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The a16z Show
Marc Andreessen on Builder Culture in the Age of AI
01:04:38
Erik Torenberg speaks with Marc Andreessen about the state of AI, media, and the broader cultural and economic shifts shaping the internet. They discuss how narratives around AI, from fear to hype, are influencing public perception, and why real-world usage tells a very different story. The conversation covers AI’s impact on jobs and productivity, the rise of “AI-native” builders, and why increased capability tends to expand work rather than eliminate it. Andreessen also examines how companies are adapting, from restructuring teams to rethinking roles around more generalist “builders.” They also explore the changing media landscape, from the dynamics of influence and information to the breakdown of traditional authority, and what it means for trust, culture, and generational attitudes. Along the way, they touch on topics ranging from institutional power to emerging internet subcultures, offering a wide-ranging look at how technology is reshaping both systems and society.
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- [00:01]
Marc Andreessen
People are becoming what we now refer to as AI vampires. They've got these huge bags under their eyes. They're completely exhausted, but they're, like, euphoric. They're thrilled. We're entering a golden age, which is AI is going to be a superpower that everybody on the planet is going to have access to. It's like the most dramatic increase in programmer productivity ever.
- [00:15]
Eric Newcomer
Twitter proved it right, cutting 70%. And then it's running better or as good as it was before.
- [00:19]
Marc Andreessen
I generally don't wish I could go back in time and do things over again, but it would be really, really fun right now to be 18 or 20 or 22 and to have this capability and figure out what I could do with it. We are going to see super producers the likes of which we've never seen in the world.
- [00:29]
Eric Newcomer
There's news about it, UFOs. What is clear is the government at certain times has hid certain materials. Why would they do that if there's nothing to really worry about?
- [00:37]
Marc Andreessen
Two things are pretty clear at this point.
- [00:39]
A16Z Podcast Host
One is that AI is moving from novelty to infrastructure, but the conversation around it is still dominated by extremes. Fear on one side, hype on the other. Meanwhile, the reality is playing out more quietly in how people work, what they build, and how organizations adapt. Productivity is increasing, roles are shifting, and entirely new ways of building are emerging. At the same time, the systems around information, media and authority are being reshaped in ways that are harder to see but just as important. The question is not just what AI can do, but how it changes the structure of work, institutions and culture. Here, Marc Andreessen joins me to talk through what's actually happening.
- [01:28]
Eric Newcomer
Mark, welcome to monitoring the situation.
- [01:30]
Marc Andreessen
Eric, it is great to be back.
- [01:32]
Eric Newcomer
So there's a lot to monitor today. I want to start first, start with something that just happened, which is the anthropic blackmailing incident. And I first want to tell a brief story, which is my friend Joe Hudson has this concept called the golden algorithm. And the gold algorithm states that whatever you're scared about, you bring it about in exactly the way you're scared about it. So if you're scared about getting abandoned, you'll be super insecure, and then you'll. People will abandon you because you're so insecure. This is an example of a literal golden algorithm where people have been so scared that AI is going to be evil and have written about all the ways in which it's evil. And in fact, maybe it's informed. Informed something. What's happening there or what do we find interesting.
- [02:16]
Marc Andreessen
I haven't studied this one in detail. I've been monitoring other situations, but however, just what I saw so far, I think I just saw Anthropic's thread. I haven't read the underlying material yet, but Anthropic's threads have. They trace some blackmail behavior literally to the AI Doomer literature that was in the training data. So there are all these scenarios of all the rogue AI gone wrong that the AI doomer's been writing about for 20 years. And literally Anthropic, of course, which is, of course, the company is like, you know, half Doomer, apparently, you know, basically, you know, essentially said that their own, Their own. Their own movements, literature is the thing that's causing the behavior that they say they don't want. So it is a fairly incredible. Yes. Yes, it is, yes. I mean, like, look, if you, if you don't want to build the killer AI, you know, step one would be don't build the AI. It's like. And then, you know, step two is like, don't train it on all the data that says it's supposed to, you know, the literature that your movement wrote that says it's supposed to be a killer AI. So, you know. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's like your, it's like your, Your. Your golden algorithm coupled. Coupled with like the snake eating his tail coupled with, you know, I don't even know, like, the whole thing is so bananas.
- [03:25]
Eric Newcomer
Yeah, yeah, the.
- [03:28]
Marc Andreessen
I mean, you know, I can't resist, you know, if I could, if I can, If I could act up memes as the scream meme. Right. Which is, you know, the calls coming from inside the house.
- [03:35]
Eric Newcomer
Yeah, yeah, exactly. The. Speaking of other situations. And another thing you've been talking about recently is, is the concept of suicidal empathy. And Matt Kramer had a good quote, which is, if the empathy you have doesn't make you more forgiving, more accepting of other people's spiritual sovereignty or more understanding of people who don't want to think or live the same way you do. You don't have empathy. You have empathy. Tm. Why have you been thinking about this concept?
- [04:01]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so there's this really brilliant. There's this really brilliant guy. Gad Saad. Exactly. How to pronounce that? Gad Saad. And very brilliant guy. And it's obviously lots of YouTube videos and books and so forth and really brilliant guy. So he's got this new book coming out so called, what he calls Suicidal Empathy. And look, it's a, you know, there's a. There's a sort of political loading to it which, you know, we don't need to spend a lot of time on. But, you know, sort of this idea that there are kind of these social justice, you know, kind of social reform movements, you know, kind of through time that have this characteristic of, you know, they, you know, they claim to be causing positive change, you know, in some direction. Then it turns out they have, you know, sort of severe, you know, sort of negative consequences. The great Thomas Sowell, you know, has, you know, basically spent 50 years writing books about this and by the way, nobody listened to. And then in the last decade, we've been through, you know, wave after wave of this kind of social activism that kind of, you know, results in, I mean, it's all this stuff, right? It's just, you know, all these like, you know, crime policy reform, defund the police things and then it causes these massive crime waves. And then, of course, low income and minority people get hit hardest by that and, you know, all the, all, all these other, all these other crazy things. And so he says, you know, he says the characteristic of kind of that kind of social reform movement is characterized by what he calls suicidal empathy. And the idea being basically it's sort of driven by a pathological, you know, take it backwards. A pathological form of empathy on the one hand, which is, you know, it's sort of a deep desire to be nice and empathetic, you know, but coupled with like, basically, you know, a sort of self destructiveness, you know, either a willingness to really cause damage to the people you claim to be speaking for, or, by the way, to cause damage to yourself kind of in that process. And it's the kind of thing where, you know, if you've, you know, if you've lived through, you know, like everybody who, you know, everybody in San Francisco has lived through this for the last decade and seen the consequences of these movements. You know, the San Francisco version of this is like the, quote, harm reduction movement, you know, that ended up basically handing out, you know, free drug, you know, paraphernalia and, you know, in some cases actually just free drugs to, you know, people who are just literally dying in the street from drug addiction, right? So you just look at it and you're like, well, yeah, you know, they claim to be activists, they claim to be reformers, they claim to care about these people, and yet they're killing them and then killing the city and causing innocent people to get harmed. It's like, okay, that, you know, you know, that, you know, they seem so actively like that they're doing it out of some sense of compassion, that this must be suicide. Subtle empathy. The problem with it is, and I think that the problem is the theory is sort of easily falsifiable or maybe lets the reformers off the hook, which is they certainly don't show empathy to their enemies. Right. And so if they're like all empathetic, you would think that they would be less aggro when it comes to destroying their ideological opponents who they take great delight in trying to wreck, number one on the one hand. And then number two is they use the, you know, the classic reformer move is to use these movements to gain power and status and money for them. And again, San Francisco is a case study of this where you have all these nonprofits that recall this damage on the city and yet basically get lavishly funded, including, by the way, by the city government, by the state government. And so it's just like, okay, well, if you just spend two seconds thinking about it, they're neither empathetic nor are they suicidal. Rather quite the opposite. They're hateful and they're greedy. They're sort of self aggrandizing and gathering power and resources for themselves. And so I just think it lets the phenomenon off the hook. You know, it's a little bit like, oh, Eric, what's your biggest flaw? You know, oh, I'm too nice. Yeah, I care too much, Right, Exactly. It's like, yeah, don't bullshit. By the way, Eric, I don't know what your biggest flaw is. Definitely, it's definitely not that because that's also definitely not my flaw. I guarantee I have other things wrong with me that are like way more wrong than that. And so I just, yeah, I can't, I hit my limit on that topic
- [07:44]
Eric Newcomer
and maybe, maybe a crazy example of this and I'm not sure if all the, all the facts are out yet, but, but it was a situation a week ago, but it hasn't been covered, you know, that much. The SPLC incident, is it accurate that basically what was happening or is it our understanding that basically the groups that they were sort of fighting the most or, or thought were the biggest threats to sort of, you know, what they care about? Also the same groups that they were secretly funding unbeknownst to those, to, to those groups or how do we make sense of what was actually happening there and is that, is that indicative of what's of, of something bigger happening? And it's funny because that happened the day after we had a conversation about astroturfing And I was. And I was like, is it really happening to the degree that. That, you know, people are sort of conspiracies? Are things like that really happening? And it's just funny that more and more seem to get uncovered.
- [08:37]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And so I should start by saying the reason why this situation really matters, and actually I think matters a lot, is the. The SPLC specifically, and Kit as well. But the SPLC specifically played a dominant role in the debanking and censorship and cancellation programs of the last 15 years. And I cannot tell you, I was in so many meetings in so many contexts with so many companies where the SPLC's word was gospel. Like, it was just like, oh, it's the splc. It was almost like they're the outsourced US Department of, Like, I don't know, racism, detection or something. It's just like if the SPLC says you're bad, you're bad, and you're bad means you get kicked off of all the social media platforms. It means you get debanked. It means you can't get a job. It means, like, just like. It's just like total, absolute, like, you know, social, economic death. And in my view, you know, I've been very vocal on the debanking and censorship topics. In my view, that includes, you know, very deeply un American and I think in many cases, unconstitutional removal of both free speech rights and also literally the ability to bank. And in fact, you know, our partner, Ben's father himself was. Was. Was specifically tagged and attacked by the SPLC for. For unfairly, very unfairly, for being racist and was himself debanked and, you know, really like, directly threatened his livelihood in a. In a really, you know, egregious way. And then, by the way, the significance of this is, of course, it's not literally the U.S. department of Racism. It's actually arguably worse than that. It's not a government agency, and so it's not subject to any level of government oversight. It's a completely, as I say, it's an ngo, Right. And so it lives in this twilight world. It doesn't have the business responsibilities of a company. It doesn't have any of the legal oversight that a government agency has. It lives in this kind of twilight world where it gets to do. Fundamentally gets to do whatever it wants. And then, by the way, on top of that, it raises money as a nonprofit. So on top of that, everybody gets a tax break. And so it's this kind of shadowy thing. If you didn't agree with his politics, you were just like, wow, this is a weird star chamber shadowy thing, like, what the hell? But it had really, really, really, really intense power, particularly in the business world, particularly in the financial sector, particularly in Silicon Valley. It was like a death star to be able to aim at obliterating people's reputations and rights. And so this is a really big deal. By the way, many of the big corporations and including big tech companies, funded it directly. And so the money trail on this is not just major philanthropists and political activists, but also actual companies. And then, by the way, they also had a long history of actually cooperation with certain government agencies, including, I think, for a long time, they quote, unquote, trained FBI agents on basically, essentially catching racist and therefore sort of presumptive domestic terrorists or something. And so just like a very powerful outfit. And then this thing that dropped is that they've been now criminally indicted by the U.S. justice Department. And I should say that the indictment reads like a novel. No, it's an indictment that splc, in fairness, has not had a chance to present a defense. And so presumably in court, we'll get both sides of this, which I'm sure will be an absolutely spellbinding experience. So, of course, I want to say all of the things that are in the indictment are allegations and innocent until proven guilty and so forth. You know, however, the allegations are eye watering, right? And the allegations are that the splc, using donor funds, was directly funding, among other organizations, the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. Let me just repeat that. The Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, as well as an array of other sort of extreme hate, you know, literal hate groups. And, you know, and funding them, and not just funding them, not just like funneling money in, but like funneling money to very senior members or leaders of these organizations. And then the kicker is, among the allegations is, as they were directly funding one of the leaders of the January 6th, whatever you want to call it, riot at the Capitol. Oh, sorry, no, I'm going to. Let me back up. We need to clip that. I'm sorry, I can't remember if that was the one. But for sure, what I meant to say was the Charlottesville riot. So the Charlottesville riot in 2017, that played such a central role, you know, in our politics at the time, you know, the, you know, the kind of. The famous, they're good people on both sides, you know, kind of thing, you know, which was like one of the big crises of kind of that. Of kind of that era. The SVOC was directly Funding, evidently. Allegedly they were directly funding one of the organizers of the January 6 riot. And apparently they were also paying for transport for rioters to go to the Capitol. Right. And so, like, if this is true, you know. Yeah, I mean, if this is, if this, you know, what could you conclude if this is true? Well, number one is like the allegation is they broke the law doing that. There's additional allegations in the DOJ indictments that they committed, you know, various kinds of money laundering crimes, you know, other kinds of crimes. And so that, you know, that, you know, that's a big deal. And then I've been asking the obvious question, which is if any of these claims are true, what did their donors know? And you know, were the donors all totally oblivious to this or did the donors, you know, work closely with them also, by the way, the companies that worked with them, you know, did they, did, you know, what did they know of what was happening? And so I, you know, I do wonder whether there's like a, you know, I wonder whether over time what we're going to discover is this was a, you know, sort of sprawling network, you know, of which there's, you know, a legal, the legal term would be conspiracy. You know, that was, that was going on around this. And so I think this needs to be fully undressed. You know, look, the other thing is, you know, this raises the obvious question is were they the only one? And so there's a variety of these groups that had, you know, degrees of the kind of power that I was talking about and tremendous amounts of funding along the way and the ability to basically, again, direct some combination of state and private sector sort of obliteration raise at American citizens. There have been rumors for years, I mean, there's been rumors for years on this, by the way. There's been incidents like this in the past. Like, this isn't the first time this has happened. But if, if the, if, if the allegations are true and the SPLC was doing it, I think it raises the very direct question of like, okay, who, who else is? It's hard to believe they were the only one. And so who else was doing it? And then, yeah, and then we're back to our astroturfing thing, which is, yeah, you know, where are they constructing the boogeyman, you know, that they claim to be fighting? And by the way, and this is where you get into the sort of self interest component of it. This is where you get back to the suicidal empathy thing, which is like, okay, how, how suicidal is it? If you're the anti KKK group to fund the kkk. Like part of, I don't know, maybe it's suicidal if people find out about it, but if they don't find out about it, like, that's not, that's like the, that's like the opposite of suicidal because like, wow, like what, you know, wouldn't you like to get to like, if you're, if your group's entire purpose for existing is to fight an enemy, then you need to make sure that that enemy exists to do that. Of course, of course, of course you would fund them. And so yeah, you, you. I don't know what is that? That's like the reverse. The snake eating the tail. It's the, you know, sort of a, you know, you're creating a self fulfilling prophecy. And so, yeah, I mean, look, we're going to, I mean this all needs to be ventilated. I'm really fascinated to see like what the reality is underneath this. But you know, at the end of the day and what this means about what we've all been told all these years about all these groups.
- [15:44]
Eric Newcomer
It's funny, there was a Nathan Fielder sort of AI, you know, video that looked so real, which is he's basically saying, hey, our business model is to fight racism. We need to fund more racism and then we'll get more business.
- [15:55]
Marc Andreessen
Yes, correct. Exactly. Yeah. And one of the things is the lucrative. And again, it's because they get, they get cloaked in this kind of NGO lens. I mean, they've got, you know, the amounts of money at play are not small. You know, they're, they're very, very low. You know, so I don't know, the SPLC has something like an $800 million endowment and you know, it has an enormous budget. And by the way, people get paid a lot of money to do this work. And by the way, there's recurring scandals on that front also, you know, which is, you know, you get a lot of these kind of activist, you know, kind of foundations and so forth where when you look into it, it's like, you know, some, some giant percentage of the out there of their, of their spending is going to, you know, salaries and expenses for their, for their employees. And so, and again they kind of, they cloak it and you know, they cloak it in virtue. And then you kind of look underneath and you're like, wow, like, this is, this is, you know, this is, this, this is amazing. Like, and by the way, like, I don't know, it's America. Maybe they should be allowed to do all this. But, like, maybe we should not get. Yeah, maybe we should not get lied to in the process. You know, maybe all this should not get then dressed up to make us feel like, you know, our whole society is rotten and immoral and that, and that, you know, deplatforming and censorship are. And debacking are good ideas.
- [16:59]
Eric Newcomer
People respond, of course, with, hey, this time is different, because it's all potential cognitive work. And then there's also this other statement of, hey, humans will differentiate among taste and agency, but it seems like AI can do that too. And then that juxtaposed, there's also the statement of, hey, it won't replace a lot of the jobs, because a lot of jobs are make work. Anyways, you had this tweet the other day of, hey, I've been saying companies have been, you know, 2 to 4x bloated for a long time, and people have just been unwilling to deal with it or look that in the face. So. And this presents kind of a golden opportunity for that. What. So why don't you address some of these. Some of these topics as it relates to AI and jobs of the future as rights to tech.
- [17:46]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So we'll come back to the bloat thing. I will say the funny thing on the bloat tweet was the responses have been along the line. The responses, for the most part, have not been, you're wrong. The responses have been, oh, no, the company I used to work at is like 8x bloating.
- [17:58]
Eric Newcomer
Yeah, too generous.
- [17:59]
Marc Andreessen
Right? Or, yeah, too generous. Or, you know, they're not, you know, or, by the way, the nonprofit or the, you know, whatever. The, you know, whatever kind of institution, you know, agency I used to work for.
- [18:06]
Eric Newcomer
Well, Twitter proved it right, cutting 70% or 80%. And then it's running, you know, better or as good as it was before, at least. And it's probably not the only. It's not the exception.
- [18:16]
Marc Andreessen
I mean, look, I don't even know. And, you know, if I knew, I wouldn't say. But, like, I think Twitter is way down from the 80%, I think there. I don't know if the number for sure, the number has a nine on it, if not a high nines. So, yeah, no, he's really, as usual with Elon, he's really demonstrated. He's really forecasted the future through his own actions. Yeah. So, yeah, So a couple things. So one is, I mean, look, there's just this endless, you know, there's this endless. I mean, there's literally been a 300 year argument about mechanization, industrialization technology, computers, software replacing human labor, causing unemployment, you know, lower wages and unemployment. You know, it's been a 300 year argument, quite frankly. I'm even wondering at this point whether it's even worth having that argument because people really, really deeply don't want to hear it. And what I find is I go through it many other people. By the way, there's great books on this topic than there have been for hundreds of years. And people have talked about this for a long time. People really, this is one of those things where people really don't want to hear good news. And so it's actually even hard to have a discussion about it because people actually won't, they're so dug in on this that they actually won't even engage on the topic. They just keep repeating the same, kind of repeating the same fallacy over and over again. So, so we could go through that. I guess the more interesting thing to say though is just we have data now because now we have AI and now we have data so we can look at what's actually happening. And I would just make a couple of observations. So one is there was actually jobs data just came out today as a situation to monitor and it's unexpectedly good. And by the way, the jobs data overall in the last couple of years has been interesting because the federal government has actually shed a lot of workers. I think the federal government is down. Estimates are as much as 400,000 workers in the federal government since Trump took office the second time. So private sector employment is actually way down. And then private sector employment is way up. And then the net result, I think for the last quarter was actually very positive. And so in other words, the reporting jobs numbers are even more impressive than they look because the private sector growth actually has to make up for the public sector decline, which means the private sector job growth is actually much better than people were expecting. And again, this is in the face of actual AI staring us in the face and being rapidly adopted. And so, okay, the data is there's more data. And then the other thing, that's sort of macro data. And then there's the microdata, which is the world we live in. And the microdata is that sort of obvious question is if you live in Silicon Valley or work in San Francisco, you undoubtedly have friends who are computer programmers. Those friends, some percentage of those friends are early adopters of AI coding. You can just observe their behavior. And of course, if you believe in the Luddite kind of zero sum argument. You would expect that they would be working less and less and then rapidly becoming. Getting paid less and less, by the way, and rapidly becoming unemployed. And in fact, the observed behavior of what's happening is very clear, which is the opposite, which is those people are becoming what we now refer to as AI vampires, by which I mean the individual programmers productivity. An individual programmer uses codecs or claude code or one of these AI coding systems. Just the thing that you just now see over and over again on the ground level is they're working harder than ever. They're working just like more hours than ever. And then the AI vampire thing is literally this thing where, where they stop sleeping. And then when you talk to them, it's actually really funny because. And I have a whole bunch of friends like this, they're bleary like they've got these huge bags under their eyes. They're completely exhausted, but they're like euphoric. They're thrilled. They're having the absolute time of their life, by the way, a fair number of people who we both know, literally they're former programmers who stopped coding at one point and then all of a sudden have picked it back up again. And then actually we have partners, you know, you and I have partners at the firm who actually have never coded, who are now like ripping out software like crazy. And again they've turned in, they turned into a vampires. I won't name names because I'll let him tell his own story. But we have one partner who's built an entire AI system for everything that he does at work. And he is absolutely excited about it and it works great and he loves it and it's like his partner in all of his work now. And I asked him, I said, have, you know, have you looked at, you know, he vibe coded the whole thing. And I said, you know, have you looked at the, have you looked at the code? And he's like, hell no, you know, I've never done that. And I said, you know, have you ever looked at any software code? And he's like, hell no. He's not a programmer by background, and yet all of a sudden he's hyperproductive. And so you've got, of course, the phenomenon, which is sort of exactly what classic economics would predict, which is if you increase marginal productivity of the worker, you don't have a diminishment of human work, you have an expansion of human work. You make the worker more productive, therefore the worker works more and gets paid more, and there are more jobs in the process. And so it's the opposite of what all the doomers say. So we're seeing that at the level of these individuals. And then, by the way, what you see kind of inside companies, inside employers of these individuals is of course, these people are now in even more demand than they were before. They are garnering higher salaries than they were before. And then by the way, their productivity is just starting to ramp up. Right. Everything that I'm describing. And at our leading edge companies, estimates are those leading edge programmers are 20x more productive than they were a year ago. Like, it's like the most dramatic increase in programmer productivity ever. And so again, logically, people get paid according to their marginal productivity. And you're also seeing that track in the compensation data. I'm seeing that on the ground in the companies, which is the more hyperproductive a coder becomes all of a sudden, the more bargaining power that they have for their compensation. And we're seeing comp for those people ramp up quickly. And so it's just kind of like, it's just kind of staring us in the face. And coding, of course, coding is like the first domain in which this has happened. People want to project forward and say this is going to happen in every area of knowledge work. And then, you know, I think you can predict a similar outcome. Then that gets us to the bloat topic, which is of course the other thing that's happening is of course, companies announcing big layoffs. And then, you know, of course, immediately it's like, you know, two plus two must equal four. And so if it's AI coding, it must therefore translate into layoffs. And you know, Mark, you're wrong. You know, therefore all of your ideas are wrong because that's evidence that these companies are wiping out their, you know, they're, they're, they're reducing their, their workforces or really nuking them because of AI coding. And I guess there again, this is like maybe the inside, inside baseball take on it is. But I, I see it, I see it up close, which is just every, every major Silicon Valley company is overstaffed. Every major Silicon Valley company's been overstaffed basically forever. They all know it. There's a whole variety of reasons why it's the case, by the way. I think this is true basically of just like, you know, corporate America broadly, you know, companies broadly. We, we can talk in, in detail about why that's the case because it flies in the face of the idea that these companies optimize for profits, which they definitely do not like the One thing that is the least true claim in the world is that companies are optimized for profitability, which is 100% not true. And so, and so, you know, and then, you know, basically, if you're going to do a big cut, like if you want to do a big cut, if you want to take out, you know, whether it's 15% or 40% or whatever, like obviously you want to, you want a scapegoat, right? You just, you want to peg it on something. Of course it's going to get pegged on AI. And again, it's not like it's just like a straight lie. It is simultaneously true that there are these massive. For this same amount of coding, you can now have fewer people using tools. That is true. And so do you need as many aggregate number of programmers if you're generating the same amount of code? No, you don't. And so you can take out people on the other side. So there is truth to that. But what that misses is what happens on the other side of that, which is of course you're not just going to be generating the same amount of code in the future, you're going to be generating a lot more code, you're going to be building a lot more products a lot more quickly, and that's going to fuel enormous amounts of employment growth on the other side. And so I think you're seeing both, basically both phenomena play out and you kind of have to read the announcements coming out of these companies in code because of the way those two dynamics are crossing.
- [26:04]
Eric Newcomer
Yeah, that's well said. There was an article that was going viral in our circles the other week about the jobs of the future. And Yoni Recman, he said there's, there's a possibility that the only jobs in tech companies are going to be one, product engineer slash vibe coder slash slop, cannon, two, you know, infra security systems, three adults in the room, you know, like legal and finance, and then four hot people slash personality hires. Any, any, any truth in there or, you know, what do we make sense of this?
- [26:39]
Marc Andreessen
What, what do the hot people do exactly?
- [26:41]
Eric Newcomer
Range sales people, you know, customer support. There will always be an important place for those who present easy UX to the world and are pleasant to be around. There are many ways to be hot.
- [26:52]
Marc Andreessen
Otherwise known as the pharmaceutical sales rep or the Oracle. Or the Oracle sales rep. So yeah, so. Yes, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, look, this is going to happen like, well, not literally, but like the jobs are, the jobs are going to change. I mean, this is sort of the obvious thing. And this always happens. The jobs are going to change, you know, by the way. So there's like a nascent concept that is actually playing out. I'm seeing it a bunch of the early leading edge companies in the Valley, which is they're kind of circling around a, a job title loosely called Builder or something like it. And basically the idea is that you had these separate jobs in the past of programmer, product manager and designer. And I've been describing what's happening in the Valley companies as sort of this three way Mexican standoff where the programmers think that they don't need the product managers and the designers anymore because they can have AI do that. And then each of the other two doesn't think they need the other two either. And what I've been predicting is they're all correct. The product manager can generate code and design now, so each of them can do the job of all three. And so the idea is the job's changed. Now the job is builder. And you might come into the builder, you might get on the builder track by coming out of coding or product management or design or maybe even something else, customer service or whatever, but you then become responsible for building complete products. And again, you have this kind of, you're super empowered by the AI that can help fill in all the things that are not directly in your background. And so I think it's entirely possible that we're sitting here in 10 years, in 20 years or whatever, and the job of coder is gone, but you have this just extraordinary number of builders running around. And again, by the way, this is the historical pattern, right? And so I think our partner David George did a post on this this week, but I forget the exact numbers, but it's some giant percentage of the jobs that existed in call it 1940 were gone by 1970 and they were like ancient history. Today the ultimate example of this is United States 200 years. Like 99% of the people in the US were farming and today it's like 2%. And having grown up in farm country, I can tell you all these people who worry about job loss and job change would not like to go back and be farmers, I guarantee that. And particularly they would not like to go back and be farmers the way people were farming in 1800. They definitely don't want to do that. And so the new jobs that have been created of course are far better jobs. And that isn't to understate the level of kind of stress in individual people's lives as the economy changes. But, but in aggregate the result is evolution towards higher income and sort of more jobs that people are happier to do. By the way, you can also see all of this playing out in the American economy broadly, which is the American economy is again, there's this kind of, and there's this kind of doomer narrative that has been for a long time that the American middle class is falling apart. And the sort of presumption of that is that all the middle class people are kind of falling off the ledge and becoming lower class. But actually the, and by the way, there is some of that and there are communities in which that's very clearly happening. But having said that, there is at least as much or more of the other phenomenon, which is people in the middle class climbing the ladder into the upper middle class and rapidly gaining in wealth and income. And again, just like quality of life for themselves and for their kids and their grandkids as time passes. And that is a consequence of actual economic development, technological changes, job transformation actually being allowed to happen is 20 years later you look back and you're just like, oh thank God, this is just a much better world for me and my family than it was before. And so this is why I'm so optimistic. I think God willing, we're entering a golden age on this topic, which is AI is going to be a superpower that everybody in the country and everybody on the planet is going to have access to. Everybody's going to become far more capable at whatever it is that they want to do. They're going to become far more productive in whatever line of work that they're in. They're going to get compensated. The economy naturally compensates according to productivity, so they'll get compensated that way. There will be a rapidly rising ladder of both incomes and number of jobs. And my prediction, again consistent with history, is the extent to which that's a positive phenomenon is a function to the degree to which it's actually allowed to happen. And then of course Europe is going to run the opposite test, which is they're going to try to prevent all this from happening. And again I think the data is already in there, which is they've been falling very badly behind economically and they're going to continue to fall further and further behind the US and it's a tragedy because it's 100% self inflicted wound.
- [31:20]
Eric Newcomer
Yeah, as well said you were also we've talked about and you've written about how AI psychosis, there's an AI psychosis summit apparently happening. I'm not sure if that's real. Or a parody. I haven't looked into it.
- [31:33]
Marc Andreessen
It.
- [31:33]
Eric Newcomer
But I'm curious how you make sense of this phenomenon you've also written about. So you tweeted the other day, sort of the opposite of AI psychosis is cope. AI Cope. Maybe you talk about both sides. Yeah.
- [31:43]
Marc Andreessen
I also identified, earlier identified the concept of AI psychosis psychosis, which we should also talk about.
- [31:51]
Eric Newcomer
Let's unpack it as well.
- [31:53]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So first of all, the AI Psychosis Summit did in fact happen. I was not there, but I am assured that it did. Some very, very smart and creative people put that on in New York, I think late last week, I think maybe about a week ago ago. And it was an art. It's like an art. It's essentially an art project. And it was basically artists and creative people who got together and fully indulged their AI psychosis in the form of creating new art using AI. And yeah, I would definitely recommend people should go on excellent search on AI Psychosis Summit and take a look because it's incredibly creative and I think it's fantastic because it's a little bit tongue in cheek, but also it's a. There is a real split that's developed in the artistic community, the creative community in Hollywood, and there are people who are staking out kind of very extreme positions on pro AI, anti AI, and it's generating a lot of heat. And so I think this was a nice example of. No, actually, in a world of AI, creatives are going to have, again, creatives are going to have all these superpowers, they're going to be able to create all kinds of art that wasn't possible before. And then of course, this whole topic, you can create art about this topic. So I think all the stuff that was there was very creative. Yeah. And then. Yeah, okay, so my concept. So AI psychosis. So AI psychosis is a pejorative. So AI psychosis is the idea that. It's the idea that basically people get whammied by the AI. So the classic example is through what's called sycophancy. So it's basically like you tell Claude you've discovered a new idea for an anti gravity machine. And Claude says, oh, that's amazing. That's amazing. You've achieved a giant breakthrough in physics. Nobody else has ever thought of this before. You are an underappreciated genius and it's so unfair that you couldn't get admitted to the physics department at mit and they're all going to feel completely stupid when they See this work that you've done. And so people go down this rabbit hole. And again, in fairness, I should also say if people are prone to delusion and an AI is overly sycophantic, then it is going to feed delusions. And so there is a serious element to that among people who are kind of predisposed to that kind of thing. But again, it's like, okay, yes, there be some number of those cases. But that causes kind of AI critics or AI doomers to basically say, anybody therefore who reports a positive productive experience with AI has fallen into AI psychosis. So anybody who actually is like, wow, my productivity is way up, or wow, I really have a thought partner for the first time in my work, or wow, I really have been able to produce something that I never would have been able to produce before. That's sort of all bucketed under. They all have AI psychosis. And then that led me to my AI cope, right? Which is the other side of it, which is like AI Cope is classifying anybody who has a positive experience with AI as being an AI psychosis. And AI Cope is this thing where concentrated in certain places on the planet where people are just absolutely hell bent on proving to themselves and everybody else that this whole thing is a complete fraud. Fake. Stochastic parrot. AI is fake. It doesn't work. And if anybody's having a good experience, they must be full of it. And so that's the AI Cope. And I would describe the AI Cope is people who are basically dismissive. And then AI psychosis, psychosis is the people who get really mad, the people who froth at the mouth. And so maybe it's AI Cope, but with a different load of coding. And then look, all of this is going to become just like so much more intense over the next several years. Because look, the reality is that the large language models that we had between, call it 19 or sorry, 20, call it between GPT 2 to GPT 4, something like that, maybe four and a half. They were fun, they could compose Shakespearean rap lyrics or whatever you want. You could have very interesting late night conversations with them. But the hallucination rates were high and they weren't good at reasoning and so forth and they couldn't write code very well and couldn't do math very well and we're too prone to syncopency and so on. And so I think what happened is a lot of skeptics basically used the early models and got a, let's say accurate but early and therefore lagging view of the actual quality of the technology. And then you fast forward to today and what may of 26th and we have just stellar, absolutely stellar models now like the GPT 5.5 is just extraordinary. And then we have reasoning models on top of that and we have RL post training happening in all these different domains to get kind of deterministic, high quality work out of these things. And then now we have agents, now we have long lived agents. And now we have just in the last week GPT has this new thing, the goal feature of Codex that is letting people literally run projects, have codecs go off and do projects for 24 hours or longer without human intervention. And so the actual, what we see in our job is the actual utility of these things is ramping incredibly quickly. And by the way, it's really good today and ramping very fast. And we and every other I think serious company in the space expects the ramp and capability to be very rapid, at least for the next couple of years. Years. We have I think line of sight to it for sure is going to ramp dramatically. The capability is going to ramp dramatically. The other thing here is just like a lot of people, I don't know either skeptics or people who just don't know what to think. If they tried it two years ago, they don't understand what's happening today. If they tried it six months ago, they might not have a good idea of what's happening today. By the way, if they try the free version, they might not have a good idea of what's happening today. Or if they try the version that's bundled into their whatever, there just is like a free add on to something they're not going to have. You know, to really, it's just like anything new, like to really understand this, you have to be directly in front of it. The good news is like that literally means you have to be willing to put out $200 to get the, to get whatever is the, you know, basically the premium package, any of these things. So it's like not that much money if you want to get up close to these things. But I would, yeah, if anybody, yeah, I don't know. We have a selected audience of people who are probably believers, but anybody who's a skeptic on these things, I would just say it's really important to be face to face with the actual technology and to be face to face with it now and not have a lagging view. Right.
- [38:11]
Eric Newcomer
And state of the art. What do you say to people or what do you say to the idea of like you know, apparently, you know, The NPS of AI in this country was like 30% or something like that. It came out recently is pretty low. And they're comparing it to China where it's much higher. I'm curious what you think is a source of why it's currently low and what could a strategy to boost it look like? Some people have suggested to economic incentives, like, you know, some sort of like Trump accounts tied to AI companies, like a basket that people get access to to feel economically aligned with it in a more direct way. Even though of course, you know, it will increase the, you know, GDP and economy in ways that they'll also benefit from. Others say, hey, we actually just need to tell better stories around the impact that it's having on, you know, in people's lives and their health and their education and just the, you know, people having a tutor or people having a lawyer or people having a doctor or who couldn't afford one otherwise. What are your thoughts on the sort of AI sentiment perspective?
- [39:14]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so I would separate two things. So I would separate sentiment. And sentiment is interpreted through polling and we'll talk about that. And then I bring it up to separate it out though, because you use the term maybe inadvertently nps, which is Net Promoter score, which is more their view of actual product usefulness. Right. NPS for people who don't know, is a term of our called Net Promoter Score. And it's like, it's basically the most high quality way to find out whether somebody really likes a product, which is you literally ask them, would you recommend this to a friend? That's called the NPS rate. And so but I bring that up, of course, because there's a big difference between those, right?
- [39:47]
Eric Newcomer
And so everyone's using it and benefiting from it, couldn't live without it. And yet.
- [39:52]
Marc Andreessen
Well, exactly. This is the thing. This is the thing. And by the way, this is a very common thing in properly conducted social science. Like every Social Science 101 textbook will tell you that you cannot just ask people what they think. You will get back all kinds of crazy shit and we'll talk about why that's the case. But this is like, this is very standard social science methodology, which is you never just ask people what you do is you watch their behavior, right? And what you do is. And then you want to, what you want to do is you want to look for the gaps between what they say they believe versus what they actually do. And this is true, like universally for all form of human behavior. For example, if you're Studying, let's say, mating patterns, right? Like, you know, who people date and marry. Like, it's just been well established forever that the thing that they say that their criteria, I mean, you know, we all see this with our friends, right? You know, our friends all start out single with a certain criteria list, and then they marry somebody, like, completely different. And so it's like, okay, you know, who do you believe, me or your lying eyes? Right? Like, who do you believe? What do you believe what I told you I wanted or what I actually demonstrated that, you know, that I wanted? And this is basically true for all areas of human behavior. But this is like fairly archae. You know, this is a fair. You know, this is one of these sort of slightly counterintuitive ideas that you have to kind of have been trained up in and have seen examples to really understand. And so what happens is, of course, people. People don't know this or they forget this. And then what happens is there's literally just like a poll, and somebody does a poll poll, and then the poll comes back with, like, results. And it looks. And it looks like in the results, it looks like, oh, if people say that, then that must be the case. But then you get into this thing, which is like, okay, first of all, you're asking them what they think as opposed to watching their behavior. And there's potentially huge delta there. And then the other thing is, everybody in the world of polling will tell you, like, you can basically make a poll, say whatever you want. And this is one of the reasons why you have to look at what people do, is because you can make a poll, say whatever you want. In fact, there's a whole category of poll that's called a push poll, poll, push poll, P O L L push poll, which is you word the questions in a way to generate the answers that you want, or you word the questions in a way to actually cause people to think differently than they did before the poll. So the political example of a push pull is, would you continue to support your favorite candidate if you knew that he was killing kittens in his spare time? Right? And so, number one is people are going to say, no, of course, I would not support him. And then, number two, people are going to say, wait a minute, I didn't know he killed kittens in his spare time. You know, that's horrible, right? And so in polling, you can manipulate these things in all kinds of ways up to and including what people actually think. So it's really, really dangerous. And then you overlay on top of that the media environment. And of course, the media environment is, as you and I have discussed many times, like, what is the thing that hates the most in the entire world is tech. And of course, what is the vanguard of tech right now? One of the things is AI. And so, of course, the press hates AI with the fury of a thousand suns. And so the press is running this sustained kind of fear campaign on AI. And so if you just. If you like, drown the audience with negative narratives and then you ask, you know, basically these loaded polling questions, of course you're going to generate. I mean, we can pick any topic. We can pick like fluffy bunnies running in the field, and we can produce the same thing, you know, don't you know how much they shit? Like, I mean, you can just do all kinds, you know, they chew up all the crops, everybody's going to die from hunger. Like, you can manufacture a negative result on anything by how you do this, which is the exercise that these people have been on. And the reason I'm confident in saying that is because then you look at what they actually do, and of course, what they're actually doing is they're using AI. They're using it a lot. They love it. The NPS scores are like super high. The usage levels are super high, by the way. The churn levels are shrinking. The recurring usage patterns, consumptions are rising over time, which is really important. And people love it. And people love it in the same way that they love their cell phones and in the same way they love their Netflix, and the same way that they love their. The same way that they love their social media. And it's the same way that they love their ice cre. And people love it. Now, if you pull somebody and you ask, do you think ice cream is good for you? They're going to say no. But late at night, they're going to be in there with the carton because ice cream is delicious. And so it's the same thing with AI, which is, yeah, people are using it, they love it. The usage numbers are speaking for themselves. The growth rates of these companies are speaking for themselves. This is the fastest category of technology in the entire history of the world in terms of growth, rate of usage and revenue. So it's speaking for itself. And so basically what you have is you have this project Fear campaign. And I would say maybe two things added onto that. Which is, number one is it's like the thing that is, I would say, not helpful is that the companies themselves have been running the Fear campaign. And so the fact that Certain companies have been sort of for a variety of reasons. Running a fear campaign is certainly not helping any. And again, it's this weird paradox is they're running the fear campaign while they're actually building the thing that they probably would be afraid of. And so there's again a little bit of a watch what I do, not what I see say. And then it's like, yeah, should the industry have like better narratives? Like yes, almost certainly the industry should have better narratives and better spokespeople and so forth and so on. But just like, okay, like fine, yes, I'm sure that's true. But having said that, it's not like that would make the fear campaigns go away. It's not like that would make the press coverage go away. It's not like that would make the sort of fake polls go away. I'll close on one final polling observation, which is David Shore, who's by the way a very left wing, very progressive pollster, but very well respected, just did a different kind of poll, I think, much more properly constructed conducted where he asked Americans to stack rank the issues that they really care about. And I believe I'm pulling this out of the top of my head, But I believe AI ranked as number 29. And again, it's just sort of like once you get out of the bubble of like everybody must hang through this stuff, it's just like of course AI ranks as number 29 because it's having no tangible impact on anything relative to issues one through 28. Right. Like just obviously Americans are dealing with like more important issues in their daily lives than AI. Like obviously like they're dealing with energy costs and they're dealing with crime and they're dealing like any number of drug addiction, like any number of other things they're more worried about. And by the way, everybody knows this who lives a normal life is just like this is not the thing that I'm worried about. I'm worried about how am I going to make my house payment. Much more fundamental things. And so what's happening at my kids school, what's happening with my health, much more central things. And so I think if you get to the smart polls and the smart pollsters, they also end up debunking this.
- [45:54]
Eric Newcomer
Speaking of things that are not, you know, urgent on people's day to day life and yet capture the imagination whenever they, they, there's news about it, UFOs. So there was some, some news that came out. You know, I don't, we haven't spent a ton of time Talking about this topic. So I'm curious for your general, how have you kind of perceived this topic when there's been news out about it over the, over the years? I remember during, during COVID you know, Mike Solana, our friend, was, was coming out and really sort of getting excited about the news that was being reported then. What's been your vantage point and what do you, what do you think about it now?
- [46:32]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so I should start by saying I don't. So I don't know anything. So start, start saying that I know nothing that everybody else doesn't know. So I start by saying like, number one, I want to believe. Like, I, my, my usual thing on this is I want to live in the world in which this is a real possibility. And by the way, I was, I was actually, I. Okay, AI psychosis. I was in AI psychosis the other night and I was like, I was talking to one of the. One of. And I was like, all right, how many galaxies are there in the universe again? And I don't know if you've like, looked that up recently, but the number keeps growing and I forget what the number is, but it's like a giant number. And then I'm like, how many stars in each galaxy? And then how many planets? And then how many Earth like planets? And the number, I don't have the top of my head, but if you, if you do address it, like, how many Earth like planets are there in the world in which a human being could like, step out of a spaceship and breathe and be fine? It's a staggering. It's a very, very, very large number. I mean, it's almost uncountable number of Earth like planets just in the statistics. And so it'. Like, all right, it must be the case. There's other stuff going on out there. And so logically that makes sense. And then I would love to live in a world in which they figure out a way to at some point get here, hopefully in a peaceful way. Having said that, as you know, the problem with this space is generally as you get close to the details, the examples tend to fall apart. And there's all these, the classic examples, like you have like, what, what appears to be like, you know, you'll have these things where like a US Military aircraft or something will have a camera imagery that looks like it's tracking a, you know, rapidly moving and weirdly maneuvering object. And it's, it's just like, you know, you get, you get close enough to that and look at the details and it's you know, it's like the. There's like a parallax optical illusion thing that pops up and then there's artifacts, instrument artifacts, camera artifacts, imagery, digital imagery artifacts. And then there's, you know, like, literally like weather balloons and ball lightning and all these other things. So, like. Yeah, so I, I haven't. I would. Yes. I want to believe I haven't seen the one yet that is. Has tipped me over it. I would like to. I will. I will. This big, big release of new information today. It is really fun, by the way, to have the official White House X account being tweeting transcripts of interviews with US Intelligence officers apparently relaying accounts that they've had. So I will be up late reading tonight, but, you know, fingers crossed, cost. Yeah.
- [48:54]
Eric Newcomer
Friends have said something to the effect of, hey, it's unclear what's actually happening, but what is clear is the government is, or at certain times has. Has hid certain, certain materials. Why would they do that if. If there's nothing to really worry about?
- [49:07]
Marc Andreessen
So I don't know how much of this has been fully validated and I'm not really an expert in it. I would say, like my. Under. Like, I, I think two things are pretty clear at this point. I think one is that, you know, there have been classified. You know, they've been classified. They're, you know, that when, when stealth, when stealth fighters and bombers are being developed, you know, that whole program was like incredibly highly classified. And so if they were test flights on something like that, you know, they were going to have to like, do anything they could to prevent people from realizing what was actually happening. And so, you know, you know, for sure there were lots of classified aerospace programs over the years that would have had various kinds of COVID stories or various kinds of, you know, let's just say blankets of suppression of information, you know, kind of placed over them. Because it's like the most, you know, some of the most highly classified information in the government, you know, that would cause people to kind of think that there's information being hidden. I mean, Area 51 was of course the classic example of this for a long time time, which was a, you know, which was. Which is the whole Area 51 thing was around basically these classified test flights for, for new, new aircraft. And then, and then, and then at least, you know, there are suggestions. I don't know if this has been validated, but there are suggestions that at different points in time the government might have put out UFO stories as basically, as an actual. Over a cover story. And so you know what if you're, you know, if you're a, let's, let's say you're a highly capable military intelligence officer whose job is to make sure that, that the stealth flight doesn't become recognized for what it is. Because if that would be very bad for national security, then you'd much rather have basically a UFO cult kind of get built up around it where people get all kind of crazed and freaked out about UFOs by the way, for two reasons. One is to give people a story to believe it's not that you have some new breakthrough military technology. But the other thing is, and this is actually maybe the serious observation, if you can build, the argument would be, I think if you could build up a UFO cult around something, then you make any investigation into that topic something that people feel like they can't, can't do, right? And my understanding is, by the way, this was true for a long time even in the US Military, which is if a US Air Force pilot or a commercial airline pilot, by the way, thought that they had seen something weird. I think for a long time a lot of pilots didn't want to report what they had seen because they didn't want to be viewed that they were like UFO nuts. And of course, if there are actual UFOs out there, like that is a very big problem. Or by the way, if there are just other kinds of things out there, right? You know, if there's, you know, if the Chinese are testing some sort of new, advanced, you know, high speed drone or something, you know, you want the pilots to be able to report that even if they think that it might get mischaracterized as a ufo. And so anyway, I don't know, maybe the interesting thing we could say on this is all of this played out in the old media environment. And so all of this played out in the world of broadcast TV and then sort of official programming on the one hand. And then to the extent that there was unofficial media, it had to be in mimeographed newsletters or paperback books. And when I was a kid there were all these crazy UFO paperback books. You'd always tell us the books that said there were no UFOs, you know, were in hardback in the books that said there were, you know, many UFOs were in paperback. So, you know, in the, maybe, maybe the smart thing you could say is in the, in the, in the new media environment, this is yet another example of like these old walls just collapse, you know, the Overton Window just disintegrates and so, of course, you know, the new media environment is extremely conducive to the spread of every UFO theory in the world. Of course, it's also extremely conducive to the spread of propaganda campaigns. If you wanted to, you know, like I said, if you wanted to hide real information by spreading propaganda. And then, of course, the pressure builds, you know, very much along the lines of the Epstein thing. Right? The pressure builds and builds and builds and builds until it's. At some point, you know, you know, you get, you know, you get somebody in the White House who's just like, all right, screw it. Like, we're going to rip the band aid off and find out what's actually going on. Yeah. You know, now, you know, assuming that they're not still fuzzing the details. But we'll leave that to the next turn of the situation.
- [52:45]
Eric Newcomer
Exactly. We will stay monitoring. We'll close on a last couple of questions from the chat. One is advice for young graduates. If you were in college today, you of course, were at the forefront of the Internet revolution at the University of Illinois. What would you be studying? Or would you even be in College today, in 2026? What advice might you have for college students? Sort of trying to make sense of how to prepare for what's to come.
- [53:12]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so it's basically gain AI superpowers. I think it's actually very straightforward. It's like, okay, you have the enormous stroke of. Of luck that you have arrived at the moment in which there is this new capability for augmenting human ability on a thousand fronts at the same time that's just dropped into our laps. And it's going to get much better from here. And enormous numbers of people who are supposedly older and wiser than you are are going to dig in their heels and they're going to be mad about it and they're going to fight it, they're going to not want to do it, and you are going to have the opportunity to have this be something that is absolutely key to your skill set and key to everything that you can accomplish as a professional or as a creative for the next 50 years. And so I would just, like, lean in incredibly hard on that. Walk into every job interview with, like, here's my. Whatever, portfolio, resume, whatever. Like, here is how I use this technology. Here are the capabilities that I'm bringing to the table. And by the way, you know, some employers you'll talk to will, you know, they'll fuzz out on that and not respect it, but other employers will Be like, wow, like that's clearly. This is exactly what we're, we want. And so this is actually funny. Douglas Adams, the great science fiction novelist, he said there's a repeating. And this was by the way, pre AI like this is something he said like 30 years ago. He said there's a repeating pattern of how new technology is received by the different age cohorts in society. He said when a new technology arrives, whatever it is in this case AI he said if you're below the age of 15, he said this is just how the world's always work is just off obvious. And then if you're between the ages of 15 to 35, this is cool and nifty and you can probably get a career using it. And then if you're above the age of 35, this is unholy and against everything that society stands for and should absolutely be destroyed. And so I think that, I think 15 to 35 and especially 15 to 25 right now. Yeah, I am very jealous. I generally don't wish I could go back in time and do things over again. But it would be really, really fun right now to be 18 or 20 or 20 to and to have this capability and figure out what I could do with it.
- [55:17]
Eric Newcomer
And we're, it's funny, we at ASIC&Z are trying to hire more, more of these people because they're AI native and they're going to help us become more a native.
- [55:27]
Marc Andreessen
By the way, this is the thing, this is. There's this narrative right now to be part of the doomer. Part of the doomer narrative is oh, companies are never going to hire junior employees again. The new generation is screwed because companies are never going to hire junior employees again because those are the most easily replaced by AI and so companies are only ever going to have senior people. And I think the, I believe the idea opposite is true. I think 100% you want the AI native kids. The AI native kids are going to outperform their older Luddite peers gigantically, titanically, no, their older peers who are not Luddites are also going to do great. But it is. Yeah, no, an 18 year old with or by the way a 24 year old or by the way, a 14 year old with AI. We are going to see super producers the likes of which we've never seen in the world. So yes, by the way, this is going to greatly stress the. This is going to be another big point of stress on all the child labor laws.
- [56:13]
Eric Newcomer
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [56:17]
Marc Andreessen
Let me just say, let me just Say the children yearn for the AI minds.
- [56:19]
Eric Newcomer
Yeah, yeah, they're. Yeah, absolutely. The. Speaking of, you know, we talked about zoomers in previous episodes and, and why you like them in terms of, you know, they just have so much courage and are willing or sort of kind of fake fed up because they grew up in, you know, Covid school and all these sort of, you know, adjacent sort of, you know, sort of impositions and. But one thing you quote tweeted recently was Chris Arnaud's sort of post around the, you know, people talk about the educational divide, but there's also generational divide in terms of boomers being just much more sort of confident in their sort of truth and younger people being more. More sort of post truth relativistic, more pluralist. And I thought that was a really interesting sort of epistemological divide. What did you find interesting about her? How do you see that play out?
- [57:11]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so there's really two parts to it, which is very interesting. So part number one is a lot of boomers. Somebody once said the definition of a baby boomer, or somebody who believes what's on the TV set, like, they believe what they're talking on the TV says. And like anybody who's 20 knows that you obviously don't do that, right? That would be stupid. But every 60 year old or 80 year old has been watching TV their entire life. And when they grew up, you know, it's the old story. We've all heard it a million times. Walker Cronkite used to tell us what the truth was, right? And you know, of course that was always B.S. but nevertheless, that was what the boomers believed. They believed what the TV said, they believed what the New York Times wrote, right? They believe these things. You know, anybody below the age of 40, like just at this point has example after example after example of how, like, obviously that's just not true. And then anybody who's like 20, who's been through the last 15 years in school, like, just obviously knows that these people are fake and this is not real. And you just can't take the. This stuff seriously. So part of it is that divide. And so the boomers had. By the way, it's this great YouTube account. There's this amazing video on this. There's this great YouTube account called Academic Agent. There's a British author named Neiman Parvini who writes these really interesting books, but he has this two hour video that's really worth watching and it's called Boomer Truth. And so it's like A two hour documentary on kind of this concept he calls Boomer truth, which is basically whatever the team, he says. And I was falling apart. So there's sort of the Boomer truth thing, but then there's this other thing which is like a key part of Boomer truth is that there's no fixed morality, right? So, like a key part of Boomer truth is you get to make up your own values. Like all cultures are this moral relativism. All cultures are the same. Western society is not superior. You know, there's many, many different cultures. They're all wonderful. Like, it's all great. It's all great. It's all great. If anything, the west is the worst of the cultures. The other ones are better. You know, just like that was such a. Like, like before there was woke, there was political correctness and like, the political correctness of like when I was in like college, it was literally around what's called multiculturalism or Peter Thiel and David
- [59:08]
Eric Newcomer
Sacks wrote about it. Their book, you know, diversity myth in 1985.
- [59:11]
Marc Andreessen
Diversity myth. And it was, it was, it was actually, it was actually a term that was called multi. Multicult. Multi culty. Multiculti. Multicultural. And there were these furious debates. There's a classic book of that era. Peter's book is great. But actually before that, there was a famous, famous book at the time which has been huge headline news all through the country when it came out called the Closing of the American Mind. And this sort of right wing academic at University of Chicago who basically said, these colleges are teaching these kids that there is no morality. It's all just basically morality is just choose your own adventure. And so there is this moral relativism that's kind of at the heart of Boomer truth, right? And so it's this weird thing where it's like there is a fixed received belief that there is no fixed morality. And so if you're on the. And then basically like the entire media apparatus, the entire cultural program, the entire educational system got designed around this. And all of the stuff, all of the crazy stuff that kids are getting in school now is basically downstream of this movement from 30, 40 years ago, 60 years ago. And so if you're 20, you've just come up in this sort of weird environment in which on the one hand, the boomers have no credibility at all, because I can't believe they still believe what's on tv. And then number two is to the extent that we do listen to anything they say, they keep telling us to not judge it anybody and not judge anything, and that all moralities are equal and all cultures are equal. And so of course they're going to. Of course their consumers are going to come out of that with just like an incredible level of skepticism. And then, by the way, this is not an abstract exercise because these are the kids who came up through Covid. Right. And these are the kids who came up through woke, and these are the kids who came up through, like, all of the craziness of the last decade, 15 years. And so I think these kids are just coming out with a completely different viewpoint on how the world works, by the way. Not in every case, but in many cases cases. Completely different. Like, much more. I would say much. Almost like simultaneously more open minded, more critical, much more interested in ideas, much more skeptical of authority, much more skeptical of received wisdom, much more cynical about manipulation, by the way, much more sensitive about the media environment. They're much more aware of the idea that there actually is psychological warfare going on, and they have been on the receiving end of it. Much more skeptical of authority. Their view of the authority figures that they've seen in their life in many cases, cases, is just like complete contempt and in many cases, very well earned. And so, yeah, it's just a. It's. It's just a. It's a starkly different. I think it's a starkly different worldview than the. For sure, Than the boomer. Sad. Also very different than my generation, Gen X. Also very different than millennials. Like, it's something new and I'm very excited. I think they're fantastic.
- [61:46]
Eric Newcomer
Yeah. Speaking of something new, would it be fair to summarize retard maxing as stoicism meets you can just do things?
- [61:57]
Marc Andreessen
No, I think it's just. You can just do things.
- [61:59]
Eric Newcomer
Okay.
- [62:01]
Marc Andreessen
Like, I think it's even. Like, I think it's even. It's even shouting. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe. I think I can see what you're driving at. And I think you could probably explain it that way, but I think. I don't know. The way I put it is the stoics put a lot of time and effort into trying to be stoic, whereas the whole point of retard maxing is you're not supposed to put that level of time and effort into being the way that you are. You're just supposed to do it. And so, yeah, I guess you could say our friend Ryan Holiday is a stoic and not a retard maxer, as he demonstrated this week. And so Maybe right there in that, in that, in that, in that, in that video. You can see the difference.
- [62:32]
Eric Newcomer
Yeah, that's well said. Last question from the chat. We'll get you out of here. How are you such a good monitor? What is your secret to monitoring so many situations? Any strategies? What is your approach?
- [62:44]
Marc Andreessen
Well, of course being plugged into the MTS firehose is of course absolutely critical and of course the amazing tools that the team is developing and putting online is fantastic. I had been glued, I've been, among other things, been glued to the, the coverage of the, of the OpenAI trial this week on, on, on. Is it MT? MTS? Is it mts.com okay, yeah, yeah, so yeah, for sure. That. And then yeah, I mean I'm at, you know, I, I, I long ago plugged the back of my skull, you know, I wire jacked into, into social media. So I sort of, you know, continuous X feed, my continuous substack feed, my continuous YouTube feed and yeah, and then trying to as usual, trying to read enough old books to try to have some counterbalance to the, to the, to, to, to the daily fire hose.
- [63:25]
Eric Newcomer
Yeah, awesome. Well, Mark, thank you so much for coming on another great episode at mts and we'll see you back soon.
- [63:32]
Marc Andreessen
See you soon.
- [63:35]
A16Z Podcast Host
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