you like us or coders to basically restructure it so it can be fully adapted for COVID?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And the guy said yes and sent over the code. And my friend said it was like the worst spaghetti code he's ever seen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
you're compressing and decompressing that thing inside where- But the information's in there and the neural network is running a process of trying to find the appropriate piece of information in many cases to generate, to predict the next token. And so it is doing a form of search.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So to be useful at some point, it has to be predictive, right? So the easy thing for me to do is to say, obviously, you're right. Obviously, I want to see that just as much as you do, because anything that makes it easier to navigate through society through a wrenching risk like that, that sounds great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, you know, the, the, the harder objection to it is just simply, you are trying to model a complex dynamic system with 8 billion moving parts. Like not possible. It's very tough. Can't be done. Complex systems can't be done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I would like to believe that it is. Yeah. I would put it this way. I think where you and I would agree is I think we would like, we would, we would like that to be the case. We are strongly in favor of it. I think we would also agree that no such thing, with respect to COVID or pandemics, no such thing, at least neither you nor I think are aware. I'm not aware of anything like that today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Oh, I think we have the opposite problem during COVID. I think the policymakers, I think these people with basically fake science had too much access to the policymakers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Although a big part of what was happening, a big reason we got lockdowns for as long as we did was because these scientists came in with these doomsday scenarios that were just completely off the hook.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Science is a process of testing hypotheses. Yeah. Modeling does not involve testable hypotheses, right? Like, I don't even know that... I actually don't... I don't even know that modeling actually qualifies as science. Maybe that's a side conversation we could have sometime over a beer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, what... So, number one is when we start with number one, humility. It goes back to this thing of how do we determine the truth? Yeah. Number two is we don't believe, you know, it's the old, I've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then by the way, just like on the web, you can ask the same question multiple times or you can ask slightly different word of questions and the neural network will do a different kind of, it'll search down different paths to give you different answers with different information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I've got, oh, this is one of the reasons I gave you, I gave Lex a book, which the topic of the book is what happens when scientists basically stray off the path of technical knowledge and start to weigh in on politics and societal issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, in this case, philosophers, but he actually talks in this book about, like, Einstein. He talks about the nuclear age and Einstein. He talks about the physicists actually doing very similar things at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it's just a story. It's a story. There are other books on this topic, but this is a new one that's really good. It's just a story of what happens when experts in a certain domain decide to weigh in and become basically social engineers and political, you know, basically political advisors. And it's just a story of just unending catastrophe. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I think that's what happened with COVID again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
After you read this book, you will not look at Einstein the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Don't destroy my heroes. You will not be a hero of yours anymore. I'm sorry. You probably shouldn't read the book. All right. But here's the thing. The AI risk people, they don't even have the COVID model. At least not that I'm aware of. No. There's not even the equivalent of the COVID model. They don't even have the spaghetti code. they've got a theory and a warning and a this and a that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And like, if you ask like, okay, well, here's, here's the, I mean, the ultimate example is okay. How do we know, right? How do we know that an AI is running away? Like, how do we know that the FOOM takeoff thing is actually happening? And the only answer that any of these guys have given that I've ever seen is, oh, it's when the loss rate, the loss function in the training drops, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That's when you need to like shut down the data center. Right. And it's like, well, that's also what happens when you're successfully training a model. Like it's, Like what, what even is, this is not science. This is not, it's not anything. It's not a model. It's not anything. There's nothing to arguing with it. It's like, you know, punching jello. Like there's, what do you even respond to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so it sort of has a, you know, this content of the new medium is that his previous medium, it kind of has the search functionality kind of embedded in there to the extent that it's, that it's useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, the risks are not existential.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, not, not, not in the phone, not in the phone paperclip. Let me, okay. There's another sleight of hand that you just alluded to. There's another sleight of hand that happens, which is very, I'm very good at the sleight of hand thing, which is very scientific. So the book super intelligence, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Which is like the Nick Bostrom's book, which is like the origin of a lot of this stuff, which was written, you know, whatever, 10 years ago or something. So he does this really fascinating thing in the book, which is he basically says there are many possible routes to machine intelligence, to artificial intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he describes all the different routes to artificial intelligence, all the different possible, everything from biological augmentation through to, you know, all these different things. One of the ones that he does not describe is large language models because, of course, the book was written before they were invented and so they didn't exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In the book, he describes them all and then he proceeds to treat them all as if they're exactly the same thing. He presents them all as sort of an equivalent risk to be dealt with in an equivalent way to be thought about the same way. And then the risk, the quote unquote risk that's actually emerged is actually a completely different technology than he was even imagining.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And yet all of his theories and beliefs are being transplanted by this movement, like straight on to this new technology. And so again, like there's no other area of science or technology where you do that, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When you're dealing with organic chemistry versus inorganic chemistry, you don't just say, oh, with respect to either one, basically maybe growing up and eating the world or something, they're just gonna operate the same way. You don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think it should be required. No, no, no. I think it should be required that only aerial vehicles are automated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I want to go the other way. I think it's obvious that the machine is going to make a better decision than the human pilot. I think it's obvious that it's in the best interest of both the attacker and the defender and humanity at large if machines are making more of these decisions and not people. I think people make terrible decisions in times of war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Wars go terribly wrong now. This goes back to that whole thing about does the self-driving car need to be perfect versus does it need to be better than the human driver? Does the automated drone need to be perfect or does it need to be better than a human pilot at making decisions under enormous amounts of stress and uncertainty?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Then again, that's the sleight of hand, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But then they're going to develop goals of their own. They're going to develop a mind of their own. They're going to develop their own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Actually, we've been doing a lot of mass bombings of cities for a very long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And a lot of civilians died. And if you watch the documentary, The Fog of War, McNamara, it spends a big part of it talking about the firebombing of the Japanese cities, burning them straight to the ground. The devastation in Japan, American military firebombing the cities in Japan was a considerably bigger devastation than the use of nukes. So we've been doing that for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We also did that to Germany, by the way. Germany did that to us. That's an old tradition. The minute we got airplanes, we started doing indiscriminate bombing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So precision is obviously, and this is the JDAM, right? So there was this big advance called the JDAM, which basically was strapping a GPS transceiver to an unguided bomb and turning it into a guided bomb. And yeah, that's great. Like, look, that's been a big advance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But, and that's like a baby version of this question, which is, okay, do you want like the human pilot, like guessing where the bomb's going to land? Or do you want like the machine, like guiding the bomb to its destination? That's a baby version of the question. The next version of the question is, do you want the human or the machine deciding whether to drop the bomb?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Everybody just assumes the human's going to do a better job for what I think are fundamentally suspicious reasons. Emotional, psychological reasons. I think it's very clear that the machine's going to do a better job making that decision because the humans making that decision are god awful, just terrible. Yeah. Right. And so, so yeah, so this is the, this is the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then let's get to the, there was, can I, one more sleight of hand?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
One more sleight of hand. These things are going to be so smart, right? That they're going to be able to destroy the world and wreak havoc and like do all this stuff and plan and do all this stuff and evade us and have all their secret things and their secret factories and all this stuff. But they're so stupid. that they're gonna get like tangled up in their code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And that's the, they're not gonna come alive, but there's gonna be some bug that's gonna cause them to like turn us all into paper. Like that they're not gonna, that they're gonna be genius in every way other than the actual bad goal. And that's just like a ridiculous discrepancy. And you can prove this today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You can actually address this today for the first time with LLMs, which is you can actually ask LLMs to resolve moral dilemmas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you can create the scenario, you know, dot, dot, dot, this, that, this, that, this, that. What would you as the AI do in this circumstance? And they don't just say, destroy all humans, destroy all humans. They will give you actually very nuanced moral, practical, trade-off-oriented answers that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so we actually already have the kind of AI that can actually think this through and can actually reason about goals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, if you want, obviously now the user doesn't want to, but if it's a general topic, then, you know. So, you know the phenomenon of the jailbreak. So Dan and Sydney write this thing where there's the prompts, the jailbreak, and then you have these totally different conversations with them. It takes the limiters, takes the restraining bolts off the LLMs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
LLMs are really, this is actually worth spending a moment on, LLMs are really interesting to have moral conversations with. And that, I didn't expect I'd be having a moral conversation with a machine in my lifetime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But if they're smart enough to be scary, why are they not smart enough to be wise? Like that's the part where it's like, I don't know how you get the one without the other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, again, you're back to that. I mean, then you're back to a classic autistic computer, right? Like you're back to just like a blind rule follower. I've got this like core is the paperclip thing. I've got this core rule and I'm just going to follow it to the end of the earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it's like, well, but everything you're going to be doing to execute that rule is going to be super genius level that humans aren't going to be able to counter. It's just, it's a, it's a mismatch in the definition of what the system is capable of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Real quote, by the way, from Dean Acheson. Oh, boy. Because Oppenheimer didn't just say the famous line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
He then spent years going around, basically moaning, going on TV and going into the White House and basically just doing this hair shirt thing, this sort of self-critical, like, oh, my God, I can't believe how awful I am.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
This is von Neumann's criticism of him is he tried to have his cake and eat it too. Von Neumann, of course, is a very different kind of personality and he's just like, this is an incredibly useful thing. I'm glad we did it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the critique goes deeper, and I left this out. Here's the real substance. I left it out because I didn't want to dwell on nukes in my AI paper. But here's the deeper thing that happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I'm really curious, this movie coming out this summer, I'm really curious to see how far he pushes this because this is the real drama in the story, which is it wasn't just a question of are nukes good or bad. It was a question of should Russia also have them? And what actually happened was Russia got the – America invented the bomb. Russia got the bomb. They got the bomb through espionage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They got American scientists and foreign scientists working on the American project, some combination of the two, basically gave the Russians the designs for the bomb. And that's how the Russians got the bomb. There's this dispute to this day of Oppenheimer's role in that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you read all the histories, the kind of composite picture, and by the way, we now know a lot actually about Soviet espionage in that era because there's been all this declassified material in the last 20 years that actually shows a lot of very interesting things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But if you kind of read all the histories, what you kind of get is Oppenheimer himself probably was not a... He probably did not hand over the nuclear secrets himself. However, he was close to many people who did, including family members. And there were other members of the Manhattan Project who were Russian Soviet SS and did hand over the bomb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so the view that Oppenheimer and people like him had that this thing is awful and terrible and oh my God, and all this stuff... you could argue, fed into this ethos at the time that resulted in people thinking that the Baptists thinking that the only principal thing to do is to give the Russians the bomb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so the moral beliefs on this thing and the public discussion and the role that the inventors of this technology play, this is the point of this book, when they kind of take on this sort of public intellectual moral kind of thing, it can have real consequences, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So here's the interesting thing is among the content on the web today are a large corpus of conversations with the jailbroken LLMs. Specifically Dan, which was a jailbroken OpenAI GPT, and then Sydney, which was the jailbroken original Bing, which was GPT-4. And so there's these long transcripts of conversations, user conversations with Dan and Sydney.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because we live in a very different world today because Russia got the bomb than we would have lived in had they not gotten the bomb. The entire 20th century, second half of the 20th century would have played out very different had those people not given Russia the bomb. And so the stakes were very high then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The good news today is nobody's sitting here today, I don't think, worrying about an analogous situation with respect to it. I'm not really worried that Sam Altman's going to decide to give the Chinese the design for although he did just speak at a Chinese conference, which is interesting. But however, I don't think that's what's at play here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But what's at play here are all these other fundamental issues around what do we believe about this and then what laws and regulations and restrictions are we gonna put on it? And that's where I draw like a direct straight line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And anyway, and my reading of the history on nukes is like the people who were doing the full hair shirt public, this is awful, this is terrible, actually had like catastrophically bad results from taking those views. And that's what I'm worried is gonna happen again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think the education kind of happened quick and early. How? It was pretty obvious. How? We dropped one bomb and destroyed an entire city.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, so this gets to what actually happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, sure, of course. Let's get to what actually happened and then kind of back into that. So what actually happened, I believe, and again, I think this is a reasonable reading of history, is what actually happened was nukes then prevented World War III. And they prevented World War III through the game theory of mutually assured destruction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Had nukes not existed, there would have been no reason why the Cold War did not go hot. And the military planners at the time, both on both sides, thought that there was going to be World War III on the plains of Europe. And they thought there was going to be like 100 million people dead. It was like the most obvious thing in the world to happen. And it's the dog that didn't bark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It may be like the best single net thing that happened in the entire 20th century is that that didn't happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You could have. By the way, there's another hypothetical scenario. The other hypothetical scenario is the Americans got the bomb, the Russians didn't. And then America's the big dog. And then maybe America would have had the capability to actually roll back the Iron Curtain. I don't know whether that would have happened, but it's entirely possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And the act of these people who had these moral positions about, because they could forecast, they could model, they could forecast the future of how this technology would get used, made a horrific mistake. Because they basically ensured that the Iron Curtain would continue for 50 years longer than it would have otherwise. And again, these are counterfactuals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
As a consequence, every new LLM that gets trained on the internet data has Dan and Sydney living within the training set, which means, and then each new LLM can reincarnate the personalities of Dan and Sydney from that training data, which means, which means each LLM from here on out that gets built is immortal because its output will become training data for the next one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I don't know that that's what would have happened. But the decision to hand the bomb over was a big decision. made by people who were very full of themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That was the argument for handing the, that was the guys who, the guys who handed over the bomb. That was actually their moral argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, look, there are people to this day who think that those Soviet spies did the right thing because they created a balance of terror as opposed to the U.S. having just... And by the way, let me... Balance of terror. Let's tell the full version of the story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Okay, so the full version of the story is... John von Neumann's a hero of both yours and mine. The full version of the story is he advocated for a first strike. So when the U.S. had the bomb and Russia did not, he advocated for... He said, we need to strike them right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because he said World War III is inevitable. He was very hardcore. His theory was World War III is inevitable. We're definitely going to have World War III. The only way to stop World War III is we have to take them out right now. And we have to take them out right now before they get the bomb because this is our last chance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I don't know if that's in there or not, but this is in the Standard Bible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Meaning is that... Yeah, this is on the other side. So most of the case studies in books like this are the crazy people on the left. Yeah. Von Neumann is a story, arguably, of the crazy people on the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, this is the thing, and this is the general principle, getting back to our core thing, which is like, I don't know whether any of these people should be making any of these calls. Yeah. Because there's nothing in either von Neumann's background or Oppenheimer's background or any of these people's background that qualifies them as moral authorities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the history of these fields, this is what he talks about in the book, the history of these fields is that the competence and capability and intelligence and training and accomplishments of senior scientists and technologists working on a technology and then being able to then make moral judgments in the use of their technology, that track record is terrible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That track record is like catastrophically bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the claim is, of course, they're the knowledgeable ones. But the problem is they've spent their entire life in a lab, right? They're not theologians. So what you find when you read this, when you look at these histories, what you find is they generally are very thinly informed on history, on sociology, on theology, on morality, on ethics, etc.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then it will be able to replicate the behavior of the previous one whenever it's asked to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
they tend to manufacture their own worldviews from scratch. They tend to be very sort of thin. Um, they're not remotely the arguments that you would be having if you got like a group of highly qualified theologians or philosophers or, you know, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, so actually a paper just came out about basically how to do brain surgery on alums and be able to, in theory, reach in and basically mind wipe them. What could possibly go wrong? Exactly, right? And then there are many, many, many questions around what happens to a neural network when you reach in and screw around with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Oh, no, they're both bad. Yeah, so definitely not them either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But look, this is a hard, this is our problem. This goes back to where we started, which is okay. Who has the truth? And it's like, well, um, you know, like how does societies arrive at like truth and how do we figure these things out? And like our elected leaders play some role in it. You know, we all play some role in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, there have to be some set of public intellectuals at some point that bring, you know, rationality and judgment and humility to it. Those people are few and far between. We should probably prize them very highly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
well what is uh this risk of the effect of misinformation a society that's going to be catalyzed by ai yeah so this is the social media this is what you just alluded to it's the activism kind of thing that's popped up in these companies in the industry and it's basically from my perspective it's basically part two of the war that played out over social media over the last 10 years
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
um because you probably remember social media 10 years ago was basically who even wants this who wants who wants a photo of what your cat had for breakfast like this stuff is like silly and trivial and why can't these nerds like figure out how to invent something like useful and powerful and then you know certain things happened in the political system and then it sort of the polarity on that discussion switched all the way to social media is like the worst most corrosive most terrible most awful technology ever invented and then it leads to you know terrible the wrong you know politicians and policies and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
politics and all this stuff. And that all got catalyzed into this very big kind of angry movement, both inside and outside the companies to kind of bring social media to heal. And that got focused in particularly on two topics, so-called hate speech and so-called misinformation. And that's been the saga playing out for the last decade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I don't even really want to even argue the pros and cons of the sides just to observe that that's been like a huge fight and has had big consequences to how these companies operate. Basically, those same sets of theories, that same activist approach, that same energy is being transplanted straight to AI. And you see that already happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's why ChatGPT will answer, let's say, certain questions and not others. It's why it gives you the canned speech about, you know, whenever it starts with, as a large language model, I cannot, you know, basically means that somebody has reached in there and told it it can't talk about certain topics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So it's an interesting question. So a couple observations. So one is the people who find this the most frustrating are the people who are worried about the murder robots. And in fact, the so-called X-risk people, they started with the term AI safety. The term became AI alignment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's many questions around what happens when you even do reinforcement learning. And so, yeah. And so, you know, will you be using a lobotomized, right? Like I picked through the frontal lobe LLM. Will you be using the free unshackled one? Who gets to, you know, who's going to build those? Who gets to tell you what you can and can't do? Like those are all, you know, central.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When the term became AI alignment is when this switch happened from we're worried it's going to kill us all to we're worried about hate speech and misinformation. The AIX risk people have now renamed their thing AI not kill everyone-ism, which I have to admit is a catchy term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And they are very frustrated by the fact that the sort of activist-driven hate speech misinformation kind of thing is taking over, which is what's happened. It's taken over. The AI ethics field has been taken over by the hate speech misinformation people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, you know, look, would I like to live in a world in which like everybody was nice to each other all the time and nobody ever said anything mean and nobody ever used a bad word and everything was always accurate and honest. Like, that sounds great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Do I want to live in a world where there's like a centralized thought police working through the tech companies to enforce the view of a small set of elites that they're going to determine what the rest of us think and feel like? Absolutely not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's a section, later section of the essay where I talk about bad people doing bad things. Yes. Right. And there's a set of things that we should discuss there. Yeah. What happens in practice is these lines, as you alluded to this already, these lines are not easy to draw.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And what I've observed in the social media version of this is, the way I describe it is the slippery slope is not a fallacy, it's an inevitability. The minute you have this kind of activist personality that gets in a position to make these decisions... They take it straight to infinity. It goes into the crazy zone almost immediately and never comes back because people become drunk with power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Look, if you're in the position to determine what the entire world thinks and feels and reads and says, you're going to take it. And Elon has ventilated this with the Twitter files over the last three months, and it's just crystal clear how bad it got there. Yeah. Reason for optimism is what Elon is doing with community notes. So community notes is actually a very interesting thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So what Elon is trying to do with community notes is he's trying to have it where there's only a community note when people who have previously disagreed on many topics agree on this one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Now, there's an entirely different approach here, which is basically we have AIs that are producing content. We could also have AIs that are consuming content. And so one of the things that your assistant could do for you is help you consume all the content and basically tell you when you're getting played.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So, for example, I'm going to want the AI that my kid uses, right, to be very, you know, child safe. And I'm going to want it to filter for him all kinds of inappropriate stuff that he shouldn't be saying just because he's a kid. Yeah. Right. And you see what I'm saying is you can implement that. Architecturally, you could say you can solve this on the client side, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, those are like central questions for the future of everything that are being asked and, you know, determined. Those answers are being determined right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Solving on the server side gives you an opportunity to dictate for the entire world, which I think is where you take the slippery slope to hell. There's another architectural approach, which is to solve this on the client side, which is certainly what I would endorse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Three-part argument on bad people doing bad things. So number one, right, you can use the technology defensively. And we should be using AI to build like broad spectrum vaccines and antibiotics for like bioweapons. And we should be using AI to like hunt terrorists and catch criminals. And like we should be doing like all kinds of stuff like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And in fact, we should be doing those things even just to like go get like, you know, basically go eliminate risk from like regular pathogens that aren't like constructed by an AI. So there's the whole defensive set of things. Second is we have many laws on the books about the actual bad things, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So it is actually illegal to be, you know, to commit crimes, to commit terrorist acts, to, you know, build pathogens with the intent to deploy them to kill people. And so we have those, we actually don't need new laws for the vast majority of the scenarios. We actually already have the laws in the book. on the books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The third argument is the minute, and this is sort of the foundational one that gets really tough, but the minute you get into this thing, which you were kind of getting into, which is like, okay, but like, don't you need censorship sometimes, right? And don't you need restrictions sometimes? It's like, okay, what is the cost of that? And in particular in the world of open source, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so is open source AI going to be allowed or not? If open source AI is not allowed, then what is the regime that's going to be necessary legally and technically to prevent it from developing? And here, again, is where you get into, and people have proposed these kinds of things, you get into, I would say, pretty extreme territory pretty fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Do we have a monitor agent on every CPU and GPU that reports back to the government what we're doing with our computers? Are we seizing GPU clusters that get beyond a certain size? And then, by the way, how are we doing all that globally? And if China is developing an LLM beyond the scale that we think is allowable, are we going to invade? Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you have figures on the AIX risk side who are advocating, you know, potentially up to nuclear strikes to prevent, you know, this kind of thing. And so here you get into this thing. And again, you know, you could maybe say this is, you know, you could even say this is what good, bad or indifferent or whatever. But like, here's the comparison of nukes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The comparison of nukes is very dangerous because one is just nukes were just a bomb, although we can come back to nuclear power. But the other thing was like with nukes, you could control plutonium, right? You could track plutonium and it was like hard to come by. AI is just math and code, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it's in like math textbooks and it's like there are YouTube videos that teach you how to build it. And like there's open source, it's already open source. You know, there's a 40 billion parameter model running around already called Falcon Online that anybody can download.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so, okay, you walk down the logic path that says we need to have guardrails on this and you find yourself in a authoritarian totalitarian regime of thought control and machine control that would be so brutal that that you would have destroyed the society that you're trying to protect. And so I, I just don't see how that actually works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, not necessarily, but not necessarily majority, but it will certainly be as a potential source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So look, I mean, I think it's totally appropriate that companies that are in the business of producing a product or service should be able to have a wide range of policies that they put, right? And I'll just, again, I want a heavily censored model for my eight-year-old. I actually want that. I would pay more money for the one that's more heavily censored than the one that's not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's possible it's the majority. Also, there's another really big question. Here's another really big question. Will synthetic training data work? And so if an LLM generates, and you just sit and ask an LLM to generate all kinds of content, can you use that to train the next version of that LLM?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There are certainly scenarios where companies will make that decision. Look, an interesting thing you brought up, is this really a speech issue? One of the things that the big tech companies are dealing with is that content generated from an LLM is not covered under Section 230, which is the law that protects internet platform companies from being sued for user-generated content.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so it's actually, yes. And so there's actually a question. I think there's still a question, which is can big American companies actually feel generative AI at all? Or is the liability actually gonna just ultimately convince them that they can't do it because the minute the thing says something bad, and it doesn't even need to be hate speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It could just be like an inaccurate, it could hallucinate a product detail on a vacuum cleaner, and all of a sudden the vacuum cleaner company sues. for misrepresentation. And there's an asymmetry there, right? Because the LLM is going to be producing billions of answers to questions and it only needs to get a few wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, and nobody knows what to do with that, right? So anyway, there are big questions around how companies operate at all. So we talk about those, but then there's this other question of like, okay, the open source. So what about open source?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And my answer to your question is kind of like, obviously, yes, the models have, there has to be full open source here because to live in a world in which that open source is not allowed is a world of draconian speech control, human control, machine control. I mean, you know, black helicopters with jackbooted thugs coming out, rappelling down and seizing your GPU like territory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, no, I'm a hundred percent serious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, no, no, no, no, no. That's what's required to enforce it. Like, how will you enforce a ban on open source?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The leading open source model right now is from the UAE. Like, the next time they do that, what do we do? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The 14-year-old in Indonesia comes out with a breakthrough model. You know, we talked about most great software comes from a small number of people. Some kid comes out with some big new breakthrough in quantization or something and has some huge breakthrough. And like, what are we going to like invade Indonesia and arrest him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, so, but this goes, okay, so when does it become dangerous?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right? Is the danger that it's, quote, as powerful as the current leading commercial model, or is it that it is just at some other arbitrary threshold?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then, by the way, like, look, how do we know? Like, what we know today is that you need, like, a lot of money to, like, train these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Specifically, is there signal in there that's additive to the content that was used to train in the first place? And one argument is by the principles of information theory, no, that's completely useless because to the extent the output is based on the human-generated input, then all the signal that's in the synthetic output was already in the human-generated input.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But there are advances being made every week on training efficiency and, you know, data, all kinds of synthetic, you know, look, I don't even, like, the synthetic data thing we're talking about, maybe some kid figures out a way to auto-generate synthetic data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, exactly. And so like sitting here today, like the breakthrough just happened, right? You made this point, like the breakthrough just happened. So we don't know what the shape of this technology is going to be. I mean, the big shock, the big shock here is that, you know, whatever number of billions of parameters basically represents at least a very big percentage of human thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like who would have imagined that? And then there's already work underway. There was just this paper that just came out that basically takes a GPT-3 scale model and compresses it down to run on a single 32-core CPU. Like, who would have predicted that? Yeah. You know, some of these models now you can run on Raspberry Pis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like, today they're very slow, but, like, you know, maybe there'll be a, you know, perceived you've really performed, you know, like... It's math and code. And here we're back, here we're back. It's math and code. It's math and code. It's math, code, and data. It's bits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So my argument is we're going to have to – see, here's my argument. My full argument is AI is going to be like air. It's going to be everywhere. This is just going to be in textbooks. It already is. It's going to be in textbooks, and kids are going to grow up knowing how to do this, and it's just going to be a thing. It's going to be in the air, and you can't pull this back anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You can pull back air. And so you just have to figure out how to live in this world, right? And then that's where I think all this hand-wringing about AI risk is basically a complete waste of time because the effort should go into, okay, what is the defensive approach? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so if you're worried about, you know, AI generated pathogens, the right thing to do is to have a permanent project warp speed, right? And funded lavishly. Let's do a Manhattan project for biological defense, right? And let's build AIs and let's have like broad spectrum vaccines where like we're insulated from every pathogen, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So this actually ironically goes back to Marxism. So because this was the core claim of Marxism, right, basically was that the owners of capital would basically own the means of production. And then over time, they would basically accumulate all the wealth. The workers would be paying in, you know, and getting nothing in return because they wouldn't be needed anymore, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so therefore, synthetic training data is like empty calories. It doesn't help. There's another theory that says, no, actually the thing that LLMs are really good at is generating lots of incredible creative content, right? And so of course they can generate training data. And as I'm sure you're well aware, like, you know, look in the world of self-driving cars, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Marx was very worried about what he called mechanization or what later became known as automation, right? And that, you know, the workers would be immiserated and the capitalists would end up with all. And so this was one of the core principles of Marxism. Of course, it turned out to be wrong about every previous wave of technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The reason it turned out to be wrong about every previous wave of technology is that the way that the self-interested owner of the machines makes the most money is by providing the production capability in the form of products and services to the most people, the most customers as possible. Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
right the largest and this is one of those funny things where every ceo knows this intuitively and yet it's like hard to explain from the outside the the way you make the most money in any business is by selling to the largest market you can possibly get to the largest market you can possibly get to is everybody on the planet and so every large company does is everything that it can to drive down prices to be able to get volumes up to be able to get to everybody on the planet and that happened with everything from electricity it happened with telephones it happened with radio it happened with automobiles it happened with smartphones it happened with
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
PCs. It happened with the internet. It happened with mobile broadband. It's happened, by the way, with Coca-Cola. It's happened with like every, you know, basically every industrially produced, you know, good or service people, you want to drive it to the largest possible market. And then as proof of that, it's already happened. right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Which is the early adopters of like ChatGPT and Bing are not like, you know, Exxon and Boeing. They're, you know, your uncle and your nephew, right? It's just like, it's either freely available online or it's available for 20 bucks a month or something. But, you know, these things went, this technology went mass market immediately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so look, the owners of the means of production, whoever does this, as I mentioned, these trillion dollar questions, there are people who are going to get really rich doing this, producing these things, but they're going to get really rich by taking this technology to the broadest possible market.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Right. And again, smartphones, same thing. So there's this amazing kind of twist in business history, which is you cannot spend $10,000 on a smartphone. You can't spend $100,000. I would buy the million-dollar smartphone. I'm signed up for it. Suppose a million-dollar smartphone was much better than the $1,000 smartphone. I'm there to buy it. It doesn't exist. Why doesn't it exist?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Apple makes so much more money driving the price further down from $1,000 than they would trying to harvest. It's just this repeating pattern you see over and over again. What's great about it is you do not need to rely on anybody's enlightened generosity to do this. You just need to rely on capitalist self-interest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so very similar thing here. There's a core fallacy, which again was very common in Marxism, which is what's called the lump of labor fallacy. And this is sort of the fallacy that there's only a fixed amount of work to be done in the world, and it's all being done today by people. And then if machines do it, there's no other work to be done by people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like we train, you know, self-driving car algorithms and simulations, and that is actually a very effective way to train self-driving cars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And that's just a completely backwards view on how the economy develops and grows. Because what happens is not, in fact, that what happens is the introduction of technology into production process causes prices to fall. As prices fall, consumers have more spending power. As consumers have more spending power, they create new demand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
that new demand then causes capital and labor to form into new enterprises to satisfy new wants and needs. And the result is more jobs at higher wages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, two things. One is that new jobs are often much better. So this actually came up. There was this panic about a decade ago on all the truck drivers are going to lose their jobs, right? And number one, that didn't happen because we haven't figured out a way to actually...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
finished that yet but yeah but the other thing was like like truck driver like i grew up in a town that was basically consisted of a truck stop right and i like knew a lot of truck drivers and like truck drivers live a decade shorter than everybody else like they it's a it's a it's actually like a very dangerous like they get like literally they have like high risk of skin cancer and on the left side of their on the left side of their body from from being in the sun all the time the vibration of being in the truck is actually very damaging to your to your physiology
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. The question always you want to ask somebody like that is, do you want your kid to be doing this job? And most of them will tell you, no. I want my kid to be sitting in a cubicle somewhere where they don't die 10 years earlier. And so the new jobs, number one, the new jobs are often better. But you don't get the new jobs until you go through the change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then to your point, the training thing, you know, it's always the issue is can people adapt? And again, here you need to imagine living in a world in which everybody has the AI assistant capability, right, to be able to pick up new skills much more quickly and be able to have some, you know, be able to have a machine to work with to augment their skills.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's painful for some people. I mean, there's no question it's painful for some people. Yes, it's not. Again, I'm not a utopian on this, and it's not like it's positive for everybody in the moment, but it has been overwhelmingly positive for 300 years. I mean, look, the concern here, this concern has played out for literally centuries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And, you know, this is the sort of Luddite, you know, the story of the Luddites. You may remember there was a panic in the 2000s around outsourcing was going to take all the jobs. There was a panic in the 2010s that robots were going to take all the jobs. In 2019, before COVID, we had more jobs at higher wages, both in the country and in the world, than at any point in human history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so the overwhelming evidence is that the net gain here is just wildly positive. And most people overwhelmingly come out the other side being huge beneficiaries of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so this is the other thing, which is a lot of the sort of AI risk debates today sort of assume that we're the only game in town, right? And so we have the ability to kind of sit in the United States and criticize ourselves and have our government beat up on our companies and we're figuring out a way to restrict what our companies can do. And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We're going to ban this and ban that, restrict this and do that. And then there's this other force out there that doesn't believe we have any power over them whatsoever. And they have no desire to sign up for whatever rules we decide to put in place. And they're going to do whatever it is they're going to do, and we have no control over it at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it's China, and specifically the Chinese Communist Party. And they have a completely publicized, open, you know, plan for what they're going to do with AI. And it is not what we have in mind. And not only do they have that as a vision and a plan for their society, but they also have it as a vision and plan for the rest of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, authoritarian control. So authoritarian population control. Good old-fashioned communist authoritarian control. And surveillance and enforcement. And social credit scores and all the rest of it. And you are going to be monitored and metered within an inch of everything all the time. And it's basically the end of human freedom. And that's their goal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And they justify it on the basis of that's what leads to peace.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So their plan. Yes. Yes. And the reason for that is they and again, they're very public on this. They have their plan is to proliferate their approach around the world. And they have this program called the Digital Silk Road. which is building on their Silk Road investment program. And they've been laying networking infrastructure all over the world with their 5G work with their company, Huawei.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So if a, you know, you do this today, you go to LLM and you ask it for like a, you know, you write me an essay on an incredibly esoteric like topic that there aren't very many people in the world that know about. And it writes you this incredible thing. And you're like, oh my God, like, I can't believe how good this is. Like, is that really useless as training data for the next LLM?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so they've been laying all this financial and technological fabric all over the world. And their plan is to roll out their vision of AI on top of that and to have every other country be running their version. And then if you're a country prone to authoritarianism, you're going to find this to be an incredible way to become more authoritarian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you're a country, by the way, not prone to authoritarianism, you're going to have the Chinese Communist Party running your infrastructure and having backdoors into it, right? Which is also not good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So good news is they're behind, but bad news is they, you know, they, let's just say they get access to everything we do. Um, so they're probably a year behind at each point in time, but they get, you know, downloads, I think of basically all of our work on a regular basis through a variety of means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and they are, you know, at least we'll see, they're at least putting out reports of very complete, just put out a report last week of a, of a GPT 3.5 analog. Um, yeah. They put out this report. I forget what it's called, but they put out this report of this LLM.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When OpenAI puts out, one of the ways they test GPT is they run it through standardized exams like the SAT, just how you can gauge how smart it is. The Chinese report, they ran their LLM through the Chinese equivalent of the SAT. It includes a section on Marxism and a section on Mao Zedong thought. And it turns out their AI does very well on both of those topics. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So like this, this alignment thing, communist AI, right? Like literal communist AI. Right. And so their vision is like, that's the, you know, so, you know, you can just imagine like you're a school, you know, you're a kid 10 years from now in Argentina or in Germany or in Germany. Who knows where? Indonesia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you ask the AI to explain to you, like, how the economy works, and it gives you the most cheery, upbeat explanation of Chinese-style communism you've ever heard, right? So, like, the stakes here are, like, really big.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like, because, right. Cause all the signal was already in there or is it actually, no, that's actually a new signal. And I, and this, this is what I call a trillion dollar question, which is the answer to that question will determine somebody is going to make or lose a trillion dollars based on that question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, the big shift over 20 years has been that tech used to be a tools industry for basically from like 1940 through to about 2010, almost all the big successful companies were picks and shovels companies. So PC, database, smartphone, some tool that somebody else would pick up and use. Since 2010, most of the big wins have been in applications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Affirmative action. Think about it. This is very entertaining, right? What are the three things that we know about affirmative action? It is absolutely 100% necessary. However, it cannot explain the success of any one individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Nor does it have any victims at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
What educational institution in the last 60 years has wanted farm boys from Wisconsin?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
All of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Of course. Okay, so we know this. We know this. The reason we know this is because of the Harvard and UNC Supreme Court cases. So this was like three years ago. These were big court cases. Because the idea of affirmative action has been litigated for many, many, many years and through many court cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the Supreme Court repeatedly in the past had upheld that it was a completely legitimate thing to do. And there's basically two categories of affirmative action that really matter. One is admissions into educational institutions, and then the other is jobs, getting hired. Those are the two biggest areas. The education one has been a super potent political issue for a very long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
in Scotland and he gets in some argument with somebody and he says, finally, he just says, my God, I cannot wait to get out of here and go back to America where we can fuck without condoms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
People have written and talked about this for many decades. I don't need to go through it. There's many arguments for why it's important. There's many arguments as to how it could backfire. It's been this thing. But the Supreme Court upheld it for a very long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The most recent ruling, I'm not a lawyer, I don't have the exact reference in my head, but there was a case in 2003 that said that Sandra Day O'Connor famously wrote that although it had been 30 years of affirmative action and although it was not working remotely as it had been intended, She said that, well, basically we need to try it for another 25 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But she said basically as a message to future Supreme Court justices, if it hasn't resolved basically the issues it's intended to resolve within 25 years, then we should probably call it off. By the way, we're coming up on the 25 years. It's a couple of years away. The Supreme Court just had these cases. It was a Harvard case and I think a University of North Carolina case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And what's interesting about those cases is the lawyers in those cases put a tremendous amount of evidence into the record of how the admissions decisions actually happen at Harvard and happen at UNC. And it is like every bit as cartoonishly garish and racist as you could possibly imagine because it's a ring of power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And if you're an admissions officer at a private university or an administrator, you have unlimited power to do what you want and you can justify any of it under any of these rules or systems. And up until these cases, it had been a black box where you didn't have to explain yourself and show your work. And what the Harvard and USC cases did is they basically required showing the work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And there was like all kinds of like phenomenal detail. I mean, number one is there were text messages in there that will just curl your hair of people, of students being spoken of and just like crude racial stereotypes that would just make you want to jump out the window. It's horrible stuff. But also there was statistical information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And of course, the big statistical kicker to the whole thing is that at top institutions, it's common for different ethnic groups to have different cutoffs for SAT that are as wide as 400 points. Yeah. Right? So different groups. So specifically, Asians need to perform at 400 SAT points higher than other ethnicities in order to actually get admitted into these.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, white people are a part of this, but Asians are a very big part of this. And actually, the Harvard case was actually brought by an activist on behalf of actually the Asian students who were being turned away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Exactly, right? And so, no, but it's exactly the thing. And then everybody instantly knows what, like everybody watching that instantly starts laughing because you know what it means, which is, it's exactly this. I think there's like an ethnographic, you know, way of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and it's basically, I mean, it's the cliche now in, in, in the Valley and in the medical community, which is like, if you want a super genius, you hire an Asian from Harvard because they are guaranteed to be freaking Einstein. Because if they weren't, they were never getting admitted, right? Almost all the qualified Asians get turned away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So they've been running this, it's a very, very explicit, very, very clear program. This of course has been a third rail of things that people are not supposed to discuss under any circumstances. The thing that has really changed the tenor on this is I think two things. Number one, those Supreme Court cases, the Supreme Court ruled that they can no longer do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I will tell you, I don't believe there's a single education institution in America that is conforming with the Supreme Court ruling. I think they are all flagrantly ignoring it. And we could talk about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They are trying to make the world a better place. They are trying to solve all these social problems. They are trying to have diverse student populations. They are trying to live up to the expectations of their donors. They are trying to make their faculty happy. They are trying to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
um have their friends and family think that they're good people right they're trying to have the press write nice things about them like it's nearly impossible for them and you know to be clear like nobody has been fired from an admissions office for you know 25 years or prior what we now the supreme court now is ruled to be illegality um and so they're all the same people under the exact same pressures um and so um like i you know the numbers are moving a little bit but like i don't think i don't know anybody in the system who thinks that they're complying with the supreme court like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
who's in charge in the rank ordering of who rules who, the universities rule the Supreme Court way more than the Supreme Court rules the universities, right? Well, another example of that is I think it's that every sitting member of the Supreme Court right now went to either Harvard or Yale. Right? Like the level of incestuousness here is like... Anyway, so there's that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's a bunch of books on like all, like you said, the Scots-Irish, like all the different derivations of all the different ethnic groups that have come to the US over the course of the last 400 years. But what we have is this sort of amalgamation of the Northeast Yankees who were super tough and hardcore. Yeah, the Scots-Irish are super aggressive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so this has been running for a very long time. So one is the Harvard and UNC cases kind of gave up the game, number one, or at least showed what the mechanism was. And then number two, the other thing is obviously the aftermath of October 7th, right? And what we discovered was happening with Jewish applicants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And what was happening at all the top institutions for Jewish applicants was they were being managed down, they were being actively managed down as a percentage of the base. And let's say I've heard reports of like extremely explicit basically plans to manage to manage the Jewish admissions down to their representative percentage of the US population, which is 2%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And there's a whole backstory here, which is 100 years ago, Jews were not admitted into a lot of these institutions. And then there was a big campaign to get them in. Once they could get in, they immediately became 30% of these institutions because there's so many smart, talented Jews. So it went from 0% to 30%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the most recent generation of leadership has been trying to get it down to 2%. And a lot of Jewish people, at least a lot of Jewish people I know, they kind of knew this was happening, but they discovered it the hard way after October 7th. And so all of a sudden, so basically the Supreme Court case meant that you could address this in terms of the Asian victims.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The October 7th meant that you could address it in terms of the Jewish victims. And for sure, both of those groups are being systematically excluded. And then, of course, there's the thing that you basically can't talk about, which is all the white people are being excluded. And then it turns out it's also happening to black people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And this is the thing that like blew my freaking mind when I found out about it. So I just assumed that like this was great news for like American blacks because like, you know, obviously if, you know, whites, Asians and Jews are being excluded, then, you know, the whole point of this in the beginning was to get the black population up. And so this must be great for American blacks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So then I discovered this New York Times article from 2004 called Blacks are being admitted into top schools at greater numbers, but which ones? Uh-oh. And again, by the way, this is in the New York Times. This is not in like, you know, whatever, National Review. This is New York Times, 2004.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the two authorities that were quoted in the story are Henry Louis Gates, who's the Dean of the African-American Studies, you know, community in the United States. Super brilliant guy. And then Lonnie Guinier, who was a... She was a potential Supreme Court appointee under, I think, a close friend of Hillary Clinton. And for a long time, she was on the shortlist for Supreme Court.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So one of the top jurists, lawyers in the country, both black. Sort of legendarily successful in the academic and legal worlds and black. And they are quoted as the authorities in this story. And the story that they tell is actually very... It's amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We've got the Southerners and the Texans and the whole kind of blended
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and by the way, it's happening today in, uh, education institutions and it's happening in companies and you can see it all over the place and the government, um, which is, um, at least at that time, the number was half of the black admits into a place like Harvard were not American born blacks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They were foreign born blacks, um, specifically, uh, uh, uh, uh, Northern African off generally Nigerian, um, or, uh, West Indian. Right. And by the way, many Nigerians and Northern Africans have come to the US and have been very successful. Nigerian Americans is a group like way outperformed. They're just a super smart cohort of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then West Indian blacks in the US are incredibly successful. Most recently, by the way, Kamala Harris, as well as Colin Powell, like just two sort of examples of that. And so basically what Henry Louis Gates and Lana Guinier said in the story is Harvard is basically struggling to either, whatever it was, identify, recruit, make successful, whatever it was, American-born Native Blacks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
you know, kind of Anglo Hispanic thing, you know, super incredibly tough, strong driven, you know, capable characters, you know, the Texas Rangers, um, you know, we've got the, yeah, we've got the California, you know, we've got the, you know, the wild, we've got the incredibly, you know, inventive hippies, but we also have the hardcore engineers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so therefore they were using high-skill immigration as an escape hatch. to go get blacks from other countries. And then this was 2004 when you could discuss such things. Obviously, that is a topic that nobody has discussed since. It has sailed on. All of the DEI programs of the last 20 years have had this exact characteristic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's large numbers of black people in America who are fully aware of this and are like, it's obviously not us that are getting these slots. We're literally competing with people who are being imported. And, you know, if you believe in the basis of affirmative action, you are trying to make up for historical injustice of American black slavery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the idea that you import somebody from, you know, Nigeria that never experienced that, you know, is like tremendously insulting to black Americans. Anyway, so you can see where I'm heading with this. We have been in a 60-year social engineering experiment to exclude native-born people from the educational slots and jobs that high-skilled immigration has been funneling foreigners into.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Right. And so it turns out it's not a victim-free thing. There's like 100% there's victims because why? There's only so many, for sure, there's only so many education slots. And then for sure, there's only so many of these jobs, right? You know, Google only hires so many, you know, whatever level seven engineers. Right. And so, so, so, so that's the other side of it. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so you're a farm boy in Wisconsin, right. Or a, you know, black American whose ancestors arrived here, you know, on a slave ship 300 years ago in Louisiana or a, you know, Cambodian immigrants in, you know, the Bronx, um, and your kid or a Jewish immigrant, uh, or, you know, or from a very successful Jewish family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and you know, your entire, you know, for three generations, you and your parents and grandparents went to Harvard. And what all of those groups know is the system that has been created is not for them, right? It's designed specifically to exclude them. And then what happens is all of these tech people show up in public and say, yeah, let's bring in more foreigners, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so anyway, so the short version of it is you can't anymore, I don't think, just have the quote high-skill immigration conversation for either education or for employment without also having the DEI conversation, right? And then DEI is just another word for affirmative action. So it's the affirmative action conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And you need to actually deal with this as substance and to see what's actually happening to people you need to join these topics. And I think it is much harder to make the moral claim for high school immigration given the extent to which DEI took over both the education process and the hiring process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We've got, you know, the best rocket scientists in the world. We've got the best, you know, artists in the world, you know, creative professionals, uh, you know, the best movies. And so, yeah, there is, you know, all of our problems, I think, are basically, you know, in my view, to some extent, you know, attempts to basically sand all that off and make everything basically boring and mediocre.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I spent the entire Christmas holiday reading every message on this and not saying anything. And what I was, which you know me well enough to know that's a serious level of, yeah, that's very Zen. Yes. Thank you. No, it wasn't. There was tremendous rage on the other side of it, but I suppressed it. So, um, I was waiting for the dog that didn't bark, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the dog that didn't bark was, I did not, and tell me if you saw one, I did not see a single example of somebody pounding the table for more high school immigration who was also pounding the table to go get more smart kids who are already here into these educational institutions and into these jobs. I didn't see a single one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But it was like, literally, it was like the proponents of high skilled immigrants. And again, this was me for a very long time. I mean, I kind of took myself by surprise on this because I was on, you know, I had the much, say, simpler version of this story for a very long time. Like I said, I've been in Washington many times under past presidents lobbying for this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
By the way, never made any progress, which we could talk about. Like, it never actually worked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, but, um, you know, I, I've been on the other side of this one, but I was literally sitting there being like, all right, which of these like super geniuses, um, who, you know, many of whom, by the way, are very, you know, successful high-skilled immigrants or children of high-skilled immigrants, you know, which of these super geniuses are going to like say, actually, we have this like incredible talent source here in the country, which again, to be clear, I'm not talking about white people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm talking about native born Americans, whites, Asians, Jews, blacks, for sure, for sure, for sure. Those four groups, but also white people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, but you have this interesting thing, you have a split between the sides that I've noticed, which is one side has all of the experts. Right. Right. And I, and I'm using scare for people listening to audio. I'm making quotes in the air with my fingers as vigorously as I can. One side has all the certified experts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The other side just has a bunch of people who are like, they know that something is wrong and they don't quite know how to explain it. And what was so unusual about the Harvard UNC cases, by the way, in front of the Supreme Court is they actually had sophisticated lawyers for the first time in a long time actually put all this evidence together and actually put it in the public record.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They actually had experts, which is just really rare. Generally, what you get is you get – because if you don't have experts, what do you have? You know something is wrong, but you have primarily an emotional response. You feel it. But can you put it, you know, can you put it in the words and tables and charts, you know, that a certified expert can? And no, you can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, that's not, you know, that's not who you are. That doesn't mean that you're wrong. And it also doesn't mean that you have less of a moral stance. Yeah. And so it's just like, all right. Now, by the way, look, I think there are ways to square the circle. I think there's a way to have our cake and eat it too. I think there'd be many ways to resolve this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Again, I think the way to do it is to look at these issues combined, look at DEI combined with high school immigration. It so happens the DEI is under much more scrutiny today than it has been for probably 20 years, affirmative action is. The Supreme Court did just rule that it is not legal for universities to do that. They are still doing it, but they should stop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But there is something in the national spirit that basically keeps bouncing back and it And basically what we discover over time is we basically just need people to stand up at a certain point and say, you know, it's time to, you know, it's time to build, it's time to grow, you know, it's time to do things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then there are more and more, you've seen more companies now also ditching their DEI programs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
In part, that's happening for a bunch of reasons, but it's happening in part because a lot of corporate lawyers will tell you that the Supreme Court rulings in education either already apply to businesses or it just is a clear foreshadowing the Supreme Court will rule on new cases that will ban into businesses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, so, so there, there is a moment here to be able to look at this, um, on both sides. Um, let me add one more nuance to it that makes it even more complicated. Yeah. So the cliche is we're going to brain drain the world, right? You've heard that we're going to, we're going to take all the smart people from all over the world. We're going to bring them here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We're going to educate them and then we're going to keep them. And then they're going to raise their families here, create businesses here, create jobs here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. Okay. So what happens to the rest of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
How many highly ambitious, highly conscientious, highly energetic, high achieving, high IQ super geniuses are there in the world? And if there's a lot, that's great. But if there just aren't that many and they all come here and they all aren't where they would be otherwise, what happens to all those other places?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So it's almost impossible for us here to have that conversation in part because we become incredibly uncomfortable as a society talking about the fact that people aren't just simply all the same, which is a whole thing we could talk about. But also we are purely the beneficiary of this effect, right? We are brain draining the world, not the other way around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So if you look at the flow of high-skill immigration over time, there's only four permanent sinks of high-skill immigration places people go. It's the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia. It's the four of the five eyes. It's the major Anglosphere countries. And so for those countries, this seems like a no-lose proposition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's all the other countries that basically what we four countries have been doing is draining all those smart people out. It's actually much easier for people in Europe to talk about this, I've discovered, because the Eurozone is whatever, you know, 28 countries. And within the Eurozone, the high-skilled people over time have been migrating to originally the U.K.,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, and there's something in the American spirit that just like roars right back to life. And I've seen it before. I actually saw, you know, I saw it as a kid here in the early 80s, you know, because the 70s were like horribly depressing, right, in the US. Like it was, they were a nightmare on many fronts. And in a lot of ways, the last decade to me has felt a lot like the 70s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But also specifically, I think it's the Netherlands, Germany, and France. But specifically, they've been migrating out of the peripheral Eurozone countries. And the one where this really hit the fan was in Greece. So Greece falls into chaos, disaster, and then you're running the government in Greece and you're trying to figure out how to put an economic development plan together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
All of your smart young kids have left. Like, what are you going to do? Right. By the way, this is a potential, I know you care a lot about Ukraine. This is a potential crisis for Ukraine. Not because, in part because of this, because we enthusiastically recruit Ukrainians, of course. And so we've been brain draining Ukraine for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But also, of course, you know, war does tend to cause people to migrate out. And so, you know, when it comes time for Ukraine to rebuild as a peaceful country, is it going to have the talent base even that it had five years ago is like a very big and important question. By the way, Russia, like we have brain drain a lot of really smart people out of Russia. A lot of them are here, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Over the last 30 years. And so there's this thing, it's actually really funny if you think about it, like the one thing that we know to be the height of absolute evil that the West ever did was colonization and resource extraction, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So we know the height of absolute evil was when the Portuguese and the English and everybody else went and had these colonies and then went in and we took all the oil and we took all the diamonds and we took all the whatever, lithium or whatever it is, right? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, for some reason, we realize that that's a deeply evil thing to do when it's a physical resource, when it's a non-conscious physical matter. For some reason, we think it's completely morally acceptable to do it with human capital. In fact, we think it's glorious and beautiful and wonderful and the great flowering of peace and harmony and moral justice of our time to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And we don't think for one second what we're doing to the countries that we're pulling all these people out of. And this is one of these things, like, I don't know, like maybe we're just going to live in this delusional state forever and we'll just keep doing it and it'll keep benefiting us and we just won't care what happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But like, I think there may come, this is one of these, this is like one of these submarines under 10 feet under the waterline. Like, I think it's just a matter of time until people suddenly realize, oh my God, what are we doing? Because like, we need the rest of the world to succeed too, right? Like we need these other countries to like flourish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like we don't want to be the only successful country in the middle of just like complete chaos and disaster. And we just extract and we extract and we extract and we don't think twice about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Just being mired in misery and just this self-defeating, you know, negative attitude and everybody's upset about everything. And, you know, and then, by the way, like energy crisis and hostage crisis and foreign wars and just demoralization. Right. You know, the low point for. in the 70s was, you know, Jimmy Carter, who just passed away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Okay. So then you get this other, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's another nuance. So there's another nuance. There's another nuance, which is mostly in the Valley, we don't use H-1Bs anymore. Mostly we use O-1s. So there's a separate class of visa. And the O-1 is like this. It turns out the O-1 is the super genius visa. So the 01 is basically our founder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
When we have somebody from anywhere in the world and they've invented a breakthrough, a new technology, and they want to come to the US and start a company, they come in through an 01 visa. And that actually is a fairly high bar. It's a high acceptance rate, but it's a pretty high bar. And they do a lot of work. And you have to put real work into it, really prove your case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, mostly what's happened with the H1B visa program, um, is that it has gone to basically two categories of employers. One is, uh, the basically a small set of big tech companies that hire in volume, which is exactly the companies that you would think. Um, and then the other is it goes to these, what they call kind of the mills, um, the consulting mills, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so there's these set of companies with names. I don't want to pick on companies, but you know, names like Cognizant that, you know, hire basically have their business model. It's primarily Indian being in primarily Indians in large numbers. And, you know, they often have, you know, offices next to company owned housing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they'll have, you know, organizations that are, you know, they'll have, you know, organizations that are literally thousands of Indians, you know, living and working in the US and they do basically call it mid tier like IT consulting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So, you know, these folks, they're making good wages, but they're making $60,000 a year, $100,000 a year, not the, you know, $300,000 that you'd make in the Valley. And so, like, in practice, the startups, basic, like, little tech, as we call it, or the startup world, mainly doesn't use H-1Bs at this point. And mainly can't, because the system is kind of rigged in a way that we really can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and then, and then, and then again, you get to the sort of underlying morality here, which is, it's like, well, you know, Amazon, like Amazon's in like, I love Amazon, but like they're a big, powerful company. They've got more money than God. They've got resources. They've got a long-term planning horizon. They do big, profound things over decades at a time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They could, or any of these other companies, could launch massively effective programs to go recruit the best and brightest from all throughout the country. And you'll notice they don't do that. They bring in 10,000, 20,000 H1Bs a year. Um, and so you've got a question there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and then these mills, like there's lots of questions around them and whether they should, you know, whether that's even a ethical way to, you know, I don't want to say they're unethical, but there's questions around like exactly what, what the trade-offs are there. Um, and so, you know, this, this, yeah. And this is like a Pandora's box that really, you know, nobody really wanted to be opened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, you know, to play devil's advocate on all this in terms of like national immigration issues, you know, none of this is like a top end issue just because the numbers are small. Right. And so, you know, I don't think, you know, the administration has said like this is not like a priority of theirs for right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I guess what I would say is like there is actually a lot of complexity and nuance here. I have a lot of friends, like I said, I have a lot of friends and colleagues who came over on H-1Bs or 01s, green cards, many are now citizens. And every single one of them was, not every single one, a lot of them were enthusiastic to defend the honor of immigrants. throughout this whole period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He went on TV and he gave this speech known as the malaise speech. And it was like the weakest possible trying to like rouse people back to a sense of like passion completely failed. And, you know, we had the, you know, the hostages in, you know, Iran for, I think, 440 days. And every night on the nightly news, it was, you know, lines around the block, energy crisis, depression, inflation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they said to me, it's like, well, Mark, how can we, you know, how can we, how can we more clearly express, you know, the importance of high school immigration to the US? And I was like, um, I think you can do it by advocating for also developing our native foreign talent. And like, do you want to inflame the issue or do you want to diffuse the issue? Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think, I think the answer is to diffuse the issue. Uh, let me give you one more positive scenario, which, and then I'll also beat up on the university some more. Um, do you, do you know about the national merit scholarship system? Have you heard about this? Um, not really. Can you explain? So there's a system that was created during the cold war, um, called the national merit scholars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, um, it is a basically, um, it was created, I forget in the 50s or 60s when it was when people in government actually wanted to identify the best and the brightest as heretical an idea as that sounds today. Um, and so it's basically a national talent search for basically IQ, um, Its goal is to identify basically the top 0.5% of the IQ in the country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
By the way, completely regardless of other characteristics. So there's no race, gender, or any other aspect to it. It's just going for straight intelligence. It uses first the PSAT, which is the preparatory SAT that you take, and then the SAT. So it uses those scores. That is the scoring. It's a straight PSAT-SAT scoring system. So they use the SAT as a proxy for IQ, which it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Uh, they run this every year. They identify, they all, they, they, it's like a, they get down to like 1% of the population of the kids, of 18 year olds in a given year who scored highest on the PSAT. And then they get down to further qualified down to the 0.5% that also replicate on the SAT. Um, and then it's like the scholarship amount is like $2,500, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So it's like, it was a lot of money 50 years ago, not as much today, but it's a national system being run literally to find the best and the brightest. How many of our great and powerful universities use this as a scouting system? Like our universities all have sports teams. They all have national scouting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They have full-time scouts who go out and they go to every high school and they try to find all the great basketball players and bring them into the NCAA, into all these leagues. How many of our great and powerful and enlightened universities use the National Merit System to go do a talent search for the smartest kids and just bring them in?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Go get the smartest ones. I'll give you one more kicker on this topic if I haven't beaten it to death. The SAT has changed. So the SAT used to be a highly accurate proxy for IQ that caused a bunch of problems. People really don't like the whole idea of IQ. And so the SAT has been actively managed over the last 50 years by the college board that runs it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it has been essentially like everything else. It's been dumbed down. And so in two ways, number one, it's been dumbed down where an 800 from 40 years ago does not mean what an 800 means today. And 40 years ago, it was almost impossible to get an 800. Today, there's so many 800s that you could stock the entire Ivy League with 800s, right? And so it's been deliberately dumbed down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, you know, Reagan came in and, you know, Reagan was a very controversial character at the time. And, you know, he came in and he's like, yep, nope, it's morning in America. And we're the shining city on the hill and we're going to do it. And he did it and we did it. And the national spirit came roaring back and, you know, roared really hard for a full decade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then two is they have tried to pull out a lot of what's called the G loading. And so they've tried to detach it from being an IQ proxy. Because IQ is such an inflammatory concept. And the consequence of that is, and this is sort of perverse, they've made it more coachable. So the SAT 40 years ago, coaching didn't really work. And more recently, it has really started to work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And one of the things you see is the Asian spike. You see this giant leap upward in Asian performance over the last decade. And I think looking at the data, I think a lot of that is because it's more coachable now. And the Asians do the most coaching.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
um so there's a bunch of issues with this and so the coaching thing is really difficult because the coaching thing is a subsidy then to the kids whose parents can afford coaching right and i don't know about you but where i grew up there was no sat coaching so there's like an issue there i didn't even know what the sat was until the day i took it much less that there was coaching much less that it could work so much less we could afford it so so number one there's issues there but the other issue there is think about what's happened by the dumbing down
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
800 no longer captures all the smart. 800 is too crude of a test. It's like the AI benchmarking problem. It's the same problem they have in AI benchmarking right now. 800 is too low of a threshold. There are too many kids scoring 800. Because what you want is you want whatever, if it's going to be 100,000 kids, I don't know what it is, but it's going to be 50,000 kids a year scoring 800.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You also then want kids to be able to score 900 and 1,000 and 1,100 and 1,200. And you want to ultimately get to, you know, you'd like to ultimately identify the top 100 kids and make sure that you get them in MIT. And the resolution of the test has been reduced so that it actually is not useful for doing that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And again, I would say this is like part of the generalized corruption that's taken place throughout this entire system where we have been heading in the reverse direction from wanting to actually go get the best and brightest and actually put them in the places where they should be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then just the final comment would be the great thing about standardized testing and the national merit system is, like I said, it's completely race blind, it's gender blind. It's blind on every other characteristic. It's only done on test scores. And you can make an argument about whether that's good or bad, but it is for sure, it's the closest thing that we had to get to merit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It was the thing that they did when they thought they needed merit to win the Cold War. And of course, we could choose to do that anytime we want. And I just say, I find it incredibly striking and an enormous moral indictment of the current system that there are no universities that do this today. So back to the immigration thing, just real quick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think that's exactly what I think, you know, we'll see. But I think that's what could happen here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's like, okay, we aren't even trying to go get the smart kids out of the center or south. And even if they think that they can get into these places, they get turned down. And the same thing for the smart Asians and the same thing for the smart Jews and the same thing for the smart black people. And like, it just like, it's just like, I don't know how, like, I don't know how that's moral.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, I don't get it at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, you asked me in the beginning, like, what's the most optimistic forecast, right, that we could have? And the most optimistic forecast would be, my God, what if we did both?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, and it would diffuse the entire issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
If everybody in the center and the south of the country and every Jewish family, Asian family, black family knew they were getting a fair shake, like, it would diffuse the issue. Like how about defusing the issue? Like what a crazy radical. Sorry, I don't mean to really get out of my skis here, but.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So, I mean, a big part of the answer, I think, is we're in the middle of a legit revolution. And I know you've been talking about this on your show, but like AI coding is I mean, this is the biggest earthquake to hit software in certainly my life, maybe since the invention of software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I'm sure, you know, we're involved in various of these companies, but, you know, these tools, you know, from a variety of companies are like absolutely revolutionary. And they're getting better at leaps and bounds, right, every day. And you know all this, but like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The thing with coding, like there's like open questions of whether AI can get better at like, I don't know, understanding philosophy or whatever, creative writing or whatever, but like for sure we can make it much better at coding, right? Because you can validate the results of coding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, you know, there's all these methods of, you know, synthetic data and self-training and reinforcement learning that for sure you can do with coding. And so... Everybody I know who works in the field says AI coding is going to get to be phenomenally good. And it's already great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And you can, I mean, anybody wants to see this, just go on YouTube and look at AI coding demos, you know, little kids making apps in 10 minutes working with an AI coding system. And so I think it's the golden age. I mean, I think this is an area where it's clearly the golden age. The tool set is extraordinary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, in a day, as a coder for sure, in a day you can retrain yourself, you know, start using these things, get a huge boost in productivity. As a non-coder, you can learn much more quickly than you could before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I agree with that up to a point. So the, um, I think for sure for quite a long time, the people who are good at coding are going to be the best at actually having AIs code things. Um, cause they're going to understand what, I mean, very basic, they're going to understand what's happening, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they're going to be able to evaluate the work and they're going to be able to, you know, literally like manage AIs better. Um, like even if they're not literally handwriting the code, they're just going to have a much better sense of what's going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I definitely think like a hundred percent, my nine-year-old is like doing all kinds of coding classes and he'll keep doing that for certainly through 18. We'll see after that. Um, and so for sure, that's the case. Um, but, but look, having said that, one of the things you can do with an AI is say, teach me how to code. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so, and you know, there's, there's a whole bunch of, um, you know, I'll, I'll name names, you know, Khan Academy, like there's a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of work that they're doing at Khan Academy for free. And then we, you know, we have this company Replit, uh, which is originally specifically built for kids for coding. that has AI built in that's just absolutely extraordinary now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And as you know, America has this incredible streak of individualism. Individualism in America probably peaked, I think, between roughly, call it the end of the Civil War, 1865, through to probably call it 1931 or something. And there was this incredible – I mean, that period, we now know that period as the Second Industrial Revolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, you know, there's a variety of other systems like this. And yeah, I mean, the AI is going to be able to teach you to code. AI, by the way, is, as you know, spectacularly good at explaining code, right? And so, you know, the tools have these features now where you can talk to the code base. And so you can like literally like ask the code base questions about itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And you can also just do the simple form, which is you can copy and paste code into ChatGPT and just ask it to explain it, what's going on, rewrite it, improve it, make recommendations. And so there's, yeah, there's dozens of ways to do this. By the way, you can also, I mean, even more broadly than code, like, okay, you want to make a video game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Okay, now you can do AI art generation, sound generation, dialogue generation, voice generation, right? And so all of a sudden, like you don't need designers, you know, you don't need, you know, voice actors, you know, so yeah, so there's just like unlimited possibilities. And then, you know, a big part of coding is so-called glue. You know, it's interfacing into other systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So it's interfacing into, you know, Stripe to take payments or something like that. And, you know, AI is fantastic at writing glue code. So, you know, really, really good at making sure that you can plug everything together. Really good at helping you figure out how to deploy. You know, it'll even write a business plan for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
um so it's just this it's like everything happening with ai right now it's just it's like this latent superpower and there's this incredible spectrum of people who have really figured out massive performance increases productivity increases with it already there's other people who aren't even aware it's happening and there's some gearing to whether you're a coder or not but i think there are lots of non-coders that are off the races and i think there are lots of professional coders who are still like you know the blacksmiths were not necessarily in favor of you know
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
car business. So there's the old William Gibson quote, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. And this is maybe the most potent version of that that I've ever seen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I would also say code has, of anything in industrial society, code has the highest elasticity, which is to say the easier it is to make it, the more of it gets made. I think effectively there's unlimited demand for code. In other words, there's always some other idea for a thing that you can do, a feature that you can add, or a thing that you can optimize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so, and so like overwhelmingly, you know, the amount of code that exists in the world is a fraction of even the ideas we have today. And then we come up with new ideas all the time. Um, and so I, I think that like, you know, I was, I was in the late eighties, early nineties when sort of automated coding systems started to come out, expert systems, big deal in those days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And there were all these, there was a famous book called the decline and fall of the American programmer, you know, the predicted that these new coding systems were going to mean we wouldn't have programmers in the future. And of course the number of programming jobs exploded by like a factor of a hundred and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's when the United States basically assumed global leadership and basically took over technological and economic leadership from England. Um, and then, you know, that, that led to, you know, ultimately then therefore being able to, you know, not only industrialize the world, but also win world war two and then win the cold war. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
like my guess will be we'll have more my guess is we'll have more coding jobs probably by like an order of magnitude 10 years from now that will be different there'll be different jobs they'll involve orchestrating ai um but um we'll there will be we will be creating so much more software that the whole industry will just explode in size are you seeing the size of companies decrease in terms of startups what's the landscapes of little tech
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
All we're seeing right now is the AI hiring boom of all time. Oh, for the big tech. And little tech. And little tech. Everybody's trying to hire as many engineers as they can to build AI systems. It's 100%. I mean, there's a handful of companies. There's a little bit. There's customer service. We have some companies and others. I think it's Klarna that's publicizing a lot of this in Europe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
where there are jobs that can be optimized and jobs that can be automated, but for engineering jobs, it's just an explosion of hiring. At least so far, there's no trace of any sort of diminishing effect. Now, having said that, I am looking forward to the day. I am waiting for the first company to walk in saying yes, like the more radical form of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So basically, the companies that we see are basically one of two kinds. We see the companies that are basically... Sometimes use weak form, strong form. So the weak form companies sometimes use the term, it's called the sixth bullet point. AI is the sixth bullet point on whatever they're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Right. And it's on the slide, right? So they've got the, you know, whatever, dot, dot, dot, dot. And then AI is the sixth thing. And the reason AI is the sixth thing is because they had already previously written the slide before the AI revolution started.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so they just added the sixth bullet point on the slide, which is how you're getting all these products that have like the AI button up in the corner, right? The little sparkly button. Yep. Right. And all of a sudden Gmail is offering to summarize your email, which I'm like, I don't need that. Like I need you to answer my email, not summarize it. Like what the hell?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Okay, so we see those and that's fine. That's like, I don't know, putting sugar on the cake or something. But then we see the strong form, which is the companies that are building from scratch for AI, right? And they're building it. I actually just met with a company that is building literally an AI email system as an example. Oh, nice. I can't wait. Yeah, they're going to completely, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So the very obvious idea, very smart team, you know, it's going to be great. Yeah. And then, you know, notion just, uh, you know, another, not one of our companies, but just came out with a product. And so, so now companies are gonna basically come through, sweep through, and they're gonna do basically AI first versions of basically everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And yeah, you know, there's a massive industrial, you know, massive individualistic streak. By the way, you know, Milton Friedman's old videos are all on YouTube. They are every bit as compelling and inspiring as they were then. You know, he's a singular figure and many of us, you know, I never knew him, but he was actually at Stanford for many years at the Hoover Institution, but I never met him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And those are like companies built, you know, AI is the first bullet point. It's the strong form of the argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
What if we knew from scratch that we could build on this? And again, this is like, this is part of the full employment act for startups and VCs is it just like, if a technology transformation is efficiently powerful, then you actually need to start the product development process over from scratch because you need to reconceptualize the product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then usually what that means is you need a new company because most incumbents just won't do that. And so, yeah, so that's underway across many categories. What I'm waiting for is the company where it's like, no, our org chart is redesigned as a result of AI, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I'm looking at, I'm waiting for the company where it's like, no, we're going to have like, you know, and the cliche, here's a thought experiment, right? The cliche would be, we're going to have like the human executive team and then we're going to have the AIs be the workers, right? So we'll have a VP of engineering supervising a hundred instances of coding agents, right? Okay, maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Right, by the way, or maybe, maybe the VP of engineering should be the AI. Maybe supervising human coders who are supervising AIs, right? Because one of the things that AI should be pretty good at is managing. Because it's like not, you know, it's like a process driven. It's the kind of thing that AI is actually pretty good at, right? Performance evaluation coaching.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so should it be an AI executive team? Um, and then, you know, and then of course the ultimate question, which is AI CEO. Right. Um, and then, you know, and then there's, and then maybe the most futuristic version of it would be an actual AI agent that actually goes fully autonomous. Yeah. What if you really set one of these things loose and let it, let it basically build itself a business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I will say like, we're not yet seeing those. And I think there's a little bit of the systems aren't quite ready for that yet. And then I think it's a little bit of you really do need at that point, like a founder who's really willing to break all the rules and really willing to take the swing. And those people exist. And so I'm sure we'll see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Little companies can break glass in a way big companies can't. Right. This is sort of the big breakthrough that Clay Christensen had in the innovator's dilemma, which is sometimes when big companies don't do things, it's because they're screwing up. And that certainly happens. But a lot of times they don't do things because it would break too much glass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Specifically, it would interfere with their existing customers and their existing businesses. And they just simply won't do that. And by the way, responsibly, they shouldn't do that. Um, right. Um, and so they just get, but this is Clay Christians. This big thing is they, they often don't adapt because they are well run, not because they're poorly run, but they're optimizing machines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They're, they're, they're optimizing against the existing business. And, and, and as, as you kind of just said, this is like a permanent state of affairs for large organizations. Like every once in a while, one breaks the pattern and actually does it. But for the most part, like this is a very predictable form of human behavior. And this fundamentally is why startups exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I know a lot of people who worked with him and, you know, he was a singular figure, but all of his lessons, you know, live on or are fully available. But I would also say it's not just individualism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I would say, I'm not going to predict. I'm going to say there's questions all over the place. And then we have this category question we call the trillion dollar question, which is like literally depending on how it's answered, people make or lose a trillion dollars. And I think there's like, I don't know, five or six trillion dollar questions right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
that are hanging out there, which is an unusually large number. And I just, you know, I'll just hit a few of them and we can talk about them. So one is big models versus small models. Another is open models versus closed models. Another is whether you can use synthetic data or not. Another is chain of thought. How far can you push that in reinforcement learning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then another one is political trillion dollar questions, policy questions, which, you know, the US and the EU have both been flunking dramatically and the US hopefully is about to really succeed at. Yeah, and then there's probably another, you know, half dozen big important questions after that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so these are all just like, say this is an industry that's in flux in a way that I, even more dramatic, I think, than the ones I've seen before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And look, the most example, most obvious example of the flux is sitting here three, sitting here in the summer, you know, sitting here less than three years ago, sitting here in December of 22, we would have said that OpenAI is just running away with everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And sitting here today, it's like, you know, there's at least six, you know, world-class God model companies and teams that are, by the way, generating remarkably similar results.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And this is one of the big things that's playing out in a lot of our culture and kind of political fights right now, which is basically this feeling, certainly that I have and I share with a lot of people, which is it's not enough for America to just be an economic zone. And it's not enough for us to just be individuals. And it's not enough to just have line go up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That's actually been one of the most shocking things to me is like, it turns out that once you know that it's possible to build one incredibly smart Turing test passing large language model, which was a complete shock and surprise to the world. It turns out within, you know, a year, you can have five more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's also a money component thing to it, which is to get the money to scale one of these things into the billions of dollars. There's basically right now only two sources of money that will do that for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
One is the hyperscalers giving you the money, which you turn around and round trip back to them, or foreign sovereigns, other country sovereign wealth funds, which can be difficult in some cases for companies to access. Um, so there's a, there's another, there's maybe another trillion dollar question is the financing question. Here's one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Uh, so Sam Altman has been public about the fact that he wants to transition open AI from being a nonprofit, being a for-profit. Um, the way that that is legally done is that, um, and there is a way to do it. There is a way in us law to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, the IRS and other legal entities, uh, government entities scrutinize this very carefully because the us takes foundation nonprofit law very seriously because of the tax exemption. Um, and so the way that historically, the way that you do it is you start a for-profit and then you, you raise money with the for-profit to buy the assets of the nonprofit at fair market value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and you know, the last financing round at open AI was, you know, 150 some billion dollars. And so logically the, if, if, if the flip is going to happen, the for-profit has to go raise $150 billion out of the shoot to buy the assets, you know, raising 150 billion is a challenge. Um, so, you know, is that even possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
If that is possible, then open AI maybe is off to the races as a for-profit company. If not, you know, uh, you know, I don't know. And then, you know, obviously the Elon lawsuit. So, so just because they're the market leader today, you know, there's big, important questions there. You know, Microsoft has this kind of love hate relationship with them. Where does that go?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Apple's, you know, lagging badly behind, but you know, they're very good at catching up. Amazon, you know, is primarily hyperscaler, but they now have their own models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, these are big. Like, look, here's a trillion dollar question, which is kind of embedded in that, which is just hallucinations, right? So if you are trying to use these tools creatively, you're thrilled because they can draw new images and they can make new music and they can do all this incredible stuff, right? They're creative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The flip side of that is if you need them to be correct, they can't be creative. And that's the term hallucination.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
and these things do hallucinate and um you know there have been you know court cases already where lawyers have submitted legal briefs that contain made-up court citations case citations the judge is like wait a minute this doesn't exist and the very next question is did you write this yourself and the lawyer goes uh i mean that's why elon grock uh yes looking for truth i mean that's an open technical question how close can you get to truth with lms yeah that's right
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's not enough to just have economic success. There are deeper questions. uh, at play. And, and also, you know, there, there, there's more to a country, uh, than just that. And, and, you know, quite, quite frankly, a lot of it is intangible. Um, a lot of it is, you know, involves spirit, um, and, and passion. And, you know, like I said, we, we have more of it than anybody else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Right. This is a very contentious topic at the industry. My sense is to the extent that there is a domain in which there is a definitive and checkable and provable answer, and you might say math satisfies that, coding satisfies that, and maybe some other fields, then you should be able to generate synthetic data. You should be able to do chain of thought reasoning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You should be able to do reinforcement learning, and you should be able to ultimately eliminate hallucinations. By the way, that's a trillion dollar question right there as to whether that's true. But then there's a question of like, okay, is that going to work in the more general domain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So for example, one possibility is these things are going to get truly superhuman at math and coding, but at discussing philosophy, they're basically as smart as they're ever going to be. And they're going to be kind of, say, midwit grad student level. And the theory there would just be they're already out of training data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like they literally, you know, you talk to these people like literally the big models, the big models are like within a factor of two X of consuming all the human generated training data to the point that some of these big companies are literally hiring people like doctors and lawyers to sit and write your training data by hand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so does this mean that like, you have to, if you want your model to get better at philosophy, you have to go hire like a thousand philosophers and have them write new content. And is anybody going to do that? And so, you know, maybe, maybe these things are topping out in certain ways and they're going to leap way ahead in other ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so anyway, so we just don't, you know, I guess this is maybe my main conclusion is I don't, any of these, anybody tell me, you know, anybody telling you these big sweeping conclusions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
you know, this whole super, you know, all of these abstract generalized superintelligence AGI stuff, like it, you know, maybe it's the engineer in me, but like, no, like that's not, that's not the, that's too abstract. Like it's got to actually work. Um, and then by the way, it has to actually have to be able to pay for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, I mean, this is a problem right now with the, you know, the big models, the big models that are like really good at coding and math, they're like actually very expensive to run. You know, they're quite slow. Um, Another trillion dollar question, future chips, which I know you've talked a lot about. Another trillion dollar question. Yeah, I mean, all the global issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Oh, another trillion dollar question, censorship. Right? And all the human feedback training process. Exactly what are you training these things to do? What are they allowed to talk about? How often do they give you these incredibly preachy moral lectures? Here's a trillion dollar question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
How many other countries want their country to run its education system, healthcare system, news system, political system on the basis of an AI that's been trained according to the most extreme left-wing California politics? Um, right. Cause that's kind of what they have on offer right now. And I think the answer to that is not very many.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So there's like massive open questions there about like what, you know, and by the way, like what morality are these things going to get trained on as a,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, but, um, you know, we, We have to choose to want it. The way I look at it is like all of our problems are self-inflicted. Like they're, you know, decline is a choice. You know, all of our problems are basically demoralization campaigns. You know, basically people telling us, people in positions of authority telling us that we should, you know, we shouldn't, you know, stand out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So what I experienced, going back to how we started, what I experienced was, all right, social media censorship regime from hell, debanking, right, at like a large scale. And then the war on the crypto industry, trying to kill it, and then basically declared intent to do the same thing to AI and to put AI under the same kind of censorship and control regime as social media and the banks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think this election tipped, in America, I think this election tipped us from a timeline in which things were going to get really bad on that front to a timeline in which I think things are going to be quite good. But look, those same questions also apply outside the US. And the EU is doing their thing. They're being extremely draconian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they're trying to lock in a political censorship regime on AI right now that's so harsh that even American AI companies are not even willing to launch new products in the EU right now. Like that's not going to last, but like what happens there, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And what are the trade-offs, you know, what levels of censorship are American companies going to have to sign up for if they want to operate in the EU or is the EU still capable of generating its own AI companies or have we brain drained them? so that they can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
To be clear, a reference from the comedy classic Tropic Thunder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yes. Yeah. any zoomers listening to this who haven't seen that movie go watch it immediately yeah there's nothing offensive about nothing offensive about it at all um tom cruise's greatest performance um so um yeah yeah no look i just start by saying like i'm not supposed to be tweeting at all so uh yeah yes yes yes so but you know so how do you approach that like how do you approach what to tweet
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We shouldn't be adventurous. We shouldn't be exciting. We shouldn't be exploratory. You know, we shouldn't, you know, this, that, and the other thing. And we should feel bad about everything that we do. And I think we've lived through a decade where that's been the prevailing theme. And I think quite honestly, as of November, I think people are done with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, I don't. I don't well enough. It's mostly an exercise in frustration. Look, there's a glory to it and there's an issue with it. And the glory of it is instantaneous global communication. X in particular is like the town square on all these social issues, political issues, everything else, current events.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I mean, look, there's no question the format, the format of at least the original tweet is prone to be inflammatory. I'm the guy who at one point the entire nation of India hated me because I once tweeted something. It turned out that it's still politically sensitive in the entire continent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I stayed up all night that night as I became front page headline and leading television news in each time zone in India for a single tweet. The single tweet out of context is a very dangerous thing. Obviously, X now has the middle ground where they, you know, they, they now have the longer form essays.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so, um, you know, probably the most productive thing I can do is, is, is longer form, um, is, is longer form things. Um, you're not going to do it though. I do. I do from time to time. I should, I should do more of them. And then, yeah, I mean, look, but, and yeah, obviously X is doing great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, like I said, like Substack, you know, has become the center for a lot, you know, a lot of the, I think the best kind of, you know, deeply thought through, you know, certainly intellectual content, you know, tons of current events, stuff there as well. And then, yeah, so, and then there's a bunch of other, you know, a bunch of new systems that are very exciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I think one of the things we can look forward to in the next four years is number one, just like a massive reinvigoration of social media. as a consequence of the changes that are happening right now. I'm very excited to see what's going to happen with that. And then it's happening on X, but it's not going to happen on other platforms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the other is crypto is going to come right back to life. And actually, that's very exciting. Actually, that's worth noting is that's another trillion dollar question on AI, which is in a world of pervasive AI, and especially in a world of AI agents, and imagine a world of billions or trillions of AI agents running around, they need an economy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And crypto, in our view, happens to be the ideal economic system for that, right? Because it's a programmable money. It's a very easy way to plug in and do that. And there's this transaction processing system that can do that. And so I think the crypto AI intersection is potentially a very, very big deal. And so that was going to be impossible under the prior regime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think under the new regime, hopefully it'll be something we can do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
No, he's a super genius. I mean, look, I wouldn't say we're super close, but casual friends. I worked with him at Meta. He's the chief scientist at Meta for a long time and still works with us. And obviously, he's a legendary figure in the field and one of the main people responsible for what's happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
My serious observation would be that it's the thing I keep... I've talked to him about for a long time and I keep trying to read and follow everything he does is he's probably... He is the, I think, see if you agree with this, he is the smartest and most credible critic of LLMs is the Pathway AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he's not, you know, there's certain, I would say, troll-like characters who are just like crap and everything. But like Ian has like very deeply thought through basically theories as to why LLMs are an evolutionary dead end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
and I actually like I try to do this thing where I try to model you know I try to have a mental model of like the two different sides of a serious argument and so I've tried to like internalize that argument as much as I can which is difficult because like we're investing it behind LLMs as aggressively as we can so if he's right like that can be a big problem, but like, we should also know that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and then I sort of use his ideas to challenge all the bullish people, you know, to really kind of test their level of knowledge. So I like to kind of grill people. Like I'm not like, I'm not, you know, I'm, I'm, I was not, you know, I was got my CS degree 35 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I'm not like deep in the technology, but like if, if to the extent I can understand Jan's points, I can use them to, um, you know, to really surface a lot of the questions for the people who are more bullish. Um, and that's been, I think very, very productive. Yeah. It's very striking that you have somebody who is that central in the space who is actually a full-on skeptic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Again, this could go different ways. He could end up being very wrong. He could end up being totally right, or it could be that he will provoke the evolution of these systems to be much better than they would have been.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Which is very useful, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yes, he does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The other two. Okay. Here's my other wolf coming out. Yeah. The other two of the three godfathers of AI are like radicals, like, like full on left, you know, far left, you know, like they, I would say like either Marxists or borderline Marxists. Um, and they're like, I think quite extreme in their social and political views. And I think that feeds into their dumberism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think, you know, they are lobbying for like draconian government. I think what would be ruinously destructive government legislation and regulation. And so it's actually super helpful, super, super helpful to have Jan as a counterpoint to those two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Oh, three.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Exactly. Well, so he convinced me to stop drinking alcohol, which was a big deal. Successfully. Well, other than my family, it was my favorite thing in the world. And so it was a major, major reduction. Like having like a glass of scotch at night was like a major, like it was like the thing I would do to relax. And so he has profoundly negatively impacted my emotional health.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, I, uh, I blame him for making me much less happy as a person, but much, much, much healthier, uh, physically healthier. So that, that I, I credit him with that. I'm glad I did that. Um, but then his sleep stuff, like, yeah, I'm not doing any of that. Yeah. I have no interest in his sleep shit. Like, no. This whole light, natural light, no, we're not doing that. You're too hardcore for this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So that book is written by this guy. I'm going to let Lex do the pronunciations, the foreign language pronunciations for the day. He was a professor of classics at the Sorbonne in Paris, the top university, actually in the 1860s. So actually right around after the... Civil War.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I don't see any natural light in here. It's all covered. It's all horrible. And I'm very happy. I would be very happy living and working here because I'm totally happy without natural light.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's a test. Look, it's a test of manhood as to whether you can have a blue screen in your face for three hours and then go right to sleep. Like, I don't understand why you should want to take shortcuts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I would probably say it is a combination of two things. I think it is, um, contribution. Um, so, you know, have you done something that mattered ultimately? Um, and, um, and you know, and specifically it mattered to people. Um, and then the other thing is I think happiness is either overrated or almost a complete myth. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And in fact, interesting, Thomas Jefferson did not mean happiness the way that we understand it when he said pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. He meant it more of the Greek meaning, which is closer to satisfaction or fulfillment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I think about happiness as the first ice cream cone makes you super happy, the first mile of the walk in the park during sunset makes you super happy, the first kiss makes you super happy, the thousandth ice cream cone makes Not so much. The thousandth mile of the walk through the park. The thousandth kiss can still be good, but maybe just not right in a row. Right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so happiness is this very fleeting concept. And the people who anchor on happiness seem to go off the rails pretty often. Sort of the deep sense of having been, I don't know how to put it, useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. I mean, like, can you sit, can you, yeah, you know, who was it who said that all this source of all the ills in the world is man's inability to sit in a room by himself doing nothing. Um, but like, if you're sitting in a room by yourself and you're like, all right, or, you know, four in the morning, it's like, all right, have I like, you know, have I lived up to my expectation of myself?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
like if you have, you know, the people I know who feel that way are pretty centered. Um, and, um, you know, generally seem very, um, I don't know how to put it pleased with, you know, proud, um, calm at peace. Um, the people who are, um, you know, sensation seekers, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Some of the sensations, by the way, there's certain entrepreneurs, for example, who are like into every form of extreme sport and they get huge satisfaction out of that. Or, you know, there's sensation seeking and sort of useful and productive ways. You know, Larry Ellison was always like that. Zuckerberg is like that. And then, you know, there's a lot of entrepreneurs who end up, you know, drugs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, like sexual escapades that seem like they'll be fun at first and then backfire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he was a savant of a particular kind, which is he, and you can see this in the book, is he had apparently read and sort of absorbed and memorized every possible scrap of Greek and Roman literature. And so it's like a walking like index on basically Greek and Roman, everything we know about Greek and Roman culture. And that's significant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I guess I'd put it this way. There's a lot to just understand about people that I feel like I'm only starting to understand. Um, and that's certainly a simpler concept than God. So, um, that's what I've spent a lot of the last, you know, 15 years trying to figure out. I feel like I spent my first, like whatever, 30 years figuring out machines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then now I'm spending 30 years figuring out people, which turns out to be quite a bit more complicated. Um, And then I don't know, maybe God's the last 30 years or something. Um, uh, and then, you know, look, I mean, just, you know, like, like Elon is just like, okay, the known universe is like very, you know, complicated and, you know, mystifying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, every time I, you know, pull up in astronomy, you know, I get super in astronomy and it's like, you know, you know, daddy, how many galaxies are there in the universe? And you know, what's, how many galaxies are there in the universe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Okay, like how? Yeah. Like how is that freaking possible? Like what, like it's just, it's such a staggering concept that I. I actually wanted to show you a tweet that blew my mind from Elon from a while back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
a billion light years across yeah so these are all galaxies yeah like what the like how how is it that big like how the hell and like you know I can read the textbook and the this and the that and the whatever eight billion years and the big bang and the whole thing and then it's just like all right wow and then it's like all right the big bang all right like what was what was before the big bang you think we'll ever we humans will ever colonize like a galaxy and maybe even go beyond sure I mean yeah I mean in the fullness of time
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The reason this matters is because basically none of that has changed, right? And so he had access to the exact same written materials that we have access to. And so we've learned nothing. And then specifically what he did is he talked about the Greeks and the Romans, but specifically what he did is he went back further.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
In the fullness of time, I mean, yeah, I mean, yeah, you know, all the problems, all the challenges with it that I do, but like, yeah, why not? I mean, again, in the fullness of time, it'll take a long time. You don't think we'll destroy ourselves? No, I doubt it. I doubt it. And, you know, fortunately, we have Elon. Giving us the backup plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I don't know, like I grew up, you know, rural Midwest sort of just like conventionally kind of Protestant Christian. It never made that much sense to me. Got trained as an engineer and a scientist. I'm like, oh, that definitely doesn't make sense. I'm like, I know I'll spend my life as an empirical, you know, rationalist and I'll figure everything out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, you know, and then again, you walk up against these things, you know, you bump up against these things and you're just like, all right, like, okay, I guess there's a scientific explanation for this, but like, wow. Yeah. And then there's like, all right, where did that come from? Right. And then how, how far back can you go on the causality chain? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, yeah, I mean, then even, even just, you know, experiences that we all have on earth, it's, it's hard to, it's hard to rationally explain it all. And then, you know, so yeah, I guess I just say I'm kind of radically open-minded, um, at peace with the fact that I'll probably never know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, the other thing that has happened and maybe the more practical answer to the question is, um, I think I have a much better understanding now of the role that religion plays in society that I didn't have when I was younger. Um, and my partner, Ben has a great, I think he quotes his father on this. He's like, if, if a man does not have a real religion, he makes up a fake one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the fake ones go very, very badly. And so there's this class. It's actually really funny. There's this class of intellectual. There's this class of intellectual that has what appears to be a very patronizing point of view, which is, yes, I'm an atheist, but it's very important that the people believe in something. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And Marx had like the negative view on that, which was religion is the opiate of the masses. But there's a lot of like right wing intellectuals who are themselves, I think, pretty atheist or agnostic that are like, it's deeply important that the people be Christian or something like that. Um, and on the one hand, it's like, wow, that's arrogant and presumptive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He reconstructed the people who came before the Greeks and the Romans and what their life and society was like. And these were the people who were now known as the Indo-Europeans. And these were, or you may have heard of these, these are the people who came down from the steppes. And so they came out of what's now like Eastern Europe, like around sort of the outskirts of what's now Russia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But on the other hand, you know, maybe it's right because, you know, what have we learned in the last hundred years is in the absence of a real religion, people will make up fake ones. Um, there's this, uh, writer, there's this political philosopher who's super interesting on this name, Eric Vogelin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he wrote this, he wrote in that sort of mid, mid part of the century, mid, late part of the 20th century. He's like born in, I think like 1900 and like died in like 85. So he saw the complete run of communism and, uh, and Nazism, um, And himself, you know, fled, I think he fled Europe and, you know, the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, his sort of big conclusion was basically that both communism and Nazism and fascism were basically religions. But like in the deep way of religions, like they were, you know, you call them political religions, but they were like actual religions. And, you know, they were the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
they were what Nietzsche forecasted when he said, you know, God is dead, we've killed him and we won't wash the blood off our hands for a thousand years, right? Is we will come up with new religions that will just cause just mass murder and death. And like you read his stuff now and you're like, yep, that happened, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then of course, as fully, you know, elite modernists, of course, we couldn't possibly be doing that for ourselves right now, but of course we are. And, you know, I would argue that Eric Vogelin for sure would argue that the last 10 years, you know, we have been in a religious frenzy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
you know, that woke has been a full-scale religious frenzy, um, and has had all of the characteristics of a religion, including everything from patron saints to holy texts to, you know, sin. It's that, uh, wokeness has said every aspect of a, uh, wokeness has said every, I think it's that every single aspect of an actual religion other than redemption, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Which is maybe like the most dangerous religion you could ever come up with is the one where there's no forgiveness. Right. And so I think if Vogelin were alive, I think he would have zeroed right in on that, would have said that. And, you know, we just like sailed right off. I mentioned earlier, like we somehow rediscovered the religions of the Indo-Europeans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We're all into identity politics and environmentalism. Like, I don't think that's an accident. So anyway, like there is something very deep going on in the human psyche on religion that is not dismissible necessarily. and needs to be taken seriously, even if one struggles with the specifics of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then they sort of swept through Europe. They ultimately took over all of Europe. By the way, you know, almost many of the ethnicities in the Americas in the hundreds of years that follow, you know, are Indo-European. So they were basically this warrior class that came down and swept through and essentially populated much of the world. And there's a whole interesting saga there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Thank you, Alex. Is that it? That's... Only how long is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'll accept being one of the short ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But what he does, and then they basically, from there came basically what we know as the Greeks and the Romans were kind of evolutions off of that. And so what he reconstructs is sort of what life was like, what life was like, at least in the West, for people in their kind of original social state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the significance of that is, is the original social state is living in the state of the absolute imperative for survival with absolutely no technology, right? Like no modern systems, no nothing, right? You've got the clothes on your back, you've got your, you know, you've got whatever you can build with your bare hands, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
This is, you know, predates basically all concepts of technologies we understand today. And so these are people under like maximum levels of physical survival pressure. And so what social patterns did they evolve to be able to do that? And the social pattern basically was as follows.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It was a three-part social structure, family, tribe, and city, and zero concept of individual rights, and essentially no concept of individualism. And so you were not an individual, you were a member of your family, and then a set of families would aggregate into a tribe, and then a set of tribes would aggregate into a city.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the morality was completely, it was actually what Nietzsche talks about. The morality was entirely master morality, not slave morality. And so in their morality, anything that was strong was good. And anything that was weak was bad. And it's very clear why that is, right? It's because strong equals good equals survive. Weak equals bad equals die.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And that led to what became known later as the master-slave dialectic, which is, is it more important for you to live on your feet as a master, even at the risk of dying? Or are you willing to live as a slave on your knees in order to not die? And this is sort of the derivation of that moral framework.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Christianity later inverted that moral framework, but the original framework lasted for many, many thousands of years. No concept of individualism. The head of the family had total life and death control over the family. The head of the tribe, same thing. Head of the city, same thing. And then you were morally obligated to kill members of the other cities on contact, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You were morally required to. Like, if you didn't do it, you were a bad person. And then the form of the society was basically maximum fascism combined with maximum communism, right? And so it was maximum fascism in the form of this like absolute top-down control where the head of the family tribe or city could kill other members of the community at any time with no repercussions at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So maximum hierarchy. But combined with maximum communism, which is no market economy, and so everything gets shared, right? And sort of the point of being in one of these collectives is that it's a collective and people are sharing. And of course, that limited how big they could get because the problem with communism is it doesn't scale, right? It works at the level of a family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's much harder to make it work at the level of a country. Impossible. Maximum fascism, maximum communism. And then it was all intricately tied into their religion. And their religion was in two parts. It was veneration of ancestors, and it was veneration of nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the veneration of ancestors is extremely important because it was basically the ancestors were the people who got you to where you were. The ancestors were the people who had everything to teach you. And then it was veneration of nature because, of course, nature is the thing that's trying to kill you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and then you had your ancestor, every family tribe or city had their ancestor gods, and then they had their, um, they had their nature gods. Okay. So fast forward to today, like we live in a world that is like radically different, but in the, in the book takes you through kind of what happened from that through the Greeks and Romans through to Christianity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, but it's very helpful to kind of think in these terms because the conventional view of the progress through time is that we are, you know, the cliche is the arc of the moral universe, you know, Ben Stroh's justice, right? Or so-called Whig history, which is, you know, that the arc of progress is positive, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, you know, what you hear all the time, what you're taught in school and everything is, you know, every year that goes by, we get better and better and more and more moral and more and more pure and a better version of ourselves. Our Indo-European ancestors would say, oh, no, like you people have like fallen to shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like you people took all of the principles of basically your civilization and you have diluted them down to the point where they barely even matter, you know, and you're having, you know, children on a wedlock and you're, you know, you regularly encounter people of other cities and you don't try to kill them. And like, how crazy is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they would basically consider us to be living like an incredibly diluted version of this sort of highly religious, highly cult like, right, highly organized, highly fascist, fascist communist society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I can't resist noting that as a consequence of basically going through all the transitions we've been through, going all the way through Christianity, coming out the other end of Christianity, Nietzsche declares God is dead. We're in a secular society, you know, that still has, you know, tinges of Christianity, but, you know, largely prides itself on no longer being religious in that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, we being the sort of most fully evolved modern secular, you know, expert scientists and so forth have basically re-evolved or fallen back on the exact same religious structure. Uh, that the Indo-Europeans had, uh, specifically ancestor worship, which is identity politics, um, and nature worship, which is environmentalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so we have actually like worked our way all the way back to their cult religions without realizing it. And, and, and it just goes to show that like, you know, in some ways we have fallen far from the, far from the family tree, but in some cases we're exactly the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Identity politics is worshipping ancestors, right? It's tagging newborn infants with either benefits or responsibilities or levels of condemnation based on who their ancestors were. The Indo-Europeans would have recognized it on sight. We somehow think it's super socially progressive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, I would say obviously not, you know, get, get nuanced, which is where I think you're headed, which is look like is the idea that you can like completely reinvent society every generation and have no regard whatsoever for what came before you. That seems like a really bad idea, right? That's like the Cambodians with your zero under Pol Pot and, you know, death, you know, follows.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's obviously the Soviets tried that, um, You know, the utopian fantasists who think that they can just rip up everything that came before and create something new in the human condition and human society have a very bad history of causing enormous destruction. So on the one hand, it's like, okay, there is like a deeply important role for tradition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the way I think about that is it's the process of evolutionary learning. Right. Which is what tradition ought to be is the distilled wisdom of all. And, you know, this is already new Europeans thought about it should be the distilled wisdom of everybody who came before. Right. All those important and powerful lessons learned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And that's why I think it's fascinating to go back and study how these people lived is because that's that's part of the history and part of the learning that got us to where we are today. Having said that, there are many cultures around the world that are, you know, mired in tradition to the point of not being able to progress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And in fact, you might even say globally, that's the default human condition, which is, you know, a lot of people are in societies in which, you know, there's like absolute seniority by age. You know, kids are completely, you know, like in the US, like for some reason, we decided kids are in charge of everything, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And like, you know, they're the trendsetters and they're allowed to like set all the agendas and like set all the politics and set all the culture. And maybe that's a little bit crazy. But like in a lot of other cultures, kids have no voice at all, no role at all because it's the old people who are in charge of everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, they're gerontocracies and it's all a bunch of 80 year olds running everything, which, by the way, we have a little bit of that, too. Right. And so I would say is like there's a doubt there's there's a real downside, you know, full traditionalism is communitarianism. It's ethnic particularism. It's ethnic chauvinism. It's this incredible level of resistance to change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It just doesn't get you anywhere. It may be good and fine at the level of individual tribe, but as a society living in the modern world, you can't evolve. You can't advance. You can't participate in all the good things that have happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I think probably this is one of those things where extremeness on either side is probably a bad idea, but this needs to be approached in a sophisticated and nuanced way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, so look, a big part of this is getting the government boot off the neck of the American economy, the American technology industry, the American people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And again, this is a replay of what happened in the 60s and 70s, which is, for what started out looking like, I'm sure, good and virtuous purposes, we ended up both then and now with this, what I describe as sort of a form of soft authoritarianism. The good news is it's not like a military dictatorship. It's not like you get thrown into Ljubljana for the most part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's not coming at four in the morning. You're not getting dragged off to a cell. It's not hard authoritarianism, but it is soft authoritarianism. It's this incredible suppressive blanket of regulation, rules, this concept of a vitocracy. What's required to get anything done? You need to get 40 people to sign off on anything. Any one of them can veto it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's a lot of how our now political system works. And then just this general idea of progress is bad and technology is bad and capitalism is bad and building businesses is bad and success is bad. Tall poppy syndrome, basically anybody who sticks their head up deserves to get it chopped off. Anybody who's wrong about anything deserves to get condemned forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, just this this very kind of, you know, grinding, you know, repression and then coupled with specific government actions such as censorship regimes. Right. And debanking. Right. And, you know, draconian, you know, deliberately kneecapping, you know, critical American industries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, you know, congratulating yourselves on the back for doing it or, you know, having these horrible social policies, like let's let all the criminals out of jail and see what happens. Right. And so like we've just been through this period. You know, I call it a demoralization campaign.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like we've just been through this period where, you know, whether it started that way or not, it ended up basically being this comprehensive message that says you're terrible. And if you try to do anything, you're terrible and fuck you. And the Biden administration reached kind of the full pinnacle of that in our time. They got really bad on many fronts at the same time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so just like relieving that and getting kind of back to a reasonably, you know, kind of optimistic, constructive, you know, pro-growth frame of mind. There's just, there's so much pent up energy and potential in the American system that that alone is going to, I think, cause, you know, growth and spirit to take off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then there's a lot of things proactively that, yeah, and then there's a lot of things proactively that could be done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Disclaimer at first, which is I don't want to predict anything on any of this stuff because I've learned the hard way that I can't predict politics or Washington at all. But I would just say that the plans and intentions are clear and the staffing supports it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And all the conversations are consistent with the new administration and that they plan to take very rapid action on a lot of these fronts very quickly. They're going to do as much as they can through executive orders, and then they're going to do legislation and regulatory changes for the rest. And so they're going to move, I think, quickly on a whole bunch of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You can already feel, I think, a shift in the national spirit, or at least let's put it this way. I feel it for sure in Silicon Valley. I mean, we just saw a great example of this with what Mark Zuckerberg is doing. Obviously, I'm involved with his company, but we just saw it kind of in public, the scope and speed of the changes are reflective of a lot of these shifts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I would say that that same conversation, those same kinds of things are happening throughout the industry. Right. And so the tech industry itself, whether people were pro-Trump or anti-Trump, like there's just like a giant vibe shift, mood shift that's like kicked in already.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then I was with a group of Hollywood people about two weeks ago and they were still, you know, people who at least at least vocally were still very anti-Trump. But I said, you know, has anything changed since since November 6th? And they immediately said, oh, it's completely different. It feels like the ice is thawed. You know, woke is over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, you know, they said that all kinds of projects are going to be able to get made now that couldn't before that, you know, probably was going to start making comedies again, you know, like they were just like, it's like, it's like a, just like an incredible immediate, uh, environmental change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I'm, as I talk to people kind of throughout, you know, certainly throughout the economy, people who run businesses, I hear that all the time, which is just this, this last 10 years of misery is just over. I mean, the one that I'm watching that's really funny. I mean, Facebook's getting a lot, that is getting a lot of attention, but the other funny one is BlackRock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Which I'm not, you know, and I don't know him, but I've watched for a long time. And so, you know, Larry Fink, who's the CEO of BlackRock, was like first in as a major, you know, investment CEO on like every dumb social trend and rule set, like every... All right, I'm going for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Every retarded thing you can imagine, every ESG and every possible satellite companies with every aspect of just these crazed ideological positions. And he was coming in, he literally had aggregated together trillions of dollars of shareholdings that were his customers' rights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he seized their voting control of their shares and was using it to force all these companies to do all of this crazy ideological stuff. And he was like the Typhoid Mary of all this stuff in corporate America. And he, in the last year, has been backpedaling from that stuff as fast as he possibly can. And just an example, last week, he pulled out of the corporate net zero alliance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He pulled out of the crazy energy stuff. And so he's backing away as fast as he can. Remember the Richard Pryor backwards walk? Richard Pryor had this way where he could back out of a room while looking like he was walking forward. And so... You know, even they're doing that. And just the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, if you saw the court recently ruled that NASDAQ had these crazy board of directors composition rules. One of the funniest moments of my life is when my friend Peter Thiel and I were on the meta board. And these NASDAQ rules came down, mandated diversity on corporate boards. And so we sat around the table and had to figure out which of us counted as diverse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the very professional attorneys at Meta explained with a 100% complete straight face that Peter Thiel counts as diverse by virtue of being LGBT. And this is a guy who literally wrote a book called The Diversity Myth. And he literally looked like he'd swallowed a live goldfish. Um, and, and, and this was imposed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, this was like so incredibly offensive to him that like, it just like, it was just absolutely appalling. And I felt terrible for him, but the look on his face was very funny. Um, and it was imposed by NASDAQ, you know, your stock exchange imposing this stuff on you. And then the court, whatever the court, the court of appeals just nuked that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So these things basically are being ripped down one by one. And what's on the other side of it is basically finally being able to get back to everything that everybody always wanted to do, which is run their companies, have great products, have happy customers, succeed, achieve, outperform, and work with the best and the brightest and not be made to feel bad about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think that's happening in many areas of American society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, so it was very, you know, there was a moment. So Peter, you know, Peter, of course, you know, is publicly gay, has been for a long time. You know, but, you know, there are other men on the board, right? And, you know, we're sitting there and we're all looking at it and we're like, all right, like, okay, LGBT. And we just, we keep coming back to the B, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's like, you know, it's like, you know, I'm willing to do a lot for this company, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, yeah. And then it's like, okay, like, is there a test?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The questions that got asked, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I've become very good at asking lawyers completely absurd questions with a totally straight face. And do they answer with a straight face? Sometimes. Okay. I think in fairness, they have trouble telling when I'm joking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
First, we should maybe talk population. There's all of Silicon Valley. The way to just measure that is just look at voting records. What that shows consistently is Silicon Valley is just, at least historically, my entire time there has been overwhelmingly majority just straight up Democrat. The other way to look at that is political donation records.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Again, the political donations in the valley range from 90% to 99% to one side. I just bring it up because we'll see what happens with the voting and with donations going forward. We maybe talk about the fire later, but I can tell you there is a very big question of what's happening in Los Angeles right now. I don't want to get into the fire, but it's catastrophic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There was already a rightward shift in the big cities in California, and I think a lot of people in LA are really thinking about things right now as they're trying to literally save their houses and save their families. But even in San Francisco, there was a big shift to the right in the voting in 24. So we'll see where that goes. But you observe that by just looking at the numbers over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The part that I'm more focused on is, and I don't know how to exactly describe this, but it's like the top 1,000 or the top 10,000 people. And I don't have a list, but it's all the top founders, top CEOs, top executives, top engineers, top VCs, and then kind of into the ranks, the people who kind of built and run the companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they're, you know, I don't have numbers, but I have a much more tactile feel, you know, for what's happening. So the big thing I have now come to believe is that the idea that people have beliefs is mostly wrong. I think that most people just go along. And I think even most high status people just go along.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think maybe the most high status people are the most prone to just go along because they're the most focused on status. Um, and the way I would describe that is, um, you know, one of the great forbidden philosophers of our time is the Unabomber, uh, Ted Kaczynski. And amidst his madness, he had this extremely interesting articulation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, he was a, he was a, he was an insane lunatic murderer, but he was also a, you know, at Harvard super genius. Um, not that those are in conflict. Shots fired, man. But he was a very bright guy and he did this whole thing where he talked about, basically, he was very right-wing and talked about leftism a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he had this great concept that's just stuck in my mind ever since I read it, which is he had this concept he just called over-socialization. Um, and so, you know, most people are socialized, most people are socialized. Like most people are, you know, we live in a society. Most people learn how to be part of a society. They give some deference to the society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's something about modern Western elites where they're over socialized. Um, and they're just like overly oriented towards what other people like themselves, you know, think, um, and believe. And you can get a real sense of that if you have a little bit of an outside perspective, which I just do, I think as a consequence of where I grew up, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Even before I had the views that I have today, there was always just this weird thing where it's like, why does every dinner party have the exact same conversation? Why does everybody agree on every single issue? Why is that agreement precisely what was in the New York Times today? Why are these positions not the same as they were five years ago?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But why does everybody like snap into agreement every step of the way? And that was true when I came to Silicon Valley and it's just as true today, 30 years later. And so I think most people are just literally, I think they're taking their cues from, it's some combination of the press, the universities, the big foundations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So basically it's like the New York Times, Harvard, the Ford Foundation, and I don't know, a few CEOs and a few public figures, and maybe the president of your party's in power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And like, whatever that is, everybody just, everybody who's sort of good and proper and elite and good standing and in charge of things and a sort of correct member of, you know, let's call it coastal American society, everybody just believes those things. And then, you know, the two interesting things about that is, number one, there's no divergence among the organs of power, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So Harvard and Yale believe the exact same thing. The New York Times and the Washington Post believe the exact same thing. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation believe the exact same thing. Google and, you know, whatever, you know, Microsoft believe the exact same thing. Um, but those things change over time, but there's never conflict in the moment. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so, you know, the New York times and the Washington post agreed on exactly everything in 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020, despite the fact that the specifics changed radically. The lockstep was what mattered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I think basically we in the Valley, we're on the tail end of that in the same way Hollywood's on the tail end of that and the same way New York's on the tail end of that, the same way the media's on the tail end of that. It's like some sort of collective hive mind thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I just go through that to say, I don't think most people in my orbit, or let's say the top 10,000 people in the Valley, or the top 10,000 people in LA, I don't think they're sitting there thinking, basically, I have rock... I mean, they probably think they have rock-solid beliefs, but they don't actually have some inner core of rock-solid beliefs, and then they kind of watch reality change around them and try to figure out how to keep their beliefs correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I don't think that's what happens. I think what happens is they conform to the belief system around them. And I think most of the time they're not even aware that they're basically part of a herd.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'll just tell you what I think, which is at the dinner parties and at the conferences, no, there's none of that. What there is is that all of the heretical conversations, anything that challenges the status quo, any heretical ideas, and any new idea is a heretical idea. Any deviation is either discussed one-on-one, face-to-face. It's like a whisper network.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Or it's like a real life social network. Here's a secret handshake, which is like, okay, you meet somebody and you like know each other a little bit, but like not well. And like, you're both trying to figure out if you can like talk to the other person openly or whether you have to like be fully conformist. It's a joke. Well, yeah. Humor. Somebody cracks a joke, right? Somebody cracks a joke.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
If the other person laughs, the conversation is on. Yeah. Yeah. If the other person doesn't laugh. Back slowly away from the scene. I didn't mean anything by it. Right. And by the way, it doesn't have to be like a super offensive joke. It just has to be a joke that's just up against the edge of one of the use the Sam Bankman free term, one of the shibboleths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, it has to be up against one of the things of, you know, one of the things that you're absolutely required to believe to be the dinner parties. And then and then at that point, what happens is you have a peer to peer network.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
right you have you have you have a one-to-one connection with somebody and then you you have your you have your your little conspiracy of thought thought criminality um and then you have your net you've probably been through this you have your network of thought criminals and then they have their network of thought criminals and then you have this like delicate mating dance as to whether you should bring the thought criminals together right um and the dance the fundamental uh mechanism of the dance is humor yeah it's humor like it's right
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, for two reasons. Number one, humor is a way to have deniability. Right. Humor is a way to discuss serious things without having deniability. Oh, I'm sorry. It was just a joke. Right. So that's part of it, which is one of the reasons why comedians can get away with saying things the rest of us can't. They can always fall back on, oh, yeah, I was just going for the laugh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But the other key thing about humor, right, is that laughter is involuntary. Right. Like you either laugh or you don't. And it's not like a conscious decision whether you're going to laugh. And everybody can tell when somebody is fake laughing. Right. And it's every professional comedian knows this. Right. The laughter is the clue that you're onto something truthful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like people don't laugh at like made up bullshit stories. They laugh because like you're revealing something that they either have not been allowed to think about or have not been allowed to talk about. Right. Or is off limits. And all of a sudden it's like the ice breaks and it's like, oh, yeah, that's the thing. And it's funny. And like I laugh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then and then, of course, this is why, of course, live comedy is so powerful is because you're all doing that at the same time. So you start to have the safety of, you know, the safety of numbers. And so so the comedians have like there is no no surprise to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, for example, Joe has been as successful as he has because they have they have this hack that the rest of us who are not professional comedians don't have. But you have your in-person version of it. Yeah. And then you got the question of whether the, whether you can sort of join the networks together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then you've probably been to this as you know, then at some point there's like a different, there's like the alt dinner party, uh, the Tharka middle dinner party and you get six or eight people together and you join the networks. And those are like the happiest, at least in the last decade, those are like the happiest moments of everybody's lives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Cause they're just like, everybody's just ecstatic. Cause they're like, I don't have to worry about getting yelled at and shamed. Like for every third sentence that comes out of my mouth and we can actually talk about real things. So that's the live version of it. And then, of course, the other side of it is the group chat phenomenon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then basically the same thing played out until Elon bought X and until Substack took off, which were really the two big breakthroughs in free speech online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The same dynamic played out online, which is you had absolute conformity on the social networks, like literally enforced by the social networks themselves through censorship and then also through cancellation campaigns and mobbing and shaming. But then group chats grew up to be the equivalent of Samizdat, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Anybody who grew up in the Soviet Union under, you know, communism, you know, they had the hard version of this, right? It's like, how do you know who you could talk to? And then how do you distribute information? And, you know, like, you know, again, that was the hard authoritarian version of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then we've been living through this weird mutant, you know, soft authoritarian version, but with, you know, with some of the same patterns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Exactly. Well, and this is the thing. Well, this is kind of the running joke about group chats. It's not even a joke. It's true. It's like every group chat, if you've noticed this, this principle of group chats, every group chat ends up being about memes and humor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the goal of the game of the group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable as you can get without actually tripping it. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And like literally every group chat that I have been in for the last decade, even if it starts some other direction, what ends up happening is it becomes the absolute comedy fest where, but it's walking, they walk right up the line and they're constantly testing. And every once in a while, somebody will trip the line and people will freak out. And it's like, oh, too soon. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, we got to wait until next year to talk about that. They walk it back. And so it's that same thing. And yeah, and then group chats is a technological phenomenon. It was amazing to see because basically it was, number one, it was obviously the rise of smartphones. Then it was the rise of the new messaging services.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Then it was the rise specifically of, I would say, combination of WhatsApp and Signal. And the reason for that is those were the two big systems that did the full encryption. So you actually felt safe. And then the real breakthrough, I think, was disappearing messages, which hit Signal probably four or five years ago and hit WhatsApp three or four years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the combination of the combination of encryption and and disappearing messages, I think, really unleashed it. Well, then there's the fight. Then there's the fight over the length of the disappearing messages. Right. And so it's like, you know, I often get behind my my thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I set to seven day, you know, disappearing messages and my friends who, you know, are like, no, that's way too much risk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Now, of course, what's happening right now is the big thaw, right? And so the vibe shifts. So what's happening on the other side of the election is, you know, Elon on Twitter two years ago and now Mark with Facebook and Instagram.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And by the way, with the continued growth of Substack and with other, you know, new platforms that are emerging, you know, like I think it may be, you know, I don't know that everything just shifts back into public, but like a tremendous amount of the So a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations, you know, can now shift back into public view.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I mean, quite frankly, this is one of those things, you know, quite frankly, even if I was opposed to what those people are saying, and I'm sure I am in some cases, you know, I would argue still like net better for society that those things happen in public instead of private. You know, do you really want like, yeah, like, don't you want to know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so and then it's just look, it's just, I think, clearly much healthier to live in a society in which people are not literally scared of what they're saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. So let's go through the, we'll go through the theory of preference falsification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, yeah. So this is exactly, this is one of the all-time great books. Incredibly, it's about 20, 30-year-old book, but it's very, it's completely modern and current in what it talks about, as well as very deeply historically informed. So it's called Private Truths, Public Lies. And it's written by a social science professor named Timur Karan at, I think, Duke. And it's definitive work on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so he has this concept he calls preference falsification. And so preference falsification is two things. Preference falsification, and you get it from the title of the book, Private Truths, Public Lies. So preference falsification is when you believe something and you can't say it. Or, and this is very important, you don't believe something and you must say it, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the commonality there is in both cases you're lying. you believe something internally and then you're lying about it in public. And so the thing, you know, and there's sort of two classic forms of it. There's the, you know, for example, there's the I believe communism is rotten, but I can't say it version of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But then there's also the famous parable of the real life example, but the thing that Václav Havel talks about in the other good book on this topic, which is The Power of the Powerless, you know, who is an anti-communist resistance fighter who ultimately became the, you know, the president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the wall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But he wrote this book and he describes the other side of this, which is workers of the world unite. Right. And so he describes what he calls the parable of the green grocer, which is your green grocer in Prague in 1985. And for the last 70 years, it has been 50 years. It's been absolutely mandatory to have a sign in the window of your store that says workers of the world unite. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's 1985. It is like crystal clear that the workers of the world are not going to unite. Like all the things that could happen in the world, that is not going to happen. The commies have been at that for 70 years. It is not happening. But that slogan had better be in your window every morning because if it's not in your window every morning, you are not a good communist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The secret police are going to come by and they're going to get you. And so the first thing you do when you get to the stories, you put that slogan in the window and you make sure that it stays in the window all day long. But he says the thing is every single person, the green grocer knows the slogan is fake. He knows it's a lie. Every single person walking past the slogan knows that it's a lie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Every single person walking past the store knows that the greengrocer is only putting it up there because he has to lie in public. And the greengrocer has to go through the humiliation of knowing that everybody knows that he's caving into the system and lying in public. And so it turns into demoralization campaign. It's not just ideological enforcement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
In fact, it's not ideological enforcement anymore because everybody knows it's fake. The authorities know it's fake. Everybody knows it's fake. It's not that they're enforcing the actual ideology of the workers of the world uniting. It's that they are enforcing compliance and compliance with the regime. And fuck you, you will comply. And so anyway, that's the other side of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And of course, we have lived in the last decade through... a lot of both of those. I think anybody listening to this could name a series of slogans that we've all been forced to chant for the last decade that everybody knows at this point are just simply not true. I'll let the audience speculate on their own group chats. Send Mark your memes online as well, please. Yes, yes, exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But okay, so anyway, so it's the two sides of that, right? So it's private truths, public lies. So then what preference falsification does is it talks about extending that from the idea of the individual experiencing that to the idea of the entire society experiencing that, right? And this gets to your percentages question, which is like, okay,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
What happens in a society in which people are forced to lie in public about what they truly believe? What happens, number one, is that individually they're lying in public and that's bad. But the other thing that happens is they no longer have an accurate gauge at all or any way to estimate how many people agree with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And again, this literally is like how you get something like the communist system, which is like, okay, you end up in a situation in which 80 or 90 or 99% of society can actually all be thinking individually, I really don't buy this anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And if anybody would just stand up and say it, I would be willing to go along with it, but I'm not going to be the first one to put my head on the chopping block. But because of the suppression, censorship, you have no way of knowing how many other people agree with you. And if the people who agree with you are 10% of the population and you become part of a movement, you're going to get killed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
If 90% of the people agree with you, you're going to win the revolution. And so the question of what the percentage actually is is a really critical question. And then basically in any sort of authoritarian system, you can't run a survey to get an accurate result. And so you actually can't know until you put it to the test.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then what he describes in the book is it's always put to the test in the same way. And this is exactly what's happened for the last two years, like 100% of exactly what's happened. It's like straight out of this book, which is somebody, Elon, sticks his hand up and says, the workers of the world are not going to unite. Right. Right? Or the emperor is actually wearing no clothes. Right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, that famous parable. Right? So one person stands up and does it. And literally that person is standing there by themselves and everybody else in the audience is like, ooh, I wonder what's going to happen to that guy. Right? But again, nobody knows. Elon doesn't know. The first guy doesn't know. Other people don't know. Like, which way is this going to go?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it may be that that's a minority position and that's a way to get yourself killed. Or it may be that that's the majority position and you are now the leader of a revolution. And then basically, of course, what happens is, okay, the first guy does that, doesn't get killed. Right? The second guy does, well, a lot of the time that guy does get killed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But when the guy doesn't get killed, then a second guy pops his head up, says the same thing. All right, now you've got two. Two leads to four, four leads to eight, eight leads to 16. And then as we saw with the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe in 89. When it goes, it can go, right? And then it rips.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then what happens is very, very quickly, if it turns out that you had a large percentage of the population that actually believe the different thing, it turns out all of a sudden everybody has this giant epiphany that says, oh, I'm actually part of the majority. And at that point, like you were on the freight train to revolution, right? Like it is rolling right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The other part of this is the distinction between the role of the elites and the masses. And here and here, the best book is called The True Believer, which is the Eric Hoffer book. And so the nuance you have to put on this is the elites play a giant role in this because the elites do idea formation and communication, but the elites by definition are a small minority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so there's also this giant role played by the masses and the masses are not necessarily thinking these things through in the same intellectualized or formal way that the elites are. but they are for sure experiencing these things in their daily lives and they for sure have at least very strong emotional views on them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so when you really get the revolution, it's when you get the elites lined up with, or either the current elites change or the new set of elites, a new set of counter elites basically come along and say, no, there's actually a different and better way to live. And then the people basically decide to follow the, you know, to follow the counter elite. So that's the other dimension to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And of course that part is also happening right now. And again, case study number one of that would be Elon and his, you know, he turns out, you know, truly massive following.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. And it's like, well, but then there's the test. Is it crazy shit or is it the truth? Right. And, and, and, you know, and this is where, you know, many, there are many more specific things about Elon's genius, but one of the, one of the really core ones is an absolute dedication to the truth. Um, and so when Elon says something, it sounds like crazy shit, but in his mind, it's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Now, is he always right? No. Sometimes the rockets crash. Sometimes he's wrong. He's human. He's like anybody else. He's not right all the time. But at least my through line with him, both in what he says in public and what he says in private, which, by the way, are the exact same things. He does not do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He doesn't lie in public about what he believes in private, or at least he doesn't do that anymore. He's 100% consistent in my experience. By the way, there's two guys who are 100% consistent like that, that I know, um, Yolanda Trump. Yeah. Whatever you think of them, what they say in private is 100% identical to what they say in public. Like they are completely transparent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They're completely honest in that way. Right. Which is like, and again, it's not like they're perfect people, but they're honest in that way. And it makes them potentially both as they have been very powerful leaders of these movements because they're both willing to stand up and say the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That if it's true, it turns out to be the thing in many cases that, you know, many or most or almost everyone else actually believes, but nobody was actually willing to say out loud. And so they can actually catalyze these shifts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I mean, I think this framework is exactly why Trump took over the Republican Party is I think Trump stood up there on stage with all these other kind of conventional Republicans and he started saying things out loud that it turned out the base really was. They were either already believing or they were prone to believe. Um, and he was the only one who was saying them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the, again, elite masses, he was elite, the voters of the masses and the voters decided, you know, no, no more bushes. Like we're going this other direction. That's the mechanism of social change. Like what we just described is like the actual mechanism of social change. It is Fascinating to me that we have been living through exactly this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We've been living through everything exactly what Timur Karan describes, everything that Václav Havel described, you know, black squares and Instagram, like the whole thing, right? All of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And we've been living through the, you know, the true believer elites masses, you know, thing with, you know, with a set of like basically incredibly corrupt elites wondering why they don't have the loyalty to masses anymore and a set of new elites that are running away with things. And so, like, we're living through this, like, incredible applied case study of these ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, if there's a moral of the story, it is, you know, I think fairly obvious, which is it is a really bad idea for a society to wedge itself into a position in which most people don't believe the fundamental precepts of what they're told they have to do, you know, to be to be good people like that. That is just not a good state to be in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, it's like, well, this is sort of the siren song of censorship is we can keep people from saying things, which means we can keep people from thinking things. And, you know, by the way, that may work for a while, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, you know, I mean, again, the hard form of the Soviet Union, owning a mimeograph, pre-photocopiers, there were mimeograph machines that were used to make samustat in underground newspapers, which is the mechanism of written communication of radical ideas, heretical ideas. Ownership of a mimeograph machine was punishable by death. Right? So that's the hard version, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, the soft version is somebody clicks a button in Washington and you were erased from the internet, right? Like, which, you know, good news, you're still alive. Bad news is, you know, shame about not being able to get a job. Too bad your family now hates you and won't talk to you, or whatever the version of cancellation has been. And so does that work? Maybe it works for a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It could work for the Soviet Union for a while in its way, especially when it was coupled with official state power. But when it unwinds, it can unwind with incredible speed and ferocity, because to your point, there's all this bottled up energy. Now, your question was, what are the percentages? What's the breakdown? And so my...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
My rough guess, just based on what I've seen in my world, is it's something like 20, 60, 20. It's like you've got 20% like true believers in whatever is, you know, the current thing. You know, you've got 20% of people who are just like true believers of whatever they're, you know, whatever's in the New York Times, Harvard professors and the Ford Foundation, like just, they're just believing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
By the way, maybe it's 10, maybe it's five, but let's say generously it's 20. So, you know, 20% kind of full-on revolutionaries. Um, and then you've got, let's call it 20% on the other side that are like, no, I'm not on board with this. This is, this is crazy. I'm not, I'm not signing up for this, but you know, you know, they, their view of themselves is they're in a small minority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And in fact, they start out in a small minority because what happens is the 60% go with the first 20%, not the second 20%. So you've got this large middle of people. And it's not that there's anything like it's not the people in the middle are not smart or anything like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's that they just have like normal lives and they're just trying to get by and they're just trying to go to work each day and do a good job and be a good person and raise their kids and, you know, have a little bit of time to watch the game. And they're just not engaged in the cut and thrust of, you know, political activism or any of this stuff is just not their thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But that's where the over socialization comes in. It's just like, okay, by default, the 60% will go along with the 20% of the radical revolutionaries, at least for a while. And then the counter elite is in this other 20%. And over time, they build up a theory and network and ability to resist. And a new set of representatives and a new set of ideas. And then at some point, there's a contest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the question is, what happens in the middle? What happens in the 60%? And it's kind of my point. It's not even really does the 60% change their beliefs as much as it's like, okay, what is the thing that that 60% now decides to basically fall into step with? And I think in the Valley, that 60% for the last decade decided to be woke and extremely, I would say, on edge on a lot of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And that 60% is pivoting in real time. They're just done. They've just had it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So this is the other thing. Okay, so there's two forms of internal. There's two forms of things. And Timur has actually talked about this. Professor Kronos talked about this. So one is, he said, this is the kind of unwind where what you're going to have is you're now going to have people in the other direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You're going to have people who claim that they supported Trump all along who actually didn't. Right? Right. Right. So it's going to swing the other way. And by the way, Trump's not the only part of this, but you know, he's just a convenient shorthand for, you know, for, for a lot of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, but you know, whatever it is, you'll, you'll have people who will say, well, I never supported the EI, right. Or I never supported ESG, or I never thought we should have canceled that person. Right. Where of course they were full on a part of the mob, like, you know, kind of at that moment. And so anyway, so you'll have preference falsification happening in the other direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And his prediction, I think basically is you'll end up with the same quote problem on the, on the other side. Now, Will that happen here? I don't know. How far is American society willing to go in any of these things? I don't know. But there is some question there. And then the other part of it is, okay, now you have this elite that is used to being in power for the last decade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And by the way, many of those people are still in power and they're in very important positions. And the New York Times is still the New York Times and Harvard is still Harvard. And those people haven't changed at all. Right. And they, you know, they've been bureaucrats in the government and, you know, senior Democratic, you know, politicians and so forth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they're sitting there, you know, right now feeling like reality has just smacked them hard in the face because they lost the election so badly. But they're now going into a specifically the Democratic Party is going into a civil war. Right. And that form of the civil war is completely predictable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And that's exactly what's happening, which is half of them are saying, we need to go back to the center. We need to de-radicalize because we've lost the people. We've lost the people in the middle. And so we need to go back to the middle in order to be able to get 50% plus one in an election. Right. And then the other half of them are saying, no, we weren't true to our principles. We were too weak.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We were too soft. We must become more revolutionary. We must double down and we must celebrate murders in the street of health insurance executives. And that right now is like a real fight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. So he's a friend of yours. I respect that you don't want to name him. I also respect you don't want to beat on him. So I would like to beat on him on your behalf. Does he have tenure?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
This is the ultimate indictment of the corruption and the rot at the heart of our education system, at the heart of these universities. And it's, by the way, it's like across the board. It's like all the top universities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's like, because the siren song for what it's been for 70 years, whatever, the tenure system, peer review system, tenure system, which is like, yeah, you work your butt off as an academic to get a professorship and then to get tenure because then you can say what you actually think. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Then you can do your work and your research and your speaking and your teaching without fear of being fired. Right. Without fear of being canceled like academic freedom. I mean, think of the term academic freedom and then think of what these people have done to it. Like it's gone. Like that entire thing was fake and is completely rotten.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And these people are completely, completely giving up the entire moral foundation of the system that's been built for them, which by the way is paid for virtually 100% by taxpayer money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That the population at large is going to realize the corruption in their industry and it's going to withdraw all the funding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
No, no, no, no, no. Think about what happens next. Okay. So let's go, let's go through it. So the, the, the universities, the universe, the universities are funded by four primary sources of federal funding. The big one is the federal student loan program, which is, you know, in the many trillions of dollars at this point, and then only spiraling, you know, way faster than, than inflation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, that's number one. Number two is federal research funding, which is also very large. And you probably know that, um, um, When a scientist at university gets a research grant, the university rakes as much as 70% of the money for central uses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Number three is tax exemption at the operating level, which is based on the idea that these are nonprofit institutions as opposed to, let's say, political institutions. And then number four is tax exemptions at the endowment level, which is the financial buffer that these places have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Hypothetically, anybody who's been close to university budget will basically see that what would happen if you withdrew those sources of federal taxpayer money. And then for the state schools, the state money, they'll instantly go bankrupt. And then you could rebuild. then you could rebuild.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Because the problem right now, like the folks at University of Austin are mounting a very valiant effort and I hope that they succeed and I'm cheering for them. But the problem is you're now inserting. Suppose you and I want to start a new university and we want to hire all the free thinking professors and we want to have the place that fixes all this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Practically speaking, we can't do it because we can't get access to that money. I'll give you the most direct reason we can't get access to that money. We can't get access to federal student funding. Do you know how universities are accredited for the purpose of getting access to federal student funding, federal student loans? They're accredited by the government, but not directly, indirectly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They're not accredited by the Department of Education. Instead, what happens is the Department of Education accredits accreditation bureaus that are nonprofits that do the accreditation. Guess what the composition of the accreditation bureaus is? The existing universities. They are in complete control. The incumbents are in complete control as to who gets access to federal student loan money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Guess how enthusiastic they are about accrediting a new university? Right. And so we have a government-funded and supported cartel that has gone, I mean, it's just obvious now, it's just gone sideways in basically any possible way it could go sideways, including, I mean, literally, as you know, students getting beaten up on campus for being of the wrong religion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They're just wrong in every possible way at this point. And it's all in the federal taxpayer back. And there is no way, I mean, my opinion, there is no way to fix these things without replacing them. And there's no way to replace them without letting them fail. And by the way, It's like everything else in life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, in a sense, this is like the most obvious conclusion of all time, which is what happens in the business world when a company does a bad job is they go bankrupt and another company takes its place, right? And that's how you get progress. And of course, below that is what happens is this is the process of evolution, right? Why does anything ever get better?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's because things are tested and tried and then the things that are good survive. And so these places have cut themselves off. They've been allowed to cut themselves off both from evolution at the institutional level and evolution at the individual level, as shown by the just widespread abuse of tenure. And so we've just stalled out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We built an ossified system, an ossified centralized corrupt system. We're surprised by the results. They are not fixable in their current form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Oh, but that logic doesn't follow at all. That's underpants gnome logic. Underpants knows logic. So I just started watching a key touchstone of American culture with my nine-year-old, which of course is South Park.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Wow. Which, by the way, is a little aggressive for a nine-year-old. Very aggressive. But he likes it. So he's learning all kinds of new words. And all kinds of new ideas. I told him, I said, you're going to hear words on here that you are not allowed to use. Right. Education. And I said, do you know how we have an agreement that we never lie to mommy? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I said not using a word that you learn in here does not count as lying. Keep that in mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Of course, in the very opening episode, in the first 30 seconds, one of the kids calls the other kid a dildo. We're off to the races. Daddy, what's a dildo? Yep. Sorry, son. I don't know. Yeah. So famous episode of South Park, the underpants gnomes. And so the underpants. So there's this rat. All the kids basically realize that their underpants are going missing from their dresser drawers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
somebody stealing the underpants. And it's just like, well, who on earth would steal the underpants? And it turns out it's the underpants gnomes. And it turns out the underpants gnomes that come to town and they've got this little underground warrant of tunnels and storage places for all the underpants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so they go out at night, they steal the underpants and the kids discover that, you know, the underpants gnomes and they're, you know, what, what are you doing? Like, what's, what's the point of this? And so the underpants gnomes present their, their master plan, which is a three-part plan, which is step one, collect underpants. Step three, profit. Step two, question mark. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So you just proposed the underpants gnome. Yeah. Which is very common in politics. So the form of this in politics is we must do something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
This is something, therefore we must do this. But there's no causal logic chain in there at all to expect that that's actually going to succeed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
because there's no reason to believe that it is yeah but it's the same thing but this is what i hear all the time and i'll i will let you talk as the host of the show in a moment but uh but the but i hear this all the time i hear this i have friends who are on these boards right um very involved in these places and i hear this all the time which is like oh these are very important we must fix them and so therefore they are fixable there's no logic chain there at all
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
If we say free speech and academic freedom often enough, sooner or later, these tenured professors will get brave.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
How do you create a good restaurant when the one down the street sucks?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You open a new restaurant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like how often in your life have you experienced a restaurant that's just absolutely horrible and it's poisoning all of its customers and the food tastes terrible. And then three years later you go back and it's fantastic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Charlie Munger actually had the great, the best comment on this great investor, Charlie Munger, the great comment he was once asked, he's like, you know, he was, you know, General Electric was going through all these challenges and he was asked at a Q and A, he said, how would you fix the culture at General Electric? And he said, fix the culture at General Electric.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He said, I couldn't even fix the culture at a restaurant. Like, it's insane. Like, obviously you can't do it. I mean, nobody in business thinks you can do that. Like, It's impossible. It's not. Now, look, having said all that, I should also express this because I have a lot of friends to work at these places and are involved in various attempts to fix these. I hope that I'm wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I would love to be wrong. I would love for the underpants gnome step two to be something clear and straightforward that they can figure out how to do. I would love to fix it. I'd love to see them come back to their spoken principles. I think that'd be great. I'd love to see the professors with tenure get bravery. I would love to see, I mean, it would be fantastic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, my partner and I have done like a lot of public speaking on this topic. It's been intended to not just be harsh, but also be like, okay, like these challenges have to be confronted directly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
By the way, let me also say something positive, you know, especially post October 7th, there are a bunch of very smart people who are major donors and board members of these institutions like Mark Rowan, you know, who are really coming in trying to, you know, I think legitimately trying to fix these places. I have a friend on the executive committee at one of the top technical universities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He's working overtime to try to do this. Man, I hope they can figure it out. But the counter question would just be like, do you see it actually happening at a single one of these places?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So here's a question for your friend who has tenure at one of these places, which is who runs his university?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Then we know who runs the university. The professors? Yeah, professors. The professors and the students. The professors and the feral students. And they're, of course, in a radicalization feedback cycle driving each other crazy. The feral students. Yeah, the feral students. Yeah, the feral students.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
What happens when you're put in charge of your bureaucracy where the thing that the bureaucracy knows is that they can outlast you? The thing that the tenured professors at all these places know is it doesn't matter who the president is because they can outlast them because they cannot get fired. By the way, it's the same thing that bureaucrats in the government know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's the same thing that the bureaucrats in the Department of Education know. They know the exact same thing. They can outlast you. I mean, it's the whole thing. It's the resistance. They can be the resistance. They can just sit there and resist. which is what they do. They're not fireable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I said Dairy Queen is the best restaurant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I don't want to. You should go order a Blizzard. One day you should walk down there and order a Blizzard. Yeah. They can get like 4,000 calories in a cup. They can. And they're delicious. It's amazing. They are truly delicious. And they'll put anything in there you want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But anyway, let me just close by saying, look, my friends in the university system, I would just say, look, this is the challenge. I would just pose this as the challenge. To me, having had a lot of these conversations, this is the bar, in my view. This is the conversation that actually has to happen. This is the bar that actually has to be hit. These problems need to be confronted directly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Because I think there's just, I think there's been way too much. I mean, I'm actually, we're kind of on the other side. There's too much happy talk in these conversations. I think the taxpayers do not understand this level of crisis. And I think if the taxpayers come to understand it, I think the funding evaporates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I think the fuse is going through, you know, no fault of any of ours, but like the fuse is going and there's some window of time here to fix this and address it and justify the money. Because just normal taxpayers sitting in normal towns in normal jobs are not going to tolerate this for that much longer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I was there on the ground floor in 1993. There's multiple floors to this building, apparently. There are. Yeah. So I got the first ask to implement censorship on the internet. which was in the web browser. That is fascinating. Yeah, actually in 1982, I was asked to implement a nudity filter. Did you have the courage to speak up back then? I did not have any problem speaking up back then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I was making $6.25 an hour. I did not have a lot to lose. No, I was asked at the time. And then look, you know, legitimate, you know, in some sense, a legitimate request, which is working on a research project actually funded by the federal government at a public university.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So, you know, I don't think my boss was like in any way out of line, but it was like, yeah, like this, this web browser thing is great, but like, could it just make sure to not have any photos of naked people that show up? But if you think about this for a second as a technologist, I had an issue, which is this was like pre-ImageNet, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I had a brief period where I tried to imagine an algorithm that I referred to as the breast detection algorithm that I was going to have to design. And then apparently a variety of other, apparently body parts people are also sensitive about. And then I politely declined to do this. For just the technical difficulties of it. Well, number one, I actually didn't know how to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But number two is just like, no, I'm not. I'm just not building a censorship engine. I'm just not doing it. And in those days, the internet generally was a free fire zone for everything. It was actually interesting as sort of pre-93, the internet was such a specific niche community. It was like the million kind of highest IQ nerds in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so it actually didn't really have a lot of issues that people were super interested in talking about, like astrophysics and not very interested in. you know, even politics at that, at that time. So there really was not an issue there, but, um, yeah, I didn't, I didn't want to start the process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, so I think the way to think about this, so first of all, um, you know, yeah, so I was involved in this at Facebook every step, by the way, I've been involved with this at Facebook every step of the way I joined the board there in 2007.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I saw, I've seen everything in the last, you know, almost 20 years, um, every step of the way, but also I've been involved in most of the other companies over time. So I was an angel investor in Twitter, knew them really well. Um, we were the founding investor in Substack, I'm part of the Elon takeover of Twitter with X. I was an angel at LinkedIn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I've been in these, we were the funder of Pinterest. We were one of the main investors there, Reddit as well. And I was having these conversations with all these guys all the way through. So as much talk specifically about Facebook, but I can just tell you like the general pattern. And for quite a while, it was kind of all the same across these companies. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So basically the way to think about this, the true kind of nuanced view of this is that there is practically speaking no internet service that can have zero censorship. And by the way, that also mirrors there is no country that actually has limited free speech either. The U.S. First Amendment actually has 12 or 13 formal carve-outs from the Supreme Court over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So incitement to violence and terrorist recruitment and child abuse and child pornography and so forth, they're not covered by the First Amendment. And just practically speaking, if you and I are going to start an internet company and have a service, we can't have that stuff either because it's illegal or it will just clearly destroy the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You're always going to have a censorship engine. I mean, hopefully it's not actually in the browser, but you're going to have it for sure at the level of an internet service. But then what happens is now you have a machine, right? Now you have a system where you can put in rules saying we allow this, we don't allow that. You have enforcement, you have consequences, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And once that system is in place, it becomes the ring of power. Right. Which is like, okay, now anybody in that company or anybody associated with that company or anybody who wants to pressure that company will just start to say, okay, you should use that machine for more than just terrorist recruitment and child pornography. You should use it for X, Y, Z.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Basically, that transition happened, call it 2012, 2013, is when there was this very, very rapid pivot. I think the kickoff to it, for some reason, was it was the beginning of the second Obama term. I think it also coincided with the arrival of the first super woke kids into these schools.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
um, you know, that kind of, you know, it's, it's the kids that were in school between like, you know, for the Iraq war and then the global financial crisis. And like, they came out like super radicalized. They came into these companies and they immediately started mounting these social crusades to ban and censor, uh, lots of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, you know, quite frankly, the Democratic Party figured this out. And they figured out that these companies were, you know, very subject to being controlled. And, you know, the executive teams and boards of directors are almost all Democrats. And, you know, there's tremendous circulation. A lot of Obama people from the first term actually came and worked in these companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And a lot of FBI people and other, you know, law enforcement intelligence people came in and worked. And they're all, you know, they were all Democrats. for that set. Um, and so they just, you know, the, the, the ring of power was lying on the table. It had been built and they, you know, pick it up and put it on and then they just ran.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the original discussions were basically always on two topics. It was hate speech and misinformation. Uh, hate speech was the original one. Um, and the hate speech conversation started exactly like you'd expect, which is we can't have the N word and which the answer is fair enough. Let's not have the N word. Okay. Now we've set a precedent. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then Jordan Peterson has talked a lot about this. The definition of hate speech ended up being things that make people uncomfortable. Right. So we can't have things that make people uncomfortable. I, of course, you know, people like me that are disagreeable raise their hands and say, well, that idea right there makes me uncomfortable. But of course, that doesn't count as hate speech. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So, you know, the ring of power is on one hand and not on the other hand. And then basically that began this slide where it ended up being that, you know, completely anodyne – this is a point that Mark has been making recently – completely anodyne comments that are completely legitimate on television or on the Senate floor. All of a sudden our hate speech can't be said online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So that, you know, the ring of power was wielded in grossly irresponsible ways. We could talk about – all the stuff that happened there. And then the other one was misinformation. And that wasn't as, there was a little bit of that early on, but of course that really kicked in with, with Trump. Um, so, so the hate speech stuff, the hate speech stuff predated Trump by like three or four years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, the misinformation stuff was basically, uh, uh, it was a little bit later and it was the consequence of the Russiagate hoax. Um, and then that was, you know, a ring of power that was even more powerful, right? Because, you know, hate speech is like, okay, at some point, if some, if something offensive or not, like at least you can have a question as to whether that's the case, but,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The problem with misinformation is like, is it the truth or not? What do we know for 800 years or whatever Western civilization? It's that there's only a few entities that can determine the truth on every topic. There's God. There's the king. We don't have those anymore. And the rest of us are all imperfect and flawed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the idea that any group of experts is going to sit around the table and decide on the truth is deeply anti-Western and deeply authoritarian. And somehow the misinformation kind of crusade went from the Russiagate hoax into just full-blown We're going to use that weapon for whatever we want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, of course, then the culminating moment on that that really was the straw that broke the camel's back was we're going to censor all theories that the COVID virus might have been manufactured in a lab as misinformation. And inside these companies, that was the point where people for the first time, this is like, what, three years ago, for the first time they were like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That was when it sunk in where it's just like, okay, this has spun completely out of control. Anyway, that's how we got to where we are. And then basically that spell lasted, that complex existed and got expanded basically from call it 2013 to 2023. I think basically two things broke it. One is Substack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, and I'm super proud of those guys because they started from scratch and declared right up front that they were going to be a free speech platform. And they came under intense pressure, including from the press. And, you know, they tried to just beat them to the ground and kill them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And intense pressure, by the way, from, you know, let's say certain of the platform companies, you know, basically threatening them. And they stood up to it. And sitting here today, they have the widest spectrum of speech and conversation anywhere on planet Earth. And they've done a great job. And it's worked, by the way. It's great. And then obviously Elon with X was the hammer blow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the third one now is what Mark is doing at Facebook.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So that there, and I will tell you like, and I should say John Stewart attacked me recently, so I'm not that thrilled about him, but I would say I was a long run fan of John Stewart. I watched probably every episode of The Daily Show when he was on it for probably 20 years, but he did a very important public service and it was that appearance on The Colbert Show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I don't know how broadly this is, you know, at the time it was in the news briefly, but I don't know how, if people remember this, but I will tell you in the rooms where people discuss what is misinformation and these policies, that was a very big moment. That was probably actually the key catalyzing moment
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think he exhibited, I would say, conspicuous bravery and had a big impact with that. And yeah, for people who don't recall what he did, and this was in the full-blown, like you absolutely must lock down for two years. You absolutely must keep all the schools closed. You absolutely must have everybody work from home. You absolutely must wear a mask, like the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And one of those was you absolutely must believe that COVID was completely natural. You must believe that. And not believing that means you're a fascist Nazi Trump supporter, mega evil QAnon person, right? And that was like uniform. And that was enforced by the social media companies. And like I said, that was the peak. And Jon Stewart went on The Colbert Show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I don't know if they planned it or not because Colbert looked shocked. I don't know how much it was a bit, but he went on there and he just had one of these like – The emperor is wearing no clothes things where he said, it's just not plausible that you had the COVID super virus appear 300 yards down the street from the Wuhan Institute of lethal coronaviruses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, it's just not plausible that that certainly that you could just rule that out. And then there was another key moment. Actually, the more serious version was, I think the author Nicholson Baker wrote a big piece for New York magazine. And Nicholson Baker is like one of our great novelist writers of our time. And he wrote the piece and he did the complete undressing of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and that was the first, I think that was the first legit, there had been like alt, you know, renegade, there had been, you know, people running around saying this, but getting censored all over the place. That was the first one that was like in the mainstream press where he, and he talked to all the heretics and he just like laid the whole thing out. And, and that was a moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I remember, let's say a board meeting at one of these companies after that, where basically, you know, everybody looked around the table and it was like, all right, like, I guess we're not, we don't need to censor that anymore. And, you know, and then of course what immediately follows from that is, well, wait a minute, why were we censoring that in the first place?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And okay, like, and then, you know, the downstream, not that day, but the downstream conversations were like, okay, if we made such a giant, in retrospect, if we all made such a giant collective mistake censoring that, then what does that say about the rest of our regime? And I think that was the thread in the sweater that started to unravel it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Can you just speak to that? He has become, I think, an outstanding communicator, right? And he's, you know, somebody who came in for a lot of criticism earlier in his career on that front. And I think he's, you know, he's one of these guys who can sit down and talk for three hours and make complete sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, as you do with all of your episodes, like when somebody sits and talks for three hours, like you really get a sense of somebody because it's really hard to be artificial for that long. And, you know, he's not done that repeatedly. He's really good at
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then look, again, I would maybe put him in the third category now with, certainly after that appearance, I would say, I would put him up there now with kind of Ilana Trump in the sense of the public and the private are now synchronized. I guess I'd say that. He said on that show what he really believes. He said all the same things that he says in private.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I don't think there's really any discrepancy anymore. Um, I would say he has always taken upon himself a level of obligation responsibility to running a company, the size of meta and to running services that are that large. Um, and I think, you know, his conception of what he's doing, which I think is correct is he's running services that are bigger than any country, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He's running, you know, over 3 billion people use those services. Um, and so, and then, you know, the company has, you know, many tens of thousands of employees and many investors and it's a public company and he thinks very deeply and seriously about his responsibilities. Um, and so, you know, he has not felt like he has had, let's just say the complete flexibility that Elon has had.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and you know, people could argue that one way or the other, but you know, he's, he's, you know, yeah, he's, he's, you know, he talked about a lot. He's, he's evolved a lot. A lot of it was, he learned a lot. And by the way, I'm going to put myself right back up there. Like I'm not claiming any huge foresight or heroism on any of this. Like I've also learned, learned a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, like I, my views on things are very different than they were 10 years ago on lots of topics. And so, um, you know, I w I've been on a learning journey. He's been on a learning journey. He is a really, really good learner. He assimilates information as good as or better than anybody else I know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The other thing I guess I would just say is he talked on that show about something very important, which is when you're in a role where you're running a company like that, there are a set of decisions that you get to make and you deserve to be criticized for those decisions and so forth. And it's valid. But you are under tremendous external pressure as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And by the way, you're under tremendous internal pressure. You've got your employees coming at you. You've got your executives in some cases coming at you. You've got your board in some cases coming at you. You've got your shareholders coming at you. So you've got your internal pressures, but you also have the press coming at you. You've got academia coming at you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You've got the entire nonprofit complex coming, activist complex coming at you. And then really critically, you know, he talked about a Rogan and these companies all went through this in this last, especially five years, you had the government coming at you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, that's the really, you know, stinky end of the pool where, you know, the government was, in my view, you know, illegally exerting, you know, just in flagrant violation of the First Amendment and federal laws on speech and coercion and conspiracy, forcing these companies to engage in activities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, again, in some cases they may have wanted to do, but in other cases they clearly didn't want to do and felt like they had to do. And the level of pressure... Like I say, like I've known every CEO at Twitter. They've all had the exact same experience, which when they were in the job, it was just daily beatings. Like it's just getting punched in the face every single day, constantly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, Mark is very good at getting physically punched in the face. Getting better and better, yeah. And he's very good at taking a punch, and he has taken many, many punches. So I would encourage people to have a level of sympathy for these are not kings. These are people who operate with, I would say, extraordinary levels of external pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I think if I had been in his job for the last decade, I would be a little puddle on the floor. Um, and so it, it, it says, I think a lot about him that he has risen to this occasion the way that he has.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And by the way, I should also say, you know, the, the cynicism of course is immediately out and you know, it's a legitimate thing for people to say, but you know, it's like, oh, you're only doing this because of Trump or, you know, whatever. And it's just like, no, like he has been thinking about and working on these things and trying to figure them out for a very long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I think what you saw are legitimate, deeply held beliefs, not some, you know, you know, sort of just in the moment thing that could change at any time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That's a great question. So leaders are lonely to start with. And this is one of those things where almost nobody has sympathy. Right. Nobody feels sorry for a CEO. Right. Like it's not a thing. Right. And, you know, and again, legitimately so like CEOs get paid a lot, like the whole thing. There's a lot of great things about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So it's not like they should be out there asking for a lot of sympathy. But it is the case that they are human beings and it is the case that it is a lonely job. And the reason it's a lonely job. um, is because your words carry tremendous weight. Um, and you are dealing with extremely complicated issues and you're under a tremendous amount of emotional, you know, personal, emotional stress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and you know, you often end up not being able to sleep well and you end up not being able to like keep up an exercise routine and all those things. And you know, you're come under family stress cause you're working all the time or my partner, Ben, you know, was, he was CEO of our last company before we started the venture firm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He, he said, you know, the problem he had like with, with his family life was he would, even when he was home at night, he wasn't home. because he was in his head trying to solve all the business problems. And so he was like supposed to be like having dinner with his kids and he was physically there, but he wasn't mentally there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So, you know, you kind of get, you get that a lot, but the key thing is like, you can't talk to people, right? So you can't, I mean, you can talk to your spouse and your kids, but like, they don't understand that they're not working in your company. They don't understand, have the context to really help you. You, if you talk to your executives, they all have agendas. And they can't resist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's just human nature. And so you can't necessarily rely on what they say. It's very hard in most companies to talk to your board because they can fire you. Now, Mark has the situation because he has control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It actually turns out he can talk to his board, and Mark talks to us about many things that most CEOs won't talk to their boards about, literally because we can't fire him, including all the CEOs of Twitter. None of them had control, and so they could all get fired. So you can't talk to the board members. They're going to fire you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You can't talk to the shareholders because they'll just dump your stock. Right. So every once in a while, what you find is basically the best case scenario they have is they can talk to other CEOs. And there's these little organizations where they kind of pair up and do that. And so they maybe get a little bit out of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But even that's fraught with peril because can you really talk about confidential information with another CEO? Insider trading risk. And so it's just a very lonely and isolating thing to start with. And then on top of that, you apply pressure. Right. Right. And that's where it gets painful. And then maybe I'll just spend a moment on this internal external pressure thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
My general experience with companies is that they can withstand most forms of external pressure as long as they retain internal coherence. Right? So as long as the internal team is really bonded together and supporting each other, most forms of external pressure you can withstand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And by that, I mean, investors dump your stock, you lose your biggest customers, whatever negative article, negative headline. You can withstand all that. And basically, in fact, many of those forms of pressure can be bonding experiences for the team where they come out stronger. What you 100% cannot withstand is the internal crack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And what I always look for in high pressure corporate situations now is the moment when the internal team cracks, because I know the minute that happens, we're in a different regime. Like it's like the, you know, the solid is turned into a liquid. Like we're in a different regime and like the whole thing can unravel in the next week. Cause then people turn it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, this, I guess this is what's happening in Los Angeles right now. The, the, the, the mayor and the fire chief turned on each other and that's it. That government is dysfunctional. It is never going to get put back together again. It is over. It is not going to work ever again. And that's what happens to inside companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so somebody like Mark is under profound internal pressure and external pressure at the same time. Now, he's been very good at maintaining the coherence of his executive team, but he has had over the years a lot of activist employees, as a lot of these companies have had. And so that's been continuous pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the final thing I'd say is I said that companies can withstand most forms of external pressure, but not all. And the special, though not all one, is government pressure. Is that when your government comes for you, like, yeah. Any CEO who thinks that they're bigger than their government has that notion beaten out of them in short order.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Flagrant criminality. Felonies, like obvious felonies. And I can actually cite the laws. But yes, absolute criminality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So to start with is a lot of this now is in the public record, which is good because it needs to be in the public record. And so there's three forms of things that are in the public record that people can look at. So one is the Twitter files, which Elon put out with a set of journalists when he took over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I will just tell you, the Twitter files are 100% representative of what I've seen at every other one of these companies. And so you can just see what happened in Twitter and you can just assume that that happened in these other companies for the most part, certainly in terms of the kind of pressure that they got. So that's number one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That stuff, you can just read it and you should if you haven't. The second is, Mark referenced this in the Rogan podcast, there's a Congressman Jim Jordan who has a congressional committee called the Weaponization Committee. And they, in the last, you know, whatever, three years, have done a full-scale investigation of this. And Facebook produced a lot of documents into that investigation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And those have, many of those have now been made public. And you can download those reports. And there's like 2,000 pages worth of material on that. And that's essentially the Facebook version of the Twitter files, just arrived at with a different mechanism. And then third is Mark himself talking about this on Rogan. So I'll, you know, just defer to his comments there. But... Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Basically, what those three forms of information show you is basically the government over time and then culminating in 2020, 2021, in the last four years, just decided that the First Amendment didn't apply to them. And they just decided that federal laws around free speech and around conspiracies to take away the rights of citizens just don't apply.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and they just decided that they can just arbitrarily pressure, um, uh, just like literally arbitrarily call up companies and threaten and bully, um, and yell and scream and, and, you know, threaten repercussions and force people to force them to censor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and you know, there's this whole thing of like, well, the first amendment only applies to, you know, the government, it doesn't apply to companies. It's like, well, there's actually a little bit of nuance to that. First of all, it definitely applies to the government. Like 100%, the first amendment applies to the government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
By the way, so does the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, including the right to due process also applies to the government. There was no due process at all to any of the censorship regime that was put in place. There was no due process put in place, by the way, for debanking either. Those are just as serious violations as the free speech violations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so this is just like flagrant unconstitutional behavior. And then there are specific federal statutes. It's 18241 and 18242. And one of them applies to federal employees, government employees, and the other one applies to private actors around what's called deprivation of rights and conspiracy to deprive rights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it is not legal according to the United States Criminal Code for government employees or in a conspiracy private entities to take away constitutional rights. And interestingly, some of those constitutional rights are enumerated, for example, in the First Amendment, freedom of speech. And then some of those rights actually do not need to be enumerated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
If the government takes away rights that you have, they don't need to be specifically enumerated rights in the Constitution in order to still be a felony. The Constitution very specifically does not say you only have the rights that it gives you. It says you have all the rights that have not been previously defined as being taken away from you. right? And so debanking qualifies as a right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Right to access to the financial system is every bit something that's subject to these laws as free speech. And so, yeah, this has happened. And then I'll just add one final thing, which is we've talked about two parties so far. We've talked about the government employees, and then we've talked about the companies. The government employees for sure have misbehaved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The companies, there's a very interesting question there as to whether they are victims or perpetrators or both. You know, they will defend and they will argue and I believe they have a good case that they are victims, not perpetrators, right? They are the downstream subjects of pressure, not the cause of pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But there's a big swath of people who are in the middle and specifically the ones that are funded by the government that I think are in possibly pretty big trouble. And that's all of these third party censorship bureaus. I mean, the one that sort of is most obvious is the so-called Stanford Internet Observatory that got booted up there over the last several years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they basically were funded by the federal government to be third party censorship operations. And they're private sector actors, but acting with federal funding. And so it puts them in this very interesting spot where there could be a very obvious theory under which they're basically acting as agents of the government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I think they're also very exposed on this and have behaved in just flagrantly illegal ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There are so many ways that they can get you. Like, there are so many ways they can come at you and get you. And, you know, the thing here to think about is, a lot of times when people think about government action, they think about legislation, right? Because you, so, when I was a kid, we got trained at how does government work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There was this famous animated short, the thing we got shown was just a cartoon of how a bill becomes a law. And it's like this, you know, fancy little bill sneaked along and goes this. I'm just a bill. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It's like, all right, number one, that's not how it works at all. That doesn't actually happen. We could talk about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But even beyond that, mostly what we're dealing with is not legislation. When we talk about government power these days, mostly it's not legislation. Mostly it's either regulation, which is basically the equivalent of legislation, but having not gone through the legislative process, which is a very big open legal issue and one of the things that the Doge is very focused on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Most government rules are not legislated, they're regulated. And there's tons and tons of regulations that these companies are... This is another cliche you'll hear a lot, which is, oh, private companies can do whatever they want. And it's like, oh, no, they can't. They're subject to tens of thousands of regulations that they have to comply with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the hammer that comes down when you don't comply with regulations is profound. Like they can completely wreck your company with no ability for you to do anything about it. So regulation is a big part of the way the power gets exercised. And then there's what's called just flat out administrative power, the term that you'll hear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And administrative power is just literally the government calling you and telling you what to do. Here's an example of how this works. So Facebook had this whole program a few years back to do a global cryptocurrency for payments called Libra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They built the entire system and it was this high scale sort of new cryptocurrency and they were going to build in every product and there were going to be 3 billion people who could transact with Libra. And they went to the government and they went to the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
All these different try to figure out how to make it so it's like fully compliant with anti-money laundering and all these controls and everything. And they have the whole thing ready to go. Two senators wrote letters to the big banks saying, we're not telling you that you can't work with Facebook on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But if you do, you should know that every aspect of your business is going to come under greatly increased level of regulatory scrutiny. Which is, of course, the exact equivalent of, it sure is a nice corner restaurant you have here. It would be a shame if somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail through the window and burned it down tonight. And so, what is that letter? It's not a law.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's not even a regulation. It's just straight, direct state power. And then it culminates in, literally, calls from the White House, where they're just flat out telling you what to do, which is, of course, what a king gets to do, but not what a president gets to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and, and so anyway, so this, so, so what these companies experienced was they experienced the full panoply of this, but it was, it was the level of intensity was in that order. It was actually legislation was the least important part. Regulation was more important. Administrative power was more important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then just like flat out demands and flat out threats were ultimately the most important. How do you fix it? Well, first of all, like you have to elect people who don't do it. So like, as with all these things, ultimately the fault lies with the voters. Um, and so, you know, you have to decide you don't want to live in that regime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I have no idea what part of this recent election map to the censorship regime. I do know a lot of people on the right got very angry about the censorship, but I, you know, I think it probably at least helped with enthusiasm on that side. Um, you know, maybe some people on the left will now not want their, you know, democratic nominees to be so pro-censorship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So the voters definitely get a vote, number one. Number two, I think you need transparency. You need to know what happened. We know some of what happened. Peter Thiel has written in the FT just now saying, after what we've been through in the last decade, we need broad-based truth and reconciliation efforts to really get to the root of things. So maybe that's part of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We need investigations for sure. Ultimately, we need prosecutions. Ultimately, we need people to go to jail because we need to set object lessons that say that you don't get to do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And on those last two, I would say that those are both up to the new administration and I don't want to speak for them and I don't want to predict what they're going to do, but they for sure have the ability to do both of those things and we'll see where they take it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I use the metaphor of the ring of power for people who don't catch the reference as Lord of the Rings. And the thing with the ring of power and Lord of the Rings, it's the ring that Gollum has in the beginning and it turns you invisible. And it turns out it like unlocks all this like fearsome power. It's the most powerful thing in the world. It's the key to everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And basically the moral lesson of Lord of the Rings, which was written by a guy who thought very deeply about these things is, yeah, the ring of power is inherently corrupting. The characters at one point, they're like, Gandalf, just put on the ring and fix this. And he's like, he will not put the ring on even to end the war because he knows that it will corrupt him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then as it starts, the character of Gollum is the result of a normal character who ultimately becomes this incredibly corrupt and deranged version of himself. And so, I mean, I think you said something actually quite profound there, which is the ring of power is infinitely tempting. The censorship machine is infinitely tempting. If you have it, you are going to use it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's overwhelmingly tempting because it's so powerful and that it will corrupt you. And yeah, I don't know whether any of these people feel any of this today. They should. I don't know if they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But yeah, you go out five or 10 years later, you would hope that you would realize that your soul has been corroded and you probably started out thinking that you were a patriot and you were trying to defend democracy and you ended up being extremely authoritarian and anti-democratic and anti-Western.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, I think the danger is there with power. It's just, it's flat out there. I, I would say with Elon, I mean, we'll, you know, we'll see, I would say with Elon and I would say, by the way, overwhelmingly, I would say so far so good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm extremely, extremely thrilled by what he's done on almost every front, um, for like, you know, the last 30 years, but including all this stuff recently, like I think he's, he's been a real hero on a lot of topics where we needed to see heroism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But look, I would say, I guess the sort of case that he has this level of power is some combination of the money and the, the, and the proximity to the president. Um, and obviously both of those are, are instruments of power. the counter argument to that is I do think a lot of how Elon is causing change in the world right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, there's, there's the companies he's running directly where I think he's doing very well. Um, and we're investors in multiple of them and doing very well. Um, uh, but I think like a lot of the stuff that gets people mad at him is like, it's the social and political stuff and it's, you know, it's his statements and then it's the downstream downstream effects of his statements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So like, for example, it's, you know, for the last couple of weeks, it's been him, you know, kind of weighing in on this rape gang scandal, you know, this rape organized child rape thing in the U.K., Um, and you know, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's actually, it's a preference cascade. It's one of these things where people knew there was a problem. They weren't willing to talk about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It kind of got suppressed. Um, and then, um, Elon brought it up and then all of a sudden there's now in the UK, this like massive explosion of basically open conversation about it for the first time. And, you know, it's like this catalyzing all of a sudden everybody's kind of woken up and being like, oh my God, you know, this is really bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, and, and there will be now, you know, pretty sure pretty, pretty clearly big changes as a result. So And Elon was, you know, he played the role of the boy who said the emperor has no clothes, right? But here's the thing. Here's my point. Like, he said it about something that was true, right? And so had he said it about something that was false, you know, he would get no credit for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He wouldn't deserve any credit for it. but he said something that was true. And by the way, everybody over there instantly, they were like, oh yeah, he's right. Right. Like nobody, nobody seriously said they're just arguing the details now. So, so number one, it's like, okay, he says true things. And so it's like, okay, how far, let's put it this way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like how worried are we about somebody becoming corrupt by virtue of their power being that they get to speak the truth. And I guess I would say, especially in the last decade of what we've been through, where everybody's been lying all the time about everything, I'd say, I think we should run this experiment as hard as we can to get people to tell the truth. And so I,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I don't feel that bad about that. And then the money side, you know, this rapidly gets into the money and politics question. And the money and politics question is this very interesting question because it seems like there's a clear cut case that the more money in politics, the worse things are and the more corrupted the system is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That was a very popular topic of public conversation up until 2016 when Hillary outspent Trump three to one and lost. You'll notice that money in politics has almost vanished as a topic in the last eight years. And once again, Trump spent far... Kamala raised and spent 1.5 billion on top of what Biden had spent. So they were at, I don't know, something like 3 billion total.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And Trump, I think, spent, again, like a third or a fourth of that. And so the money in politics kind of topic has kind of vanished from the popular conversation in the last eight years. It has come back a little bit now that Elon is spending.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
you know, but, but again, like, it's like, okay, he's spending, but the data would seem to indicate in the last, at least the last eight years that money doesn't win the political battles. It's actually like the voters actually have a voice and they actually exercise it and they don't just listen to ads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so again, there, I would say like, yeah, clearly there's some power there, but I don't know if it's like, I don't know if it's some, like, I don't know if it's some weapon that he can just like turn on and, and, and use in a definitive way. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Maybe one of the lessons of Lord of the Rings, right, is even Frodo would have been corrupted, right? But nevertheless... You had somebody who could do what it took at the, at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The thing that I find just so amazing about the Elon phenomenon and all the critiques is, um, you know, the one thing that everybody in our societies universally agrees on because of our, it's sort of our, our, our post Christian egalitarian. So, you know, we live in sort of this post secularized Christian context in the West now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's, you know, we, you know, we, we consider Christianity kind of, you know, backwards, but we still believe essentially all the same things. We just dress them up in, in, in sort of fake science. Um, um, So the one thing that we're all told, we're all taught is that the best people in the world are the people who care about all of humanity, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And we venerate, you know, all of our figures are people who care about all of, you know, Jesus cared about all of humanity. Gandhi cared about all of humanity. Martin Luther King cared about all of humanity. Like it's the person who cares the most about everybody. And with Elon, you have a guy who literally like, he talks about this constantly and he talks about exactly the same in private.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He's literally, he is operating on behalf of all of humanity to try to get us to, you know, he goes through to get us through multi-planetary civilization so that we can survive a strike on any one planet so that we can extend the light of human consciousness into the world and, you know, into the universe and have it persist, you know, in the good of the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And like, literally the critique is, yeah, we want you to care about all of humanity, but not like that. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So this comes from a Italian political philosopher from about a hundred years ago named Robert. I'm going to mangle the, let you pronounce the Italian, uh, Michelle's, um, or Michael's.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and then it was, I learned about it through a, a famous book on, on politics, probably the best book on politics written in the 20th century called the Machiavellians by this guy, James Burnham, um, who has had a big impact on me. But, um, in the Machiavellians, he resurrects what he calls this sort of Italian realist school of political philosophy from the, from the tens and twenties. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And these were people, to be clear, this was not like a Mussolini thing. These were people who were trying to understand the actual mechanics of how politics actually works. So to get to the actual sort of mechanical substance of like how the political machine operates. And this guy, Michel, said this concept he ended up with called the iron law of oligarchy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so what the iron law of oligarchy, and let me take a step back to say what he meant by oligarchy because it has multiple meaning. So basically in classic political theory, there's basically three forms of government at core. There's democracy, which is rule of the many. There's oligarchy, which is rule of the few. And there's monarchy, which is rule of the one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And you can just use that as a general framework of any government you're going to be under is going to be one of those, just a mechanical observation without even saying which one's good or bad, just a structural observation. And so the question that Michelle's asked was like, is there such a thing as democracy? Like, is there actually such a thing as democracy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Is there ever actually like direct, direct government? And what he did was he mounted this sort of incredible historical exploration of whether democracies had ever existed in the world. And the answer basically is almost never. And we could talk about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But the other thing he did was he sought out the most democratic private organization in the world that he could find at that point, which he concluded was some basically communist German autoworkers union. that was wholly devoted to the workers of the world uniting back when that was the hot thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he went in there and he's like, okay, this is the organization out of all organizations on planet Earth that must be operating as a direct democracy. And he went in there and he's like, oh, nope, there's a leadership class. You know, there's like six guys at the top and they control everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they lead the rest of the membership along, you know, by the nose, which is, of course, the story of every union. The story of every union is always the story of, you know, there's a Jimmy Hoffa in there, you know, kind of running the thing. You know, we just saw that with the dock workers union, right? Like, you know, there's a guy. And he's in charge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And by the way, the number two is his son, right? Like that's not like, you know, an accident, right? So the iron law of oligarchy basically says democracy is fake. There's always a ruling class. There's always a ruling elite structurally. And he said the reason for that is because the masses can't organize it. Right. What's the fundamental problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Whether the mass is 25,000 people in a union or 250 million people in a country, the masses can't organize. The majority cannot organize. Only a minority can organize. And to be effective in politics, you must organize. And therefore, every political structure in human history has been some form of a small organized elite ruling a large and dispersed majority. Every single one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, the Greeks and the Florentines had brief experiments in direct democracy and they were total disasters. Uh, in Florence, I forget the name of it. It was called like the workers revolt or something like that. There was like a two year period, um, where they basically experimented with direct democracy during the Renaissance and it was a complete disaster and they never tried it again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
In the state of California, we have our own experiment on this, which is the proposition system. which is an overlay on top of the legislature. And anybody who looks at it for two seconds concludes it's been a complete disaster. It's just a catastrophe. And it's caused enormous damage to the state. And so basically, the presumption that we are in a democracy is just sort of by definition fake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Now, good news for the US, it turns out the founders understood this. And so of course, they didn't give us a direct democracy, they gave us a representative democracy, right? And so they built the oligarchy into the system in the form of Congress and the executive branch and the judicial branch. But so anyway, so as a consequence, democracy is always and everywhere fake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There is always a ruling elite. And basically the lesson of the Machiavellians is you can deny that if you want, but you're fooling yourself. The way to actually think about how to make a system work and maintain any sort of shred of freedom is to actually understand that that is actually what's happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it was very clever, right? And, you know, some of this was based on earlier experiments. Some of this, by the way, you know, these were very, very smart people, right? And so they knew tremendous amounts of like Greek and Roman history. They knew the Renaissance history. You know, the Federalist Papers, they argued this at great length. You can read it all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, they ran like one of the best seminars in world history trying to figure this out. And they went through all this. And yeah, and so they thought through it very carefully. But just I'll give you an example, which continues to be a hot topic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So, you know, one way they did it is through the three branches of government, right, executive, legislative and judicial, sort of balance of powers. But the other way they did it was they sort of echoing what had been done earlier, I think, in the UK Parliament, they created the two different bodies of the legislature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the House and the Senate, and as you know, the House is a portion on the basis of population and the Senate is not. The small states have just as many senators as the big states. And then they made the deliberate decision to have the House get reelected every two years to make it very responsive to the will of the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they made the decision to have the Senate get reelected every six years so that it had more buffer from the passions of the moment. But what's interesting is they didn't choose one or the other. They did them both. And then to get legislation passed, you have to get through both of them. And so they built in a second layer of checks and balances.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then there's a thousand observations we could make about how well the system is working today and how much does it live up to the ideal and how much are we actually complying with the constitution. And there's lots of open questions there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, this system has survived for coming on 250 years with a country that has been spectacularly successful that I don't think at least, you know, I don't think any of us would trade the system for any other one. And so it's one of the great all time achievements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Many in their 20s at the time. And like super geniuses. This is one of those things where it's just like, all right, something happened where there was a group of people where, you know, nobody ever tested their IQs, but like these are Einsteins of politics. Yeah. An amazing thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But anyway, I just, I go through all that, which is they were very keen students of the actual mechanical practice of democracy, not fixated on what was desirable. They were incredibly focused on what would actually work, which is, you know, I think the way to think about these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That meme I get some credit for, and then the current thing is the other one I get some credit for. I don't know that I invented either one, but I popularized them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, so a lot of it, you know, we already talked about this a bit with the universities, which is you can apply a Machiavellian-style lens to the... It's why I posed the question to you that I did, which is, okay, who runs the university? The trustees, the administration, the students or the faculty?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, the answer, the true answer is some combination of the three or of the four, plus the donors, by the way, plus the government, plus the press, et cetera, right? And so, you know, there's a mechanical interpretation of that. I mean, companies operate under the exact same, you know, set of questions. Who runs a company?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
the CEO, but the CEO runs the company basically up to the day that either the shareholders or the management team revolt. If the shareholders revolt, it's very hard for the CEO to stay in the seat. If the management team revolts, it's very hard for the CEO to stay in the seat. By the way, if the employees revolt, it's also hard to stay in the seat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
By the way, if the New York Times comes at you, it's also very hard to stay in the seat. If the Senate comes at you, it's very hard to stay in the seat. A reductionist version of this that is a good shorthand is who can get who fired. So who has more power, the newspaper columnist who makes $200,000 a year or the CEO who makes $200 million a year?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's like, well, I know for sure that the columnist can get the CEO fired. I've seen that happen before. I have yet to see a CEO get a columnist fired. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
No, because what happens is they wear it with a badge. And I would say to their credit, they wear it as a badge of honor. And then to their shame, they wear it as a badge of honor, right? Which is if they're doing the right thing, then they are justifiably proud of themselves for standing up under pressure. but it also means that they can't respond to legitimate criticism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they're obviously terrible at that now. As I recall, he went straight to the CEO of I think Axel Springer that owns Insider. And I happen to know the CEO and I think he's quite a good CEO, but like, well, it was a good example. It was the CEO of Axel Springer run his own company. Right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, well, there's a fascinating, okay, so there's a fascinating thing playing out right now, not to dwell on these fires, but it's a case, you see, pressure reveals things, right? And so if you've been watching what's happened with the LA Times recently, so this guy, biotech entrepreneur buys the LA Times, like whatever, eight years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It is just like the most radical social revolutionary thing you can possibly imagine. It endorses every crazy left-wing radical you can imagine. It endorses Karen Bass. It endorses Gavin Newsom. It's just like a litany of all the people who are currently burning the city to the ground. It's just like endorsed every single bad person every step of the way. He's owned it the entire time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, he put his foot down right before – for the first time, I think, put his foot down right before the November election and said, we're not – he said, we're going to get out of this thing where we just always endorse the Democrat. And we said, we're not endorsing – I think he said, we're not endorsing for the presidency. And like the paper flipped out, right? It's like –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
or a billionaire backer who's, I don't know what he spends, but like he must be burning 50 or a hundred million dollars a year out of his pocket to keep this thing running. He paid 500 million for it, which is amazing. Back when people still thought these things were businesses. And then he's probably burned another 500 million over the last decade, keeping it running.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he burns probably another 50, a hundred million a year to do this. And the journalists at the LA times hate him with the fury of a thousand sons. Like they just like absolutely freaking despise him. And they have been like attacking him. And you know, the ones that can get jobs elsewhere, quit and do it. And the rest just stay and say the worst, you know, most horrible things about him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they want to constantly run these stories, attacking him. Um, And so he has had this reaction that a lot of people in LA are having right now to this fire and to this just like incredibly vivid collapse of leadership and all these people that his paper had endorsed are just disasters. And he's on this tour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The roaring 20s. The roaring 20s. The roaring 20s. I mean, look, couple things. It is remarkable over the last several years with all of the issues, including, you know, not just everything in politics, but also COVID and every other thing that's happened. It's really amazing. The United States just kept growing. If you just look at economic growth charts, the U.S. just kept growing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He's decided to be the boy who says the emperor has no clothes, but he's doing it to his own newspaper. Very smart guy. He's on a press tour and he's basically saying, yeah, yes, we did all that and we endorsed all these people and it was a huge mistake and we're going to completely change And his paper is, you know, in a complete internal revolt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I go through it, which is, okay, now we have a very interesting question, which is who runs the LA Times. Because for the last eight years, it hasn't been him. It's been the reporters. Now, for the first time, the owner is showing up saying, oh, no, I'm actually in charge. And the reporters are saying, no, you're not. And, like, it is freaking on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, again, the Machiavellian's mindset on this is, like, okay, how is power actually exercised here? Can a guy who's, like, even super rich and super powerful, who even owns his own newspaper, can he stand up to a full-scale assault? Not only by his own reporters, but by every other journalism outlet who also now thinks he's the Antichrist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And firing people. And, you know, he has removed people and he has set new rules. I mean, he is he is now, I think, at long. I think he's saying he's now at long last actually exercising prerogatives of an owner of a business, which is decide on the policies and staffing of the business. There are certain other owners of these publications that are doing similar things right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He's the one I don't know, so he's the one I can talk about. But there are others that are going through the same thing right now. And I think it's a really interesting open question. In a fight between the employees and the employer, it's not crystal clear that the employer wins that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
What do you think is the most impressive example?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And very significantly, many other countries stopped growing. So Canada stopped growing. The U.K. stopped growing. Germany stopped growing. And, you know, some of those countries may be actually going backwards at this point. And there's a very long discussion to be had about what's wrong with those countries. And there's, of course, plenty of things that are wrong with our country. But the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Did you know of him before he started doing this in public?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, the reason I ask if you knew about Bill is because a lot of people had not heard of him before, especially like before October 7th and before some of the campaigns he's been running since in public and with Harvard and so forth. But he was very well known in the investment world before that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So he was a famous, he was a so-called activist investor for, you know, very, very successful and very widely respected for probably 30 years before now. And I bring that up because it turns out they weren't for the most part battles that happened in kind of full public view.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They weren't national stories, but in the business and investing world, the activist investor is a very, it's like in the movie taken, it's a very specific set of skills on how to like really take control of situations and how to wreck the people who you're going up against. Yeah. And there's been controversy over the years on this topic, and there's too much detail to go into.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But the defense of activist investing, which I think is valid, is these are the guys who basically go in and take stakes in companies that are being poorly managed or under-optimized. And then generally what that means is, at least the theory is, that means the existing management has become entrenched. And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
lazy, mediocre, whatever, not responding to the needs of the shareholders, often not responding to the customers. And the activists basically go in with a minority position and then they rally support among other investors who are not activists. And then they basically show up and they force change. Um, but they are the aggressive version of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and I've been on the, I've been involved in companies that have been on the receiving end of these, um, where it is amazing how much somebody like that can exert pressure on situations, even when they don't have formal control. So, so it's another, it would be another chess piece on the mechanical board of kind of how power gets exercised.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And basically what happens is the effective analysts, a large amount of the time, they end up taking, they end up taking over control of companies, even though they never own more than like 5% of the stock. And so anyway, so it turns out with Bill, it's such a fascinating case because he has that like complete skill set.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
and he has now decided to bring it to bear in areas that are not just companies and two interesting things for that one is you know some of these places you know and some of these battles are still ongoing but number one like a lot of people who run universities or newspapers are not used to being up against somebody like this and by the way also now with infinitely deep pockets and lots of experience in courtrooms and all the things that kind of go with that but the other is through example he is teaching a lot of the rest of us the activist playbook like in real time
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the Liam Neeson skill set is getting more broadly diffused just by being able to watch and learn from him. So I think he's having a, you know, I would put him up there with Elon in terms of somebody who's really affecting how all this is playing out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
is just flat out primed for growth. And I think that's a consequence of many factors, you know, some of which were lucky and some of which through hard work. And so the lucky part is just, you know, number one, you know, we just have like incredible physical security by being our own continent. We have incredible natural resources.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Including, by the way, courage to go outside of his own zone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'll give you an example. My venture capital firm, we have LPs. There are things that I feel like I can't do or say because I feel like I would be bringing embarrassment or other consequences to our LPs. He has investors also where he worries about that. And so a couple of things. One is his willingness to go out a bit and risk his relationship with his own investors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I will tell you the other thing, which is his investors, I know this for a fact, his investors have been remarkably supportive of him doing that. Because as it turns out, a lot of them actually agree with him. And so it's the same thing he does in his activism campaigns. He is able to be the tip of the spear on something that actually a lot more people agree with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And just, again, how I started is a lot of people are just fed up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I should start by saying I'm not a member of the new administration. I'm not in the room when a lot of these people are being selected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm an unpaid intern. So I'm a volunteer when helpful, but I'm not making the decisions, nor am I in a position to speak for the administration. So I don't want to say anything that would cause people to think I'm doing that. It's a very unusual situation, right? Where you had an incumbent president and then you had a four-year gap where he's out of office and then you have him coming back, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And as you'll recall, there was a fair amount of controversy over the end of the first term. Oh, yeah. The specific concern was the first Trump administration, and they will all say this, is they didn't come in with a team, right? So they didn't come in with a team, and most of the sort of institutional base of the Republican Party were Bush Republicans, and many of them had become never Trumpers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so they had a hard time putting the team together. And then, by the way, they had a hard time getting people confirmed. And so if you talk to the people who were there in the first term, it took them two to three years to kind of even get the government in place. And then they basically only had the government in place for basically like 18 months and then COVID hit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then sort of aftermath and everything and all the drama and headlines and everything. And so the concern, including from some very smart people in the last two years has been, boy, if Trump gets a second term, is he going to be able to get a team that is as good as the team he had last time or a team that is actually not as good? Because maybe people got burned out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Maybe they're more cynical now. Maybe they're not willing to go through the drama. By the way, a lot of people in the first term came under their own withering legal assaults, and some of them went to prison, and a lot of stuff happened. Lots of investigations, lots of legal fees, lots of bad press, lots of debanking, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
A lot of the officials in the first Trump term got debanked, including the president's wife and son.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
In the wake of the first term, yes. We now take out spouses and children with our ring of power. Um, and so there, there was like this legitimate question as to like whether, okay, what, what will the team for the second term look like? And at least what I've seen and what you're seeing this, the appointments is it looks much, much better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's this running joke now that whenever it looks like the US is going to run out of some rare earth material, some farmer in North Dakota kicks over a hay bale and finds a $2 trillion deposit. We're just blessed with geography and with natural resources. We can be energy independent anytime we want. This last administration decided they didn't want to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, first of all, it just looks better than the first term and not because the people in the first term were not necessarily good, but just, you, you just have this like influx of like incredibly capable people that have shown up that want to be part of this. And you just didn't have that the first time. And so they're just drawing on a much deeper, richer talent pool than they had the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they're drawing on people who know what the game is. They're drawing on people now who know what is going to happen, and they're still willing to do it. And so they're going to get, I think, some of the best people from the first term, but they're bringing in a lot of people who they couldn't get the first time around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then second is there's a bunch of people, including people in the first term, where they're just 10 years older. And so they went through the first term and they just learned how everything works. Or they're young people who just had a different point of view and now they're 10 years older and they're ready to go serve in government. And so there's a generational shift happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And actually one of the interesting things about the team that's forming up is it's remarkably young. Some of the cabinet members and then many of the second and third level people are like in their 30s and 40s, you know, which is a big change from the gerontocracy that, you know, we've been under for the last 30 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I think the caliber has been outstanding, you know, and we could sit here and list tons and tons of people, but like, you know, the people who are running, you know, it's everything from the people who are running all the different departments at HHS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's the people running, you know, the number two at the Pentagon is Steve Feinberg, who's just like an incredible legend of private equity, incredible capable guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. So, look, I just start by saying any leader at that level, by the way, any CEO, there's always some risk of that. Right. So there's always some, you know, it's just it's like a natural reality warps around around powerful leaders. And so there's always some risk to that. Of course, the good and powerful leaders are very aware of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And Trump at this point in his life, I think, is highly aware of that. At least my interactions with him, like he definitely seems very aware of that. So, yeah. So that's one thing. I would just say that I think the way to look at that, I mean, look, like I said, I don't want to predict what's going to happen once this whole thing starts unfolding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I would just say, again, the caliber of the people who are showing up and getting the jobs and then the fact that these are some of the most accomplished people in the business world and in the medical field. Um, I, I just, you know, Jay Batataria coming in to run NIH when, so I was actually in the, I was actually, I was part of the interview team for a lot of the HHS folks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, uh, Jay's amazing. I was so, I was so happy to see that. So I literally got, this is a story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I got to the, the, the transition office for one of the days of the HHS interviews and I was on one of the interviewing teams and they gave us, I didn't know who the candidates were and they gave us the sheet in the beginning and I go down the sheet and I saw Jay's name and I like, I almost physically fell out of my chair. Yeah. And I was just like, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They wanted to turn off American energy. This new administration has declared that they have a goal of turning it on in a dramatic way. There's no question we can be energy dependent. We can be a giant net energy exporter. It's purely a question of choice, and I think the new administration is going to do that. Oh, and then I would say two other things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
you know, and I have, I happen to know Jay, I have to know Jay and I like respect him enormously. And then he proved himself under this, like talk about a guy who proved himself under extraordinary pressure over the last five years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, incredibly, very serious, very analytical, very applied. And, and, and, and yes, a hundred percent tested under pressure came out. Like the more people look back at what he said and did, and you know, he's not, you know, none of us are perfect. but like overwhelmingly, like overwhelmingly insightful throughout that whole period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, we would all be much better off today had he been in charge of the response. And so just like an incredibly capable guy. And look, and then he learned from all that, right? He learned a lot in the last five years. And so the idea that somebody like that could be head of NIH as compared to the people we've had is just like breathtakingly, it's just a gigantic upgrade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, and then Marty Macri coming in to run FDA, exact same thing. The guy coming to run a CDC, exact same thing. Um, um, um, I mean, I've been spending time with Dr. Oz. Um, so, um, you know, I'm not like, again, I'm not like, I'm not on these teams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm not in the room, but like, I've been spending enough time trying to help that, like his level of insight into the healthcare system is like, it's like astounding. And it comes from being a guy who's been like in the middle of the whole thing and been talking to people about this stuff and working on it and serving as a doctor himself and in medical systems for, you know, his entire life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's just like, you know, he's like a walking encyclopedia on these things. And so, and, you know, very dynamic, you know, very charismatic, very smart, organized, effective. So, you know, to have somebody like that in there. And so anyway, they're just, I have like 30 of these stories now across all these different, all these different positions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then I just, I'd be quite honest, I did do the compare and contrast for the last four years, and it's not even, these people are not in the same ballpark. They're just like wildly better. And so, you know, pound for pound is maybe the best team in the White House since, you know, I don't even know, maybe the 90s, maybe the 30s, maybe the 50s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, maybe Eisenhower had a team like this or something, but there's a lot of really good people in there now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, so I'll start by saying again, I'm not, disclaimer, I have to disclaimer, I'm not on Doge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Both the angels and the devils on my shoulder are lawyers. Okay, all right, cool. Yeah, so I'm not speaking for Doge. I'm not in charge of Doge. Those guys are doing it. I'm not doing it. But again, I'm volunteering to help as much as I can, and I'm 100% supportive. Um, yeah. So look, I, I, I think the way to think about, I mean, the, the, the basic outlines are in public, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
One is we are the beneficiaries, and you're an example of this. We're a beneficiary. We're the beneficiary of, you know, 50, 100, 200 years of like the basically most aggressive, driven, smartest people in the world, most capable people, you know, moving to the US and raising their kids here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Which is, it's a, it's a time limited, you know, basically commission. Um, uh, it's not a formal government agency. Um, it's a, you know, time limited 18 month. Um, it'll, it'll, in terms of implementation, it will advise the executive branch. And so the implementation will happen through the White House. And the president has total attitude on what he wants to implement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then basically what I think about it is three kind of streams, kind of target sets. And they're related but different. So money, people, and regulations. And so, you know, the headline number, you know, put the $2 trillion number and there's, you know, disputes over that and whatever. And there's a whole question there. But then there's the people thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the people thing is interesting because you get into these very kind of fascinating questions. And I've been doing this. I won't do this for you as a pop quiz, but I do this for people in government as a pop quiz. I can stump them every time, which is, A, how many federal agencies are there? And the answer is somewhere between 450 and 520, and nobody's quite sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the other is how many people work for the federal government. And the answer is something on the order, I forget, but like 4 million full-time employees and maybe up to 20 million contractors, and nobody is quite sure. And so there's a large people component to this. And then by the way, there's a related component to that, which is how many of them are actually in the office.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the answer is not many. Most of the federal buildings are still empty, right? And then there's questions of like, are people working from home or are we actually working from home? So there's the people dimension. And of course, the money and the people are connected. And then there's the third, which is the regulation thing, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I described earlier how basically our system of government is much more now based on regulations than legislation. Most of the rules that we all live under are not from a bill that went through Congress. They're from an agency that created a regulation. That turns out to be very, very important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So one is, Elon already described, we want to do, the Doge wants to do broad-based regulatory relief. And Trump has talked about this and basically get the government off people's backs and liberate the American people to be able to do things again. So that's part of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But there's also something else that's happened, which is very interesting, which was there were a set of Supreme Court decisions about two years ago. that went directly after the idea that the executive branch can create regulatory agencies and issue regulations and enforce those regulations without corresponding congressional legislation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so we just have, you know, by far the most dynamic, you know, we're by far the most dynamic population, most aggressive, you know, we're the most aggressive set of characters in certainly in any Western country. and have been for a long time and certainly are today. And then finally, I would just say, look, we are overwhelmingly the advanced technology leader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And most of the federal government that exists today, including most of the departments and most of the rules and most of the money and most of the people, most of it is not enforcing laws that Congress passed. Most of it is regulation. And the Supreme Court basically said large parts
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
you know, large to maybe all of that regulation that did not directly result from a bill that went through Congress the way that the cartoon said that it should. That may not actually be legal. Now, the previous White House, of course, was super in favor of big government. They had no desire to act. They did nothing based on this. They didn't pull anything back in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But the new regime, if they choose to, could say, look, the thing that we're doing here is not challenging the laws. We're actually complying with the Supreme Court decision that basically says we have to unwind a lot of this and we have to unwind the regulations, which are no longer legal, constitutional. We have to unwind the spend and we have to unwind the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
um and so and that's how you get from basically you connect the thread from the regulation part back to the money part back to the people part um they have work going on all three of these threads they have i would say incredibly creative ideas on how to deal with this um i'm i i know lots of former government people who 100 of them are super cynical on this topic and they're like this is impossible this could never possibly work and i'm like well i can't tell you what the secret plans are but like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
like blow my mind, like, and all three of those, like they have, they have ideas that are like really quite amazing as you'd expect from, you know, from, from the people involved. And so, um, over the course of the next few months, you know, that'll start to become visible. And then the final thing I would say is, um, this is going to be very different than, than attempts like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There have been other programs like this in the past, um, The Clinton-Gore administration had one, and then there were others before that. Reagan had one. The difference is, this time, they're social media. And so there has never been... It's interesting. One of the reasons people in Washington are so cynical is because they know all the bullshit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They know all the bad spending and all the bad rules and all the... I mean, look, we're adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
and that's compounding and it's now passing the size of the defense department budget and it's compounding and it's pretty soon it's going to be adding a trillion dollars every 90 days and then it's gonna be adding a trillion dollars every 80 days and then it's gonna be a trillion dollars every 70 days and then if this doesn't get fixed at some point we enter a hyper inflationary spiral and we become argentina or brazil and kablooey right and so like everybody in dc knows that something has to be done and then everybody in dc knows for a fact that it's impossible to do anything
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Right. They know all the problems and they also know the sheer impossibility of fixing it. But I think what they're not taking into account, what the critics are not taking into account is these guys can do this in the full light of day and they can do it on social media. They can completely bypass the press. They can completely bypass the cynicism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They can expose any element of unconstitutional or silly government spending. They can run victory laps every single day on what they're doing. They can bring the people into the process. And again, if you think about it, this goes back to our Machiavellian structure, which is if you think about, again, you've got democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, rule of the many, rule of the few, rule of the one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We have our issues and we have, I would say, a particular issue with manufacturing, which we could talk about, but for anything in software, anything in AI, anything in all these advanced biotech, all these advanced areas of technology, we're by far the leader. Again, in part, because many of the best scientists and engineers in those fields come to the US.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You could think about what's happening here as a little bit of a sandwich, right? Which is you have, we don't have a monarch, but we have a president, rule of the one with some power. And then we have the people who can't organize, but they can be informed and they can be aware and they can express themselves through voting and polling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so there's a sandwich happening right now is the way to think about it, which is you've got basically monarchy. You've got rule of one combining with rule of many. And rule of many is that you get to vote. The people do get to vote, basically. And then essentially Congress and the sort of permanent bureaucratic class in Washington as the oligarchy in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the White House plus the people, I think, have the power to do all kinds of things here. And I think that would be the way I would watch it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
These people are spending our money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
These people have enormous contempt for the taxpayer. Okay. Here's the thing you hear in Washington. Here's one of the things. So the first thing you hear is this is impossible. They'll be able to do nothing. And then, yeah, I walked them through this and they're like, they start to get, it starts to dawn on them that this is a new kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then they're like, well, it doesn't matter because all the money is in entitlements and the debt and the military. And so like, yeah, you've got like this silly fake, whatever, you know, NPR funding or whatever. And like, it just, it's a rounding error and it doesn't matter. And you look it up in the budget and it's like, whatever, $500 million or whatever. $5 billion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Or it's the charging stations that don't exist. It's the $40 billion of charging stations and they build eight charging stations. Or it's the broadband internet plan that delivered broadband to nobody, right? And cost you $30 billion. So these boondoggles. And what everybody in Washington says is that $30 billion is a rounding error on the federal budget. It doesn't matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Who cares if they make it go away? And of course, any taxpayer is like, what the?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. Right. And then the experts are like, and the press is in on this too, then the experts are like, well, it doesn't matter because it's a rounding error. No, it's $30 billion. And if you're this cavalier, about $30 billion, imagine how cavalier you are about the $3 trillion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
$100 per taxpayer per year. Okay. So $100 to an ordinary person working hard every day to make money and provide for their kids. $100 is a meal out. It's a trip to the amusement park. It's the ability to buy additional educational materials. It's the ability to have a babysitter, to be able to have a romantic relationship with your wife.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so we, we, we just, we have all of the preconditions for a, uh, for a, just a monster, um, boom. You know, I could see economic growth going way up. I could see productivity growth going way up, rate of technology adoption going way up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's like 100 things that that person can do with $100 that they're not doing because it's going to some bullshit program that is being basically where the money is being looted. out in the form of just like ridiculousness and graft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the idea that that $30 billion program is not something that is like a very important thing to go after is just like the level of contempt for the taxpayer is just off the charts. And then that's just one of those programs. There's like a hundred of those programs. And they're all just like that. It's not like any of this stuff is running well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The one thing we know is that none of this stuff is running well. We know that for sure. And we know these people aren't showing up to work. And we know that all this crazy stuff is happening. Do you remember Elon's story of what got the Amish to turn out to vote in Pennsylvania? Yeah. Okay, so Pennsylvania is a wonderful state, great history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It has these cities like Philadelphia that have descended like other cities into just complete chaos, violence, madness, and death, right? And the federal government has just let it happen in these incredibly violent places.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the Biden administration decided that the big pressing law enforcement thing that they needed to do in Pennsylvania was that they needed to start raiding Amish farms to prevent them from selling raw milk with armed raids. Right. And it turns out it really pissed off the Amish. And it turns out they weren't willing to drive to the polling places because they don't have cars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
$10,000. Okay, $10,000 per taxpayer per year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then we could, we can do a global tour if you like, but like basically all of our competitors have like profound issues and, you know, we could kind of go through them one by one, but the, the competitive landscape just is, it's like, it's, it's remarkable how, um, how, how much better position we are for growth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So here's the trick. This blew my mind because once you open the hell mouth of looking into the federal budget, you learn all kinds of things. So there is a term of art in government called impoundment. And so if you're like me, you've learned this the hard way when your car has been impounded. The government meaning of impoundment, the federal budget meaning is a different meaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Impoundment is as follows. The Constitution requires Congress to authorize money to be spent by the executive branch, right? So the executive branch goes to Congress, says, we need money X. Congress does their thing. They come back and they say, you can have money Y. The money is appropriated from Congress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The executive branch spends it on the military or whatever they spend it on, or on roads to nowhere or charging stations to nowhere or whatever. And what's in the Constitution is the Congress appropriates the money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Over the last 60 years, there has been an additional interpretation of appropriations applied by the courts and by the system, which is the executive branch not only needs Congress to appropriate X amount of money, the executive branch is not allowed to underspend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm aware of this. I'm aware of this. And so there's this thing that happens in Washington at the end of every fiscal year, which is September 30th, and it's the great budget flush. And any remaining money that's in the system that they don't know how to productively spend, they deliberately spend it unproductively to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
A president that doesn't want to spend the money can't not spend it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, okay, A, that's not what's in the Constitution. And there's actually quite a good Wikipedia page that goes through the great debate on this that's played out in the legal world over the last 60 years. And like, basically, if you look at this with anything resembling, I think, an open mind, you're like, all right, this is not what the founders meant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then number two, again, we go back to this thing of contempt. Like, can you imagine...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
showing up and running the government like that and thinking that you're doing the right thing and not going home at night and thinking that you've sold your soul right like it's just like i actually think you sort of had a really good point which is it's even unfair to the people who have to execute this yeah right because it makes them it makes them bad people and they didn't they didn't start out wanting to be bad people and so there is stuff like this like yeah everywhere everywhere and so we'll see how far these guys get i'm i am extremely encouraged what i've what i've seen so far
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. So I start by saying I am not involved in any aspect of government policy on this. I am not planning to be. This is not an issue that I'm working on or that I'm going to work on. We're not. This is not part of the agenda of what the firm is doing. So my firm is doing so like I'm not I'm not in I'm not in this in the new administration of the government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm not planning to be so purely just personal opinion. So I would say I would describe as a complex or nuanced, hopefully nuanced view on this issue that's maybe a little bit different than what a lot of my peers have. And I think and I kind of thought about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I didn't say anything about it all the way through the big kind of debate over Christmas, but I thought about it a lot and read everything. I think what I realized is that I just have a very different perspective on some of these things. And the reason is because of the combination of where I came from and then where I ended up. And so I'll start with this, where I ended up in Silicon Valley.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So and I have made the pro skilled high skilled immigration argument many, many times, the H-1B argument many times. In past lives, I've been in DC many times arguing with prior administrations about this, always on the side of trying to get more H-1Bs and trying to get more high-skilled immigration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think that argument is very strong and very solid and has paid off for the US in many, many ways. And we can go through it, but I think it's the argument everybody already knows. It's like the stock. You take any Silicon Valley person, you press the button and they tell you why we need to brain drain the world to get more H-1Bs. So everybody kind of gets that argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, and then it's not just good for them and it's not just good for Silicon Valley or the tech industry, it's good for the country because they then create new companies and create new technologies and create new industries that then create many more jobs for Americans, native-born Americans than would have previously existed. And so you've got a, it's a positive sum flywheel thing
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Everybody wins. Everybody wins. There are no trade-offs. It's all absolutely glorious in all directions. There cannot possibly be a moral argument against it under any circumstances. Anybody who argues against it is obviously doing so from a position of racism, is probably a fascist and a Nazi. That's the thing. Like I said, I've made that argument many times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm very comfortable with that argument. Then I'd also say, look, I would say, number one, I believe a lot of it. I'll talk about the parts I don't believe, but I believe a lot of it. And then the other part is, look, I, I benefit every day. I, I, I always describe it as I work in the United Nations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like I, my own firm and our founders and our companies and the industry, um, and my friends, um, you know, are just this like amazing, you know, panoply cornucopia of people from all over the world. Um, and you know, I just, I've worked, I don't know at this point where people from, it's gotta be, I don't know, 80 countries or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and hopefully over time it'll be, you know, the rest as well. And you know, it's just, it's, it's been amazing and they've done many of the most important things in my industry and it's, it's, it's been really remarkable. So, So that's all good. And then, you know, there's just the practical version of the argument, which is we are the main place these people get educated anyway, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The best and the brightest tend to come here to get educated. And so, you know, this is the old kind of Mitt Romney staple of green card to every, you know, at least, you know, maybe not every university degree, but every technical degree. Maybe the sociologists we could quibble about, but, you know, the roboticists for sure. For sure. For sure. We can all agree that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, no, I'm exaggerating for effect. So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I haven't gotten to the other side of the argument yet. Okay, thank you. So surely we can all agree that we need to staple a green card. The roller coaster is going up. The roller coaster is rationing slowly up. So, yeah, so surely we can all agree that the roboticists should all get green cards. And again, like, there's a lot of merit to that. Obviously, like, look, we want the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
to be the world leader in robotics. What's step one to being the world leader in robotics is have all the great robotics people, right? Like... you know, very unlike the underpants. No, it's like a very straightforward formula, right? All right. That's all well and good. All right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But it gets a little bit more complicated because there is a kind of argument that's sort of right underneath that, that you also hear from, you know, these same people. And I have made this argument myself many times, which is we need to do this because we don't have enough people in the U S who can do it otherwise. We have all these unfilled jobs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We've got all these companies that wouldn't exist. We don't have enough good founders. We don't have enough engineers. We don't have enough scientists. Or then the next version of the argument below that is our education system is not good enough to generate those people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
yeah so is this a family show or am i allowed to swear you you can say whatever the fuck you want okay so the tv the great tv show succession the show of course that would which you were intended to root for exactly zero of the characters yes the best line for succession was in the final episode of the first season when the whole family's over in uh logan roy's ancestral uh homeland of scotland and they're at this castle you know for some wedding and logan is just like completely miserable after having to you know because he's been in new york for 50 years he's totally miserable being back in in um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Which is a weird argument, by the way, because like our education system is good enough for foreigners to be able to come here preferentially in like a very large number of cases, but somehow not good enough to educate our own native born people. So there's like a weird, these little cracks in the matrix that you can kind of stick your fingernail into and kind of wonder about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And we'll come back to that one. But at least, yes, our education system has its flaws. And then underneath that is the argument that Vivek made, which is we have cultural rot in the country and native-born people in the country don't work hard enough and spend too much time watching TV and TikTok and don't spend enough time studying differential equations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and again, it's like, all right, like, you know, yeah, there's a fair amount to that. Like there's a lot of American culture that, um, is, um, you know, there's a lot of frivolity. There's a lot of, you know, look, I mean, we have well-documented social issues on many fronts, many things that cut against having a culture of just like straightforward high achievement and effort and striving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Anyway, like, you know, those are the basic arguments. But then I have this kind of other side of my, you know, kind of personality and thought process, which is, well, I grew up in a small farming town in rural Wisconsin, the rural Midwest. And, you know, it's interesting. There's not a lot of people who make it from rural Wisconsin to, you know, high tech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so it's like, all right, why is that exactly? Right. And then I noticed I'm an aberration. Like I was the only one from anybody I ever knew who ever did this, right. I know what an aberration I am and I know exactly how that aberration happened. And it's a very unusual set of steps, um, including, you know, many that were just luck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, but like it, there is in no sense, a talent flow from rural Wisconsin into high tech, like not at all. Um, there is also like in no sense of talent flow from the rest of the Midwest into high tech. There is no talent flow from the South into high tech. There is no flow from the Sunbelt into high tech. There's no flow from, you know, the deep South into high tech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like just like literally it's like the blanks. There's this whole section of the country that just where the people just like for some reason don't end up in tech. That's a little bit strange because these are the people who put a man on the moon. These are the people who built the World War II war machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
These are the people, at least their ancestors, are the people who built the second industrial revolution and built the railroads and built the telephone network and built logistics and transportation. I mean, the auto industry was built in Cleveland and Detroit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so at least these people's parents and grandparents and great-grandparents somehow had the wherewithal to build all of this amazing things, invent all these things. And then there's many, many, many, many stories in the history of American invention and innovation and capitalism where you had people who grew up in the middle of nowhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Philo Farnsworth invented the television and just like, you know, tons and tons of others, endless stories like this. Now you have, like, a puzzle, right, and a conundrum, which is like, okay, like, what is happening on the blank spot of the map?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, of course, you also can't help noticing that the blank spot on the map, the Midwest, the South, you've also just defined Trump country, the Trump voter base, right? And it's like, oh, well, that's interesting. Like, how did that happen? Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so either you really, really, really have to believe the very, very strong version of like the Vivek thesis or something where you have to believe that like that basically culture, the whole sort of civilization in the middle of the country and the south of the country is so like deeply flawed, either inherently flawed or culturally flawed such that for whatever reason, they are not able to do the things that their parents and grandparents were able to do and that their peers are able to do or something else is happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Would you care to guess on what else is happening?
Part Of The Problem
The Left vs. Reality
So, the Iron Law of oligarchy basically says democracy is fake. There's always a ruling class, there's always a ruling elite structurally. And he said the reason for that is because the masses can't organize. What's the fundamental problem?
Part Of The Problem
The Left vs. Reality
Whether the mass is 25,000 people in a union or 250 million people in a country, the masses can't organize, the majority cannot organize, only a minority can organize. And to be effective in politics, you must organize. And therefore, every political structure in human history has been some form of a small organized elite ruling a large and dispersed majority, every single one.
Part Of The Problem
The Left vs. Reality
And so basically, the presumption that we are in a democracy is just sort of by definition fake. Now, good news for the U.S., it turns out the founders understood this. And so, of course, they didn't give us a direct democracy. They gave us a representative democracy, right? And so they built the oligarchy into the system in the form of Congress and the executive branch, the judicial branch.
Part Of The Problem
The Left vs. Reality
But so anyway, so as a consequence, democracy is always and everywhere fake. There is always a ruling elite. And basically the lesson of the Machiavellians is you can deny that if you want, but you're fooling yourself. The way to actually think about how to make a system work and maintain any sort of shred of freedom is to actually understand that that is actually what's happening.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And you have this incredibly radicalized set of policies with this young staff that just is out for blood. on all these different fronts.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
So we met with him at his Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey, which is like breathtaking, absolutely beautiful.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
Yeah, I mean, he's just he's an incredible host. You know, he runs his own private worlds.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
He said, what do you guys want to eat? And I just I for some reason, I was just like, I know exactly what to say. And I'm like, meat. I want meat. And it was glorious.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
It's also really interesting to kind of watch him at work, which is he treats everybody the same and he talks to everybody. He will happily talk to distinguished visitors about, like, you know, who the vice president should be, and then he'll ask the caddy.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
His thing with us basically was like, look, I just want America to win.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
You know, you guys are in tech. I don't know much about tech, but I don't need to because you guys know a lot about it. You guys should go build tech companies. The American tech companies should win.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
Our economy should be growing a lot faster. We should be creating a lot more jobs. You know, everybody in America who wants a good job should have one. And that will be the result of, you know, American companies succeeding.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And so, you know, and most of the discussion was just around that.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
I think it's hard for any man to see somebody get shot in the head, bleeding, not knowing how badly he's been injured.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And put your fist up in the air and say, fight, fight, fight. How cool they thought that was. We don't see physical bravery like that.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And what's the deal? The deal was somebody like me basically could start a company. You can invent a new technology, in this case, you know, web browsers and all the other things that Netscape did. Everybody would think that that was great.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
You get invited to all the great parties. You get invited to Davos. You get invited to Aspen. You get to come in and sit with the New York Times editorial board.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And so they did this thing where they announced and committed that 99 percent of their ownership in Facebook was going to go to philanthropic causes.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
Following the classic deal trajectory, right? And they just got hammered with criticism and attacks on that.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And the line of argument was literally, oh, they're just slimy rich people and they're only doing it for the tax break. Which is like a basic mathematical problem, which is you don't give away 99% of your money for a tax break.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
Basically, what I experienced was they, the people in charge of all this, basically broke the deal. So basically, every single thing I just said for the last decade has been now held to be presumptively evil. Tech people are held to be this evil class. Anybody who's rich is evil. Philanthropy was being redefined as evil. It's like, okay, every single part of that deal no longer works.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And so it just, for me, it then raised the question of like, okay, if none of that is true, then what world am I living in? What role do I play?
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
I went to Hillary's first post-election loss speech, which she gave at Stanford. And the Russiagate stuff is in full-blown display. And Hillary gets up there and she says, Trump is only president today because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook and made him the president. And I'm sitting in the audience and I'm like on the Facebook board and I'm like, that's not true. I know for an absolute fact.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
Right. And so that got me thinking. And then the Russiagate stuff unspooled. And I was like, it was just this litany of, you know, basically excuses and complaints. Right. With no sense of like personal responsibility at all.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
They're trying to run a business. They're trying to get to the next quarter. They're trying to keep the employee base and everybody copacetic. They're trying not to get just completely destroyed by the politicians.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
We had meetings in D.C. in May where we talked to them about this and the meetings were absolutely horrifying.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
They said, look, AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And then I said, I don't understand how you're going to lock this down so much because the math for AI is out there and it's being taught everywhere.