A (2:55)

It's all one boiling, boiling mass. It's there, it's all interconnected. I mean, I was like, GPUs still internally use all the logic of showing things on a screen. You buy like a GPU for a data center. It still has little ports on the back to connect a monitor to it. They'll never be used, right. Like it's all deeply intertwined. Every piece of technological progress can be reapplied somewhere else. That's the whole beauty of software. That's the whole beauty of computing. So I, I don't even understand the question, Eric. That's how I put it. I don't even understand the question.

B (3:24)

Eric, I've been begging you and telling you. We have to have the techno Optimist manifesto on the front page of our website, right? Because to me that is the coherent thesis of what all building is. It's, it's the thesis of every, every founder's journey, right? Like the founder's journey is pretty universal across every sector. It's sort of a universal story arc in terms of what they experience, even if they're building in different realms. I think this sort of atoms and bits, sort of playful battles between our founders is actually more of. It's sort of like a humorous thing versus one that's really grounded in philosophy. Because at the same time everyone's going through the same thing of building and no one can predict like you could have. You can be directionally correct on where you believe the future is headed, but no one can make predictions that no one would have ever looked at Palmer in his, in his, his motor home, living outside his parents house when he was trying to build Oculus and say he's going to remake American defense. Now I don't even think Palmer would have said that about himself. Right? So there's something about the hero's journey and the building journey that is very universal, that brings all of these categories together, where tech should be aligned on these things and shouldn't necessarily have infighting or think of these categories as very different. And I know, Eddie, we're going to get into, like, where are the sort of unique, kind of, I don't know, philosophical overlaps between American dynamism and crypto, which I actually, there are many kind of similar personality profiles of the founders that are attracted to these categories. But I think if people question how can you do it all? Or what is the unifying force between all of these categories, go back and read Mark's techno optimist manifesto. Right. Because that to me exemplifies how all of these things are really on the same hero's journey.

D (4:59)

Yeah. I think you need to riff on Chris Dixon's great line. Everything great starts looking like a toy. Toys or games can inspire so much beyond that can sort of be a playground to experiment with new technologies that can then, you know, sort of be the inspiration for something way bigger or very different. And then to your point, it's all a boiling pot. But I also think the toys or games or platforms themselves are underrated, just as is. I remember Thiel's famous line. We wanted flying cars. We got 140 characters. Turns out 140 characters is way more impactful than flying cars. So these toys or games or products are underrated just on their own merits. So separate from them being inspiration for.

B (5:32)

Other things, I actually have a great story, a very timely story about this. We were just in Washington D.C. with Mark and a senator who I won't name was in the meeting and was talking about what could be very valuable for the defense world. And he was talking about basically in Ukraine, just how this just in time, manufacturing then feeds into building things in the trenches very quickly and basically doing this iteration live with people who are then using the products, changing the products every few days. And his sort of question was, why can't we do this inside the defense industrial base? And Mark actually responded to him and he said, well, we do this with toys. This is how we build hardware toys. Of course we can do this with hardware in America, because this is how any type of toy is built. Any type of hardware is built. Like, you iterate very rapidly and you can iterate in the field. It's only in defense where we don't do this. Right. Because there's infrastructure that makes it impossible for us to do this. But it is very possible. And we do it in consumer Land. And so I thought that was like a very interesting thing. You could kind of see the light bulbs going off like, oh, American dynamism actually does exist in various categories. And you can bring some of those learnings from consumer land into defense land, and it will be incredibly impactful. And clearly that's what the Ukrainians have done. Yeah.

D (6:39)

Let's segue to the crypto American dynamism interplay. Eddie. I remember we were at a retreat a few years ago and someone smartly asked, hey, how do we think about. On the one hand, we're trying to strengthen American power and strengthen the dollar and strengthen our influence globally. And on the other hand, crypto seems like it could be a threat to that to some degree. How do we sort of think about how American dynamism and crypto are interlinked from a philosophical, practical level?

A (7:02)

Yeah. So the trick here is that, like, American whatever. Right. Is kind of hiding what values are underneath it. Right. I think of crypto as freedom promoting technology Right now, in the case. In the horrible case, and I don't think that's the case today where America becomes not freedom promoting. Right. Then you could see, I guess you could see crypto as a hedge. And that's kind of what Satoshi meant when he was talking about the banking system failing. Right. And he wanted to create this technological option. I think of him as trying to create in software a way to represent those same values that was in some sense immune to whatever the states happened to be doing at the time. So I don't think that there are necessarily replacements. I think that they're compliments. Right. They're trying to get at the same underlying value system, the same concepts about freedom to move capital, property rights for individuals, the ability of capital to flow freely, payments to flow freely, for people to be able to own things. Just two different mechanisms for putting them in place. And I don't think that they're replacements by any means. There will be states for the foreseeable future. There will be the Internet for the foreseeable future. How do you want them to actually represent these things? I think they can be incredibly complementary. There's another spin on it kind of connecting to what we were talking about now is experimentation, being able to experiment with the means of ownership and the means of morphing and moving around capital. That's hard to do because you have to do it in the construct of the state. And the state has certain degrees of freedom that it can take. Right. It has to be very, very careful and very protective of these Things for totally good reasons. If you can allow those types of experiments to happen in a totally open source and visible way out in the public for everybody to scrutinize in a way that doesn't give anyone outside the state asymmetric power, then you allow for those exact types of experiments. Another way to put it is, does the state really want someone outside the state to have all the power and to make all these experiments? I don't think it does. I think that what the state would like to see if the state is freedom promoting and in America, it certainly is. I think the state would like to see people doing these experiments in a way that's totally visible and legible. Right. And that's exactly what crypto does. So I see there being profound conceptual overlaps. Like, we haven't even talked about, like, privacy. We haven't even talked about ways that consumers can be actually protected. I have a whole riff on how the whole point of crypto is actually to protect consumers from software developers. Right. And that's really what it is.

B (9:35)

But anyway, the things that I've anecdotally seen the connection on, and again, I'm not a crypto person, I consider myself kind of a normie. But the things that I've picked up on over 10 years of investing is really like philosophical alignment between the types of founders who start crypto companies and the types of founders who start American dynamism companies. So much so that some founders that we have backed, I will not out them without their permission, but some founders that we have backed that are now leading uniforms corn companies in American dynamism were toying with the idea, do I want to start something in crypto, or do I want to start something in American dynamism? And people would say, like, that's crazy, right? Like one's like hardware ones, you know, like, these are completely different things. But from a philosophical level, the conversations we were having about what does America need? Like, what are the biggest problems for our generation? Like, these people are very aligned at what the problems are 100%. And I think that's probably where there's the most alignment. Right. Like, you could come to different results. Like I always say, like, Balaji and I have a ton in common. We come to completely different ends on where we end up in many cases, but we have a ton in common on what we agree is the problem. Right. And so I think in some ways there's like a unifying sort of philosophical connection between the people who operate in these ecosystems. And then the other thing that I always point out that's an anecdote too, is like the first time that like I've like the sovereign individual and sort of like the canonical books that led to people really investigating. Is this a category? All of those people that introduced those books to me like 10 years ago when I first moved to the Valley, those people are like all American dynamism. Hardware, early SpaceX investors, early Palantir. These people have a lot in common philosophically. And when you look at sort of the, even just the way I describe myself as an American dynamist, I always describe myself as a federalist. Like someone who was in, in deep favor of.

A (11:25)

I thought you said you're a normie.

B (11:30)

Right? Yeah, maybe. Right. But like I believe in federalism. That's why I live in Florida. Like I believe in the federalist experiment. Right. I think that's something that's like under discussed about what makes America extraordinary and unique and sort of the, the. The where is decentralization most prominent in the tech community? It is in the crypto world, right? Like that's, that's where you actually words and it's very much aligned to, I would say a strain of, you know, political philosophy that really focuses on sort of the federalist experiment as the unique part of America, not necessarily the, you know, the other parts that people always point to as like, makes America great. So in some ways I think like there's, there's a ton of alignment between how the people view why it's so necessary to build for America in a startup versus why it's, you know, why, you know, anyone could go into government, they could go into other means to serve their country. But I think there's a lot of philosophical alignment from like why you need American dynamism companies and why decentralization is important in tech.

A (12:27)

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I put the bluntest, the most blunt point I can put on it is that it's incredibly obvious that crypto is American culturally. Like the crypto ethos is a uniquely American cultural phenomenon.

B (12:41)

I didn't know if we were allowed to claim it. I'm glad you do.

A (12:44)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean there's a lot of things that people don't appreciate are really American that feel like they're the global.

B (12:50)

Now, but as, as is the startup. The startup is an American concept. Founder is an American concept. Right. Like why do we call them founders? Like, you know it. We don't use the French term, we don't use entrepreneur. You know, it is a very American thing. What we do or not what I do, but what, what the people we support do.

D (13:08)

It is interesting how ironic that China got sort of an early lead on some of this open source AI stuff. And going back to Catherine's mention of some of the meetings in D.C. one of the things senators were asking Mark is just about the US China sort of AI race and what we should do. And Mark has this phrase which is are we going to win by being more like them or more like us, more like our values and leaning into what made us so great. And I found that a really compelling phrasing and it is just interesting as we're at a time where sort of AI policy is going to be litigated and then set in terms of how we could. Pete, maybe let's use that as a segue into, into the stories of the day. There's been a lot of stories of the week. There's been a lot in healthcare this week. We had Dr. Bhattacharya on the day of the autism announcement. You know, we were joking that the administration has previously been so friendly to Silica Valley startups, but now with this work in reducing autism, you know, it seems like a grave threat. No, on a surface. Katherine, what struck you about some of the health related news of the week?

B (14:17)

One of the things that I've been reflecting on a lot and again, I know we're going to talk about Eddie has a new arrival to his family. I'm going to have my third child just here in a few months. But there's something about the way that this generation understands medicine that I actually think comes from the Internet. Is your doctor now? And maybe 10 years ago there was a lot of fear around that. There was a lot of, oh, you can't trust the Internet. You can't trust, you know, information sources that are not, you know, reviewed by government and aren't, aren't passed down by experts. And I think we're just living in this like completely different reality where the people who are having children now who are sort of entering their 30s, their 40s and really vocal around a lot of these topics grew up in an age of just completely distributed information, particularly around things like medicine. And they follow the wisdom of crowds. They've been pitched. I just posted about sort of the history of OxyContin, right, where it's like there was a whole decade where they were preparing class action action lawsuits against Purdue Pharma before 2013 when FDA, you know, took the drug off the market and it had been on the market for 20 years as sort of this miracle drug. And so I think what you're seeing from this generation isn't like skepticism of experts. It's like, it's not how it's portrayed. Like, you know, the New York Times had this big expose maybe a week ago where they were like, you can't trust these sort of Internet quacks. Right? And it's like, like Gwyneth Paltrow's been selling us weird stuff for like 15 years. And like, it's like it's so part of our DNA now that you can't call it quackery. You can't, you kind of have to call it like wisdom of crowds. And I've, you know, I have a lot of doctor friends, I have a lot of people I grew up with who are in the medical community. And the way that these doctors practice medicine now is they realize that you're not just practicing it in the, the, you know, the, the, the doctor's office. Like you're competing with all of these different information sources, all of these different backgrounds. People are a lot more open with their questions. I'm having my third child. I joke. It's my chatgpt baby, because I upload every single medical diagnostic, every blood report, everything to ChatGPT and it gives me a ton of data that the doctors don't have time to give me. I share it with my doctors. They think it's cool. It's like we're just in this totally different generation where people are a lot more open minded and they expect things to swing faster than the Purdue pharma case, which was a 20 year, you know, it was a 20 year issue where it went from this is a miracle drug to this is terrible for you. And I just think people have expectations of speed.

A (16:59)

Yeah, My, my wife has been the same. Like she's a total expert on all this stuff. I would frame it as, and I really, channeling this through the lens of like seeing my wife really spend so much time on this is like it's just a higher information standard. It's a higher epistemic standard. It's not just skeptical of experts. It's maybe resisting the idea to accept like un, un. Unchallenged what the first expert you talk to said. Right. That's how I'm seeing it. We, we see doctors and, but we come to, we always come to the doctor now informed by a bunch of research. And that's also not taking for granted even what ChatGPT says, to be honest. I'll send the same thing to ChatGPT, Anthropic and Grok at the same time, force them to fight against each other and then end up with just kind of a list of interesting sources that I put in front of the doctor. Right. Like, that's, like, that's. That. That's the. That's the feedback loop now. And I think that's far better. Of course. It's so funny when people say elements make mistakes. Like, yeah, of course they make mistakes, but so do human doctors. So what's the, you know, so what's the answer? Right. The answer is obvious. A more rigorous standard of information, More information sources, uncorrelated channels of information. Right. How do you do that? How do you do more information processing? Well, computers and the Internet. Right. And AI models. It's like, it's all. It's actually not that complicated a way to see the world. It shouldn't be so miraculous to see it this way. Like, yet it is, right?

B (18:27)

Totally. Well, and it's so funny, I was having this exact conversation with my phlebotomist at LabCorp. Like, I. I'm like, how often do you see people come in and talk to you about, like, what they've uploaded to Chat GPT? He's like, all the time. He's like, this is like one of the number one use cases, like, of, you know, like, he did say use cases, right? He's like a norm. But he was like, yeah, like, no one just goes to the doctor. No one just comes here and then gives their results to the doctor and has them read them out. Like, everyone is putting them into Chat GPT. Everyone is having some sort of additional analysis. And it's been op. Like, it's been eye opening for people. And in some ways I feel like we should feel really good that, like, America is adopting, you know, like, like adopting, like, questioning, wanting more information. Like, this is a good thing. In some ways I feel like, you know, when people were always talking about, it was like that, yeah, maybe that was like 1.0, but like, here we are now and people really want more information.

A (19:18)

Yeah. What people are worried about, I think, is when they imagine that someone just picks the cheapest, lowest IQ LLM, and then accepts the first thing that it says. Uncritical. Right? That's what people imagine and that's what they're worried about. But that's. That's the same thing if you go to a terrible doctor who you just happen to get. It's kind of the same effect, to be honest. Like, I totally. I'll make this as short as possible. But a few years ago I was kind of worried about my cholesterol and I had a new gp, my old GP retired and this, this candidate GP they put in front of me. First thing she says when she sees my cholesterol, she says, oh, I think, you know, you should probably eat fewer eggs. Which is like a, totally based on a discredited like 60 year old study on rabbits. That's like completely wrong way to think about serum cholesterol and dietary cholesterol. And she was in her 30s, this doctor was in her 30s. So I was just like, what? Where did you get this? And I pulled up chat GPT and I was like, CEO, this is like not a thing. And she was shocked, mind blown. I don't think all doctors are like this. I don't think people should assume that all doctors are incompetent by any means. But, but the, the point is that we have more tools at our disposal. So. Totally agree with that Catherine.

B (20:30)

Totally.

D (20:30)

I, the autism rates have significantly increased the past couple of decades. I want to segue this to ADHD in a second, but do we have a pet conspiracy theory on, on why or is it just purely a diagnosis thing?

B (20:47)

Well, I mean I want to get to the, the adhd. I actually think we're, let's move to ADHD because I think that one, one I'm more familiar with it. I'm not gonna say personally but like more familiar with the data. Right. I have sons, so I'm like preparing myself for the inevitable ADHD diagnosis. And that's like even a weird thing to say, right? I have, you know, a four, a four and a half year old and a two and a half year old and just looking at their energy levels, I always joke like I have to run them before they go to school because if I don't get the energy out, like, like a dog before they go to school, like something, something will happen in school and it will be, oh, and I can already kind of see. And I don't blame, again, I don't blame teachers for this. I don't blame doctors. These are more like systematic issues. Like if you have an energetic boy, it's mostly boys, right? Like I think the New York Times expose that came out a couple months ago basically said that 17% or no, 23% of all 17 year old boys have been given an ADHD diagnosis. So that's one in four boys in America. There's something wrong with them. Right? And you can say, okay, there's clearly something wrong with all these boys. Or you can say, okay, we're, we're medicating boyhood. But what is it about, you know, what is it about why, like, why is it incentivized that doctors give them this diagnosis? And why is it, why is it, you know, something that I think teachers, in some ways, I don't want to say encourage, but, but it is sort of this strange thing where if you have a child who is very energetic in a pre K, they, they sort of say, well, you know, next time at their four year old checkup, maybe talk to them about some of these behavioral things, right? And like now my son is like an angel. He's like grown up like a little bit. And they're like, oh, he's doing green school, right? But for like a year we were like, oh, he clearly, clearly is just a high energy boy. And the, the incentive systems around a lot of these things are like, if you go to the doctor, parents one want these adhd, you know, want these diagnoses and the reason they parents want them is because it gives you extra time, it gives you extra resources. You can then opt your kid out of certain things in school. It makes school more manageable for high energy boys. The reasons the school wants it is because they get more dollars from the state if they have special needs students across a variety of different special needs. Everyone knows this, that the schools will tell you this, right? So it's like it is better if they have a student who needs additional attention or in their words, or needs something special for them to get the diagnosis from the doctor. Again, the diagnosis is not something that anyone stigmatizes anymore. And then the school can get more dollars from the state. But what that means is that both parents and teachers are incentivized for a number of different reasons, especially if you're like, wow, like my kid's about to take the act and I want them to have an extra hour so that they can perform higher than the other, you know, 25% of children who have this diagnosis. So there's a systematic reasons why people are actually asking for the diagnosis. And you know what I've joked with both of you all is it takes like a very disagreeable, sadly principled mother to be like, no, like I'm not getting my hyper energetic boy a diagnosis for life. And I'm definitely like not gonna put him on drugs because I realized the incentive system that's set up and it's funny, like again, like a couple years ago if you talked about this, you were an absolute Quack. And then this piece comes out in the New York Times, you know, in April, and it's like, oh yeah, actually the medical community kind of agrees that like this adh, like Adderall pill mill thing might be a huge problem. And so I think there's something about, you know, if you, if you look at Purdue Pharma, if you look at ADHD and you look at sort of our generation's experience with the medical community, you know, it's like it is this like consistent experience of all the incentives of large systems that go beyond individuals are pushing you to one thing. And years later you might find out, as Eric has found out, you didn't need Ritalin.

D (24:32)

Right.

B (24:32)

You're just an energetic guy.

D (24:35)

Yeah.

A (24:36)

And there's no downside to a diagnosis. That's the thing. You have total optionality on whether you want to take the medication. You have no downside in school. Even a very well meaning teacher who may, like there's almost like an optimism actually in giving these diagnoses because we're saying like, look like we can identify the pathologies in students, we want to help students, we have tools to help them. And so, and there's no downside to identifying them, misidentifying them. So let's just generously hand these out. Right. Like, like I, I, I see it, I see nothing but good intention.

B (25:08)

Oh, totally.

A (25:09)

Things and you know, I was the same, I was the same. Eric, we were talking about this before. I also had an ADHD diagnosis when I Forget how old, 8 or 9 years old. Whatever. In retrospect, I think it was totally nonsense. Right. Like I, I mean, whatever. Not for everybody necessarily, but in my case I think it was, it was nonsense and it was just, it was just that my behavior was not kind of fitting within what they believed was the proper mold and they wanted to help fix me. Right. Yeah, like that's like how they thought of it. I hated Ritalin. I tried Concert or Ritalin, Dexedrin or you know, I mean all this stuff. Vyvanse. I tried, I tried them all, hated them all. Turns out that just a little bit of like guilt and discipline was what, what you really, what you honestly needed. Yeah, yeah. In my case, in my case at least, but I see. But, but more specifically connecting to that and, and to some degree the autism, although I'm not as you know, I don't have as much personal experience with that. The, one of the issues is the diagnostic criteria can shift. Right. As people want to identify these cases, see very little downside. In identifying them, they may broaden, right. In an effort to preciseify the diagnostic criteria, they may broaden it. And I've heard that as a plausible explanation among ADHD and autism cases. Part of explaining the rise, right? It can be rising or it can just be that you're moving down the curve of diminishing marginal precision and identifying more and more and more cases with the hope that you can, with very little cost, treat the issue. And so that alone can explain what appears to be an increase in prevalence.

D (26:55)

Yeah, they sort of told me I had ADHD because I wouldn't focus in school and just did whatever I wanted. But that's because I just hated school. I could actually focus on things I was super interested in. And I think it's an interesting segue to Alpha School, which is getting a lot of attention right now. And I know, Eddie, in just having newborn, you're thinking about, about future, future schooling. And obviously, Catherine, you've talked quite a bit about it. Alpha school is interesting because one of their main KPIs is do kids love school? And my school is. I don't know about you guys, but mine was like a prison. Like, I didn't have any inspiring teachers in elementary school or middle school. Like, it was so boring. And so it's exciting to see kind of different, different models. And I have, you know, parent friends who are starting to homeschool their kids and just think about kind of alternative. Eddie, how have you been thinking about it?

A (27:41)

I mean, I feel like there's three branches now, right? There's three possible ways. There's the traditional school system, and by that I mean both public and private schools, right? I just mean like conventional school system. There's this somewhat growing alternative school system. I think Alpha School is a really cool example that I'd love to learn a lot more about. I saw this fantastic interview on X a couple weeks ago about it. And then the third is like something that I've heard people talk about but maybe doesn't exist yet. Maybe that actually just gets ended up merging into branch two, which is like the AI tutor world, right? Where like every kid gets a Socrates, right? Like that's that, that, that, like that line. I think they're all so, so interesting. But what has really leapt out to me about like the Alpha School and even the Socrates option is it turns out there's, with all this great development in software, we can put an infinite treadmill in front of kids about things that they can learn, right? At a low cost, infinite treadmill where they can Just train and learn whatever they want to. Arbitrary depth. And designing something that is rigorous enough and gives them strong enough feedback and kind of encourages them to really maximize that. That seems like the educational challenge of the 21st century to me. You couldn't do that before, right? You couldn't do that 30 years ago when you had to put them in a space with specific teachers who have specific strengths and have to get specific expensive books and stuff. Now it's just like an unbounded road ahead. I'm very, very excited about the prospect of being able to give kind of arbitrary depth to whatever interesting, challenging topic is available to my, to my son.

B (29:14)

And what's interesting about our children versus how we grew up is that arbitrary depth couldn't be nurtured when we were kids around random things, right? Like you would have to go to the public library and see if there's a book on septic tank installation, which my son was into about six months ago, like deeply into septic tanks. Now he's into garbage disposals. There is no book in the public library that has that on garbage disposals and how they work.

A (29:41)

Absolutely not. Of course not.

B (29:41)

But there are hundreds of YouTube videos, right? Like on how to install your own garbage disposal. How does it work? Like diagrams, like all the things that he's interested in. As a kid who's obsessed with garbage.

A (29:53)

Disposals, that's so cool.

B (29:54)

So in some ways it's like our kids play comes before they go to school and their play is so hyper specialized and their entertainment is so hyper specialized. And if you're like a very hands on parent and your kid's like, I want to learn about septic tanks like you, you help them learn about that in a way that like parents before, like, unless you knew a lot about septic tanks or had a friend in that business, how are you going to educate your kid on how that works?

A (30:18)

So I think, and some people may react to say, like, what's the point of your kid learning about septic tanks? Right? Or like arbitrage disposals, right? And the thing is, it's so obvious to me that. But if you really learn a lot about how a garbage disposal works, like you really like get into the. Like you see one cut in half and a diagram and you see the pipes and you kind of learn about like there's so many proximate or adjacent things to that that end up generalizing. I promise you that a kid who becomes an expert in it, just how a garbage disposal works, a little kid, they're so Primed to learn about like other mechanical systems, other hydraulic systems, like the manufacturer of like bespoke applian. Like there's so many cool things next to that. I just think of when I was a kid and I was learning those types of things as much as I could and which is not nearly as much as you could now, and you end up just applying, reapplying, reapplying that knowledge. Like the compounding nature of knowledge is maybe its most interesting part. If you can really allow a kid to lean as deep as possible into that, into that thing, just go as deep as you conceivably can. I think the benefits are unbelievable. So I'm excited to find how to do that for my kid. You know, I don't know yet. I'm really excited about Alpha school and weird stuff like that. I do wonder though, like maybe to put the other spin on it, how much of that is a selection effect, right? Like the incredible results of Alpha school, I actually believe them completely. Like I totally believe these positive results. I just wonder to what extent those results are. Crazy ass parents who did a ton of work and have like infinite resources at their disposal to jam them into this obscure school. Like, like these are obviously not normal families that are doing it right. So I want to ensure, I mean, I'll exploit every tool at my disposal obviously for my kid, but I'm also think about like, you know, what are the kinds of things that we can learn and apply to all kids?

B (32:10)

Totally, totally. And the other thing that's really interesting is like, you know, I am not, I'm very sympathetic to the homeschooling movement. I'm not a homeschooler for obvious reasons, but you can like do a lot of the homeschool stuff on the weekend. And one of the things that I've become much more sympathetic to now that I have, you know, kids who are exhibiting their own passions and sort of own personalities. Like, there is probably something good about being a slightly weird kid in a school. You know, Like I remember that experience of being like kind of bored or slightly weird and being in a normal school around normal people. And that was like a very good fit. Like I look back on, I'm like, that was probably very good for me and it's probably very good for like, you know, there's one school of thought which is you have a bright kid or a weird kid or someone who's really interested in something and you put them in alpha school and like let them go down the rabbit hole. Which again, I think that's awesome. But then there's the other thing. Like, boredom's actually good. Like, a lot of our life is pretty boring. Like, it is important to learn how to work in big systems. Like, it is important to kind of realize that, like, not everyone's gonna, like, entertain your weird rabbit hole. And so there is something about, like, getting that lesson early and having that sort of. I'm bored. I hate school. I'm gonna figure out how to make it interesting for me that, like, could be very valuable for kids as well. So I'm always, like, on the fence. Like, I feel like you can kind of dabble in different things and, like, you know, on the weekends, teach one thing, during the week, teach another, and the outcomes are probably gonna be the same no matter what. But there's choice, right? Like, there's. It's good that there's a lot of choice now so the parents can know their kid can be like, oh, like, clearly my kid's gonna thrive in a individualized, personalized environment. Or actually, I have this kid who, like, is, you know, the. The ham of the group and, like, loves being in school and, like, put them in school. It'll be great.

D (33:56)

Yeah. Yeah. I think a hybrid is interesting. There's certainly a lot to be learned for navigating social hierarchies and, you know, all these different types of people. I. I'd. I'd. I'd. I'd say maybe there's, in my case, maybe diminishing returns after. After learning those. Those skills.

B (34:10)

I think one thing that's skills. Eric, you did?

D (34:13)

Yeah, exactly. One thing that's interesting in about Alpha school that I'll say is they customize the lesson plans based on what the kid is interested in. So as a kid, I was obsessed with basketball, but. And I didn't like school, I would. I remember writing a note to my math teacher being like, what's the point of math? Like, help me understand why I need to learn math. Because this just doesn't seem like relevant to my life. And they just didn't give a compelling answer. But you could imagine a world where it's like, okay, you love basketball. You want to be a GM of this team. Like, figure out the salary cap or, like, figure out, like, what players based on other players based on statistical, you know, analysis. Like, there's just so many ways they could have made it super relevant to my interest.

A (34:51)

100%. I love that.

B (34:53)

All right, Eddie. I want to hear how fatherhood has. Has been. I always. I always feel like the first few months of, you know, becoming a new mom or dad. You have like all these like weird insights that are partially driven by sleep deprivation and then partially driven by this new important experience that happen in your life. So I'd love to hear the high level takeaways as they're fresh.

A (35:14)

Yeah, that's a great question. So much has crossed my mind. It is, it is, it is crazy. I mean, I, I would say the most. The thing that has struck me, the I'm only a month in, right? So like, am I a father? I don't even know if I'm a father, right? Like I, I, I like this little guy who's around but like, am I a dad? Like, I'm not, I'm no different, right? So I'll say that. But I am struck by how obvious it is how totally helpless they are, right? They are like functionally blind, deaf, like they're like a little ball of like nothing, right? It's ridiculous. It really struck. This is such a dorky thing to have observed. So I almost regret. But, but the, it's just, it's so obvious how human intelligence is the reason why they are allowed to be so pathetic when they're born, right? Because we're so capable of extremely specialized caregiving that they would never have survived without it. So like their helplessness is kind of the mirror of our capability. And we should like take that, we should like really lean into that. Like that is what human beings are to some degree specialized for. I feel that so intensely. I also feel like incredible empathy for people who don't have, like, who don't have maternity or paternity leave or don't have resources to put it, because my God, if I had to, like, I took a couple weeks off and my wife is on maternity leave still, it's great. Without that it would be incredibly difficult. And it makes it very obvious to me how, why in some sense like fertility is declining because the opportunity cost of this suffering is massive, right? It's a massive cost now. It's totally worth it. I know the hackneyed thing you hear from parents like all the time. Like it's horrible also. It's great. Do it. That's like the thing you always hear. I heard the same thing. I'm going to repeat exactly that same thing. But it highlights for me that the more opportunity you have and the more things that you could be doing, which is just obviously the case in light of progress, like general technological progress, the more you're kind of giving up when you do it. And I think people find that choice in advance very daunting and very scary. Now I would encourage them to take the leap, but I understand why it's daunting when you hear all these stories. It's very, that's very fresh in my mind.

B (37:37)

Totally, totally. And that's, that's one of the, I always point to like the, you know, the rise of cheap airfare and sort of international travel also becoming sort of like a widespread middle class phenomena. Right. Like it's, it's not like you have to be, you know, like when we were growing up, if you knew someone who went to Europe, you were like, seriously, like, how, how did you do that? Right. Like it was like it was a very luxurious, elite thing to do. And I think, you know, when you look at sort of the sort of. That is like a, you know, if you, if you're fortunate enough to go to university, like, you know, you can travel abroad anywhere, right? Like universities like, you know, make that, make that a possibility where it's like life has become so much more interesting. As you said, opportunity costs across a wide degree of sets where the, you, you are having to think through. Okay. Like you might have the most interesting life. You might get to go to brunch, right? I don't get to go to brunch anym. You might get to go to brunch and like that might be an enjoyable thing you do every Saturday. So like that, that is, that is definitely, I think a huge part of it. The other thing that I'll point out, like my, my experience of I'm fortunate enough to have my, my mother live with us and she has been a godsend in holding these babies as they cry for, for those of us who, you know, who, who are, are working and that sort of thing. And it's like there used to be sort of a familial unit that took care. I mean like it's very, it's only been like the last, you know, like the, the nuclear.

A (39:01)

That is so apparent to me. That is so apparent to me.

B (39:03)

Yes. Yeah. Especially if you don't have it. You're like, how do, how do two people do this? It's like, well, it used to be a tribe and then like only until the nuclear family post war did we really move to suburbs and separate sort of multi generational family units from each other. Where then you have, you know, one mother doing this all alone. Which of course was the big complaint was loneliness in the 50s and 60s of these housewives. Right. Like, even though they didn't work, it was just extreme loneliness that had never really existed because you were constantly surrounded by siblings, family, multi generations and that sort of thing. So there is something about that aspect too, where if you're in a city, it's almost impossible to have that experience of having a multi generational family.

A (39:42)

There are so many trivial questions that come to mind, right. When you have a baby, right? Like especially the first one. So many like, is this normal, Is this weird? How do I fix this problem that comes up so much? It's so obvious to me how many of those questions which once you kind of get the answer, it's easy, kind of, you figure it out pretty fast. But so many of those things would be obvious if you're growing up around a family where there's a lot of children already and a lot of people who had been caretakers of children and they would, you would just have absorbed it either through osmosis or through a benign observation by mom or dad or grandma or grandpa, right? They just would have said like, oh yeah, yeah, we just do this thing and there'd just be nothing. Whereas now, like, yeah, I'm sure you have many parents, like through totally understandable neuroses, worry about the most trivial thing and like go to the doctor and it becomes this like entire rigmarole, right? Whereas we forget like that little thing that was lost, the, the, the, the, the benefit of just the family around many, there's many little things that lost.

D (40:44)

It's interesting because there's sort of a left wing and a right wing critique of the nuclear family these days. And the right wing critique or from the right, I think similar to what we just said of like, hey, it used to be you had much more support and we sort of lost that support and we need that support. And from the left, it's kind of like it's the opposite. It's like, don't you dare assume that people need two parents at home to, you know, to raise a kid. Or don't you dare assume that not everybody's gay or bisexual or polyamorous or so like, don't assume that this is the, this is the default. And so it leads to just, you know, the nuclear family being critiqued from all sides for almost opposite reasons.

B (41:20)

Yeah, yeah, I think, I think there is, I would hope there's large scale agreement that people need help, that if you, if you see someone in your life who is having a baby, help them. They need help. No matter who it comes from or what, what form it is, it is definitely not something to be, to be done alone in a vacuum, whether it's friends, whether it's family, or kind of any form.

D (41:48)

So I want to segue to another topic I wanted to talk about. You know, we. And it's related to the Charlie Kirk assassination. And we released an episode that Katherine did on Barry Weiss's podcast, honestly, which was a beautiful sort of, you know, you know, commentary on the assassination and Charlie's martyrdom. And we had the funeral the other day, which is one of the most moving things I've ever seen. And Eddie, we were talking offline, and you talked a little bit about how to sort of the reactions to the assassination as it sort of played out on the Internet, sort of demonstrated a bit of a gap between sort of zoomer culture, Internet culture, and sort of, you know, the rest of the population. Why don't you sort of share that reflection?

A (42:27)

Well, something that really stuck out to me was how I think there's a pervasive. Well, there was a belief maybe that as the Internet became mainstream, Internet culture would become mainstream. Right. And that in some sense, like culture and Internet, the line between so called Internet culture and mainstream culture would dissolve. Right. Because of its mainstreaming. And there's a lot of truth to that. Right. A lot of people are kind of parts of the normal mimetic and cultural milieu is Internet based. But I was really struck by how. What I considered. Because I'm kind of like. I mean, I'm like a normie here in these kinds of settings, Eric. Like on a podcast, I'm a little bit. I'm a specialized, but whatever. But like, in real life, you know, in real life, I have like a. A discord of a bunch of my friends who are like, I've been running for like eight years and I play video games. And you know, my friends and I.

B (43:23)

Met on the Internet.

A (43:25)

Yeah, no, yeah, no, I know, it's crazy.

B (43:29)

You know, arson.

A (43:31)

It's uncanny. Yeah, that's true. But, you know, there's. There's like this whole universe that I've been in and like, most of my friends are in, right? And like even like crypto culture, like part of why my crypto network in the Bay Area started, like, very online and whatever, whatever. But I was struck by how when they shared a lot of the memes and references that this shooter was engaging in and sort of the kind of culture he was in, it was a culture I'm very familiar with. Right, Just like discord, gamer, online zoomer culture. Like, there's many concentric circles. I'm not so much in furry culture, you know, but. But like it's adjacent to cultures that I'm in. So all the reference, even like the Helldivers 500kg bomb, like, Arrow sequence is like something my friends and I know, right? Like, it was obvious to me. And when I saw a lot of people on my Facebook, like, people I hardly check my Facebook, my big, big blue Facebook, I saw so many people speculating about the meaning of these things, right? And they were so off. They were just unbelievably off. It was like they were scrutinizing like an alien culture. And it really struck me that although there have been elements of Internet culture that have mainstreamed, we have managed to create isolated pockets that will just permanently remain separated. And it's like, let me try to put a really fine point on this one thing is because the Internet is so open by default, anyone can make an account anywhere. I think there's this assumption that it's all accessible and therefore should permeate. But. But we have managed to create new gradients, new selection methods to create isolated little corners of the Internet, like gamer culture. You can't learn those things unless you play games, right? Like, you have to play a bunch of video games and know a bunch of people play video games to be a part of that. We've still, despite things being more connected than ever, there are still these distant branches and rabbit holes. And it just got me really thinking about, like, the diversity of online culture and what leads to the proliferation of many diverse online cultures and their mutual unintelligibility.

B (45:38)

I love that you brought this up, Eddie, because I had a conversation with my best friend Normie throwing that out. I am a creature of the Internet, clearly. But, but, but I was having a conversation with her at one point last week, and I explicitly remember saying to her, your Insta is not my ex. Like, we were totally different worlds. Like, like what she was saying from, from her takes on things on Instagram last week was wildly different than what I had seen on X. Right. And I think there's, there's something about. I actually think X is sort of a unifying platform from all of the different pockets that you talked about. Because if you're, if you're a power user of X, a lot of the early data that was coming out on anything, I, I mean, not just, not just Charlie Kirk's assassination, but, but on to X. Early people really do the investigative work. Early last week I was saying, you know, it's. It, it probably like, I don't know if The FBI or if intelligence agencies actually have people. I mean, there's that whole meme of like, the, you know, the show that was just taken off the air because maybe for a variety of reasons, but that old meme of, like, people looking at the Internet and saying, like, is what's going on here? What are these kids talking about? Right? But, like, there is probably some truth to the fact that it's so siloed from what, like just real world law enforcement or real world government officials, like the worlds they live in, that the information gets to them late. There's an information lapse. Like, you really want to know what's going on on anything, whether it's, you know, a tragic event or even the election. Right. Like, I think, you know, I talked to a lot of people about the election 2024, and I said, like, it, you know, the. The meme X is not real life. Like, no, no. X was the only place if you were spending time on X. Yeah, yeah.

A (47:27)

Exactly what I feel really strongly about. I check. I check so many sources. I mean, Reddit for many years. I even check Blue sky occasionally. Instagram, Facebook. Like, I'm all, you know. And I will honestly, I can say with total conviction that although there's of course a lot of, like, misinformation on X, as there would be on any rich and complex and highly engaged system.

B (47:52)

As. Is there misinformation in your PTA group. Right? Like, problems here. Misinformation all the time.

A (47:58)

If you want to find, like, the ground truth and you do the legwork and you kind of, like, follow the right people and you kind of go through and really, like, look for it. The answer is probably on X in a way that is unlike other places. And I really struggle with that. I wonder whether that's like a cultural thing. Like, it has to do with the type of people on it. Right. It's its roots as a journalistic, you know, outlet and so on. Or is it something technological? Right. Does it have to do with the fact that it's an open graph, quote, tweets, and sort of like correcting people is a part of the norm in a way that is just totally not on Facebook or on Instagram. You know, they even lack that technical capability. Right. Is it. So, in other words, is it like the product features that lead to this sort of dialogical conflict that often ends up with the truth? Or is it. Or is it just the people? I don't know really, but it's an interesting thing.

B (48:48)

There is something about. I think it also could be generational. And I haven't really thought through this fully, but I said something on X, like, a couple weeks ago that resonated with people, which was that I feel like there's this elder millennial cohort that is really, really good at translating across the entire living existence of humanity right now, right? Like, we remember what the world was like before the Internet, and that's like 1980s and 1986. We have deep memories of landlines, of, like, car phones, right? Like, we remember the 80s, but we also remember the 90s, right? Like, there's something about, like, we remember the shifts, but we're also, like, we're not digital natives, but we grew up with the Internet, and so we understand the pace of change. And there's something about, like, I look at, like, you know, AOC is kind of part of. Maybe she's a little on the cusp of this cohort, but, like, J.D. vance is on this cohort. You know, a lot of sort of our political leadership, I think, is going to come from this cohort that were members. But, like, also is very fluent. Like, I'd say, like, we have the first poster in chief and the vice president, right? So it's like, there's something about X that maybe captures a generation that's like, really good at amalgamating across different platforms, right? Like, you. You spend a lot of time on Discord. Like, you know, there are a lot of people who also spend time on Facebook and Insta who are on X, right? So they're able to, like, so there's something about it being like a truly. Not like just the global town square, but like, it's a translation layer. And then the other thing that I, that I often tell people, because they're like, like, people will say horrible things back to you after you post. Does it bother you? And I'm like, no, it's actually great because it gives you a theory of mind for people you otherwise would not have a theory of mind for. And I think there's something about sort of the pseudo anonymous accounts on X that actually do a really good job of giving you a full picture.

A (50:34)

I agree so strongly with that. I agree so strongly. In fact, it's. That has. That exactly has been my big argument for why it matters that you're engaging with real people on certain networks, not on networks like on TikTok, for example. I don't think it matters whether the content was specific, if it's just for entertainment, was specifically produced totally by a machine. Like, it could be literally produced by TikTok itself through a data center. And like it wouldn't matter because it's for entertainment alone, but because of the dialogical components of X. How you're really trying to develop like a sense of what people think and you, you're getting pushed back and the add ons are fighting you.

B (51:10)

You.

A (51:11)

It's actually kind of important that they're people in a way that doesn't, that, you know, it's, it's not exactly like a poll. You know, no one would pretend that your comment section is a scientific poll, right? But you are getting, you're, you're completing, you're filling out your theory of how others may view or interpret such a thing. And it matters that they're people, different social networks. I think it will matter whether they're largely human or not or. But anyway, yeah, totally agree with that.

B (51:38)

And this is my argument too, why, why more people should post because it, it becomes a personal thing if it's like your idea and then anons are engaging with you, right? Like, it's like it becomes you, you, it like resonates more where you're like, oh, I hadn't really thought about how that would be insulting to this group. Or I hadn't really thought about how, you know, half the country would perceive this thing that I thought was innocuous. So like there is something there too where it's like you learn a ton, you get the feedback loop if you're posting, whereas if you're just looking at other people's, which is also fun, you're, you're, you're lurking. But it doesn't resonate the same way with your kind of, of core and kind of allow it to evolve.

D (52:11)

Every tweet is a focus group on some idea in a way. I remember this funny anecdote where Yan Lecun got so frustrated at X that he started posting on LinkedIn. He would respond to people on LinkedIn and someone quote, tweeted him and was like, come to X and fight me like a man, you coward. This is where the actual arena is.

B (52:31)

This is the arena.

D (52:32)

Yeah. One thing that's interesting is more broadly is, you know, the Internet has become even just since COVID more fragmented and more sort of intellectually diverse. Like, you know, I remember, you know, Mike Solana was complaining or was sort of, you know, observing the sort of activism and on Instagram around BLM and he's like, Instagram is the butt app. Why are you bringing the, you know, in Twitter, the word app. Like if you have ideas Go here. What is the point of Instagram? But I just around blm, around Ukraine, remember, you know, sort of when, when Mark had the current thing discourse, there was a lot of sort of legible unification. Like dissent was on the group chat. Dissent was private and it didn't seem to be this like public place for dissent in the same way that, you know, things like October 7th, things like the Charlie Kirk assassination, these are current things but, but in a much more diverse, like the response to it is not unified across, across the board. And I, I wonder. Yeah. Is that a response to just social media fragmenting in a different way? Whereas like Blue sky is seen as way more, you know, legitimate than Gab ever was for or sort of, you know, parlor or something. Or if it's just these, these issues are, you know, something the vibe shift is, I don't know to daddy's question if it's technological or if it's actual shift.

A (53:46)

Well, I don't think, I mean, although they're, I mean, I don't think what makes Blue Sky Blue sky is technological really. I think that has a lot to do with like, it's interesting. I always thought that like the AT protocol, the underlying like protocol was interesting. Was interesting. The effort was to be a more decentralized, open, sort of censorship resistant network. I think what makes Blue Sky Blue sky today has to do with the people who sort of seeded it in its early days. Right. And then, and then later the people who kind of exodus the to it in reaction to like different, you know, things on X and so on. And it's interesting how, how important that is. Right. The seeding culture ends up leading to the downstream culture. It's sort of a, you know, it's a. Yeah.

D (54:33)

One just quick comment. One old Curtis Yarvin idea is he would say, hey, Jeff Bezos can take over the Washington Post. Washington Post not going to change. You could take over the New York Times. It's not going to change. You could take over X. It's not going to change. And I think the last few years have disproved him in a number of ways that I did. A number of ways. But Elon taking Rex actually did change the whole sort of makeup of the, of the platform. And so it just requires an owner who's willing to, willing to do. Do what it takes.

A (54:56)

Yeah. Yeah.

B (54:57)

You can also make the argument as a former Postie that Jeff Bezos taking over the Washington Post and infusing it with limitless capital actually did change the Washington Post.

D (55:06)

Sure.

B (55:07)

Like, it changed it in the opposite direction of where people would have thought. Right. But it's like if you have a struggling. Like, part of the reason I left the Washington Post was because it was about to go into bankruptcy. And if you have a business that's actually forced to rethink its views based on competitive dynamics and where the market wants it to go, if one of the richest people in the world buys it and infuses it with cash and doesn't have a strong opinion of where it's going, you could make the argument that part of the reason why the Washington Post, why it took so long for it to. I would argue now, normalizing. Right. Like normalizing to where its readership was when I was there, which is. Is still left of center, but not nearly what it was. And you know, democracy dies in darkness land. There's. There's an argument that the actual, like, infusion of cash was actually the thing that radicalized that I think most people don't talk about when they talk about sort of these media properties and, and sort of the. The growth of them.

A (55:58)

Yeah, this is kind of an incomplete thought and related to what Catherine's saying, but. But is that every network, when it's developed, has sort of selection pressures for the participants in those networks. Right. Like, if it's a highly politically polarized group, then to get a lot of engagement, you need to kind of play to that gradient. Right. Because there's those type of people around it. Certainly unlimited money that has. Comes with a few strings attached, allows things to develop one way. On the other hand, as Elon did, scrapping 80% of the staff and you know, ripping out a lot of the priorities, discourse, guiding apparatus, which he allegedly did, that certainly changes things. But perhaps even more importantly for in Elon's case, there was this shift where certain people felt more comfortable returning, certain people wanted to exit. And so then the makeup of the graph changing led to different types of behavior. Because you're catering to a slightly evolving audience. Right. The ways that the graphs evolve is maybe very complex. So I don't think that it's simply that, like, they can't be changed or are trivial to change. I think it's kind of the type of influence is important in determining how they can change.

B (57:17)

Totally.

D (57:19)

Yeah.

B (57:19)

Can I go back to something you said about the group chat?

D (57:22)

Please?

B (57:23)

I've slightly mourned the death of the group chat. As a person who looks back fondly on those years and the friends we made. In some ways, it's probably how some people view summer camp was the group chat era. It is definitely a good thing that the group chats are no longer siloed, are no longer necessary. I do think a lot of the real interesting conversations have moved to X and that is a good thing. But there's also something about, I don't know, there was something special about that moment that, that I think all of us will always miss.

A (57:56)

There's peacetime social networks and wartime social networks.

B (58:00)

Yes, yeah. Yes. Unclear which time we're in right now.

A (58:04)

But yeah, yeah, I was going to say, I'm not sure.

D (58:07)

One other comment I want to make is, you know, you were talking about the Washington Post finally normalizing. It's been interesting how sort of the media class, the political class, has become so much more extreme than the class it reports to, than the people reports to represent. And I think that's another sort of it's going back to Eddie's point about the opportunity costs as it relates to parenting. There's also the opportunity cost as it relates to the opportunity cost of going into media or going into politics has just become so much higher that in order for people to want to do that, they have to be irrational. They have to have some irrationality, which is usually a form of activism. Sometimes it's form of principle and nobility, but other times it's a form of sort of chronic status seeking via some sort of activism. Not to be too cynical, but Eddie, thank you for being our first guest. We're excited to continue the series.

A (58:58)

My pleasure.

B (58:59)

Thanks so much, Eddie.

C (59:03)

Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X16Z and subscribe to our substack@a16z.substack.com thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the company companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com disclosures.