The Techno-Optimist Manifesto with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz

Summary

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Podcast Summary

The a16z Show

Episode: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Date: January 1, 2026
Guests: Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz
Theme: Exploring Marc Andreessen’s "Techno-Optimist Manifesto"—the cultural, philosophical, and practical stakes of optimism in the age of rapid technological growth.

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Overview: Main Theme

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz break down the arguments and reactions to the "Techno-Optimist Manifesto." They examine why technology should be seen as a force for progress and abundance rather than a harbinger of existential risk or inequality. They weave through key questions on pessimism vs optimism, the role of markets and government, technology’s impacts on society, education, and even the controversial claim that "love doesn’t scale." Through lively debate and audience questions, they emphasize the importance of belief in progress, humility about predicting the future, and the pragmatic value of optimism.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Personal Backgrounds & "Luxury Beliefs"

• Ben rebuts criticism that tech optimism is out of touch with the poor, citing Marc’s humble beginnings:
  “Of all the people I know, I probably don't know anybody who's more self made than Mark...now we have people who grew up rich telling somebody who grew up poor and massively succeeded what's good for poor people who want to succeed.” (03:00)

• Luxury beliefs: Ben and Marc cite sociologist Robert Henderson—ideas held by elites which can be disastrous for those without the means to absorb failed policies.

  “The people who hold the belief are insulated from the consequences...So anyway, it's a great example of a luxury belief.” – Ben Horowitz (03:31)

2. Effective Pessimism, Technology’s Double Edge

• Prometheus myth: Marc invokes Prometheus bringing fire, the ancient symbol of double-edged technology—great good and great risk:
  “Virtually every technology that man has ever invented has been used for both good and bad.” – Marc (05:18)
• The hosts distinguish between pessimism that bans or stalls progress (e.g., nuclear power) and active, prudent risk management.
• Narrative vs. Data:
  “Dramatic example of narrative defeating data, because it's very obvious from the data that nuclear is far safer than say, oil or coal.” – Marc (09:23)

3. Victimhood, Mindset, and Marginalized Communities

• Mindset is crucial:
  “If you don't believe that you can be successful in life or with the new technology or with kind of moving the world forward, then you can't.” – Marc (00:00, repeated at 10:46 and 11:12)
• Andreessen refers to self-determination and cites leaders like Marcus Garvey; helplessness is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

4. Markets vs. Authoritarianism: Opportunities for the Poor

• Free markets most benefit the disadvantaged:
  “Free markets are the most beneficial to the lowest income and the most advantaged. And that's a counterintuitive mind bender for a lot of people...” – Ben (11:15)
• On consumption:
  “Technology does in the free market context is it drives prices down...The most profound example is the internet plus the smartphone...now the homeless in San Francisco have better access to information and knowledge than the President of the United States did in 1980.” – Marc (14:20)

5. Technology Dependency & Meaning of Life—The ‘WALL-E’ Problem

• Dystopian fears (inactivity, loss of purpose) are aired, but Ben & Marc stress: technology frees us up to pursue bigger questions, doesn't answer them.
  “It's putting a little bit too much of a burden on technology markets to answer all those questions for all people.” – Ben (18:01)
• Tech increases resilience to disaster, extends agency, and “buffers us against sources of mass death that used to be far more common.” – Ben (20:44)

6. Corruption, Monopolies, and the Market vs. Business Distinction

• Ben distinguishes “pro-business” (favoring incumbents, lobbying for special rules) from “pro-market” (favoring competition):
  “Pro business and pro market...sound like they're the same thing and they're not. Because pro business kind of begs the question of which businesses?...What you want is more competition, more markets, more capitalism as actually the answer...” – Ben (24:01)
• Agency problem and regulatory capture: Marc warns of the recurring pattern where regulation serves industry insiders rather than the public.

7. How Markets Break Monopolies

• Large companies grow unadaptive: Citing Google with AI, monopolies become sluggish and are overtaken by new competitors—if markets are left open.
• The core villain is regulation that blocks competition under the guise of protecting the public.

8. Does ‘Love Scale’? The Limits of Motivation

• Ben cites David Friedman: Only three ways to get people to act for others: love (works at small scale), money (capitalism), and force (communism).
  “Love doesn’t scale...Society built on the idea that love scales becomes an incredibly dark, dystopian, hostile, and ultimately murderous place.” – Ben (29:40)
• At family scale, communism works (sharing without expectation), but at nation scale, money is more robust than coerced love or force.

9. Public, Private, and Military R&D

• Three drivers of fundamental innovation: private markets, public research funding (e.g., NSF), and militarization (Apollo, Manhattan Projects).
• The group debates whether society should be as militarized as necessary for another Apollo/Manhattan-style leap.

10. Education: Centralization, Cartels, and Market-Driven Change

• U.S. higher education is described as a cartel:
  “The college system in the US is a cartel...the accreditation agencies that determine which colleges get federal student lending are run by the colleges themselves.” – Ben (54:08)
• Contrasts Chinese focus on technical skills vs. Western focus on intersectional and hobbyist learning; the need for competitive pressure and practical outcomes is stressed.
• Student loan debt shows systemic dysfunction: “That’s kind of the ultimate treating the symptom and not the cause, because why can't any of these students pay back their loans? And the obvious answer is: college isn't worth the money you pay for it.” – Marc (55:48)

11. Can We Control Tech Once Released?

• Marc and Ben are skeptical that technologists can predict or control the social impacts of their inventions.
  “I have not in my life and I have not in my reading of history seen a lot of examples where the inventors of technology are very good at this.” – Ben (57:54)
• Cites Edison and the phonograph: intended for sermons, used for music; complex, emergent outcomes beyond original intent.

12. Law of Accelerating Returns (Ideas Have Sex)

• Quoting Paul Romer: “Ideas have sex”—the more ideas exist, the more quickly new, better ideas combine and propagate, creating exponential progress (38:31).
• Julian Simon’s “Ultimate Resource”: more people = more ideas = more solutions to potential scarcity.

13. Notable Quotes & Commentary on Criticism

• Many negative reactions to the manifesto were personal attacks rather than critiques of ideas:
  “A lot of artists, I aspire to have a better class of critic.” – Ben Horowitz (00:09, 63:17)
• Most controversial points are those about markets and ‘love doesn't scale’. The reactions reveal “luxury beliefs” and emotional investment in pessimism.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• “If you don't believe that you can be successful...then you can't.” – Marc (00:00, 10:46, 11:12)
• “A classic example of what Robert Henderson calls luxury beliefs.” – Ben (03:13)
• “Virtually every technology...has been used for both good and bad.” – Marc (05:18)
• “The story of human civilization is in some way the story of trying to kind of figure out all those questions...Meaning of life...I think you probably need to look inside, quite honestly, inside the human soul where all the hard questions lie.” – Ben (17:32–18:15)
• “Be really careful when somebody goes, oh, this is a problem with the new technology. So therefore, we have to stop the new technology.” – Marc (23:56)
• “Love doesn't scale. Force is one way...The third option...is money.” – Ben (29:40)
• “We live in more of a captured kind of big business cartel ecosystem.” – Ben (25:00)
• “The price of that basket was lower in 10 years...it's an abundance view of the world as opposed to scarcity view...” – Marc & Ben (41:49, 43:05)
• “We've already run the experiment. The other systems don't seem to work as well.” – Marc (03:50)
• “Now, at least the poorest people in America, the homeless in San Francisco, have better access to information and knowledge than the President of the United states did in 1980.” – Marc (14:20)
• “If you wanted a plan...to have it be available to everybody, the thing to do is to lean harder into markets and into technology. Right? Not further away.” – Ben (16:19)
• “Student loan forgiveness is the ultimate treating the symptom, not the cause, because why can't any of these students pay back their loans? College isn't worth the money you pay for it.” – Marc (55:48)
• “I think we as technologists need to be very careful...we're not but we should be—about kind of crossing the line and deciding that we're going to do societal engineering in our spare time.” – Ben (60:46)
• “A lot of the attacks have been on me, more than on the ideas...” – Marc (63:22)

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Suggested Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00 — Opening statement on belief and self-determination
• 03:00 — “Luxury beliefs” and tech criticism rebuttal
• 05:01 — On effective pessimism and technology’s double-edged nature
• 11:15 — Markets and the poor: production vs. consumption
• 14:20 — Internet and information equality, digital divide
• 18:01 — Meaning of life, what tech can/can't answer
• 23:56 — The "pro-market" vs. "pro-business" distinction and agency problem
• 29:40 — “Love doesn’t scale” and the nature of incentives
• 38:31 — Law of Accelerating Returns (“ideas have sex”)
• 41:49 — Julian Simon, abundance vs. scarcity worldview
• 54:03 — Education as a cartel, market-based alternatives
• 57:54 — Inventors' limits in predicting technology's real-world impact
• 63:17 — On criticism: “aspire to a better class of critic”

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Tone and Style

The episode is lively, at times acerbic, but mainly pragmatic and grounded, with occasional philosophical tangents. Andreessen’s and Horowitz’s comments carry a mixture of irreverence, conviction, and self-awareness—reflected in their willingness to revisit their own backgrounds, address critics, and even joke about “Cheetos and meth scenarios.”

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For Listeners: Key Takeaways

• Tech optimism is not blind faith, but a belief grounded in historic progress and the demonstrated (if imperfect) power of markets and innovation.
• Not all pessimism is risk management—often it is a narrative or incentive problem that inadvertently keeps societies from tapping abundance.
• The most profound social changes come from belief, agency, and an open, competitive system—not from top-down collectivist efforts driven by force or unrealistic expectations about human motivation.
• Beware arguments to “protect” society by overregulation or stalling new technology; these are often advanced by incumbents in the name of the public.
• Neither love nor force works efficiently at scale; money (markets) and the structures of competitive capitalism, with all their flaws, have been far more effective at lifting up humanity than utopian alternatives.

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Full episode recommended for anyone interested in the philosophy of technology, startup founders, policy wonks, and skeptics of both techno-optimism and pessimism.

Transcript

[Marc Andreessen]

If you don't believe that you can be successful in life or with the new technology or with kind of moving the world forward, then you can't.

[Ben Horowitz]

I think, like a lot of artists, I aspire to have a better class of critic.

[Marc Andreessen]

What do you do about tech companies getting so big and becoming monopolies? What do you do about banks getting so big and becoming monopolies?

[Ben Horowitz]

Do we want more Manhattans than Apollos?

[Margain Reason]

On the one hand, it's hard to say no.

[Ben Horowitz]

On the other hand, do I want a society that is that much more militarized?

[Margain Reason]

If that's what's required.

[Ben Horowitz]

I don't know.

[Marc Andreessen]

Be really careful when somebody goes, oh, this is a problem with the new technology. So therefore we have to stop the new technology.

[Ben Horowitz]

Look, there's the other scenario, and I would just call that one the Cheetos and meth scenario.

[Marc Andreessen]

And PlayStation.

[Ben Horowitz]

And PlayStation, right? And like, and I like Netflix. I'm a fan of Netflix, but like, maybe not 12 hours a day. That's the existence of a cow. Cows are great, but like, I don't think we should be cows.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

Following the publication of his essay the Techno optimist manifesto in October 2023, Margain Reason sat down with his a16z co founder Benh Horowitz to talk through what sparked the piece and why he felt compelled to write it. Along the way, they take on audience questions, including whether there's such a thing as effective pessimism, why victimhood so often dominates the conversation, how dependent we risk becoming on technology, the difference between being pro business versus pro market, the role of private and public capital in driving progress, and which part of the essay Mark thinks was the most controversial. Let's get into it.

[Marc Andreessen]

Hello and welcome to the Mark and Ben podcast. Today we're going to talk about a post that Mark recently wrote called the Techno Optimist Manifesto. And like all good manifestos, many people loved it, many people hated it. And so that's given us a lot to talk about. I just want to actually point out my favorite of the people that hated it was an article that was published in TechCrunch called When's the Last Time Marc Andreessen has Spoken to Poor people? Or a poor person or something like that. And the thing that's so funny about it is that Mark, of all the people I know, I probably don't know anybody who's more self made than Mark because he grew up in a tiny town in Wisconsin. He went to public schools. Like not good public schools. Like, probably some of the worst Public schools in the country and, like, never got any money, you know, from home. Not because his parents didn't love him, they didn't have any money to give him. And then the people who wrote the article all went to, like, the fanciest schools I've ever heard of and, you know, Ivy Leagues and wonderful private high schools and these kinds of things. So now we have people who grew up rich telling somebody who grew up poor and massively succeeded what's good for poor people who want to succeed. So I just thought that was so funny. Anyway, so this one's gotten a lot of kick to it, so we're going to get right into it. The first question.

[Ben Horowitz]

Hey, Ben, can I. Oh, go ahead. Can I weigh in on that?

[Marc Andreessen]

Yes, sir.

[Ben Horowitz]

Can I weigh in on that? You can't start that way and then.

[Margain Reason]

Don'T let me talk.

[Ben Horowitz]

Not let me say something.

[Marc Andreessen]

Sorry.

[Ben Horowitz]

So it's too tempting. Look at that response. It's a classic example of what the.

[Margain Reason]

Author Robert Henderson calls luxury beliefs. Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so the definition of luxury belief is it's a belief that could be.

[Margain Reason]

Held by somebody who's in sort of an elite position, a position of power, a position of wealth and comfort, about how society should be ordered. That is incorrect. And the consequences of which would be disastrous. Right. For the people that would be subjected to the consequences of that belief.

[Ben Horowitz]

But the people who hold the belief.

[Margain Reason]

Are insulated from the consequences. Right. They live in, you know, kind of fancy places and have very good lifestyles and aren't going to suffer directly as a result. So.

[Ben Horowitz]

So anyway, it's a classic. It's a great example of a luxury belief.

[Margain Reason]

The sort of factual response to it, of course, is that capitalism and free.

[Ben Horowitz]

Markets are the machine that has lifted.

[Margain Reason]

People out of poverty for, you know, 500 years.

[Marc Andreessen]

We've run the experiment. The other systems don't seem to work as well.

[Ben Horowitz]

Many, many, many times, you know, and we. This is one of those things and.

[Margain Reason]

You know, some amazing things. Exactly. To your point, we ran this experiment.

[Ben Horowitz]

Hundreds of times in the 20th century.

[Margain Reason]

And the results are very clear.

[Ben Horowitz]

And you look most recently in China, you know, there's a direct correlation between.

[Margain Reason]

The degree to which the Chinese Communist.

[Ben Horowitz]

Party kind of takes its boot off.

[Margain Reason]

The throat of the people in terms of their ability to engage in markets.

[Ben Horowitz]

And engage in trade and the extent.

[Margain Reason]

To which their quality of life rises.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so you kind of still see.

[Margain Reason]

That, you know, playing out today and.

[Marc Andreessen]

How quickly it progresses when they move to central planning 100%.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so. And you just see this over and over again, and then, you know, you see it happen in other parts of the world also. And so, you know, it's this thing where it's just like more times running the same experiment are not going to generate different results. And then the result of this, of course, is that this is kind of.

[Margain Reason]

So obvious and well established at this point that you have to go to, you know, one of our finest elite, you know, private high schools and private, you know, universities to really get inculcated.

[Marc Andreessen]

Into the luxury belief system that's going to.

[Margain Reason]

Exactly.

[Marc Andreessen]

Trying to help.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, exactly.

[Marc Andreessen]

So that's an excellent start. So this first question is from St. Louis of Techni. What does effective pessimism look like? How can people who want to mitigate risks make sure not to waste their time on moral panic? That stymies progress.

[Ben Horowitz]

You know, look, this is really tough, right? You know, let's start by conceding the kind of giving the devil is due.

[Margain Reason]

Kind of conceding the strength of the.

[Ben Horowitz]

Other side's argument on this, which is like, look, as I say in the essay, like, you know, I'm not a.

[Margain Reason]

Utopian, you know, technology is not purely a force for good. Technologies are tools, and they can be used for both good and bad.

[Ben Horowitz]

And, you know, virtually every technology that.

[Margain Reason]

Man has ever invented has been used for both good and bad.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so it's not that there aren't downsides.

[Margain Reason]

It's not that there aren't risks.

[Ben Horowitz]

And the word. Yeah, starting with fire. I mean, look like, you know, this is a reference in the piece, you know, the myth of Prometheus, which is.

[Margain Reason]

Kind of the origin myth in Western society of sort of the implications of technology.

[Ben Horowitz]

And, you know, in the Prometheus myth.

[Margain Reason]

You know, Prometheus is the God that brought fire to man. And, you know, for that he was punished by Zeus by being chained to.

[Ben Horowitz]

A rock and having his liver pecked.

[Margain Reason]

Out every night by a bird. And then it would regenerate in the morning and then it would happen again the next day.

[Ben Horowitz]

So, you know, a very exquisite form.

[Margain Reason]

Of torture that Zeus came up with.

[Ben Horowitz]

And, you know, the reason that myth is so powerful is because, look, fire. Fire was the enabler of heat and light and cooking food, right? And defense and shelter for early man. But it was also a weapon, you know, from the very beginning, it was.

[Margain Reason]

A weapon of war, right? And if, for example, you're engaged in.

[Ben Horowitz]

Siege combat and you're going up against.

[Margain Reason]

A fortified, you know, castle or city, the way that you win is you burn them out, right?

[Ben Horowitz]

And by the way, the way they retaliate is they heat up oil to.

[Margain Reason]

Boiling temperature and they poured on your head. Right?

[Ben Horowitz]

So both sides of these are true.

[Margain Reason]

And this continues to be the case to this day.

[Ben Horowitz]

You know, actually, the effective pessimism is a clever framing. You know, these are kind of the two kind of, I don't know, valences that you could apply to this question.

[Margain Reason]

Which is you could apply.

[Ben Horowitz]

One valence is basically fundamentally, over time, net, you know, everything.

[Margain Reason]

Technology has been primarily a force for good, primarily a force for progress. And basically you embrace it and support it and accelerate it as much as.

[Ben Horowitz]

You can, and then you deal with.

[Margain Reason]

The issues as they arise, which is the story of the development of modern civilization.

[Ben Horowitz]

There is another valence, and some people.

[Margain Reason]

Incline more naturally to the pessimistic position.

[Ben Horowitz]

Which is basically, and this is true.

[Margain Reason]

By the way of both technologies and markets, people also apply the same kind of negative valence to markets, which is.

[Ben Horowitz]

Well, primarily technology or markets are a.

[Margain Reason]

Generator of bad things. Right. Technology is a weapon of war. Technology is something that has unanticipated negative consequences. Markets have winners and losers. Right. And so you start out focusing more on the winners or on the losers.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so you just kind of have to decide where you go in. The accusation, of course, from the pessimists.

[Margain Reason]

Is that optimists are too optimistic.

[Ben Horowitz]

The counter accusation, of course, is if you start out with a pessimistic frame, it's very hard to hold that in a moderate position is what I observe. The pessimists sort of slide into greater.

[Margain Reason]

And greater levels of pessimism quite quickly.

[Ben Horowitz]

And, you know, they end up very.

[Margain Reason]

Angry and bitter and hostile, and they end up advocating for extremely, you know, I would say draconian and kind of senseless policies.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so I think it's hard to be an effective pessimist. Yeah, I think it seems to be.

[Margain Reason]

Much easier to become a. I would say, you know, either an ineffective pessimist or just a flat out dangerous pessimist.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, you know, Andy Grove had a great line on this. Somebody asked him, was the microprocessor good or bad? And he said, well, that's a crazy question. It's like asking, is steel good or bad? It is like, you're not going to hold back progress. And so what you have to ask yourself is, you know, how do you make it good? But don't try and do that by banning it because you. Well, then you succeed at that. You're going to get frustrated.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, I mean, the only thing I'D argue with Andy on that is, you know, they do get banned, Right. Steel didn't get banned, but civilian nuclear power did.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so, you know, the pessimists, I mean, look, like I mentioned in the piece, you know, I think the single.

[Margain Reason]

Biggest policy mistake of my lifetime was the decision in the 70s, effectively in the 70s into the 80s, to ban.

[Ben Horowitz]

Essentially ban civilian nuclear power.

[Margain Reason]

And, you know, for sure, throughout most of the U.S. and then, you know, throughout, certainly most of Europe as well, with, you know, maybe France being the.

[Ben Horowitz]

Big exception and then by extension throughout.

[Margain Reason]

You know, a lot of the rest of the world, because it would have been Western, you know, countries and companies that would have brought it to the rest of the world in that time period.

[Ben Horowitz]

And, you know, look, I think the consequences for that, like, I think if you're an environmentalist and you kind of.

[Margain Reason]

Are looking at things dispassionately, as Stewart Brand and others have been doing now for a while, is you kind of say, you know, look, we had the silver bullet for sort of unlimited zero emission energy, and we had it and we chose not to use it.

[Ben Horowitz]

And, you know, with everything we know today, it's overwhelmingly both the safe, effective.

[Margain Reason]

And kind of zero risk of mass death, zero risk of contributing to carbon emissions and so forth.

[Ben Horowitz]

But, you know, look, we collectively made.

[Margain Reason]

A political decision to ban it, and we're, you know, paying the price for that today.

[Ben Horowitz]

And quite frankly, it's one of the.

[Margain Reason]

Reasons why Russia is able to do what it's doing in Ukraine is it has this flow of money from oil, you know, which in a counterfactual universe where the world by now had cut over to civilian electric power, they wouldn't have that. They wouldn't be able to do what they're doing.

[Ben Horowitz]

So the, the concept consequences of that.

[Margain Reason]

Decision play out decades later. And I think that's a great illustration of the risk of, let's say, not the risk of affected pessimism, let's say the risk of dangerous pessimism.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. And dramatic example of narrative defeating data, because it's very obvious from the data that nuclear is far safer than, say, oil or coal. All right, second question, and this is from your friend and mine, Shaka Senghor. How can we distribute transformative philosophies like yours to marginalized communities where a culture of despair and victimization predominates? Yeah, so this is a really interesting question for me because I think that it does get to the heart of, like, one of the reasons why victimization predominates is because it's a techno pessimistic world in those communities, in the marginalized communities. And I would say I go back to. There have been some very kind of interesting and successful leaders. Marcus Garvey comes to mind. And I think it starts with something that he really was heavily behind, which is this idea of self determination that in an individual can change their own lives, change their own circumstances. And then he had this idea at the turn of the 18th to 1900s, which was a kind of much more difficult time to do that, particularly for kind of black people in America. But, you know, he himself succeeded at it greatly. And I think it really starts with that mindset where if you don't believe that you can be successful in life or with the new technology or with kind of moving the world forward, then you can't. In Henry Ford's famous line, there are two men, one believes he can do it, the other believes he can't do it. And they're both right. I think is the key to that whole thing is it just starts with the belief that you can succeed. And look, the odds are harder for some than others, but you always end in despair if you believe you can't do it.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. And I just add building a little bit on the sort of look on the consumption side. So this is sort of one of the amazing things about free markets. Free markets are the most beneficial to.

[Margain Reason]

The lowest income and the most advantaged.

[Ben Horowitz]

And that's a counterintuitive mind bender for.

[Margain Reason]

A lot of people who have been trained at elitist capitalism, but trained in the opposite direction.

[Ben Horowitz]

But the truth is it's the best for the poorest. It's the best for the people who have the least, and by the least.

[Margain Reason]

I mean the least existing wealth, but.

[Ben Horowitz]

Also the least access the least social status. Right. Who are kind of on the receiving.

[Margain Reason]

End of not a lot of advantage in their lives.

[Ben Horowitz]

And you can kind of look at that on two sides of their lives. You can look at that for them.

[Margain Reason]

As producers and as consumers.

[Ben Horowitz]

So on the production side, markets open up opportunity, right.

[Margain Reason]

For people to be able to make their way in the world and for be able to have jobs, be able to make money, and then ultimately be able to support a family.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so again, the counterfactual is not.

[Margain Reason]

A poor person, right. Trying to navigate their way through the hell of a capitalist economy versus somehow in a socialist or communist system, they'd.

[Ben Horowitz]

Be kind of handed everything they need.

[Margain Reason]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

The reality is it's the other way around.

[Margain Reason]

It's the more capitalism, the more opportunities Are the more available jobs, the more.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right, the more lines, right? The more lines of work, the more openness and freedom and choice to be.

[Margain Reason]

Able to figure out how to succeed.

[Ben Horowitz]

And how to make money and what work to do. You end up on the wrong side of a authoritarian or communist regime or a socialist regime or an authoritarian regime. Right?

[Margain Reason]

You are screwed.

[Ben Horowitz]

Like there are no jobs for you. Right. Nobody's hiring, There are no private employers. You know, if the state, for whatever reason doesn't want to hire you, like you're out of luck if you're in a disadvantaged class category, if you're in a disadvantaged race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, any of these things, or just political views or whatever, or just that you're poor and people look down on you like that's it.

[Margain Reason]

Like you're done.

[Ben Horowitz]

Like at that point you're a ward.

[Margain Reason]

Of the state and whatever small amount of grain they want to feed you to keep you alive, fair enough, but like you're not going anywhere, right?

[Ben Horowitz]

And that was the story of low.

[Margain Reason]

Income people in most societies over basically the entirety of human existence up to the point of the invention of markets.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so that's on the one side. And then on the consumption side, I talked about this also in the essay is one of the big things that.

[Margain Reason]

Technology does in the free market context is it drives prices down.

[Ben Horowitz]

And this is a big thing on inequality and especially income inequality that people I think miss, which is like one form of like determining the level of like income inequality or the value of one's income or whatever.

[Margain Reason]

Right. Is to look at it in terms of like, you know, what literally as.

[Ben Horowitz]

Demarcated, measured by units of currency.

[Margain Reason]

Right. And so I'm either making more money or less money.

[Ben Horowitz]

Look, the other side of that is what is money used for? It's used to buy goods and services. And so if the price of goods and services is falling, that's the same.

[Margain Reason]

Effective thing to you from a standard of living standpoint, as if you're getting a natural raise. Yeah, right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so what markets do and technology.

[Margain Reason]

Does is they drive prices down. And the more they're allowed to operate, the more they drive prices down.

[Ben Horowitz]

The traditional way that economists talk about.

[Margain Reason]

This is they make the observation which is as follows, which is the Queen of England always wore silk stockings, right?

[Ben Horowitz]

Like the super rich throughout all of.

[Margain Reason]

Society, throughout all of time, have always had access to the best of goods and services, the best of available food and the best of available healthcare.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right. And so forth and so on of.

[Margain Reason]

Their time and place.

[Ben Horowitz]

It was Traditionally, like that stuff was.

[Margain Reason]

All just silk stockings and everything else. Right. Were just completely out of reach of most people.

[Ben Horowitz]

And it is precisely the engine of.

[Margain Reason]

Free markets and technology that bring down prices so that regular people can afford these things as well.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. Maybe the most profound example of that is the Internet plus the smartphone. Because when you and I grew up, information was kind of an elite thing to get to. And the big reason to go to university was the knowledge was all there. It was in books and the libraries and all these kinds of things, and you didn't actually have access to that otherwise. And computers, by the way, also we didn't have computers for individuals. And now at least the kind of poorest people in America, the homeless in San Francisco, have better access to information and knowledge than the President of the United states did in 1980, which is unbelievable.

[Ben Horowitz]

Let me give you one other one on that. And I find this totally mind blowing. So, Ben, you remember when we first started working on the Internet in the 90s, there was just this sort of endless kind of hand wringing at the.

[Margain Reason]

Time about this concept of the digital divide. Yes, right.

[Ben Horowitz]

This concept of basically digital technology, the.

[Margain Reason]

Internet, computers, PCs and the smartphones were going to basically widen inequality because it was basically well off people that were going to have them and then poor people wouldn't.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right. And then this was maybe the effective.

[Margain Reason]

Pessimism of its time is people were very worried about.

[Ben Horowitz]

So look, sitting Here today in 2023.

[Margain Reason]

The following is true.

[Ben Horowitz]

More people in the world have computers.

[Margain Reason]

In the form of smartphones specifically and.

[Ben Horowitz]

Internet access than have electricity or running.

[Margain Reason]

Water in their homes.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, amazing, right?

[Ben Horowitz]

So the digital technologies people were worried.

[Margain Reason]

About are actually the most egalitarian. Right. Of all technologies that have ever been produced, even more than running water and electricity.

[Ben Horowitz]

So I mean, we should still be worried about, like literally the gap in.

[Margain Reason]

Access to fresh water, like more than the gap in access to the Internet.

[Ben Horowitz]

And again, those are exactly one.

[Margain Reason]

The water divide. Right. The electricity divide is like still a.

[Ben Horowitz]

Thing, but the digital technology divide actually.

[Margain Reason]

Turns out to not be a thing.

[Ben Horowitz]

And of course, and again, the reason.

[Margain Reason]

For that is very straightforward. The reason for that is falling prices. The reason for that is as the global smartphone market went to 5 billion people, the price of a smartphone collapsed to, I don't even know. Today in sort of the developing world, it's, I don't know, 10 bucks or something.

[Ben Horowitz]

And the same thing, Internet access has.

[Margain Reason]

Plummeted in price over time because of Moore's law and competition and innovation.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so the paradox the flip side of this is if you wanted a plan to be able to drive something.

[Margain Reason]

Any form of good or service that is important to lots of people, to have it be available to everybody, the thing to do is to lean harder into markets and into technology. Right. Not further away.

[Marc Andreessen]

Great point. Okay, next question from Max Churatic. Technology makes life easier and necessary for a better future. However, how would you address humans getting overly dependent on tech to a point where we can't function without it?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, so I would say there's kind of the full dystopian version of this, which is sort of the Wall E scenario.

[Marc Andreessen]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

In the movie Wall E for those.

[Margain Reason]

Of you who haven't seen it, mankind in the future basically is all just like ob, literally sitting in these big like zero gravity suspension chairs and basically binging Netflix and slurping and some of that going now.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, this might sound a little, a little familiar in our times, but yeah, look, there is this sense of like, okay, we kind of at some point.

[Margain Reason]

Like we live in sort of this automated, I don't know, farm environment or something, and we're kind of farm animals and we're being kept fat and happy, but we've kind of lost agency, we've lost free will, we've lost choice, we've lost any sort of sense of self reliance, self sufficiency, any sense of adventure. Like, I think there's certainly some argument in that direction. You do see examples of that.

[Ben Horowitz]

What I try to do in the essay and what I believe on this is a little subtle, which is, look, there are really big questions about the meaning of life that people have today.

[Margain Reason]

And have had for a very long time. Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And a lot of the history of.

[Margain Reason]

Human civilization has been debates around religion and which gods to worship and moral principles and how to order a society.

[Ben Horowitz]

And what the role of the collective.

[Margain Reason]

Versus the role of the individual is and all these policy questions that flow from this. And like the story of human civilization is in some way the story of trying to kind of figure out all those questions. And of course these questions are still, at least for a lot of people, still unanswered or are still open questions or are being opened anew all the time.

[Ben Horowitz]

I think it's putting frankly too much of a burden.

[Margain Reason]

Like, I'm an enthusiastic proponent of technology.

[Ben Horowitz]

And markets, but it's putting a little.

[Margain Reason]

Bit too much of a burden on technology markets to expect technology markets to answer all those questions for all people.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so I, I think if you're.

[Margain Reason]

Looking to technology and markets to answer those Questions, I think you're probably looking in the wrong direction.

[Ben Horowitz]

I think you probably need to look.

[Margain Reason]

Inside, quite honestly, inside the human soul where all the hard questions lie.

[Ben Horowitz]

And then the observation I make is rising technological capabilities and rising standard of living right through markets, open up the room, right, individually and collectively in our.

[Margain Reason]

Society to be able to ask those questions. Right?

[Ben Horowitz]

So, and the most obvious example of.

[Margain Reason]

That is, look, when people are hungry, they don't ask any of these questions. The only question is like, where's my skill coming from? Right?

[Ben Horowitz]

And you can kind of elaborate that.

[Margain Reason]

All the way up.

[Ben Horowitz]

And you can kind of say, look, like if the ultimate human problem is that we have full bellies, our children.

[Margain Reason]

Are going to live great lives, we're able to support our family, we're able to do all the things that technology.

[Ben Horowitz]

Is able to give us, and we still have these big unanswered questions about the meaning of life, then basically what.

[Margain Reason]

Technology will have done is to open up the aperture to be able to actually spend more time trying to figure out those big questions.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, yeah, that's. That. That seems like a very champagne problem, for sure. It's funny, it reminds me of when I was in elementary school, my brother was in junior high school, I went to the school play, and the play calculators had just come out, and the whole play was about this society where nobody knew how to do math. And then the calculators all broke. And so those kinds of fears, I think, go with technology, but they tend not to play out in very real ways. At least all the calculators haven't broken yet.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, well, look, technology gives you the way. Oh, and here's the other kind of serious observation to make is technology increases.

[Margain Reason]

Resilience to natural disaster.

[Ben Horowitz]

So, for example, this comes up actually.

[Margain Reason]

A lot in the climate debate, which is basically. And I'm not. This is not questioning climate change. I'm making a different point.

[Ben Horowitz]

But, you know, one of the questions.

[Margain Reason]

Over time is basically, is nature getting more or less dangerous? Right. Over time. Right. As the world changes, as humanity changes.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so forth, and basically that deaths.

[Margain Reason]

From natural disasters have been as systemic decline for a century plus at this point.

[Marc Andreessen]

No.

[Margain Reason]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

It used to be that if you were confronted by, you know, basically any kind of. What's that? Cold? Yes. There's no heat. Yes. People, yeah, you. It was cold. You freeze to death.

[Margain Reason]

If it was hot with no air.

[Ben Horowitz]

Conditioning, you might, you might die from heat stroke. Any kind of tornado, flood, mudslide.

[Margain Reason]

I mean, look what was in Boston, like 150 years ago or something, there was like a molasses basically at mass tragedy, right.

[Ben Horowitz]

Where people, like, literally drowned in a molasses flood. Like, nature is vicious, right? Nature really has it out for you. And if you're unprotected in a state.

[Margain Reason]

Of nature, like it. The old. The old thing is life in the state of nature. Is that a nasty, brutish and short.

[Marc Andreessen]

Poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short Hobbes.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, exactly. And so, look, the flip side of the question is technology is now buffering.

[Margain Reason]

Us against sources of mass death that used to be far more common.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so this is not to sort.

[Margain Reason]

Of try to get away from the kind of the doomsday question of, like, what happens if it literally all stops.

[Ben Horowitz]

Working, but, like, how do we build.

[Margain Reason]

Defenses against the really bad scenarios in which that would happen? It actually turns out technology is our friend on that. Yeah.

[Marc Andreessen]

And our friend Elon is protecting us against everything by making us an interplanetary species. Which also deals with the asteroid problem.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, I mean. Yeah. I mean, look, the dinosaurs had no plan B, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

Nope. Turns out. So John asks, how can economic systems evolve to prevent human corruption from infiltrating advanced technologies that surpass our capacity for understanding?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, Ben, What? Ben, what do you think? Or maybe you might narrow on the.

[Margain Reason]

Question a little bit.

[Marc Andreessen]

You know, I'm not sure if I totally understand what he's getting at here, but I think human corruption there is this agency problem. And I think that you kind of alluded to it on the kind of nuclear fission issue where as these systems evolve, how do you keep the human interests from fouling them? And this kind of gets to heart of a lot of the things that you spoke about in the manifesto, which is, for example, we had this banking crisis, and everybody's intention was to basically lessen our reliance on giant banks that became as powerful as many governments in the world. And of course, because of this Baptist and bootlegger issue, where the banks were the bootleggers and the government was the Baptists, we basically got the opposite. We got much bigger banks, much more powerful. And that trend is kind of continuing forward. So I think that when we look at how systems get corrupt and create real crisis, we really have to beware of the agency problem. And we're going through a few of those now, I think, both on AI and also on crypto, where actually a lot of the answer to some of these huge, powerful monopolies, like what do you do about tech companies getting so big and becoming monopolies? What do you do about banks getting so big and becoming monopolies. We actually have a magic technology that decentralizes power, actually creates a real form of stakeholder capitalism where all of the participants in the economy get rewarded for building the economy. And the biggest adversaries of that whole movement end up being the kind of Baptists in the government, conned by the bootleggers and the big banks and so forth, Kind of over highlighting small, real but small dangers of the technology and trying to stop the technology in its tracks and kind of lead to this horrible agency problem where you have these very corrupt systems. So I guess my big thing would be like, be really careful when somebody goes, oh, this is a problem with a new technology. So therefore we have to stop the new technology. Like that, I think is the pattern that's repeated over and over again and hurt us so badly on energy and it threatens to hurt us on intelligence and threatens to hurt us on decentralization.

[Margain Reason]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. One of the ways to think about.

[Margain Reason]

This for people who haven't run into this in their lives is there's a.

[Ben Horowitz]

Fundamental difference between pro business and pro market.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

And they sound like they're the same thing and they're not. Because pro business kind of begs the.

[Margain Reason]

Question of which businesses? And then sort of, okay, what's the structure of the market? And are we talking about like.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, right, exactly. Are we talking about lots of companies having to compete and earn their way in the world?

[Margain Reason]

Are we talking about ultimately crony capitalism? And basically this is the pattern of basically what happens. This is kind of the point of the Baptist and bootlegger's idea of what.

[Ben Horowitz]

Happens, which is basically a new technology.

[Margain Reason]

Something changes in the world.

[Ben Horowitz]

You have big incumbent companies that very.

[Margain Reason]

Much are opposed to that change or want to control it. It and want to control and want to lock it down.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so what they do is they.

[Margain Reason]

Go to the government and they basically say, oh, you need to regulate this.

[Ben Horowitz]

And they don't go in and say.

[Margain Reason]

You need to regulate this for our benefit, because they would get laughed at. Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

So what they say is, you need to regulate this.

[Marc Andreessen]

That would be a dead giveaway.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, that would be a dead giveaway. So instead they say, you need to.

[Margain Reason]

Regulate this to protect basically the little people.

[Ben Horowitz]

But what they're shooting for 100% of.

[Margain Reason]

The time, what they're shooting for is basically government sanctioned barriers to competition for themselves.

[Ben Horowitz]

And I would even argue, like, I'll.

[Margain Reason]

Do a little effective pessimism.

[Ben Horowitz]

We don't. In America today, in most industries, actually.

[Margain Reason]

Live in what you call a free market system.

[Ben Horowitz]

We live in more of a captured.

[Margain Reason]

Kind of big business cartel ecosystem.

[Ben Horowitz]

And you look just across sort of.

[Margain Reason]

Sector after sector, what you see are sort of two or three or four companies that have, you know, overwhelming market share in each sector and generate, you know, an overwhelming percentage of the profits and have this extremely incestuous relationship with.

[Ben Horowitz]

The government, by the way, often to.

[Margain Reason]

The point where they're actually writing their own regulations, right? Like it's their lobbyists actually writing the regulations. I see industry groups that they run.

[Marc Andreessen]

Well, the classic example that's the majority of regulations works. Exactly.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, that's right. And of course, and then there's this.

[Margain Reason]

Other form of corruption, right, which is.

[Ben Horowitz]

The revolving door, which is like, okay.

[Margain Reason]

If you're a regulator, it is extremely tempting just out of pure self interest to kind of do what these big companies want because they'll hire you right after you're done doing that. And so this is sort of this corruption after the fact that happens with the revolving doors.

[Ben Horowitz]

So basically you could be pro business.

[Margain Reason]

And be completely in favor of all of that, right? Because it is still businesses doing everything at the end of the day, pro market, right?

[Ben Horowitz]

Says no, none of that, what I.

[Margain Reason]

Just described is acceptable. That's not how things should work at all. The last thing any government should be doing is giving any particular company some special right or privilege, some ability to block out new competition. And in fact, what you want is more competition. You want more competition, more markets, more capitalism as actually the answer to that. Precisely. To keep the big companies from basically just taking over and not having to compete anymore.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, 100%. And actually that leads very well into the next question, which is how exactly will markets prevent monopolies? Please elaborate on your point. And I think this is so key because look, the nature of companies, even monopolies, is that the older and larger they get, the less adaptive they become. And we look, we've seen this with Google, who invented most of the new AI technology and then was a little bit of sleep at the wheel when OpenAI released GPT, they miss it just because like they're big, they're complicated, they're slow, they're not as good anymore. And so if the new AI companies are free to compete, if open source AI is free to compete, then all of the sudden that's the best kind of way to break that monopoly. Similarly, there's a lot of chatter on like social networking monopolies and banking monopolies and these kinds of things. And again, we Already actually have a technology that's a great insurgent technology to defeat those monopolies. And the thing that prevents that is, as you say, not a pro market, but a pro business, a pro very specific business. Business that have enough money to bribe corrupt lobby the government into creating regulations that prevent the new company from competing.

[Margain Reason]

Right? That's right.

[Marc Andreessen]

And we're seeing a lot of that right now. I find the heart to be terribly corrupt. With that in mind, can you elaborate on your statement, love doesn't scale? I don't know if you meant because the heart is corrupt, but perhaps you do.

[Ben Horowitz]

Well, so I didn't say the heart is corrupt. So, I mean, look, I think what the questioner is alluding to there, I.

[Margain Reason]

Would assume, is sort of this perennial debate about human nature, which is man primarily good or bad, which we could talk about.

[Ben Horowitz]

But I think on the thing about love not scaling. Let me hit that one directly and.

[Margain Reason]

Then we can maybe go to the bigger topic.

[Ben Horowitz]

So the formulation here is from a.

[Margain Reason]

Guy named David Friedman, who's an economist and Milton Friedman's son.

[Ben Horowitz]

And the thing that he said that really stuck with me is, look, there's only three ways to get people to.

[Margain Reason]

Do things for other people, right?

[Ben Horowitz]

Fundamentally, one is love.

[Margain Reason]

And you see that in people's families and their friend networks. Like, I'll do things for Ben without him having to pay me, right?

[Ben Horowitz]

And so that is an important force.

[Marc Andreessen]

Without me threatening to kick your ass.

[Ben Horowitz]

Coming to the other one.

[Margain Reason]

Yes, exactly.

[Ben Horowitz]

So without force, so there's love. Without love, there's basically two other choices.

[Margain Reason]

And they're basically money and force, right?

[Ben Horowitz]

Money's the carrot, the force is the stick.

[Margain Reason]

Look, money is capitalism's answer. Force was communism's answer.

[Ben Horowitz]

And again, going back to just beat.

[Margain Reason]

Up on the communists a little bit more, this was the big realization of all the communist societies in the 20th century and today, which is basically what.

[Ben Horowitz]

Communism and its derivatives, socialism and so forth, expect. They expect love to scale, and so they expect that you should work in whatever the Siberian salt mines or whatever it is, the fields or whatever, and.

[Margain Reason]

You should do that out of love for your fellow man, and you should do that for love of the society and so forth.

[Ben Horowitz]

And by the way, look, like the.

[Margain Reason]

Nazis are the National Socialists, like they have their own spin on this. You're supposed to do things on behalf of the German people.

[Ben Horowitz]

Is same thing.

[Margain Reason]

Like you're supposed to love this macro.

[Ben Horowitz]

Unit because the love doesn't scale. The problem is people just don't naturally love people.

[Margain Reason]

They don't know. Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And by the way, my view, that's not because there's something morally wrong with them. It's because they don't know the other people.

[Margain Reason]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And it's like, okay, are they being loved back?

[Margain Reason]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And, like, are the other people going to be pulling their weight?

[Margain Reason]

Right. Or is there going to be a free rider problem? And of course, the answer is at any level of scale, of course they're a free rider problem if people aren't required to work.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so this is the irony of the heart of the whole thing. Society built on the idea that love.

[Margain Reason]

Scales becomes an incredibly dark, dystopian, hostile, and ultimately murderous place. Because love doesn't scale.

[Ben Horowitz]

Force is one way around that, which is okay. The way you get people to work.

[Margain Reason]

Even though they don't want to because they don't love people in some remote area that they'd be working on behalf of is put a gun to their head.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yep.

[Ben Horowitz]

And then the third option that falls.

[Margain Reason]

Straight out of that is, okay, how about money?

[Ben Horowitz]

And then sort of money, of course, is a proxy.

[Margain Reason]

Money is a tool for sort of, you know, what they call sort of rational self interest. Right. Or enlightened self interest, which is like, okay, I'm going to get paid money to do this. It's going to benefit these other people.

[Ben Horowitz]

I'm not primarily doing it because it's.

[Margain Reason]

Going to benefit people I haven't met.

[Ben Horowitz]

Look, maybe I love everybody and maybe.

[Margain Reason]

I would love to meet all my customers.

[Ben Horowitz]

And by the way, look, when you walk into a restaurant and you've never.

[Margain Reason]

Met the owner or the host before, like, they're thrilled to see you. Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so do they literally love you.

[Margain Reason]

Or are you their new best friend? No.

[Ben Horowitz]

Are they excited to see you? Yeah. Well, they have a very positive sentiment.

[Margain Reason]

Towards you because they know you're.

[Ben Horowitz]

They know you're going to pay.

[Margain Reason]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

Anyway, so that's the best solution that.

[Margain Reason]

We'Ve come up with.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

Barring some profound change in human nature.

[Margain Reason]

In which people all of a sudden become far more generous than they've been historically, that seems like it's likely to be a stable state.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Marc Andreessen]

You know, it's funny, that reminds me of a interesting conversation I had years ago with a friend of mine who grew up in the Soviet Union, and they made some offhand comment that, like, whatever, Stalin was a crazy psycho or that kind of thing, and he goes, what are you talking about? Stalin was very rational, very smart. Go back, read what he wrote. Look at his speeches. He was super systematic. Thinker very intelligent. I was like, well, like, what went wrong? Why did he kill 20 million of his own people? And he just said, when you take away the carrot, all you have is stick. And that is so true. And I think a lot, you know, that's a lot of the point at scale. And your family. Yes, you can run a communist family. You can even run a communist kibbutz at that scale. It can work, for sure.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, that's right. Height made this point. And Deirdre McLestie has made this point also, which is like, look, we do live in a superposition of the two systems, right? Because, like, you don't want to be the asshole who, like, you know, runs.

[Margain Reason]

Your family like it's a capitalist enterprise. Like, you charge your kids for rents, like for sleeping in their bunks when they're eight.

[Ben Horowitz]

We all grow up and in our family and friend environments, like, we're all communistic in that context.

[Margain Reason]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

But then there's this kind of schizophrenia.

[Margain Reason]

To it, which is like, okay, we.

[Ben Horowitz]

Got into the world and the world.

[Margain Reason]

Doesn'T act like that. And all of a sudden there's a different way to exchange and a different way to relate.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so I think ultimately, you know.

[Margain Reason]

The answer lies in the superposition of the small and the large. And let's just say, yeah, the people.

[Ben Horowitz]

Who are too abstract on this, I think, get derailed.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, I think that's the exact point that everyone gets confused on. Because who wouldn't want the country to run like their family? That would be so much better. The problem is it's impossible. Next question. This is actually one that I think a lot of people have from Morton. How do you see private capital versus public research budgets when it comes to fundamental Progress? Aside from AT&T's monopoly that drove Bell Labs, I have yet to see systemic technological progress from private investment. I think I would disagree with the last part, but I'll let you start.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, so I'd actually say there's actually three models. I would say there's private, there's public, and then there's a third that I'll come to. So, look like a couple things I think are true. So one is, again, I'll give the effective pessimists they're due on this one also, which is look like straight capital R research that is sort of the time honor way of, like, discovering the.

[Margain Reason]

Principles of the universe and so forth.

[Ben Horowitz]

The best of that has no idea if or when it will ever commercialize.

[Margain Reason]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

Because by definition, it has no idea whether or not the Experiments will even pan out.

[Margain Reason]

Right. Or the theories are even correct.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so there is this kind of.

[Margain Reason]

Research that historically has been publicly funded.

[Ben Horowitz]

And look, in the US we have.

[Margain Reason]

Had these agencies like the National Science foundation that have done a lot of that for a very long time.

[Ben Horowitz]

And whatever issues NSF has, if you look at the totality of spend in their existence and then the results, you.

[Margain Reason]

Would say, yeah, that was absolutely an outstanding investment from a societal standpoint. Right, right.

[Marc Andreessen]

Very long time, hundreds and investments.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And again, to be an effective pessimist.

[Margain Reason]

A lot of that research may not have been research that would get done by private companies.

[Ben Horowitz]

Look, on the other hand, I think private companies carry their weight more than people think. And look, part of it is the.

[Margain Reason]

Questioner alluded to Bell Labs, but there.

[Ben Horowitz]

Is this thing that happens when these companies, you know, when the best of the big companies get big and powerful, they do more of this. They open these labs, right? And so AT and T did it. IBM and Hewlett Packard, at Google and Microsoft and many others across many industries have done this. And I think quite honestly, part of that is PR for them.

[Margain Reason]

They like to show that off.

[Ben Horowitz]

I think part of that is, look.

[Margain Reason]

They start to think in terms of longer time horizons and they do want ultimately new products, products at some point.

[Ben Horowitz]

Part of that is it's a recruiting.

[Margain Reason]

And retention exercise to get the best and brightest technical minds to stay there.

[Ben Horowitz]

Is to tell them that they can.

[Margain Reason]

Do research and publish their research.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so there is that. And look, Ben, you mentioned, like, look.

[Margain Reason]

The breakthrough on AI just came out of Google, right? It came out of a private company, which is a great example of that.

[Ben Horowitz]

So yeah, look, there's some tension there.

[Marc Andreessen]

Quite a few researchers out of academia to pull that off.

[Ben Horowitz]

They did. And in fact, that's been a long running source of tension actually between the.

[Margain Reason]

Tech companies and the universities for the last 15 years or so, which is as these new tech companies have built these big research labs, they have pulled a lot of the good faculty out of the universities.

[Ben Horowitz]

And by the way, that process, I.

[Margain Reason]

Think is accelerating in AI specifically because the capital needs to actually do modern AI are so big that actually universities can't afford to do it right now.

[Ben Horowitz]

So you get this kind of issue.

[Margain Reason]

Of like, are you draining the universities that they're remaining competent professors and leaving.

[Ben Horowitz]

Only the other kind? And you could debate, and we could have a long debate about the pros.

[Margain Reason]

And cons of public versus private.

[Ben Horowitz]

There is a third model, and this is the one that People often talk.

[Margain Reason]

About, you know, as sort of an aspiration, which is this idea of these very large societal projects. And in the U.S. you know, we talk in particular about the. The Apollo Project and the Manhattan Project. Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And we say this is kind of.

[Margain Reason]

A frequent lament from kind of declinists. Right. Which is, why can't we have more Apollo projects in Manhattan Projects?

[Ben Horowitz]

But I think that's actually a third model.

[Margain Reason]

And the third model is military and militaristic. Right. Manhattan was just a straight up military project. Right. To build a bomb run by the military.

[Ben Horowitz]

Apollo was a sort of a civilian thing.

[Margain Reason]

NASA.

[Ben Horowitz]

But it was in the context of.

[Margain Reason]

A military arms race with the Soviet Union and a technological arms race with the Soviet Union in a much more militarized society than we have today, say.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

And of course, when the military gets involved, two things happen. One is they can do things at.

[Margain Reason]

Speed when they really want to because they just tell people what to do.

[Ben Horowitz]

And then also they get access to.

[Margain Reason]

A lot of money, even when things get rough.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so personally, I go back and forth a little bit on this is like, do we want more Manhattans and Apollo's. On the one hand, it's hard to say no. On the other hand, do I want a society that is that much more militarized? If that's what's required? I don't know.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, that could.

[Ben Horowitz]

What would that mean for what is happening in the world if we get.

[Margain Reason]

Back to the point where as militarized as we were in 1941. Right. Or even 1960.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. No, it's actually one of the great things about the modern world is we have so many fewer wars and it's a smaller scale and every war is still horrible.

[Ben Horowitz]

Look. And hopefully that continues, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

Yes. Okay, here's a good simple question from Tux. How do you bridge the gap between being anti statist and supporting America first policies or maybe American dynamism, as we do? Yeah. So I. Look, look, I think that all these things end up being a question of power and how it works. So the extreme form of statism is communism, where 100% of the power is in the public sector and no power is in the private sector. And that has the issues that we spoke of. I think that no public sector can quickly go to anarchy. And that's not, at least not something that I would advocate for. So I think, look, as a society, we kind of have this collective. There's a certain amount of collectivism in shared values, shared morals. What's. Okay. What's not okay. In America, we have things like freedom of speech, freedom to be who you are, kind of. And we're very anchored on these kind of free society ideals. And you need. You need a state to do that, at least I believe. I think there are probably some people that don't believe that, but you need a state for that and preserving that. Those values and that way of life is extremely important. And that's primarily the role of the government with all of us citizens participating. And we try to participate in that through our American dynamism efforts. And that's important. So when I say I'm anti status, I'm really saying I'm anti communist and anti too much weight on the public sector at the expense of free markets and basically freedom for the citizens.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, Ben, I think you probably mean broaden out.

[Margain Reason]

Anti communists also, or by extension, anti authoritarian.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, for sure. Anti. And I think those go together because it's hard to be an authoritarian unless you have an amazing amount of the power.

[Margain Reason]

Right.

[Marc Andreessen]

Like even if you wanted to be authoritarian in the US and we certainly like had authoritarian and tendencies from time to time from various politicians and leaders, but it's really hard to do because you don't have enough power to pull it off. And that's the greatest thing about our system, I think, is you can't gather enough power to become completely authoritarian in the US and that's maybe the most fundamental thing we want to preserve. Zach T. Can you further define the law of accelerating returns and how it may play out in the future?

[Ben Horowitz]

So I think it's. I never know whether you use this as a.

[Margain Reason]

It's such a great metaphor. I'll go ahead and use it.

[Ben Horowitz]

So it's a. Paul Romer uses this metaphor. He says ideas have sex. Let's say ideas reproduce.

[Margain Reason]

They go through the same reproduction evolutionary process as living organisms.

[Marc Andreessen]

It's different than having sex, by the way.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, you're right.

[Margain Reason]

Okay.

[Marc Andreessen]

That's right. Now that we have birth control and.

[Margain Reason]

All these things, longer, longer form is probably better.

[Ben Horowitz]

So the argument is basically ideas beget ideas in quite the same way that people beget people. So basically it's like the more ideas that you have, the more combinations of.

[Margain Reason]

Ideas you can have have.

[Ben Horowitz]

And those combinations of ideas are themselves ideas.

[Margain Reason]

And then based on that, then they can further kind of replicate. You know, they can kind of cross breed and have offspring.

[Ben Horowitz]

And you see this anytime, of course.

[Margain Reason]

You'Re building any kind of technological product is you're pulling in ideas from like all over the place. You're getting inspired by all the different technologies that are below you in the stack. You're getting inspired by all the other applications anybody has ever tried to build. You're getting inspired by all kinds of things.

[Ben Horowitz]

You know, look, AI is inspired by.

[Margain Reason]

The neural structure of the brain, quite literally, right? Deriving from biology, crossbred over into computer science, mathematics.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so basically, if this process is.

[Margain Reason]

Working the way that it should, you should see sort of this accelerating explosion of variety and sort of speciation and reproduction and scaling of the number of ideas in the world that sort of catalytic feeds on itself like a chain reaction.

[Ben Horowitz]

By the way, this was also the argument to connect this back to the.

[Margain Reason]

Idea of human population. So this was the argument for this guy, Julian Simon, who I admire a lot, who wrote this book called the Ultimate Resource. And a lot of his work was in the 60s and 70s when there were all these pitch battles, of course, around natural resources, environmentalism. And he was kind of the avowed enemy of this guy, Paul Ehrlich, who was the guy who predicted mass famine and death from kind of increases in technology.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so Julian Simon said, no, actually.

[Margain Reason]

What you want is you actually want a lot more people in the world. Humans, people are the ultimate resource, right? Not any kind of raw material, but literally people.

[Ben Horowitz]

And he said, why do you want.

[Margain Reason]

More people in the world? Because if you have more people, you'll get more ideas.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so more people means you'll have more ideas.

[Margain Reason]

More ideas in combination with ideas leads to more ideas. Those ideas lead to ways to make things better in the world.

[Ben Horowitz]

Among the things that those ideas make.

[Margain Reason]

Possible are ways to support more people on the planet.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so he said like that, quite literally the answer to natural resource consumption.

[Margain Reason]

For example, or natural resource whatever limitations or environmental considerations or whatever. The answer is not the Paul Ehrlich approach of depopulate, right? Reduce the human population, therefore reduce the number of ideas, both the number of people and the number of ideas. The answer is to actually put the pedal forward. More people, more ideas, more solutions. And yes, clearly I agree with him in that argument.

[Marc Andreessen]

Amazing. By the way, Julian Simon is probably one of the most underrated economists and philosophers of the last hundred years. So if you're not familiar with him, that's a great one to read on that real quick.

[Ben Horowitz]

A great point that he made that.

[Margain Reason]

Really blows people's minds when they read it for the first time is he.

[Ben Horowitz]

Made the argument that you'd never run.

[Margain Reason]

Out of any natural resource.

[Ben Horowitz]

And he had a bet on that, right? He did, he did. So he Had a famous, he had a 10 year bet with Paul Ehrlich.

[Margain Reason]

The population bomb guy.

[Ben Horowitz]

And it was a bet on the.

[Margain Reason]

Price of a basket of natural resource commodities 10 years in the future. And Ehrlich was of course, 100%.

[Marc Andreessen]

That's when that's the first peak oil. Da da, da, da.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, the whole peak oil thing exactly is that same thing. And he let Ehrlich actually define, I.

[Margain Reason]

Believe, the basket of the commodity. So he kind of loaded it in his direction and the bet was, will the price of this basket be greater or less than it is today in 10 years?

[Ben Horowitz]

And everybody who's kind of in the.

[Margain Reason]

Sort of conventional thinking on this was like, well, obviously the prices of all this stuff are going to go up because there's more people, there's more consumption.

[Marc Andreessen]

And that's what everybody wrote in the press for many years. Like nobody was saying what Gillian Simon was saying.

[Margain Reason]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And then the ticker is Julian Simon won the bat.

[Margain Reason]

The price of that basket was lower in 10 years.

[Ben Horowitz]

The point was we never run out of natural resources. His point was with markets, the way that we know that a natural resource.

[Margain Reason]

Is becoming scarce is its price starts to rise. As its price starts to rise, self interest says we should figure out ways to not need as much of that natural resource. Right, right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so as the price of oil rises, then all of a sudden we.

[Margain Reason]

Have an economic incentive to develop alternative energy, ranging by the way, from solar to wind through to things like nuclear and then maybe in the future even nuclear fusion.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so it's actually market at their best.

[Margain Reason]

As the price of something rises, your incentive, your self interested incentive to come up with the alternative rises.

[Ben Horowitz]

And alternatives that were not previously price.

[Margain Reason]

Effective actually become price effective. Right. So this was the rise of fracking. Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

Fracking worked because oil and gas started.

[Margain Reason]

To get expensive enough where all of a sudden the additional cost of fracking was actually worthwhile. And then fracking brought the price rap back down.

[Ben Horowitz]

And fracking was a classic example of an idea.

[Margain Reason]

It was a technological innovation made born by human creativity.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so basically what Julian Simon says.

[Margain Reason]

Is that's the homeostasis kind of in the system. And this is not a dystopian scenario in which we are doomed to run out of everything and everybody's going to freeze and die.

[Ben Horowitz]

In fact, it's not necessarily utopian, like.

[Margain Reason]

It'S still like natural resources still cost.

[Ben Horowitz]

Money, but it's a fundamentally positive view.

[Margain Reason]

Which is it is human ingenuity that is going to cause us to not have the problems that the do say or say we're going to have, which. And again, 300 years of this and so far so good.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, it's an abundance view of the world as opposed to scarcity view of the world. It turns out the abundance view is right, which is good news for all of us. Matthew has a question which I think think you have an unusual answer to, which is the dream of fusion stopping us from enjoying the insane gains we can get from fission.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yes. So primarily what's preventing us from enjoying the insane gains from fission? And by the way, they are insane. Like the level of energy that we.

[Margain Reason]

Could be producing from modern nuclear fission reactors and the safety of it is like just. Anyway, France is doing it right now.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, France is doing it. By the way, France just got. I mean the European politics are so.

[Margain Reason]

Entertaining on this because France is so pro nuclear and the rest of Europe is so anti nuclear.

[Ben Horowitz]

France just had to get a waiver.

[Margain Reason]

From Germany to continue to run their nuclear reactors, which they finally just got.

[Marc Andreessen]

But going in France is their fission reactor.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. And the German greens have been determined.

[Margain Reason]

For 50 years to turn those reactors off.

[Ben Horowitz]

So. Yeah. So look, the big reason why we.

[Margain Reason]

Don'T have widespread nuclear fission power today is because of the precautionary principle, because of the basically the fear of disaster which basically makes people emotional. And then turns out here the emotional decision is a very damaging, bad decision because the alternatives turn out to be things like gas and coal.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so that's overwhelmingly it. Now, having said that, back to the question is. Yeah, so the new thing that you can say if you're trying to fight.

[Margain Reason]

Nuclear fission is, oh, we don't need it because we have fusion right around the corner.

[Ben Horowitz]

And by the way, look, I start by saying I hope that's right.

[Margain Reason]

I hope fusion really is right around the corner.

[Ben Horowitz]

It's been right around the corner for a while.

[Margain Reason]

I hope it's right around the corner. That would be. Yeah, it turns out to be harder.

[Marc Andreessen]

Than fission by quite a bit.

[Ben Horowitz]

It's quite difficult. And then look, I think what's going to happen is, look, I think we'll get fusion to work at some point.

[Margain Reason]

There's very smart people working on it.

[Ben Horowitz]

I think they'll get it there. I think the same forces and ideas and people that have prevented the, the.

[Margain Reason]

Deployment of nuclear fission will immediately prevent the deployment of fusion.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so I think this idea that.

[Marc Andreessen]

All of a sudden the same kind of bad narrative, corrupt pessimism, it'll be.

[Ben Horowitz]

The same arguments, it's this incredibly dangerous thing, and who knows if it goes wrong? And like, what if it's this and that and the other? And like, we can't take these risks.

[Margain Reason]

And can they prove it's going to be safe forever? Infinitely.

[Ben Horowitz]

And it's going to be the same arguments. And these nuclear fusion companies are going.

[Margain Reason]

To start out being very optimistic and they're going to hit this wall of sort of regulatory and emotional and political and ideological resistance. And I hope they punch through it.

[Ben Horowitz]

But look, Richard Nixon did two things.

[Margain Reason]

In the early 70s around this. One is he declared something called Project Independence, where he said we, the US would build a thousand new nuclear fission power plants by 1980, become completely energy sufficient, be able to withdraw completely from the Middle east, be able to be zero emission.

[Ben Horowitz]

And then he created the Nuclear Regulatory.

[Margain Reason]

Commission, which then prevented that from happening.

[Marc Andreessen]

Dope. Yeah. How many new nuclear reactors have they approved?

[Ben Horowitz]

Zero new plants in 40 years. So.

[Marc Andreessen]

Not good.

[Ben Horowitz]

Well, and again, here you go back to incentives. Okay, now imagine, okay, now again, the devil is due. Like, imagine that you're the newly appointed.

[Margain Reason]

Regulator, you're the newly appointed chairman, you.

[Ben Horowitz]

Know, Ben Horowitz, you're the newly appointed.

[Margain Reason]

Chairman of the Nuclear regulatory commission in 1973.

[Ben Horowitz]

What are your incentives? How much glory are you going to.

[Margain Reason]

Get, right, if we build some new.

[Ben Horowitz]

Reactors versus how horrible is your life.

[Margain Reason]

Going to be if there's another nuclear accident? Yeah, right, right, right.

[Marc Andreessen]

Another kind of incentive agency problem. Yeah, right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And then, by the way, you've got the existing energy companies in there doing their thing, right? Saying, oh, no, don't worry about it, oil and gas.

[Margain Reason]

And by the way, we're going to do.

[Ben Horowitz]

We're going to clean where we're going.

[Marc Andreessen]

To have clean oil.

[Ben Horowitz]

Clean oil. We're going to clean the Volkswagen. We're going to, we're going to clean diesel, Right? Like, you just let us continue working on the clean coal and the clean diesel. And then again, by the way, fusion's right around the corner and that'll be better. And then you're like, wow, these companies.

[Margain Reason]

Like, they're so big and powerful and successful. And by the way, they seem like they're kind of hinting they would give.

[Ben Horowitz]

Me a job when I'm done here.

[Margain Reason]

Yep. And you're, you're back to square one.

[Marc Andreessen]

This is a fun one. Luke Croft, you say that humans want to be productive, yet so many hate their jobs and work only because they have to. When it comes to abundance due to tech innovation, should we allow people the option of not working.

[Ben Horowitz]

So, so there's these two V. And look like again, no, no utopianism here, right? Like, not all jobs are fun. Like, look, a lot of people work.

[Margain Reason]

Jobs that they really don't like. And they're doing it because they have to, and they're doing it because they're trying to support a family or support themselves. And so certainly nobody promised everybody a job everybody loves.

[Ben Horowitz]

My analysis is if you close your eyes and imagine somebody who doesn't have to work, right? And I'm not talking about like staying at home mothers, but I'm talking about like somebody who like in our system today would be working to be able.

[Margain Reason]

To make money, support themselves and then there's a future ordering of society in which they can elect not to work and they will have the same or similar level of material comfort that they have today and they can just kick it.

[Ben Horowitz]

You kind of close your eyes on.

[Margain Reason]

That and imagine that person and there's.

[Ben Horowitz]

Kind of two possible versions of that.

[Margain Reason]

Person you can imagine. One is the person who is now.

[Ben Horowitz]

By the way, as Mark said, liberate.

[Margain Reason]

To what was Marx's whole thing.

[Ben Horowitz]

We're all going to be fishermen in.

[Margain Reason]

The morning, literary critics in the afternoon, poets over dinner, and musicians at night, right?

[Ben Horowitz]

Like we're going to be able to like self actualize into all of these things that don't involve money.

[Margain Reason]

And we're going to be, we're going to all be creating this and that and we're going to be doing all these amazing things because we have all this time free.

[Ben Horowitz]

And look, there are some people for whom that's the case, right?

[Margain Reason]

There are certain people for whom I'm sure that would be the case.

[Ben Horowitz]

There's the other scenario, and I would just call that one the Cheetos and Mess scenario, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Margain Reason]

Which is like. Yeah.

[Marc Andreessen]

And PlayStation.

[Ben Horowitz]

And PlayStation, right. And I like Netflix, I'm a fan of Netflix. But like maybe not 12 hours a day, right? And like sit on the couch and get baked and just like there goes.

[Margain Reason]

All your motivation, right? Straight out the window.

[Ben Horowitz]

And this is where I use in.

[Margain Reason]

The essay the fairly provocative term like farm animal. Like that's a farm animal existence. Yeah, right.

[Ben Horowitz]

That's the existence of a cow.

[Margain Reason]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And like, cows are great, cows are great. But like, I don't think we should be cows. Like, I don't think we should be farm animals. I don't think that is an advance.

[Margain Reason]

You're back to the Wal Poly scenario we were talking about at that point. And I think we just need to be realistic about that.

[Ben Horowitz]

And again this is very much one of these luxury belief things where kind of the class of people who imagine.

[Margain Reason]

Themselves as being the poets in the morning, fishermen in the afternoon, musicians at.

[Ben Horowitz]

Night, think that's a generalized.

[Margain Reason]

And maybe that's true for them, by the way. Maybe if you went to one of these Ivy League universities and you hate.

[Ben Horowitz]

Your job as a barista and you'd.

[Margain Reason]

Be much happier and you'd be writing poetry if you didn't have to do your day job.

[Ben Horowitz]

Maybe that's true for them.

[Margain Reason]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

But like, the consequences of that misjudgment, if that's wrong on the other 8.

[Margain Reason]

Billion people, I think are very profound. Profound and possibly extremely negative.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. And then actually we've run this experiment in the US to some extent, and I've been studying this more lately. But, you know, perhaps there were a lot of kind of bad things that happened with the Pilgrims and the Native Americans. But I think the worst thing may have been the reservation system, at least the longest lasting. And the reservation System is essentially UBI. It's $65,000 a year, I believe, per resident. And. And anybody who spent time on a reservation knows, like that just hasn't worked out well. Like removing purpose from people's lives. Generally there are people who can deal with it, but that's, I think, certainly the minority. And it's. I mean, at least in my view, that's not been great for the Native Americans. And to kind of scale that to society, as many are proposing these days, it's probably not the best thing. The other thing I'll add is jobs have actually gotten much better over time since. So not all jobs are great. But like for many hundreds and thousands of years, every job was farming. And look, not every human is suited to be a farmer. I know you weren't, Mark, because there's a lot of farming in your hometown. And then the thing that came after that first was these assembly line jobs, which it's always kind of amusing to see. Politicians say, oh, we need more good jobs like these manufacturing jobs. Like doing this all day. Pay like a robot is not like the greatest job in the world. It may pay well, but it's not the most fulfilling. And so many of the people on those lines are on drugs. And in fact, Henry Ford famously doubled the minimum wage, but the reason he doubled the minimum wage was he had so much attrition because people hated those manufacturing jobs so much. And so I think that the jobs that we're producing now have been increasingly interesting and they're not all great. They're not all great for everybody. But one thing is for sure is we have a much broader variety of things that people can do. So you have many choices and hopefully people can find the job that's right for them. Oh, this is interesting. Coinfluence X. So that's a pretty neat name. How do you perceive the contrast between rigorous technological and mathematical education seen in countries like China? China, which emphasizes relentless advancement with evolving educational paradigms in the west, which prioritizes intersectional perspectives and social values?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, Ben, why don't you start that? I agree.

[Margain Reason]

That's a. That's an interesting one.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, I mean, I think that it's tricky, you know, like. And then it's been a long time since I've been in school and my children are all adults, so I'm a little far away from the actual thing that's happening in schools now. Having said that, boy, I think that there's kind of education that you can use where you can go make something or build something or figure out how large systems work or perform like a. In demand function in society. And then there are a whole class of other things, like you can teach people about anything now. They even have lots of like, rap education in college and this and that other. And, you know, it's interesting because the great musicians I know, and I know many of them never took any kind of class like that. Most of them didn't take any class in music, by the way. It's funny, like, my friend Kanye taught himself music. He was an arts student. He taught himself music. And I think that for, you know, the great creatives, I don't know, studying to become a virtuoso and those things is necessarily probably the. Even the best path. And then you have these other things, which are these social theories, unproven social theories that a lot of people are teaching these days, which I think those are fine hobbies. And you and I pursue them as hobbies. Studying these social theories and new ideas on how to organize society or whatever, how that all works. I don't think it makes sense to charge people $300,000 or whatever college costs these days to teach them a hobby that, like. That seems really absurd to me. I know people have different views on this, but I think that the purpose of the education that we funnel young people into ought to be to enable them to make significant contributions back to society. And that probably. I don't know if it's as narrow as the Chinese education, but. But it's probably not as broad as some of the Things that we're doing.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. And then I might just pop the question up one level, which is, look, education itself is an industry. It's a field and an industry, a business. And look, both the nature of the American education system and for that matter.

[Margain Reason]

A system like in China's, they're primarily centralized and government controlled.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so the American system is, you.

[Margain Reason]

Know, K through 12 is primarily a government monopoly with occasional offshoots.

[Marc Andreessen]

And the offshoots are very restricted.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah.

[Margain Reason]

And very small in number.

[Ben Horowitz]

And then look, the college system in.

[Margain Reason]

The US is a cartel. It's quite literally a self regulated cartel, virtue of the fact that it requires it's on the sort of federal student loan drug to work financially. And then the accreditation agencies that determine which colleges get federal student lending are run by the colleges themselves. And so it's a self reinforcing cartel, which is why you don't see a lot of new universities ever.

[Ben Horowitz]

That's why the major universities in the.

[Margain Reason]

US are older than the country. Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so the same thing, you know.

[Margain Reason]

Obviously in China, the system's government controlled, inherently completely government controlled. It's commonly true around the world.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so we sort of backed into.

[Margain Reason]

This idea of education is like an abstract good.

[Ben Horowitz]

And then we have this specific implementation.

[Margain Reason]

Of these highly centralized, authoritarian, non market based approaches to it. And then you can argue the pros and cons and the results and the. I thought the question set up this very interesting aspect of it, which is like, okay, when does it become kind of too much rote memorization versus when does it become kind of too much.

[Ben Horowitz]

Kind of wild theorizing with maybe a.

[Margain Reason]

Sweet spot somewhere in the middle?

[Ben Horowitz]

You know, look, the education as a system can't really respond and adapt to.

[Margain Reason]

Changing needs of people because it's primarily not market based. And so we kind of just get the system we get, we send our kids to it. We don't think we really have a choice for the most part.

[Ben Horowitz]

And I would just say like, the.

[Margain Reason]

Big thing is it's just in all these societies it's just stuck. And then there are all these signs that it's becoming dysfunctional across many societies. We could spend hours on that.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so I would just at least.

[Margain Reason]

Want to kind of put a placeholder and say, I think we should also squint and kind of wonder like, is there a different kind of system that could get built that would be much more market driven, much more technologically sophisticated, that would be much more better suited to modern needs, and would be much more subject to actual competitive pressure?

[Ben Horowitz]

And the need to be good.

[Margain Reason]

There are some very good education startups working on this, and there are some very good charter schools, and there are some very good new startup universities. And so there are some people taking swings at this, but at a macro level, like we're not there yet. And I think maybe we should think over time about trying to get there.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. And that's interesting because we are in the middle of this very interesting crisis, the student loan crisis, and President Biden has kind of proposed, and I don't know how much of it has actually gone through all the legal objections and so forth to kind of forgive some portion of the student loans. But the interesting thing about that is that's kind of the ultimate treating the symptom and not the cause, because why can't any of these students pay back their loans? And the obvious answer is college isn't worth the money you pay for it. And then it doesn't translate into a job that enables you to pay back what you borrowed to do it. And that's a much bigger problem for young people, people and an ongoing problem that, like you either kind of subsidize college in its entirety or you have to fix that problem. And I think that given what colleges are willing to do with their tuition, like grow it, double the rate of inflation and hire more administrators than they have students and all these kinds of things if they have free money. Another incentive problem, that it's a pretty dangerous idea to make college free in that way way. We do need a better mechanism, for sure. Maybe now's the time, hopefully. Okay, Sam Arnold, to what extent do you believe we really control what technology does after its release? Can we exert any meaningful control after invention?

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. So one is obviously we do control. I mean, there are pretty strict controls.

[Margain Reason]

In a lot of areas. Right. As we just discussed in the nuclear case. So one is it's not quite that there aren't any.

[Ben Horowitz]

You know, I think maybe the underlying.

[Margain Reason]

Question here would be, can we predict.

[Ben Horowitz]

What the consequences are going to be? And by the way, this is a.

[Margain Reason]

Very hot topic right now because you have this thing where there are a bunch of AI kind of practitioners who are making these very, in my view, very extreme statements about what AI is going to do? That's going to be horrible. And there's this very strong temptation on the part of people to make what seems like a very logical kind of assumption, which is that the people who invented the technology are in the best position to be able to predict what happens with it afterwards and then are presumably also going to be in the best position to propose whatever regulations or controls are required to prevent those things from happening. Happening.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

I have not in my life, and I have not in my reading of.

[Margain Reason]

History seen a lot of examples where the inventors of technology are very good at this.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

The example I like to cite is Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and he was completely convinced that the use case.

[Margain Reason]

For the phonograph was going to be to listen to religious sermons.

[Ben Horowitz]

He was a very pious man and.

[Margain Reason]

He took religion very seriously.

[Ben Horowitz]

And he just assumed that if you owned a phonograph, the point of it would be you'd get home at the end of a long day at the.

[Margain Reason]

Office or in the. That fact factory, you'd kick off your shoes, put on your slippers and you'd have your dog by your side and your kids gathered around and you would put on religious sermons.

[Marc Andreessen]

You wouldn't have to go to church and bother with all those people, which for Thomas Edison was a big thing.

[Ben Horowitz]

Exactly. And by the way. And then you could do this every night.

[Margain Reason]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

You didn't have to wait till Sunday.

[Margain Reason]

This is great. You can do this all week.

[Ben Horowitz]

And I don't know, like, look, a few people do that.

[Margain Reason]

Most people don't. Most people listen to music.

[Ben Horowitz]

And Ben, you'll recall what was the first form of music that went kind of.

[Margain Reason]

Was kind of the big hit hit genre of music on photographs was. Was jazz.

[Marc Andreessen]

Okay, yeah, sure.

[Ben Horowitz]

And you'll recall what people said about.

[Margain Reason]

Jazz at the time.

[Marc Andreessen]

Well, they said many things, but it wasn't real music.

[Ben Horowitz]

It was the devil's music. It was very bad. It was channeling of all kinds of unholy impulses.

[Margain Reason]

It was going to cause young people to fornicate.

[Ben Horowitz]

Like they just had basically all the same things that people say about rap music.

[Marc Andreessen]

I was thinking of something that there was some racism involved too.

[Ben Horowitz]

I'll just say, oh, of course it was. Absolutely. It was going to be. Yeah. All of a sudden it's a channel.

[Margain Reason]

For these black musicians to show up in the homes of white people. Like, no question.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so anyway, it turned out that people had all kind of issues with the technology. It just turns out they weren't remotely.

[Margain Reason]

The issues that Thomas Edison predicted that they would have.

[Ben Horowitz]

And if you look at this historically, you're kind of like, well, of course he didn't know because, yeah, he's a.

[Margain Reason]

Techie, he just invented the technology. But he doesn't have like a crystal ball.

[Ben Horowitz]

He doesn't have some special foresight. And in fact, he's a particular kind of person. He's the kind of person who spends.

[Margain Reason]

All this time in a lab.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, right, right.

[Marc Andreessen]

He's unusual.

[Ben Horowitz]

He's unusual.

[Margain Reason]

Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And he must maybe speculate, you know, he might be psychologically a little bit.

[Margain Reason]

Different than most people.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right. And he draws satisfaction for different things. And he doesn't spend a lot of time.

[Margain Reason]

Time. Right. With, like, regular people.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Margain Reason]

And he's certainly not an expert on, like, politics and society and psychology and sociology and all these other things.

[Ben Horowitz]

So, anyway, I think where I would start back to the original question is just like, I actually don't think it's that easy to forecast these things. And then specifically, I don't think it's.

[Margain Reason]

Any easier for the people who invent the technology to forecast these things. And I think they carry a lot of unjustified credibility.

[Ben Horowitz]

This also came up in the Oppenheimer.

[Margain Reason]

Movie, the same thing. It's like these physicists all of a sudden. Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

Are convinced that they're the ones who.

[Margain Reason]

Are going to be working on, like, the game theory and the philosophy and the morality of the deployment of nuclear bombs.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, well, they were.

[Ben Horowitz]

Well, they tried, but, you know, that.

[Margain Reason]

Was the nature of.

[Marc Andreessen]

That was a lot of that.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, it was. But I mean, this was the scene with Truman, which is something that actually happened.

[Margain Reason]

Right. Which is like Oppenheimer shows up to kind of wring his hands about the morality of the atomic bomb. And Truman is just like, get this guy out of here.

[Ben Horowitz]

I'm the elected President of the United States.

[Margain Reason]

Like, let's listen to me.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

Right. And by the way, Truman. And again, I'm not the.

[Margain Reason]

Truman made all the right decisions or.

[Ben Horowitz]

Whatever, but Truman was the duly elected.

[Margain Reason]

President of the United States. Like, he is the guy who should have been making that decision, not the guy who invented the thing. Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so I just think, like, I guess my big appeal here is just, like, humility. Like, I think we as technologists need.

[Margain Reason]

To be very careful. We're not, but we should be very.

[Ben Horowitz]

Careful about kind of crossing the line.

[Margain Reason]

And deciding that we're going to do societal engineering kind of in our spare time.

[Ben Horowitz]

And then people who hear technologists kind.

[Margain Reason]

Of doing these things should be very skeptical that the technologists deserve any kind of unwarranted credibility on this. Right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And then, look, there are going to be these big questions. What history basically says is we figure.

[Margain Reason]

Them out as we go.

[Ben Horowitz]

And I think the alternative to that.

[Margain Reason]

Is to just not do new things. And so I know where I come out on that.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. Yeah. I'll give a plug for a great book that you recommended, When Reason Goes on Holiday, which is sort of the story of how the great physicists and inventors did on politics and policy and game theory.

[Ben Horowitz]

You take super high IQ people and you put them in a research or university setting, they go crazy. Like, they very frequently go very nutty on anything involving politics and society.

[Margain Reason]

Society.

[Ben Horowitz]

And this was the American physics community.

[Margain Reason]

In the 1920s and 1930s that basically, like, most of them went like hardcore communists.

[Ben Horowitz]

Like, Einstein was a Stalinist.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

Like, we don't talk about these things anymore, but he was. These people end up, like, very radicalized. And this happens with other groups of people.

[Margain Reason]

Right. Maybe this at certain points has happened in other areas in our public life.

[Ben Horowitz]

But, you know, it definitely.

[Margain Reason]

Intellectuals go straight for it.

[Ben Horowitz]

Thomas Sowell has talked about this a lot.

[Margain Reason]

He's like, look, he's basically the problem with people who are hyperverbal and, like, working ideas is they can get kind of arbitrarily unhinged and they can kind of talk themselves into crazier and crazier things. And their level of disconnection from the real world means that they no longer have any governors on how crazy their beliefs can get.

[Ben Horowitz]

And so I think that's what's happening.

[Margain Reason]

In AI right now. And I think we need to be very cautious about who we listen to.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, yeah. Trust in their own judgment is profound. Okay, last question, and this is actually one that I would have asked. It's from Bird, and it is. Before publishing, what did you consider the most controversial point now that it is live? What makes people chimp the most?

[Ben Horowitz]

So what did I think was the most? I don't know. Ben, let me ask you that. You read the drafts, what were you.

[Margain Reason]

Predicting was gonna be the most controversial thing?

[Marc Andreessen]

Well, I thought for sure when you wrote it, everything on the economic front about free markets and love is unscalable and those kinds of things. I thought those would be the most controversial for sure.

[Ben Horowitz]

Those are kind of time honored crowd.

[Margain Reason]

Pleasers when it comes to making people mad.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, yeah. Like, it's just, like, the nature of humans that they disagree on that.

[Ben Horowitz]

That's a good question.

[Margain Reason]

I don't know.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah, I would say I don't know. Like. And Ben, you tell me if you.

[Margain Reason]

Think I'm missing this.

[Ben Horowitz]

I think most of the attacks, I think, like a lot of artists, I aspire to have a better class of critic. So this is one of these things.

[Margain Reason]

In the modern Climate. Like, a lot of the attacks have been on me.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

More than on the ideas.

[Margain Reason]

Right, right, right.

[Ben Horowitz]

And if I were including the one you started out with earlier, like, the smug interpretation of that on my part.

[Margain Reason]

Would be, wow, the ideas must all be great if they're reduced to just attacking me.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. Ad hominem attack.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. Like, if that's all they've got, like.

[Margain Reason]

I. I must have otherwise made outstandingly excellent points, and they must not have counterarguments.

[Ben Horowitz]

I was telling you, I would love to see more. There have been a few.

[Margain Reason]

But I would love to see more.

[Ben Horowitz]

Substantive responses that are legitimately, like, carefully thought through.

[Marc Andreessen]

I agree with that. I mean, I think you've gotten a lot of emotional reaction. I mean, I think some of the more thoughtful ones are just probably on a misinterpretation of what you said, which is. Is some people interpret it as technology gone wild. Like the Girls Gone Wild video of the whatever era that was. It's like, technology gone wild, just, like, let it roam free. And. Which wasn't what you're saying. It's just more like, are we going to keep doing new things or not? Or are we going to kind of nip them in the bud the way we did nuclear fission? But, like, you build something, you've got bugs, you've got issues, you have. The Internet's had crime on it since, like, the very, very early days, and we keep working on that. But the benefits of the Internet outweigh the negative and these kinds of things. And I think people wanted you to be more on one hand, on and on the other hand. But it's a manifesto, so, you know, do that in a manifesto.

[Ben Horowitz]

Exactly. I thought there was one piece of feedback on Twitter. I thought somebody made a really smart point.

[Margain Reason]

One really smart point I saw was.

[Ben Horowitz]

Back to that love force money thing. Somebody said, boy, like, isn't it the case that actually a lot of innovators.

[Margain Reason]

Like, a lot of creators of new things, actually are doing it out of a sense of love.

[Ben Horowitz]

Yeah. By the way, broaden this out beyond technology.

[Margain Reason]

But like a lot of artists, a lot of musicians, a lot of writers, this is the concept of the labor of love. Right. Is like, they really feel like they're contributing something.

[Ben Horowitz]

And, you know, like, love of society.

[Margain Reason]

Love of their fellow man is, in fact, a motivation, even if they would also like to get paid.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Ben Horowitz]

The accusation basically was I was presenting.

[Margain Reason]

Too kind of crimped a view of human nature when I narrowed down love that much.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, I think that's right. Although if you invent somebody and then you need to hire a bunch of people to work for you, that's where love runs out. Yes, they're not all going to join on that. And similarly with a musician, your publicist, your makeup artist, and that and the other, they seem to need money.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

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