Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Sun, 26 Jan 2025
Marc Andreessen is an entrepreneur, investor, co-creator of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape, and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep458-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/marc-andreessen-2-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Marc's X: https://x.com/pmarca Marc's Substack: https://pmarca.substack.com Marc's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16z Andreessen Horowitz: https://a16z.com SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Encord: AI tooling for annotation & data management. Go to https://encord.com/lex GitHub: Developer platform and AI code editor. Go to https://gh.io/copilot Notion: Note-taking and team collaboration. Go to https://notion.com/lex Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (12:46) - Best possible future (22:09) - History of Western Civilization (31:28) - Trump in 2025 (39:09) - TDS in tech (51:56) - Preference falsification (1:07:52) - Self-censorship (1:22:55) - Censorship (1:31:34) - Jon Stewart (1:34:20) - Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan (1:43:09) - Government pressure (1:53:57) - Nature of power (2:06:45) - Journalism (2:12:20) - Bill Ackman (2:17:17) - Trump administration (2:24:56) - DOGE (2:38:48) - H1B and immigration (3:16:42) - Little tech (3:29:02) - AI race (3:37:52) - X (3:41:24) - Yann LeCun (3:44:59) - Andrew Huberman (3:46:30) - Success (3:49:26) - God and humanity PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips
Full Episode
The following is a conversation with Mark Andreessen, his second time on the podcast. Mark is a visionary tech leader and investor who fundamentally shaped the development of the internet and the tech industry in general over the past 30 years.
He is the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and is one of the most influential voices in the tech world, including at the intersection of technology and politics. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Encore for unifying your email stack, GitHub for programming, Notion for team projects and collaboration, Shopify for merch, and Element for hydration. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads. No ads in the middle.
I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Encord, a platform that provides data-focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation, and management. And for model evaluation, once you train up the model on the data that you curate.
In this conversation with Marc Andreessen, we actually discuss what he calls kind of like the trillion dollar questions. And one of them for AI is how effective will synthetic data be? It really is an open question. What piece, what fraction of the intelligence of future models will be based on training on synthetic data? At the top AI labs, I'm hearing a lot of optimism.
As far as I can tell, that optimism is not currently, at least in the general case, based on any real evidence. So I do think synthetic data will play a part. But how big a part? There's still going to be some curation from humans. There's still going to need to be a human in the loop.
I think the real question is how do you effectively integrate the human in the loop so that the synthetic data, sort of 99% synthetic, 1% human, that combination can be most effective? That's a real question. And companies like Encore are trying to solve that very problem.
First of all, they want to provide the tooling for the annotation, for the actual human-IAC collaboration, but also asking and answering the research question of how do you... pull it all off, and make the resulting model more intelligent for a very specific application than for the general applications. Yeah, so Encore does a really good job on the tooling side.
Go try them out to curate, annotate, and manage your AI data at Encore.com. That's Encore.com. This episode is brought to you by GitHub and GitHub Copilot. If you don't know what that is, my friends, you're in for a joyous, beautiful surprise. I think a lot of people that program regularly know and love GitHub and know and love Copilot.
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