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Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
01:29:37
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- [00:00]
Chris Williamson
What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Marc Andreessen. He's a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and co founder of Andreessen Horowitz. America is entering a new chapter. With the recent election in the past, sweeping changes on the horizon, and a lot of uncertainty everywhere, just how optimistic should we be about the upheaval that the world is about to face? Expect to learn how we ended up on our current timeline just how big the civil war within the Democratic Party is right now. Mark's thoughts on the motives and response to the Brian Thompson killing How much government efficiency can actually be improved upon? Elon Musk's productivity secrets how much of a political revolution is happening in Silicon Valley and much more. If you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start. Which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year for you that monitor over 100 biomarkers. Their team of expert physicians then take that data and put it in a simple dashboard and give you actionable insights and recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health and your hormone levels to your thyroid function and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from your annual physical. Dr. Andrew Hubman is their scientific advisor and Dr. Mark Hyman is their chief Medical officer. So you can trust that the data and insights you receive are scientifically sound and practical. Getting your bloodwork drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with Function it is only $500. They've got a 300,000 person waitlist, but every Monday they open a few spots for Modern Wisdom listeners. And right now you can get functions expert blood work analysis and bypass that 300,000 person waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com Modern Wisdom that's functionhealth.com Modern Wisdom this episode is brought to you by Nomatic. Traveling should be about the journey, not the chaos of packing, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Nomatic. Their backpack and Carry On Pro have genuinely made the travel process infinitely more enjoyable. They've got compartments for everything. Your laptop, your shoes, your sunglasses. It's so well organized that even your toothbrush will feel important. It's like the Marie Kondo of luggage. Everything has its place. Best of all, their products will last you literally a lifetime with their lifetime guarantee. So this is the final backpack that you will ever need to buy and you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. So you can buy your new bag, try it for a month and if you do not like it, they'll give you your money back. Right now you can get 20% off everything site wide by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic.com modernwisdom that's n o m a t I c.com modernwisdom I've been loving my cold plunge and sauna from the team over at Plunge. I literally use them every single week because the benefits of hot and cold contrast therapy make me feel fantastic. I have more energy during the day, sleep better at night and recover faster after hard workouts. Plunge's Evolve collection includes four brand new offerings made to fit your lifestyle, space and goals. The new Plunge Pure Pro Chiller uses state of the art technology to filter water and chill it at the same time. The all new Plunge Air is amazing. If you're looking for a lightweight, space efficient option, you can connect it to the Plunge Pop up for maximum portability and affordability or go with the XL Plunge Pro for their signature style. Best of all, they offer a 30 day return policy so you can buy it and try it and get cold for 2019 days and if you do not like it for any reason you can send it back. Head to plunge.commodernwisdom and use the code MW150 for $150 off any purchase. That's plunge.commodernwisdom and MW150 at checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Marc Andreess. How much of a new timeline are we on right now?
- [04:06]
Marc Andreessen
We are on a very, very different new timeline. So yeah, so you know, I think the timeline split twice. It split once in the second week of July and then it split again on November 6th. And I, I don't know. You tell me. I mean, can you feel it?
- [04:25]
Chris Williamson
The sense in the air? The ambiance has certainly taken a hard pivot. Lots of people that were happy are now unhappy and lots of people that were unhappy are now fucking ecstatic.
- [04:36]
Marc Andreessen
So I think actually I've detected something interesting and maybe it's just my, my world or maybe business, but I think it's broader, which is, I actually think a fairly large number of people who didn't vote for Trump are actually feeling. People who run organizations who did not vote for Trump are feeling liberated. They're feeling like they can make changes that they have been wanting to make for a long time and they can really dial down a lot of the things that have really been causing the problems.
- [04:59]
Chris Williamson
So the, the blast radius of the good vibes is wider than people might have anticipated.
- [05:04]
Marc Andreessen
I think it's wider than people anticipated. And I've been in some discussions where people are like, yeah, like, it feel, it really feels like the air is coming out of the. It really feels like the tension is draining out of the system in an interesting way this time, which is of course, the exact opposite of how it felt in 2016. And so it's, I don't know, I'm, you know, I'm cautiously optimistic that actually a fairly, you know, look, I don't think there's any like overnight, you know, transformation and there's going to be continued, you know, drama and strife and so forth. But I think a lot of institutions, I think a lot of leaders at a lot of institutions, including ones that are left leaning, I think they've just simply had it with a lot of the chaos of the last 10 years and a lot of the drama and a lot of the pressure and conflict, and I think they're just done with it. And they want their, you know, if it's a company, they wanted to get back to business, if it's university, they wanted to get back to teaching. So I'm, you know, knock on wood, cautiously optimistic.
- [05:49]
Chris Williamson
This pivot from saying good or appearing good to hang on, but what actually happened, it's stress testing the outcomes and people optimizing for actual effectiveness as opposed to like optical slickness, I guess, or popularity reputational stuff. I think that pivot seems to be one that was quite overdue.
- [06:14]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And you know, part of it is, you know, there were some ideas that had to be stress tested. Right. Apparently. And I think they were stress tested and maybe fun watching, maybe backfired. And then, you know, there's this thing in, you know, there's this thing in philosophy, they call it the paradox of tolerance, which is in order to maximize tolerance, we must not tolerate the intolerant. Right, right, right. Like you can only have tolerance if you don't tolerate the intolerant. And so therefore, if you want to maximize tolerance, which is what we've all been told that we need to do, you need to ostracize, cancel, you know, nuke and you know, get rid of the intolerance. And of course, you know, the definition of the intolerant, you know, very rap goes from, you know, small people, small set of people who are like truly antisocial to Basically everybody who doesn't agree with every single thing on the, you know, thousand item checklist of what makes a good person. Right. And so, so, you know, it's, it's, you put it this way, it's hard to win elections when your electoral strategy is to shrink your coalition as much as you possibly can by driving out as many people as possible by tagging them as racist or sexist or intolerant. And like, it just doesn't work. It doesn't win elections, it doesn't lead to a happy company, it doesn't lead to a well functioning university, it doesn't lead to a well functioning organization of any kind. And I think, I think a lot leaders have maybe finally figured that out.
- [07:26]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, I think any group that's bound together of the mutual distaste of an out group, not the mutual love of an in group, the only way that you can continue to bind that together is to scapegoat and shave off the people on the outside. Insufficiently pure. Continue to point the finger at them and say, well at least we're not that thing over there. But yeah, I mean, it's the reason I've had a bunch of conversations with people on the left, Anna Kasparian, Chenky, Yuga, Dave Smith, like people, varied political standings. Anna, the fact that you can only move from left to right, you can't go from right to left. So it's a one way valve, you know, it's a one way street. And guess what happens? The street that allows you to move in one direction is going to be more welcoming and better populated.
- [08:12]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, and I don't know if you may know this either or either because of age or nationality, you might not know this, but you know, this happened before actually in my lifetime. So, you know, sort of the late 60s, the 1970s were in many ways, you know, a lot like what we just went through in the last decade, you know, and sort of, you know, Trump is that was that, you know, the version of Trump at that time was Nixon. And you know, the version of things like, you know, the Iraq war was the Vietnam War and so forth. And so there were, you know, energy crises, inflation, all these, all these, you know, hostages crisis, all these crazy comparisons. And basically and what happened actually was, you know, Jimmy Carter lost in 1980 and then Democrats didn't win another national election until 1992. It took actually 12 years for the Democrat party to get back on track. And really what had to happen was the party, the party and the movement behind it had to go back to the center and to your point, had to become a party of actual inclusivity, of actual inclusivity, of actual tolerance, you know, and sort of the Democratic Party had to reconstruct its own big tent precisely for the reason you said, which is you have to be able to attract people back. Like, you have to get people to be able to come back and feel like they're part of a broad based coalition and not just part of a very narrow thing. Now, at that time, it took 12 years, right? So, you know, they, they lost in 80, they lost in 84, they lost in 88. And then, and then Bill Clinton and then a guy named Al from, who ran this thing called the Democratic Leadership Council, and then Al Gore, you know, kind of put together this program to kind of bring the Democrats back to center. And then that led to, you know, a boom, you know, for the Democratic Party with a much more, you say, sensible, centrist, you know, set of policies and a much, much more, you know, kind of say open minded and optimistic attitude, by the way, pro business, pro patriotism, you know, kind of pro, you know, kind of treating everybody well. And so, you know, I am cautiously optimistic that the current Democratic Party will be able to find its way back in less than 12 years. And I think, I think that would be good for the country. Right? I mean, I think even if you're a Republican, you should want there to be a healthy, I think there should, you should want there to be a healthy, vibrant, viable, centrist, sensible, responsible, you know, kind of even, you know, kind of stable, you know, configuration of an opposition party as opposed to, you know, as opposed to what we've seen, what we've seen, seen recently. And so I'm, I'm cautiously, you know, there's a Democratic Party, there's a, there's a civil war already you're kind of playing out the Democratic Party. And, you know, there's, there's all these different arguments going back and forth already. And I'm, you know, but you're starting to see voices like Richie Torres and Ro Khanna and others who are standing up saying, you know, it's kind of time to go back to the center. And again, I'm cautiously optimistic that that will happen.
- [10:43]
Chris Williamson
How big of a civil war do you think is unfolding at the moment?
- [10:47]
Marc Andreessen
So it's really big, so it's really quite something. So a couple things. So one is there was just a Politico story that was really good that talked about the first big kind of summit meeting that the Democrats have had which was the DNC hosted a meeting of the state Democratic Party leaders. And it started with a full land acknowledgement. Right. And then the right, which is step one. Okay. And then, and then the current chairman of the party, you know, gave the stem winding speech about how the party absolutely, you know, needs to double down on identity politics. Right. You know, sort of, you know, step two. And then, and then, you know, this horrific tragedy in New York with this CEO getting, you know, shot and killed. You know, there's now, you know, loud pride, prominent voices on the, on the left, including in the press, you know, saying, you know, basically, you know, yay, murder. Which I think is, you know, step three is maybe, maybe not. Like these are not vectoring in the direction of like, let's just say a successful majority electoral, electoral path. But, but again, like, the contrast is clear. Like that, that is, that is a conceivable path. There are some people who want to go on that path. I, I mean, I think there are a much larger number of, you know, completely sensible people in the party and interested in the party and interested in rejoining the party who would like to, you know, who would like to see the exact opposite. So, but, but yeah, I mean, they're, they are going to, you know, argue this and litigate this, I think all the way out. I think they, you know, they really feel like they have to, they have to argue this. And you mentioned the folks you've talked to. Like, you know, there are now some, you know, I think some, you know, some voices, including some, you know, folks that are pretty far left who are kind of saying, all right, let's, let's pause for a moment and make sure we're not going off the cliff.
- [12:18]
Chris Williamson
You work with a lot of founders, CEOs, tons of your friends will be in that position too. What do you make of the response to the Brian Thompson killing and the situation more broadly?
- [12:30]
Marc Andreessen
Well, the killing, I mean, the killing itself was obviously an enormous shock. And I know people who knew him and had been with him recently, so he was a well known figure in the healthcare industry, so a very respected among sort of the business circles. So, yeah, I mean, enormous shock. And then of course, at first you're just like, well, these things are either random or most murders are committed by somebody in somebody's personal life. You know, the way this one seems to be unfolding, you know, is then, I don't know anything that's not in the press, but it seems to have a, you know, ideological motivation behind it. And, and so, you know, and then it's like, okay, is that just a one off or, you know, is this the beginning of a pattern? And you know, I would say, you know, a lot of people I talk to are very disconcerted by, I would say, the enthusiasm that a lot of people in the press are showing to. There have been a tremendous, there have been a shockingly large number of stories of the line of, you know, of course, murder is bad butt, but.
- [13:26]
Chris Williamson
We shouldn't laugh. I shouldn't laugh, right?
- [13:28]
Marc Andreessen
Well, I mean, it is, I mean, you have to laugh for your cry, right? So. And then it's like 3,000 words that come after the butt, right? And it's like, okay, like, you know, which is basically a long, long, long winded, you know, sort of justification for murder. And so, you know, that, that is, that is disconcerting. There are some comedians now, comedians, you know, that are, have gotten in the game. And so, you know, I would say this is fairly disconcerting. I mean, you know, we'll, you know, we'll see what happens. The, the, the scary scenario. You know, I mentioned the 70s. You know, domestic terror actually got to be quite a thing in the 70s in the US and there's this great book called Days of Rage that kind of chronicles basically this like, very widespread pattern of domestic terror, ideologically motivated domestic terror in the 70s by, you know, many kind of, you know, sort of radical revolutionary groups, the Weather Underground and, you know, and many others. And you know, what a lot of those domestic terrorists had in common was sort of this very, you know, various kind of privileged backgrounds. You know, a lot of these were like, you know, Ivy League, you know, like the Weather Underground came out of Columbia University. And then, you know, you know, domestic terrorists coming out of places like UC Berkeley and then, you know, sort of very privileged, often very privileged backgrounds, very kind of upper, you know, kind of elite, upper middle class people. And then, you know, ended up in some cases going on the lam for years, being hunted by the FBI. And there were, you know, there were years in the 1970s when there were thousands of terror bombings a year. And then there was a run of, you know, anti corporate, you know, basically murder and terrorism in Germany kind of through that period into the 80s with this thing called the Bader Meinhof Group and so forth. And so, you know, there's always been this kind of violent edge to kind of call it the anti corporate, anti business, anti industrial, you know, you know, kind of. By the way, and by the way, you know, a little bit of that, you know, some of that's on the left, some of that's on the right. You know, there's, there's different. You know, you can squint different ways. You know, Ted Kaczynski was on the right. This guy maybe appears to be a little bit more on the left. And so, you know, this pattern has unfolded before. You know, I don't know that it's ever been effective at causing any of the change that its proponents seem to want. You know, it seems to, you know, these, these tactics, violent tactics, usually backfire in our societies. But, you know, certain. Certainly, certainly hope that this hasn't become a copycat situation. And I, and I do think it's striking. I mean, I think there are a lot of voices in American public life who are behaving quite irresponsibly right now.
- [15:34]
Chris Williamson
What, what did they think that they're doing? That sometimes people that run health care organizations don't pay out when people should be paid out. Therefore it's okay to kill the person at the top.
- [15:47]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, it's the thing. Well, it's, of course, murder is bad, but. And then in the three in the 3,000 words is basically what you said. So the whole healthcare situation is very, it's obviously very complicated and very emotional. This can, you know, become a very long conversation. But the sort of key fact that all Western countries are trying to kind of grapple with, and this is true of the US but also Canada and the UK and the rest of Europe, basically, there's two key facts. So key fact number one is healthcare is at like a fifth of US GDP in terms of spending. So like a fifth of all national production per year goes to health care. And that, and that that number is rising. The healthcare is basically rising. And if any of you just chart this on a, on a graph, it's just very clear what's happening is healthcare left unchecked is going to go from being a fifth economy to a fourth to a third, to a half. And then, you know, somebody in the future, you know, effectively all of it, and then, and then nobody wants to pay for it. Right, right. And so, like, nobody wants to pay, everybody wants somebody else to pay for it. And then just saying the government should pay for it, of course, doesn't answer the question because the government has to be funded by somebody. And so that means taxpayers have to pay for it. And so you get in all these questions. And of course, we, we live in a progressive taxation system in which, you know, people who make more money pay, you know, pay a higher percentage of taxes. And you know, there's big political fights over that and I, I'm kind of neutral on that. I don't really, I don't really care. It's not one of my issues. But you know, it's part of this big fight over who pays for it. So that's, that's issue number one. And that's just going to, you know, it's going to bring out a lot of emotion to people because of course, especially as you get closer to end of life or you get into these, you very bad chronic conditions that require a lot of money to take care of people, it's this real challenge of how to pay for it. And then the other kind of key kind of fact is all these countries also are aging very rapidly, right? The demographics are headed in the direction of increased average age. And the consequence of that is a sharp reduction in the percentage of working age people versus older people retirees. And the whole basis for every social welfare system in the world is that the current workers pay for the current retirees, right? That is the basis. There is no, you know, the Social Security trust fund doesn't exist. The money that you pay in, you don't get later. You know, your money you pay in today gets paid out to old people today. And then when you're old, there, there need to be young workers in the system to be able to generate the money to pay you. And that's true for Social Security, it's true for Medicare, it's true for Medicaid, it's true for all of these kind of. So it's true of any socialized health system. It'd be true of government funded health system, it'd be the same thing. It just, you know, for, for taxpayers, taxpayers are people who work. And so if the, if the demographics go upside down and you have a country, you know, and you, you can in places like Japan where you just have like way more old people than you have young people and then you just have this like fundamental mismatch and then you, you literally quite simply can't pay for it. And so like these two things kind of put this whole issue into vice. Now what, what we try to do like in our line of work, which is, you know, tech and biotech and bc what we try to do is figure out ways to kind of get out of that vice, primarily through new technologies that at least, you know, in some cases will provide new kinds of healthcare, new kinds of drugs and new kinds of medical devices, but also things that are able to break that, that price curve and able to make healthcare much cheaper. Right. That's the other way to solve it is you make all this stuff much cheaper. And that's where we get excited about things like, for example, AI and healthcare and maybe the prospect that instead of people only having human doctors, maybe a lot of routine medical interactions are with AI doctors. And then you only consult with a human doctor when something gets really sensitive. And I think there's a reasonable chance in the next few years that we can figure out how to do that. So. So hopefully we can solve this with technology. It is weird, I will say, and it's coming out in this kind of current kind of debate and controversy. It is weird that the same people who are the maddest about healthcare costs rising and not being able to pay for it are also the ones who hate technology the most. Right?
- [19:32]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [19:36]
Marc Andreessen
People who care most about climate. The people who care most about climate and carbon emissions hate nuclear energy the most. Right. And it's like, all right, we are genuinely trying to help solve these. Those of us in tech are genuinely trying to help solve these problems.
- [19:46]
Chris Williamson
What do you think that is? Is it just some sort of generalized skepticism, generalized scrutiny over rich people that they don't have the best interests at heart of the common folk?
- [19:59]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, well, there's this part of. It's just simply. Right. Moral intuitions. Right. And so you have these kind of moral intuitions, and moral intuitions presumably evolved to be the way they are according to kind of historical conditions of how people lived. But historically, people lived in very small, you know, kind of communities. You know, one way of describing. There's this great book called the Ancient City that goes back and reconstructs basically, like, pre. Basically prehistoric civilization, like what it was like. And basically the conclusion of it is, you know, sort of pre. You know, you go back 4000, 5000, 6000 years and further back. You know, basically, we all lived in these very small tribes, you know, maxed out at a few hundred people. And then you could kind of describe the politics of the tribe being sort of a hybrid of like, absolute fascism combined with absolute communism. Right. Like, at the same time. Right. So it was like absolute fascism in that the father of the family or the leader of the tribe had the total power of life or death over all the members of the tribe and could kill them at any moment for whatever reason he wanted to. And then it was also pure communism in that there was no market economy. Everybody shared everything. And if you went out and killed an animal and brought it back and didn't share the food, they would kill it. You had to share the food, like everything had to be shared because it was how you were. Both of those forms of governance were basically how the tribe would survive. It needed total discipline and total sharing right at the same time. And so we evolve these moral intuitions that basically says maybe we don't want the fascism part, but we kind of want everything to be shared, we want everything to be equal. Having inequality is sort of intrinsically, morally offensive to us. And so we naturally drive towards. And who can possibly argue against, wouldn't it be desirable if everybody had the same it's default unfair for some people to have more than others. And then of course, profit, that particularly drives people crazy because profit feel profit. In the capitalist system, if you have this moral intuition, it feels like it's unfair because it feels like it's money that's been extracted that's not doing anything. I won't name names, but there was a congressman this morning who tweeted 2 back to back tweets. And he tweeted, he said it's just completely absurd and outrageous that the American health insurance industry generates $1.4 trillion in profits per year here. And he said that's just so clearly unfair because that's presumptively, that's $1.4 trillion being extracted, providing no value at all. And then four hours later there was a second tweet which he said, actually, I learned that actually it's $1.4 trillion in revenue, not profit, and total profits are a very small fraction of what I thought it was. But still equally absurd and unfair. Right.
- [22:34]
Chris Williamson
Going back to sort of where we're at at the moment, I know that you've been heavily involved in a lot of meetings over the last month or so. How much having been on every side of the fence and above it and inside of it, how much governmental efficiency is there to improve on, in your opinion?
- [22:51]
Marc Andreessen
Oh, like absolutely enormous. And it's actually interesting in that this, this actually, historically, this is actually a bipartisan question. And I actually think that the Vivek and Elon are looking at it in a very bipartisan way. And you may have already seen there are already some Democrats signing up for the Doge Congressional Caucus and coming out. Even Bernie Sanders, to his credit, came out and said he certainly agrees with Elon and Vivek specifically on the topic of military spending, which is of course one of the big areas. And so that's a, you know, that's. And I think, you know, that's Significant. So it historically is a bipartisan topic. When I was younger, you know, I mentioned the sort of Clinton Gore come back in 92. This was actually a big theme of the Clinton Gore campaign in 92, too. And actually Al Gore, who I know, you know, I've known over the years, Al Gore actually had a whole program like the Doge actually at the time called Rego Rego, called Reinventing Government. And he said many of the same things that actually Ilana Vivek are saying today. And he had this famous. He made it famous at the time. You find it on YouTube. There's this famous thing he did to kind of visualize this, which is he went on the David Letterman show at the time, and he took out. It was like the Department of Defense was like buying like $600 shatterproof ashtrays, and he took them onto the Letterman show with it, with a. With it. With a chisel and safety glasses and, you know, gave it a big whack. And of course, it fractures just like any other, you know, ashtray. So, like, anyway, so there was a whole program around that, you know, they made a little bit of progress. So anyway, I think, you know, I think everybody effectively agrees that there's, you know, who doesn't want. Who doesn't want tax money to be spent efficiently, who doesn't want to get results, you know, who doesn't want to eliminate waste and fraud. Like, you know, these are kind of, you know, those are hard things to argue against, against in terms of methods. You know, the big change here is that we've never, you know, in the past, these have been government officials trying to figure this out or, you know, commissions or whatever.
- [24:41]
Chris Williamson
Some may say the blind leading the blind, some may.
- [24:44]
Marc Andreessen
Some may say participants in the system, attempting to reform the system from within, let's say. And, you know, and this, of course, what's starkly different here is to have, you know, people of the caliber of Ilana Vivek, you know, who are, you know, tremendously accomplished entrepreneurs and founders and people who run businesses and people who understand how to do things that like, you know, and elders Elon, you know, Vivek's obviously very smart on all this, but Elon is legendary for being able to think, as he says, think from first principles on things like costs. And if you read the books about him, he's always focused on that. And so he's going to bring a toolkit that has been very successfully deployed at some of the world's leading, literally, some of the world's leading companies like Tesla and SpaceX. And he's going to bring that to the government for the first time.
- [25:22]
Chris Williamson
How is Elon so productive? Have you ever deconstructed this?
- [25:27]
Marc Andreessen
So actually I've known Elon for a long time. I didn't work with him for a very long time. Just we're working on, you know, different, different, different things. But I've been working with him quite closely for the last couple years, starting with the X acquisition and then, and then we've also invested in XAI and in, in SpaceX. And so we, we now work on three companies together to different degrees. And now the, the government. The government stuff. Yeah, I mean he, there, there's basically he, he has an operating method that he's developed that I would say is very unusual by modern standards. I'm not aware of another current CEO who operates the way that he does. And I think probably the single biggest kind of question in all of business right now is why don't CEOs operate the way that he does? And it's a complicated question we could talk about, but if you go back in history, you find characters more like him. And so especially like the industrialists of the late 1800s, early 1900s, you know, people like Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie or Thomas Watson who built IBM. If you go back and read the biographies of people like that, Andrew Mellon, you know those guys, Cornelius Vanderbilt, like those guys ran very similar to the way that Elon runs things. And it's just this like the top line thing is just this incredible devotion from the leader of the company to fully, deeply understand what the company does and to be, you know, completely knowledgeable about every aspect of it and to be in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work, deeply understanding the issues and you know, being the key, the lead problem solver in the organization. And basically what Elon does is he shows up every week at each of his companies. He identifies the biggest problem that the company's having that week and he fixes it. Right? And then he does that every week for 52 weeks in a row. And then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year, like in that year. And you know, most other large companies are still having the planning meeting for the pre planning meeting for the board meeting, for the presentation for the this, for the, you know, with the compliance review and the legal review. And like, so he's just like, it's this level of both like incredible intellectual capability coupled with incredible force of personality, moral authority, execution capability, focus on fundamentals that is just like really amazing to watch. And then by the way, the side effect of it is he attracts, you know, many of the best people in the world to work with him. Because if you work with Elon, like the expectations are through the roof in terms of your level of performance and he is going to know who you are and he is going to know what you've done and he's going to know what you've done this week and he's going to know if you're underperforming and he may fire you in the middle meeting if you're not, if you're not, if you're not carrying your weight. But if you're, if you are as committed to the company as he is and working hard and capable. Many people who have worked for him say that they had the best experience of their lives when they were working for him. And so then there's this attraction thing. And that's why I think his companies compound the way they do is because they, just, because of this, they just.
- [28:14]
Chris Williamson
Keep bringing, they're a black hole that sucks in the best talent. If you're the best in the world, you want to work harder than anybody else. Come here.
- [28:20]
Marc Andreessen
That's right. And people look at this from the outside and they're like, how can people tolerate, you know, all the criticisms? How can I tolerate this guy? And da, da, da, da, da. And inside the company people are like, finally I get to work. Yeah, somebody gets it. Somebody, somebody. There's a famous lion. Somebody used to work in one of the other defense space aerospace companies and went to work at SpaceX and said, he was asked what it was like and he said it's like being dropped into a shocking zone of competence. Right? It's just like, it's just like. Exactly your point. Like everybody around me is like so absolutely competent. And look, most of, most people, most of us never have that experience. You know, most people are never in an organization where like the bar is held that high. And as a consequence, as a consequence the competence level is so high and stays so high and even rises over time. And he, and he's, and again, to his master credit, he has been able to do that repeatedly.
- [29:08]
Chris Williamson
So detail oriented, focusing on everything from A to Z in terms of the business, sort of intimately familiar with it and prepared to get his hands dirty from a. I will get in there and actually look at solving the problem myself. So is that, you know, that suggests to me, although this can't be the case because you couldn't run this Many companies, if you were doing it this way, there may be some challenges in learning when to delegate, when to hand off tasks. Because in order to get that level of resolution, to be able to see things with that much finitude, you also need to spend a lot of time on it. And then if you're solving the problems, how do you choose the problems that are yours to solve and the problems that aren't? So on and so forth, forth. So that must be a challenge, delineating between what is my problem to solve and what is somebody else's.
- [29:57]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So I would say most leaders, like most CEOs we work with, have exactly that problem for exactly the reasons you described. I think the Elon method is a little bit different. And I don't know if he'd agree with this, but the way I think about it is he actually delegates almost everything. Like, he's not involved in most of the things that his companies are doing. He's involved in the thing that is the biggest problem right now until that thing is fixed, and then he doesn't have to be involved in it anymore, and then he can go focus on the next thing. That's the biggest problem for that company right now. So, like, for example, manufacturing, there's this concept of the bottleneck, right? And so in any manufacturing chain, there's always some bottleneck. There's always something that is keeping the manufacturing line from running the way that it's supposed to. And sometimes the bottleneck is at the beginning of the process. It's like we can't get enough raw material. Sometimes the bottleneck is at the end of the process. We don't have enough warehouses for the finished product. Or the bottleneck might be somewhere in the middle. And if you run a manufacturing company, there's always a bottleneck. Whatever the bottleneck is, is holding everything up. And job number one is to remove that bottleneck and get everything flowing again. And I think he basically has universalized that concept. And he basically looks at every company like it's, you know, some sort of conceptual assembly line, sometimes a literal assembly line, you know, making cars and rockets. And basically any given week, there's a bottleneck. There's guaranteed. There's guaranteed to be the main bottleneck. There's going to be one thing that's going to be the thing that's holding people back. And so the answer to your question, the resolution of the paradox, is I'm going to micromanage the solution of that. I don't need to manage everything else, because everything else by Definition is running better than that. Right. And so I can go focus on that. The other part of it that is so compelling and this is where I think a lot of especially non technical CEOs would really struggle to implement the method is he really, when he identifies the bottleneck, he goes and he talks to the line engineers who understand the technical nature of the bottleneck. And if that's people on a manufacturing line, he's talking to people directly on the line or if that's people in a software development group, he's talking to the people actually writing the code. Right. So, so he's not asking the VP of engineering to ask the Director of engineering to ask the manager to ask the individual contributor to write a report for, you know, that's to be reviewed in three weeks. He doesn't do that. He would like throw them all out of the window before. There's just no way he would do that. What he does is he goes and he goes and personally finds the engineer who actually has the knowledge about the thing and then he sits in the room with that engineer and fixes the problem with them. Right. And again, this is why he inspires such incredible loyalty from the, from the, especially the technical people who he works with, which is, they're just like, wow, if I, if I, if I'm up against a problem I don't know how to solve. Freaking Elon Musk. Freaking Elon Musk is going to show up in his gulf stream and he's going to sit with me in the overnight in front of the keyboard or in front of the manufacturing line and he's going to help me figure this out.
- [32:32]
Chris Williamson
Wow.
- [32:33]
Marc Andreessen
Right. And so it's like, how do you possibly, like how can. Yeah, and this is the thing. It's like, okay, you're like a normal CEO running a normal company. Like, how can you possibly compete with that?
- [32:42]
Chris Williamson
What are the other reasons that CEOs of similar companies or comparable companies don't do that? Technical understanding. I get that, that you need to be able to get your hands dirty from a specificity perspective. But what else?
- [32:55]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so like, so that's a lot. That, that is a lot of it. And that's a, that's a topic that makes people really mad because non technical people really hate being told that they are qualified to do something because they're not technical. But every now and then the technical details actually do matter. So there's, there's a whole domain there. And you know, most managers, you know, it's like most people in government are lawyers you know, most people in, in, in, in business and Senior levels are MBAs like, and so there, there's a, there's a, there's a, you know, most large companies are not run by engineers, right. They're run by business trained business people. And so there's a, or increasingly lawyer, increasingly also lawyers. And so, you know, there is a real challenge there. And then I, I just think more generally, really more generally it's just the way that management is taught and you know, most classically in the form of something like a Harvard Business School or Stanford Business School. It's basically taught, it's basically management as it was sort of developed and implemented I would say in like the 1950s, 60s, 70s. It was sort of the so called scientific school of management. And so it's basically management as a generic skill that you can apply to any industry. And you know, you could manage a soup company or you can manage a, you know, I don't know, whatever, whatever, whatever kind of company and they're kind of all the same and it kind of doesn't matter what they do. And there's a common set of management practices and, and it has, you know, is a lot to do. It's you know, process, it's, you know, how do you structure, you know, the, how do you, the manage the balance sheet, how do you set the review schedule for the meetings, how do you do compliance, how do you, you know, hire, you know, how do you manage a, you know, how do you hire and motivate executives? You know, how do you resolve interpersonal conflicts like all these like general business skills. And by the way, those general business skills are you know, very useful in lots of context. It's just that that training doesn't give you any of the information that training gives you. None of what you need to go do what Elon does. And then, and then Elon push, I would say he pushes it as far as he can and not doing all the stuff that you're classically trained to do so that he can spend all of his time doing the things that only he can do, which it turns out has this like, just like incredible, you know, catalytic multiplicative effect where his companies are, you know, so just incredibly amazing. Elon just said this thing at the most recent Tesla event that blew my mind. You know, because his companies are famous. They don't, they don't actually have like marketing department apartments. Like Tesla doesn't spend any money on sales and marketing. They don't sell the cars. Every other car company in the world is Running all these ad campaigns all the time. TV commercials and the newspaper flyers and the quarterly sales events and all this crazy stuff and promotions, all these things. Tesla doesn't do any of that. It's just like, it's the best car and you just show up and buy it or not. It's up to you. You're a moron if you don't. It's very straightforward.
- [35:23]
Chris Williamson
My dad went to go and test drive a Model S maybe a couple of years ago, and he's sort of an old school car guy and he's used to the. The sort of banter back and forth, the forecourt, the discussion. They say, please sit down. Would you like a coffee? Would you like, you know, what is that? And he said that he walked in and it felt like he got into an Apple store and there was some, as he called it, teenager in a hoodie that came out. And my dad started to do the whole, like, classic boomer parent negotiation thing. And this guy was like, the price is the price and I don't have any fucking coffee for you. So he left feeling like this is the new world. And now he has a Range Rover. So.
- [36:07]
Marc Andreessen
Well, that's the thing. It's like, do you want the best car in the world or not? Right? That's Elon's mentality, right? And it's working very well. And then at this event, he took it to the next level and this broke my brain. And I'm still thinking about it. He said, if you think about it, he said the best product in the world shouldn't even need a logo. Like, you shouldn't even have to have your name on the product.
- [36:26]
Chris Williamson
People can just identify it from how good it is.
- [36:29]
Marc Andreessen
It's just obvious. It's just obvious, right? It's just obvious. Everybody knows because it's the best product in the world. Everybody has it, everybody uses it. And like, of course, you don't need to put the name on it. Everybody knows, right? And so it's. And for a minute I was like, all right, is this like a zen, you know, thing that I. And then I was like, no, he's actually, as usual with Elon, it's like, no, he's actually serious. The best products in the world would not need your name on it.
- [36:53]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [36:54]
Marc Andreessen
And. And so, yeah, anyway, so it's just this, like, completely different. It's just this completely different method. And then. And then on top of that, to have the guy who's on top of his game, you know, to, you know, to, as you said, to Kind of be working on the government challenge and then to be, you know, to have, have the new, you know, for whatever people think of the new president, pros and cons like to have him fully, you know, fully signed up. Embracing, you know, Elon and encouraging him to do this is a really, I mean this, this has not. You have to go back. Like literally the last time something like this happened in, in the United States government was, was literally like 1930s. 3. This is the closest analogy to what, what at least has started to happen is literally what happened under fdr, which is just like a fundamental reinvention of how government works and like this massive influx of talent from, actually from the private sector that is able to just like do things that are unimagined. And so it's, you know, it's a once in an 80 years thing. I'm, you know, I'm doing everything I can to help and I hope it.
- [37:42]
Chris Williamson
Goes, you know, pouring some kerosene onto the fire as you are. The. I saw a clip of Elon speaking. I don't know whether it was recent clip, but the clip only came up the other day. He's talking about his thoughts on being a CEO. A lot of times people think that creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it's really not that fun. I mean, there are periods of fun and there are periods where it's just awful. And particularly if you're the CEO of the company, you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in a company. There's no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong. And there are things that are going wrong that other people can't take care care of. So you have like the worst. You have a filter for the crappiest problems in the company, the most pernicious and painful problems. So I wouldn't say it's fun. You have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold. And there's a friend of mine who says starting companies is like staring into the abyss and eating glass. And there's some truth to that. The staring into the abyss part is that you're constantly facing extermination for the company because Most startups fail. 90%, 99% fail. That's the staring part. You're constantly staring, okay, and saying, if I don't get this right, the company will die. Quite stressful. Then the heating glass part is you've got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. So you end up working on that. You really wish you weren't working on it. That's the eating glass part. And it goes on for a long time. What's your assessment of his postmortem on being a CEO?
- [39:06]
Marc Andreessen
So the original form, number one, I agree with all of that, and I felt that myself, and that's one of the reasons I'm happy to be an investor right now and not. Not a CEO of a company. But the original form of the quote, the eating glass quote, was actually Sean Parker, and the original form of the quote was, starting a company is like eating glass. Eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood. Oh, my God.
- [39:31]
Chris Williamson
Oh, my God.
- [39:32]
Marc Andreessen
And I love using that quote in front of an audience because it always gets the exact reaction you just gave me. It always gets that moment of stunned silence followed by that look on the face, and everybody's like, oh, my God, that's horrifying. And I'm like, yes, now you understand.
- [39:45]
Chris Williamson
Go forth, run your company.
- [39:47]
Marc Andreessen
Now you understand what it's going to feel like. Yeah, no, look, and the serious thing I would say is it's a little bit less now, but there have been times when the idea of being an entrepreneur and tech entrepreneur has been like a romanticized concept. And there used to be TV shows talking about how much fun it was, and people ask questions like, well, how do we, you know, how do we encourage more people to be entrepreneurs? My answer I was always was like, no, we shouldn't do that. Like, people shouldn't be encouraged to do something that painful. Um, they should do it because they really want to do it. In fact, they should do it because they can't not do it. Right? And so it's. It's. I'm not a. I'm not an endurance athlete, but it would be a little bit like encouraging somebody to do a triathlon or an ultra marathon, right? Like, oh, yeah, why don't you go out there and run 120 miles in the heat? Right? Like, no, like, that's bad. No, most people should not do that. But the people driven to do that should do that. And by the way, the people driven to do that will do that, right? For, you know, for their. For. For their own reasons. And so it. It really is like that. And yeah, and then, look, it's. It's tremendously painful. You know, most. Most of the experience of being in business in a competitive, you know, setting and a startup is sort of the peak version of that is most of it consists of basically being told no, you know, by everybody. You know, you need all these things, right? You need employees, and you need, you know, financing, and you need customers. And, you know, you go around all day long asking people for those things, and they tell you no. Or, you know, half the time, they don't even respond respond. You know, they. They just go dark on you and ghost you. And then, you know, just when you think you get it working, a new competitor emerges and just starts, like, you know, punching you square in the face. And, you know, the minute you think your product's working, there's a problem in it. You have to do a recall and. And every. You know, just. Yeah, it's just this constant. It's just kind of this. This constant rolling, you know, horse.
- [41:23]
Chris Williamson
You're now the. You're another agony ant to the people who are eating glass and. And learning to try and enjoy the taste of their own blood. Do you. Do you feel more like a therapist therapist than an investor? Sometimes.
- [41:35]
Marc Andreessen
So it really depends. One of the things, I think there are certain professors, I think there are certain fields in which you really get to see somebody's core personality, and you get to see their kind of core attributes and their core virtues and their core vices and their core weaknesses. And it's really only people under situations of extreme stress where you really see that. And so part of it is like, we see that. We see people when they're at their most stressed and when they're at their worst. And then there are, I would say, many cases where we're one of their only remaining allies. Lies, you know, kind of at that point. So that. That's a not uncommon thing. And, you know, there. There is, you know, sort of a. There's a coaching component to it and a therapeutic and a. Just a general, you know, kind of being a friend, you know, being an ally component to it. But I also say the other thing you see is just like, you know, there are very specific personality types, and, you know, there are certain people where. I'll just give you an example. Mark Zuckerberg, you know, a great superpower that Mark Zuckerberg has that probably is not well understood enough, which is he does not get emotionally upset in stressful situations. He is able to maintain an analytical frame of mind even when other people would be, you know, literally bursting into tears and hiding under the table. And I've seen that many, many times. It's just like I. You know, the company's been through a Tremendous amount of both good and bad. You know, things over the last, you know, I've been, I've been involved almost for 20 years and you know, we've been through almost everything good and bad and, and I've literally not want seen him raise his voice. You know, he's, he's always been, you know, and he's, he's very sympathetic and he's very, you know, when somebody has a personal crisis, you know, it's, it's not that he's not emotional like he, he engages emotionally with people and he's very supportive of people when they have issues. And he, you know, he feels things very deeply, like, like everybody does. But you know, he just, he has a level of emotional self control. You know, psychologists would say, you know, 0% neuroticism. He just doesn't respond emotionally and as a consequence he can keep his head right when, when everybody around, around him is, is losing theirs. And so you've got that. Having said that, we also work with a lot of people who are, let's say, higher interaction and in particular, often the more creative. You know, people who are super creative are often high in eroticism. And so sometimes you get the, you know, we get the artist type where they're like incredibly creative and they're a fountain of new ideas and they just have a much more, let's say, direct engagement with their emotions and they feel things, you know, I would say more directly or kind of in a more raw way. And so, you know, when things go bad, it really comes down to them emotionally. I was frankly myself probably more, more on that, on that side of things. And so, yeah, there, there's, you know, a therapeutic aspect to that. The good news, I would say is generally in business, so a couple things. So one is it's not in our world. It's not a 90% failure rate. It's about 50%. And in 50, 50% is still high, but, you know, you have a reasonably good shot. And then I think most problems in business are fixable as long as you can keep the team together. I think usually when companies crack and go down, it's usually not. Sometimes it's catalyzed by something that happened from the. Generally the thing that actually happens before a company goes down is the internal, the team cracks. The, the, the, the team itself cracks internally and the founders turn on each other or the management team dissolves. And so a big part of it is just with these things is just like, can, can, can you keep the team together? If you can keep the Team together and you know, we're happy to be a part of, you know, we're thr. You know, our job is to be part of that team. Then, you know, most of these companies can battle through most things. And so, so I say I've seen like, I've seen, you know, just as many like incredible last minute saves and rescues and turnarounds as I have, you know, screaming disasters. So, you know, there is reason for optimism going into even the dark times.
- [45:02]
Chris Williamson
Going back to the governmental efficiency thing. How much do you think the huge swaths, the platoons of useless middle management inside of the government are shitting themselves at the moment?
- [45:13]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so it's, you know, it's actually an interesting question. I actually, it's hard to say from the outside side. The other thing is you have this, I would say, very interesting thing. You don't have a, you know, there's no homogeneous, you know, the government employs whatever it is, you know, millions of people, multiple millions of people. It's not, you know, it's far from a homogeneous group. And I just give you some examples. There's a pretty large contingent which is sort of the baby boom component of it, you know, because the government went on a massive hiring boom in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. There's a pretty big contingent that's close to resistance retirement and you know, was probably going to retire anyway in the near future. And so, you know, there's some prospect maybe there for, you know, kind of, let's say mutually agreeable accelerated retirement. You know, is one.
- [45:56]
Chris Williamson
Is one possible mutually agreeable accelerated retirement? The most diplomatic way to say get out.
- [46:02]
Marc Andreessen
No, no, this happens to. So in fairness, this happens at companies. And I'm not saying the DOGE is going to do this. I'm not, I'm not in charge of this. But I'll just give you the scenario that happens in companies. It's something called buyouts. It's contrasted to layoffs. And it sounds like it's a clever way to do the same thing, but it's actually different, which is you basically, you offer retirement packages, right? And you let people voluntarily sign up for the retirement package and they don't have to sign up for it. And so it's a voluntary thing, but if they choose to, they can get accelerated retirement or an unusual level of retirement compensation. Like a way to think about this is like the budget crisis that we, that a business has when it gets in trouble, or that the government has where we're $36 trillion in debt. The budget crisis is not like the money that we might have to pay to have people retire this year. Like you can afford almost anything to do that. It's the savings that you can have compounded over the next 20 years if you get your fiscal house in order. Right. And so you can sometimes do things in the near term that cost more money in order to get the long term savings. And that often makes sense. And so there's so. And again, I'm not speaking for the doge. So this, you know, this is one option, another option that they've already talked about in public is the remote work thing. You know, most, most federal workers are not, most federal workers are not actually at work. You know, most, most federal workplaces are empty today. You know, there are agencies where there are formal collective bargaining agreements where the employees are down to a day, a month in the office. Right. And you know, there's a huge controversy around remote work, you know, is how effective it is. And there are companies that make it work. But, you know, if hypothetically you have a government agency with 10,000 people and nobody's literally coming to work, you might as a taxpayer have some questions about exactly what's going on. And then you have this situation where if you say, as they've said, if, say people have, they, people have to come back to work. Like part of the thing of working for the government, working for taxpayers is people have to come to work. Well, there are people who have literally left, you know, there are people who have moved to lower cost locations who are not going to come back to work. And so that's, that's another opportunity. And so there's, there's, like, there's, there's a lot of this. And then I would, I would say the third thing that they've talked about, which is I think probably the part of it that is not well appreciated is that the government that we live under today, you know, we, you know, remember that old, I don't know if you were, you probably didn't see this because you weren't maybe here at the time, but there's this cartoon that every American kid of a certain age saw in elementary school, social studies, which was how a bill becomes a law. Oh, it's, it's this very bouncy, it's this very bouncy like 1970s cartoon about the bill and you know, the con, you know, the White House proposes the bill, then the Congress agrees and then the Senate and then they reconcile and, you know, dance and the bill's, it's a little cartoon, you know, bill wrapped in a little ribbon, and it bounces up the thing and the president signs it, and everybody's happy. Right. And so it's like, you know, legislation. Right. It's a legislative process. Most of what the government does and most of the rules that we all live under are not that. Right. Most of the. Most of it's not legislation. Most of it, what is what's called regular regulation. Right. Which is very different. And most of the rules that the government sort of exists in order to process and enforce are regulatory, not legislative. The government that we live under today is the result of basically 60 to 80 years of agencies effectively putting out regulations entirely on their own. So executive branch agencies just basically deciding that there are going to be hundreds of thousands of rules that we need to live under, and then deciding that they need to staff themselves to be able to process it, handle and enforce all those rules. The Supreme Court recently ruled in a series of judgments a couple years ago, ruled that regulations that were not authorized by legislation are not constitutional. Right. And by the way, if you just read the U.S. constitution, which is quite short and to the point, it makes it very clear that the legislature, the Congress, exists to pass laws. The executive branch exists to enforce those laws. The executive branch does not get to issue its own lawsuit. Right. And so we've lived in a system where the executive branch has been issuing its own laws for a very long time. Supreme Court now says that all of those regulations are now not constitutional. And so basically, any activity in the government that relates to the staffing and enforcement and all of the processes and all the work around those regulations is no longer constitutional. And so there's a lot of government activity that actually is no longer constitutional. And, you know, the previous administration was completely uninterested in doing anything bringing the executive branch into alignment with what the Supreme Court had ruled. But again, if you read the Constitution, the Supreme Court gets to make these decisions. They've decided this is not constitutional. This new administration has an opportunity to bring the government more in compliance with the Supreme Court, which means the government will get smaller. Yeah.
- [50:19]
Chris Williamson
What happens if Trump can't deliver change? He's got all of the things House, Senate, popular vote, Elon, unlimited fundamental funds, blah, blah, blah. He doesn't even need to worry about being reelected. What's the implication for America and the west if he can't make sizable change?
- [50:37]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, I start by saying I'm optimistic. Like, I think he's determined. I think that Elon's determined. I think Vivek has determined, I think, the team around the Doge, by the way, a lot of the key staffing positions. There's a lot of controversy in the press, as usual, about the cabinet officials, and I think many of those are also very good. But a lot of the, A lot of the operational managers that are being brought in at, like, the deputy secretary level and the department heads are very, very strong people. And so I, you know, I think this is going to be one of, one of the strongest, if not strongest, you know, execution, competence, capability administrations that we've had in a long, long time. Again, maybe arguably since then, I, I think a reasonable case that this will be the best, best, the best staffed administration since the 1930s. And so, you know, I'm, I'm reasonably optimistic. And then, look, the, the president has this, you know, is in this sort of very interesting position where he doesn't ever have to run again. Right. Because he can't. Right. And so the, like, a lot of what happens in a second term, if presidents choose to take advantage of it, is they can do things that. Cause, you know, that basically might even put their reelection at peril. They can do more forceful things because they, you know, they can do the things that they actually think are important as compared to the things that they think they might need to do to get reelected. And that's something you can only do when you're going to get, when you're going to get termed out. And so. And then, of course, there's just, yeah, there's sort of, you know, all the things kind of behind Trump's level of determination this time, which I think is very high. So, you know, I'm quite optimistic. I don't know. I mean, you know, you could paint various cynical pictures of the whole thing being gummed up. My guess is if it disappoints, it's going to disappoint in the sense of some of these things are going to get done, but not all of them. And frankly, like, I think it'd be great to solve all of our problems at once. But if we can't do that, if we can just, basically, if this team can sort of give us a roadmap on how to do things properly. Properly and can kind of show us, you know, through examples, you know, if, if let, let's say there's, you know, let's, let's say there's, you know, let's say there's a thousand versions of this problem that have to get solved and this team only gets to the first hundred, then we will have the recipe book, right, for how to solve the next 900 over the next, you know, two or three or four administrations that follows that. And so that. That. That would be my optimistic failure case. And I think we'll. I think we will get at least that, if not a much more sweeping transition transformation.
- [52:43]
Chris Williamson
Talk to me about this Willow Google quantum computer thing. How big of a deal is it?
- [52:50]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So, first of all, I don't know. You know, I just read the announcement. I haven't been face to face with the technology, so I don't know anything that's not public on that. Quantum computing historically has been one of those things that is theoretically very exciting and then just extremely hard to actually get working. Quantum computers don't act like regular computers in any way. And so. And there's always this kind of thing where you, in theory, can kind of demonstrate something in a lab and that maybe it works and maybe it doesn't. It's often not completely clear even whether it worked. And then, you know, could you ever get that to repeat? Could you get that to repeat across, you know, 10 or 100 different, you know, kind of locations? Could you ever then apply that to these different problems? Like, there. There's just all these, like, really, really fundamental questions. And so it's one of these really enticing things that, you know, everybody's hoping that we get to. I. I just. I'm not close enough to know whether they got to the full breakthrough or not. The thing that I think would be the full breakthrough would be, not only does it work in one lab, this is something where you could now stamp out 10 and then 100 and then a thousand of these machines, and then you could do it repeatedly. The most enticing thing of what they said, which is one of these things where you think about it and then you decide you have to stop thinking about it because you'll never think about anything else again, is that, in theory, the lab demonstration that they have is doing a computation that the entire universe that we live in if it was converted entirely to just a giant computer, if every atom in our universe was. It was. It was. Was turned into a giant computer, that computer could not solve that problem before the universe ultimately dies of heat death. Right. And the implication of that is that the computation, therefore, must be spread out across many other parallel universes, which is therefore proof that there are many other parallel universes. And so.
- [54:40]
Chris Williamson
Interesting, right?
- [54:42]
Marc Andreessen
In other words, if you weren't able to spread this computation out across many parallel universes, it could not have been done. Therefore, there must be many parallel universes. Therefore, we do actually live in a multiverse and there are actually billions or uncountable numbers of parallel realities, including that.
- [54:55]
Chris Williamson
We'Re using for our ram.
- [54:58]
Marc Andreessen
Yes, yes. And yeah, we basically have out, yeah, we're outsourcing to these other universes. I mean, by the way, are we having any impact on them when we do that? I don't know.
- [55:07]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, there's some very glitchy 360p universe out there. And God damn it. That guy from Google. Yeah, that guy from Google is trying to work out if two plus two equals four again.
- [55:18]
Marc Andreessen
Yes, exactly. And then of course, are any of these other universes going to do it to us? So, you know, the quantum people really do believe it's a, you know, we live in many, you know, many, many, many different realities. So, you know, this may be one of those things from science fiction that we end up figuring out. But yeah, this is the kind of thing, you know, it's, it's, you know, Einstein's famous reaction to quantum physics was, you know, this is impossible because the famous quote was, God doesn't play dice with universe. Right. And it, you know, this result is yet another evidence that. No, actually God really likes playing dice with the universe.
- [55:47]
Chris Williamson
Seems like he's, he is doing it between that. I mean, this, this last period, there's so much going on in tech Sora, AI as well. What's your post? I mean, they've closed now signups and stuff, because it just went ballistic. So for the people that don't know, this is the video equivalent of OpenAI's image creating navigation service. And now you can do video too. Although so many people signed up, it's restricted to particular territories, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What do you make of the way that that went?
- [56:17]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so this is, yeah, this is video. So this is text to video generation. So you put in a text prompt, you get, you get out a video, which sounds easy, turns out to be very hard. It's very magical. Sora's, you know, one of the more impressive ones at OpenAI. There are others, you know, we have a bunch of others and there's a bunch of others underway. It's a competitive space, but, you know, the class of technologies is very impressive and Sora's very impress impressive. I mean, one is just like, how amazing is it to live in a world in which you can literally say a text prompt of a hobbit living in a hobbit town with the dragon shows up and then literally it will render that for you. And if you want the dragon to be rendered out of used car parts, you just say dragon made out of used car parts and it renders that for you. And so it's like, I mean, that's just amazing. To start with, the even more amazing thing about that, and OpenAI put out a paper about this. It's very interesting. So the more amazing thing about that is to generate video that passes the sniff test of the human eye looks at it and thinks that it's real. You can't just sort of copy from other videos. And that's part of what's happening, is you're training the system like Sora is trained on millions of hours of video from all over the world and all this open source stuff and everything, and out of old movies and all this stuff. And then there's copyright disputes over what else is in there and so forth. But, you know, so it's trained on lots of video. But it's not sufficient to just train on lots of, you know, because video is all 2D. It's not sufficient just train on 2D video and then generate a new 2D video that actually looks to the human eye like it's a representation of the real 3D world. And if you look at these videos coming out from Sora, if you look at them carefully, basically what you see is like multiple sources of lighting and in different parts in 3D space coming together, you see reflections coming off of reflective surfaces that are actually correct. You see translucency, that's correct. And then you get combinations of these factors. So like, for example, if you do something where, like man walking through puddle at night, you'll get the splashing effects of the water. The water has to splash in a way that is physically realistic. The light has to come through, refract through the water droplets in the correct way. The water droplets have to reflect the image of the man's shoe in the right way. So, and the AI term for this is world model. This is not only a model for video, this is a model that actually understands the real world. It's a model that actually understands 3D reality. Right. And it understands light. Right. And it understands surfaces and textures and materials and motion and gravity and gravity and gravity and shapes and. Right, exactly. All these things. Right, exactly. You know, a stiff surface versus a spongebob surface. Yeah, you know, def, you know, give me a close up, give me a closeup of a, of a baseball bat hitting a baseball you know, like in slow motion. It has to deform the baseball in the way that it, in the real world it does, you know, when it hits the bat. And like, for this story, it has to do all those things. And in fact, it is able to do all those things. Like the, if you just look at the results, you can see all that's happening. And so what that means backing up to that. The implication is that model is not just a video model, it's what's called a world model, meaning it actually understands 3D physical reality. The implication of that is that we may have basically just solved the fundamental challenge of robotics. The fundamental challenge of robotics is how do you get a physical robot to navigate the real world without screwing everything up? So how do you get a robot waiter to navigate through a busy restaurant without stepping on anybody's foot, without tripping over anything, without spilling water on the table? To understand everything that's happening in real time, to be able to adapt, you know, very similar to the self driving car challenge. Like, how do you do that? But how do you do that for basically everything? And how do you put machines up close with people in such a way that it's like completely safe? And it turns out one of the things you need to do to do that is you need a world model. The robot needs to have a comprehensive understanding of physical reality so that it can understand what's happening. And so when things change. Because, you know the robot's seeing primarily visual, right? It's just like you're seeing visual. And so you have to map the visual into an internal representation of the 3D world. Up until now, building a world model like that has been difficult or impossible. And it now appears that that's actually starting to work. So Westworld, it's happening 20, 28, 2030.
- [60:34]
Chris Williamson
What do you think?
- [60:36]
Marc Andreessen
It's coming.
- [60:36]
Chris Williamson
You must be knee deep in projections for robotics, for AI, for where we're going to get to. What's the meteorological artificial intelligence forecast for the next few years? What do you think people can expect? Sort of 25, 26, 27, et cetera?
- [60:53]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So I just start by saying it's really hard to forecast this. And I'll give you my favorite example of this. Which was the world's leading AI researchers in the year 1956 got together and they got a grant from the government to spend 10 weeks in the summer of 1956 at DARPA, at. Sorry, at Dartmouth, at Dartmouth University. And so they all got together and in that 10 weeks, they were going to finally get to artificial general intelligence. They were so close, like they were almost to what it was called AGI. They were almost to an AI that can do everything that a person can do. They were only 10 weeks away. And, you know, you'll notice that was in 1956. It didn't happen. We're sitting here in 2024 and we still don't have it. So this field is prone to, this field of all the fields in tech, AI is prone to utopianism, it's prone to apocalyptic nightmare scenarios, and it's prone to a very, very, it's been very hard to forecast progress. Like, extremely difficult to foresee forecast progress. Well, another, another great example of that is OpenAI was not formed to make chat GPT. OpenAI was not created to make large language models. Open AI was created to make an entirely different kind of AI. And then it, it turns out if you trace back the origin of GPT, there was literally one guy at OpenAI, his name Alec Radford, and he was like sitting in a corner and he's like, I think all this other stuff is wrong. I think we should be doing this other thing instead. And so, like, you know, even that company that brought us, you know, chat GPT, you know, didn't, you know, a few years ago, didn't, didn't, didn't, didn't know that that's what they, they were going do. So, so forecasting is very hard, especially about the future. Look, having said that, the progress is staggering and, and, and you know, one is just the observed progress is staggering. The, the plans that people have are incredibly exciting. You know, one of the things you always wonder with any field like this is just how much, how many more ideas are there, right? Like, like arguably we've run out of ideas for what the smartphone can do. Like, you know, what's new with the smartphone now versus last year versus the year before. It's. Companies kind of run out of ideas. With AI, there's ideas all over the place. And so that's very optimistic. And then many of the smartest people in the world are being drawn into the field, right? And so every smart college kid who's considering what to do, a lot of the very smartest are going into the field. And then a lot of people are like coming over from other fields, like physics, to work on this now that it's really started to work. So we're also getting this effect of kind of this reverse brain drain or something where we're pulling in all this smart people. That's another Reason for optimism. And then obviously the commercial opportunity is very large. So that's another reason for optimism. I. The big focus right now is to get these things to what's called reasoning, general purpose reasoning. So to get them to, you know, like to get them to predictably be able to solve problems in a way that is, you know, fully coherent and leads to good results every time. And, you know, these things are very good at solving certain problems most of the time. They, they, you know, they, they're. It's, it's a very unusual technology where if you ask a large language model the same question twice, it actually gives you different answers. Um, and if it doesn't know the answer to the question, it will sometimes make up an answer. And it is pretty amazing and wild that we have creative computers that will literally like, you know, make things up. Um, but like, we, we need versions of these that don't do that. We need versions of these that are able to reason their way through complicated logic chains, that are able to model physical reality like I just described, that are able to, you know, think longer and get better results. And so there's tremendous amounts of work happening on that right now. I'm pretty optimistic on that. I think by, yeah, I think by, I don't know, 2028 or something, I'm just off the top of my head just with a little bit of emergency safety by 2028, these systems, you'll be able to basically give these systems problems and they'll, you know, they'll, and they'll solve the problems. If it's something, if it's something that a human being can do, they'll be able to do it. And then robotics is basically that. And then we now have the interface method for robotics because we have large language models, so we can now make robots talk and listen and we have voices and, you know, human English comprehension, all that stuff. And then, and then basically the rest of robotics is basically mechanical engineering and then some power, basically battery technology. And I think robotics are getting quite close now. And so that, and that I bring that up because, like that AI is going to be important if it's just disembodied software, but it's going to be really important if it's around us all the time in the form of.
- [64:53]
Chris Williamson
If it exists. Yes. In the real world.
- [64:55]
Marc Andreessen
In the real world. And of course that's already happening. Right. Autonomous now, drones now fly themselves. Cars now, you know, cars now drive themselves. Right. So, you know, for people who haven't tried either the Waymo cars In places like San Francisco or the new Tesla, you know, the latest version of the Tesla software. They're both outstanding. And so cars now drive themselves. That's a big step forward. Drones now fly themselves. There are now companies making, you know, autonomous submarines and, you know, all kinds of, you know, fancy, fancy things.
- [65:24]
Chris Williamson
Oddly enough, the autonomous submarine just feels like one that you could have done earlier. You know, there's far, there's far less traffic, there's far fewer things to crash into.
- [65:32]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, yeah, prob, probably there's, yeah, we, we have a company that has a, has a, has a military submarine that is, is, is. It's literally, it's literally, it's an unpressurized shell sort of platform and you can basically customize it in many different ways, load many kinds of things on it, but it's like unpressurized form. It's able to, you know, go far deeper than, you know, than a human, than a sub that needs to support human beings can go, you know, it's able to go down and you know, be able to do all kinds of things. So yeah, like, you know, the whole, as we're seeing, you know, on the military side, you know, there's a transformation of military, of military strategy, you know, that's underway right now, you know, kind of as these technologies hit that we're already seeing in Ukraine. So that's going to matter. But you know, look, a lot of this stuff is just going to be stuff in our, in our personal lives, in our daily lives.
- [66:15]
Chris Williamson
What do you think of the adoption of self driving, sort of en masse self driving? I don't know whether there is a more highly kinetic, high risk and heavily involved area of human life that is ready to be outsourced to AI. You know, there's other things you can help you cook or it'll, you know, keep your food fresh or do whatever, but there doesn't seem to be the same sort of mortal consequences. You know, people have very strict, strange relationship between car safety when it's done manually and when it's sort of pivoting to that. Is this just some conceptual inertia thing that we're moving through over time slowly as usual?
- [66:58]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So to start with, cars today are a disaster from a safety standpoint. Right. And so cars, the current run rate of road deaths worldwide is at least a million people a year. Right. And so it's, it's about 40,000 road deaths a year in the US and about a million worldwide. And by the way, that million may be a low number. It may be much higher worldwide. And they just, we just don't know how to count it. But it's at least a million worldwide. And so, you know, and it's, it and it's sort of like again, you kind of think about this like, okay, a million people a year dying from cars, okay, over the course of a decade, that's 10 million people. Like when 10 million people die from something in modern world, we use words for it like, you know, like, you know, apocalypse, right? Genocide. Like, you know, this is like mass death at a very large scale. And so one is just like to your point, like there's a psychological thing here which is we have gotten ac. And by the way, for every death there's many injuries, right? Many people crippled and you know, never recover. And so we, there's a psychological thing here, we. Which is we have gotten used to a very large amount of carnage in return for the convenience of modern transportation and logistics. By the way, you know, in the fullness of time as a civilization, it seems to have been a good trade off. You know, I don't think, you know, very few of us not named Greta Thunberg want to go back to, you know, you know, you know, walking everywhere, right? And so, and you know, you could never go back to riding horses, right? Because of course, you know, animal rights. But you know, so like, it is amazing that we got there. By the way, implication of that being if the car were invented today, I mean, imagine the conversation that we would have, right, about the rollout of the automobile, right? Which is like, okay, the plan, right? The plan is to strap people into 6,000 pounds of steel and glass. And then the plan is to shoot them down, you know, a road that may or may not, you know, be in good shape at 60 miles an hour. And then they're going to shoot them at each other. And then we're going to have the safety measure. The safety measure is going to be we're going to paint a line down the center of the road and that's going to keep them from crashing, right? And so like there, there's no way that you'd be able to like invent this today or launch this today. So maybe it's good that it happened in an earlier era. So anyway, to your point, we're used to that. Um, the self driving, both Waymos and Teslas today are far safer than that. Far safer. And there's like edge questions about, you know, like, you know, this is, the metric is like, you know, collisions per, you know, thousand or a hundred thousand miles or something or deaths per a hundred thousand miles. And like there's just no question, they're just like tiny percentages relative. And it's by the way, not that they're necessarily zero, but they're tiny percentages of what we, of what we experience every day with, you know, with road desk. By the way. I think as humans we have a bad intuition on this because we can't see the other their drivers most of the time when we're driving. Um, so I, I find the cure for people who need to think about this harder is to just go spend a day sitting at the DMV and just watch the parade of humanity and watch the people who have to be physically steered by their relatives in front of the camera to get the new driver's license at age 90, right? Like so we, we just, you know, then, you know, and then get X. If you had like an X ray machine into cars that are driving past, you just see how many people are just texting, right? Or how many people have been hitting the vape for the last three hours, right? So, so there's no question that the technology we have is much safer. There's a societal question as to whether we want the, where we want the trade off to be, right? Do we want the trade off to be to stay to the current level of carnage because we're used to it, or do we want and wait until the computers are perfect or is it enough for the computers to be much better, which is what's actually happening. Interestingly and optimistically, we as a society have chosen to actually accept, we have chosen to roll out self driving without the computer, computers being perfect. And so, you know, there's Teslas and Waymos on the road all over the place. And you know, we're, and people are fine with it. And I actually think that's like, it's a very optimistic thing that we were, we were able to do that. If you talk to the people who make self driving cars, what they tell you is the problem is not ever a self driving car colliding with a self driving car. The problem is it's when you have other humans in the mix, right, as you'd expect, right? Because humans react in unpredictable ways. And so a lot of the engineering going into these cars is to accommodate the human, human drivers. There will be some future state years in the future where there are no more human drivers, at least on public roads. And when that happens these things will be like basically completely safe because then you won't have the human element in there. And so one of the things that we, we may want to drive, you know, we have to drive to ultimately is that there are a lot of questions around that, but that may be where we want to go to. I'm pretty optimistic about this. I think that these companies are making excellent progress. I think that the, the, this says pros and cons, but the Chinese auto industry is now coming online and I think they're also going to be quite good at this. And I think they're, they're, they're coming now. Um, and so I think that this is, this whole space is going to develop I think quite quickly.
- [71:21]
Chris Williamson
What about personal autonomous vehicles like drone? Drone? I remember I was in Leonardo da Vinci Airport years ago and there was one out, a gyrocopter thing out front. This can fly itself, et cetera. Uh, that feels like a much bigger problem in that you, you're not retrofitting a new piece of technology onto an existing infrastructure. That this is basically an entirely new thing that you need to have where they can float around.
- [71:50]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So the US the, the term, the term most common in, in our world is they call EVTOL E V T O L. So electric vertical takeoff and landing. Okay, Right, right. So vtol, vtol. Everybody's seen vtol. VTOL vertical takeoff and landing. It's the, it's a hair Harrier jet that the military flies the movie True Lies. They have a big scene on the Harrier jet. So it's the jet that can, it has thrusters that point down, it rises and then it has thrusters that carry it forward. And so, you know, we've, we've had, we've had these vtol, you know, things. And by, you know, by the way, we also have had helicopters which have the same property. So we've had these, these, these things in the past. And then the electric part is basically, you know, that they'll be electric. And then, and then the other, the other presumptive part of that is that they'll be autonomous, they'll be self piloting, you know, because for those things to go mass market, you can't expect everybody to get a pilot's license. Right. You're going to want to just get in, want to sit back and let the thing fly itself. So autonomous electric vertical takeoff and landing. We have all of the elements to do that. We know how to do all of that. Like all those technologies exist now and there are companies that have put this together and have these products working. The big issue right now, I think there's a couple of big issues. One is just. Is power, which is. It's just. It takes a lot of power to get something in the air and keep it in the air. And like I said, batteries aren't very good right now relative to what we need for things like that. So, you know, we need. We need some breakthroughs in batteries. And then the other is just, you know, cost and, you know, infrastructure and then, you know, safety regulate, you know, sort of safety regime and all that. You know, over the course of five or 10 years, I think you could imagine, you know, that happening. There's also, you know, there are people working on the Iron man suit. You know, Elon keeps making references to. I don't know that he's working on it or not, but he keeps making references to it. And then there are. There are. I. There have been. Well, I don't remember. There was at the James Bond. One of the old James Bond movies, like Goldfinger, one of those movies actually had what looked like a stunt where James Bond actually escaped from a house by strapping on a jetpack. Okay. And actually. And actually did this thing. And he did this thing, a big arc up in the air and then he landed, you know, like a half mile away. And when I was a kid, I watched it like, you know, I just love those, I love those movies. And I watched it. I was like, well, clearly they did that with like a green screen special effects. And it's like, no, that was an actual, actual jetpack. No way. Yes, that actually existed. And actually the military has those today.
- [74:05]
Chris Williamson
I'd seen someone boarding like a tanker type thing and they've got sort of the hands in gauntlets. But that's not electric. That looks like it's jet. Some sort of sort of fuel jet powered type thing.
- [74:19]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that's right. So today that would be jet powered. And there are jet packs like that. Again, expensive, risky, you know, not mainstream.
- [74:27]
Chris Williamson
Do not want to pull it in the wrong location if you've got one of those things strapped to you.
- [74:31]
Marc Andreessen
Yes, exactly. That's maybe the second most dangerous hobby after flying in squirrel suits. So it says those are the hobby videos where they end the YouTube videos and two seconds before the final moment. So, but like, you know, look, you know, we know how to get things in the air. Like, we know how to do that. And so, you know, is there a kind of, you know, is there a kind of propulsion? Is there a kind of, you know, either fuel system, propulsion system? Is there a battery system, by the way, you know, there are Hobbyists that have literally put together like quadcopter drones, you know, where you, it's like a, you know, it's like a helicopter with you know, using lots of individual like quad, quadcopter rotors and so that, that could be electric powered and could basically do the same thing. And so I, you know, there's lots of, lots of hobbyist activity here. And so I think people are going to be, you know, working on this a lot over the next few years. Solving autonomy helps tremendously because you're able to, you know, then the human doesn't need to be trained. You can, you can make the things super safe. Another interesting thing that's happened is if you've seen the Waymo car, like the Waymo cars in the street, they've got this sensor on the top of the car that kind of spins around and that's a system called lidar and it's a light based form of radar. And so it's a system that lets it do basically 3D mapping of the environment. So the Tesla is basically optical. So the Tesla is using cameras to construct a 3D model of the environment and sort of interpolating distances based on having different cameras, camera angles. The Waymo cars actually have these sensors called lidar that actually do do depth sensing. The problem with the depth sensing is lidar sensors historically have been extremely expensive which makes it hard to field these things in products. But they're coming down rapidly in price now. And I, about three months ago I bought my nine, my nine year old is my prototype in house prototyper for all this stuff and I got him a Chinese robot dog for I think $1,600 and the robot dogs snout and it's a, it's a robot dog. Like the demos you've seen like the, if you've seen like the bus dynamics robot dogs, it's like that. But you can, you can buy it and it, you can actually have one of your own and it does all the things. It's very impressive. And it actually has the snout, that's the spinning sensor. And so they, they've somehow gotten lidar down to a couple hundred dollars. Wow. And, and again like that's very encouraging because now that you've got that now you could start to think about building all kinds of things that then have, have depth sensing. And so all the, yeah, so all, all these pieces are, are starting to fall into place and with a little bit of luck and some progress in batteries, the next, you know, five years, 10 years. Yeah, more of the Iron man stuff, you know, Jetson stuff, hopefully will start to happen.
- [76:52]
Chris Williamson
It really is a different timeline. Speaking of which, I went, I was in the UK last week. I was there for a couple of weeks. I went back home. I had this live show thing. Give me your opinion on the sort of state of free speech and regulation on that side of the world. We're talking about the excesses, the overreaches that hopefully maybe coming out of over here. What's your opinion on the other side of the Atlantic?
- [77:16]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so I'd say there's like three kind of worlds of speech right now, three zones in the world. There's like the Chinese version, which is we're going to tell you explicitly what the rules are and you better not break them. But basically, you know, other than the things we tell you not to talk about, which we're very clear about, you know, you can go crazy and talk about whatever you want. So kind of the top down, authoritarian, you know, kind of model we have, the American model, which is we have free speech constitutionally guaranteed, but there are a thousand unwritten rules, rules of society, like the world's worst version of Curb youb Enthusiasm, where, you know, there's a thousand different ways to trip the PC police. And if you, if you trip any one of them, you are, you know, your life gets vaporized. And so you might call that kind of bottoms up authoritarianism, right? Like, you know, the government's not coming to get you, they're not going to jail you for it. But like, you know, boy, you know, just, it's a shame that you got fired and your family now hates you and your friends have all left you and you can never work again, right? So that's like the distributed, that's like the distributed, bottoms up, authoritarian, unwritten version of what China has, right? So top down, bottoms up. And then there's Europe, which has decided to do both for reasons, I have to say, I don't fully understand. But, you know, at least from an American perspective, if you look at, you know, this, the speech laws in, you know, the UK or Canada, they are horrifying. You know, I would like to think that if those speech laws came to the US we would have revolution. Like, they're just like completely unacceptable. Like, of course you can't send police to somebody's house because they, you know, said something wrong on Twitter. Like, of course you can't do that. But yet it happens. And then, yeah, you know, the rest of Europe has, you know, they all have variations on that. And, you know, some Obviously Germany has like very, you know, explicit, explicit versions of that on a lot of topics and other, other countries do as well. So. Yeah, but, but then also Europe, Europe and the Anglosphere have also the, you know, they, they have the top down version of, of, of the actual laws, hate speech laws and, and so forth. And, and then they, but then they, they also have the bottoms up authorities, authoritarianism of all the, of all the implicit codes which if you're a, you know, highly educated, you know, Ivy League graduate equivalent, you, you know, your job is to track those codes as they evolve every day by faithfully reading the New York Times cover to cover every day. And you know, but if you don't and you fall out of step or you're a working class person, you say the wrong thing. You know, if you, if you, if you crack your knuckles in the wrong way outside of your truck cab, you get accused of being a white supremacist and you get fired, which is something that actually happened in the US during the 2020 craziness. So yeah, so yeah, Europe, Europe right now is combining the worst of those worlds and you know, you may know more about it than I do. They, they seem hell bet to just get much, much worse.
- [79:50]
Chris Williamson
I don't know what's going on. I, I, I really, you know, I went back to the UK and I was quite disheartened by like a lot of this stuff. I was, spent my time in Kensington. You know, the diversity is our strength thing in the uk, which is a message that you're greeted by as you enter the country. I don't know whether there's such a thing as too much diversity, but, you know, it just didn't particularly feel that much like London. I'm aware that that just sounds like the most Brexit sentence that I could have ever said. I was like, huh, like this just doesn't feel very much like London. Maybe it should be a cosmopolitan place, so on and so forth. So that was kind of a little bit strange. It's just something that I hadn't noticed previously, like that level of diversity. What else? I noticed the level of service, like Every Uber took 20 minutes to get to you. It's like, why is, why is that happening? That seems I was slap bang in the middle of the city. Every bit of service in every restaurant was either a long wait or there was some sort of a problem. Ubereats seem completely determined to just like destroy whatever food or coffee. We actually started ordering twice the number of coffees that we needed to order in an attempt that we could maybe combine them together to have residual amounts of the right amount of coffee that we needed. And we still didn't get like, just. And I don't know, you know, I'm aware that I can just whine on like the fucking opulent, like returning prodigal son or something, but it just, it really was quite, it was quite disappointing in many ways. And then on top of this, you know, this upside down world where Keir Starmer is saying that immigration is too high and that this is a problem that we need to deal with, and at the same time you've got these still unbelievably bizarre non crime hate incidents that are being reported. Um, it's odd and I feel bad about my old homeland. I, I don't know whether Europe's in the middle of a downfall or what at the moment, but you know, between all of the different parties that are going in this vote of no confidence that just happened recently, it's like whatever the timeline is, maybe this is actually what happens when we get used for the RAM of another fucking universe's computation, that they just start to speed up all of the drama. That's the side effect. I don't know. Um, but yeah, there's, there's something happening and it's being expedited, whatever it is.
- [82:01]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So say a couple of things. So a friend of mine in private equity went and worked in, grew up in Texas and worked in the US and then went over and lived in London and did private equity in Europe for five years. And he came back and I said, you know, what was it like? And he said, said Europe is like, he said, in Europe it's like there are like five things that are more important than making money and nobody will tell you what they are. Right? Like there's, there's, there are these, there are these goals and objectives and they're, they're loosely around ideas of societal fairness and they're loose around ideas of not having to work very hard. And they're loosely around, you know, retirement things and social services and they're loosely around diversity and they're loosely around immigration, but they're not, they don't seem crisply defined. And so maybe there's a, a bit of an identity crisis happening there. There's another, another thing is a famous line that fascism and communism are always looming over the U.S. and landing in Europe. Right. Like the U.S. always, like there's always this threat of like the U.S. is going to go communist in the 20s or is going to go fascist in the 30s or something. And then what actually happens is, you know, Ger, France actually goes communist and Germany actually goes fascist. Right. Like, so, you know, they're actually still. They're actually still communist parties in Europe. And so maybe Europe is downstream of American culture in a way that is maybe helpful in some ways but harmful in others. Well, it's. It's a little bit. Let's say a little bit. Great example of that with England is it's like. Okay, like, you know, in the US we were all trained from birth, of course, to feel, you know, extremely bad about the fate of indigenous peoples on the North American. American continent, you know? Chris, Pop question. Who are the indigenous people of England?
- [83:33]
Chris Williamson
I don't know. Who are they? Whoever it was before the fucking Normans came and.
- [83:36]
Marc Andreessen
No, no, no, the answer is it's the English.
- [83:39]
Chris Williamson
Right, okay.
- [83:40]
Marc Andreessen
Like, it's just the English. It's just the English.
- [83:42]
Chris Williamson
Right.
- [83:43]
Marc Andreessen
Like, the English didn't display. Yeah, it's like the Normans, it's like the Saxons, like, whatever came together, but there was no displacement. Right. It's like the indigenous people of England are just the English, yet somehow the English feel just as bad about indigenous people peoples as we do. Right. Like. Right. Well, that's the other thing is, like, you know, as, you know, England has, like, no history. England has no history of, like, you know, Africans, you know. Anyway, I'm not going to go into that topic, but, yeah, the spectacle of BLM in England is really quite something. It's not historically. It's not very historically grounded, let's say so. Yeah. So, you know, maybe it's just America. Maybe America's both functions and dysfunctions kind of ripple out to the rest of the world.
- [84:21]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, yeah.
- [84:22]
Marc Andreessen
In a way that is helpful in some ways and harmful in others. And then, you know, maybe it's a. I mean, from the outside, it seems like it's a continent that is in a series of countries that are having just a massive identity crisis.
- [84:31]
Chris Williamson
I think that's. I think that's certainly true. Looking for a direction, looking for what your contribution is to the broader world. You know, it very much is a little bit of attention is being paid to Russia. Most of the attention is being paid to the US and some attention gets paid to China. China and everybody else is playing second, third, fourth, fifth string behind that. And I wonder whether the UK is feeling like a jilted lover at the moment, where it's just like, we used to be important. We used to do a thing. I actually want, you to bring this up, I've been sort of harping on about the differential number of entrepreneurs coming out of the UK versus coming out of the us, despite the fact that we have similar higher education levels and the same number of universities in the top 10 worldwide, the UK's got the same number as the US do, but we put out only 20% of the number of entrepreneurs. What, based on your assessment, culturally, commercially, what do you lay that at the feet of?
- [85:29]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, look, part of it is some of the great UK entrepreneurs come to the us and so we like. And by the way, this is not just true the uk, it's also true of France and Germany and Sweden and Norway and many other countries. Right. And so I just. Because the US has such a highly evolved, advanced entrepreneurial ecosystem, you know, it may just be that we're drawing a lot of them and so they just, you know, they don't start companies in the UK because they've. They've left. I think that's part of it. I think part of it is that, you know, the identity crisis here. I just know what I hear from my friends who are, you know, English or French or German, which is just, you know, they feel like their home countries and cultures are just not very supportive of the entire concept. You know, the governments don't necessarily really want it. You know, the, you know, the legal codes are not, you know, well set up for it. You know, look, the uk, you know, you know, this is a great example. So this is a great example of the dichotomy, just like the speech thing. So, you know, in the us, you know, this AI thing is kind of, you know, the big exciting thing in tech. And the US is forming it. And, you know, the Biden administration was threatening to do all these horrible regulatory things, but, you know, the new administration is certainly not. They're going to do, I think, really smart things. And so there's going to be a AI tech boom in the US that's going to be spectacular. And a lot of that is around startups, Europe. The EU has chosen to basically make all of that illegal, right? And so they passed this thing called the EU AI act. And this guy, Thierry Breton, is this kind of crowning achievement to basically make AI startups in the EU illegal. So they've just decided they just don't want them, and then the knees, just.
- [86:52]
Chris Williamson
In case we were going to contribute to this new fledgling industry.
- [86:56]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, well, the eu, they have this slogan, the EU kind of bureaucrats have this slogan to say, we're not going to lead the world in innovation but we can lead in regulation. Right? It's like no. Right, exactly. That's what your reaction is, the appropriate reaction which is like, no, that's not actually what we're going to. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Like if it's not literally happening there, then you're not going to be able to regulate it. And in fact what's happening is new leading edge AI products from American companies now are actually not being, are actually not being released in, not, not even being released in Europe. Right. So like the new Apple AI products and I actually think the new open AI products as well are just not even, you know, literally being released in Europe. As a result, the UK again has chosen, the UK has chosen this middle form which is they sort of made it illegal. Right. And so they did this, the last administration did this disastrous AI safety push which was basically a massive red light, basically saying don't even bother to try to start AI startups in the uk. So, but it wasn't like as overt a ban as the EU put on, but it was like this massive signal that basically says this is not a safe place to do it. And I think the UK is kind of stuck halfway in the middle right now and kind of has to decide which way it wants to go.
- [88:02]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, I, I don't know man, I, I, I really hope that we can bring ourselves back around. Maybe not like old school colonialist glory. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not hearkening back to the East India Training Company, but something, I don't know. You're right. The, the identity crisis in the direction is a big part and then you layer on top. I'm sure you've been seeing Dominic Cummings going full scorched earth recently. He, he came on the show about six months ago that he said, even like Rory Stewart, someone that you think of as, you know, being way less of a firebrand than Dominic Cummings and he has this really like visceral description of the type of people that inhabit the halls, Whitehall and Westminster and he describes the way that they smell and the way that they talk and the things that concern them. And he realized, you know, the governmental efficiency thing needs to be scaled out beyond just the us. This is the sort of thing that really needs to be probably put everywhere. Yeah.
- [89:00]
Marc Andreessen
So Dominic has this great, I'm glad you brought it. Dominic is, he's a good friend of mine. So Dominic has this great line, he says the people aren't running the system, the system is running the people, right? And he uses that to describe the UK government. But you could also describe the US government and you could also describe the EU kind of the same way, which is like, in a sense, it's like, what happens when you get face to face with people in government is what you realize is, you know, there. There are actually a significant number of, like, very publicly spirited, very determined people who actually want to do good things. And there's this, and then there's. There's people who are not like that, and they're just there for the job or whatever. But, like, there are people, you know, who legitimately are working hard and trying to figure things out. And what happens is, if you know them, what happens generally they get ground down. You know, they end up disappointed, and then they end up either, you know, becoming disillusioned or they end up leaving and going into the private sector. And so I think Dominic's explanation is a good one, which is the system is running the people, not the people running the system. The bad news with that is that, you know, it'd be easier, like, if the solution was just to swap out the people. In a sense, that would be an easy answer to the question. Whether you could do that or not is an open question, but at least you would know what to do to reform the system, as Dominic talks about and others talk about. And actually Starmer is now talking about this too, right? Which is like, okay, how do we actually, like, redo the system? Is, of course, much harder. The other lens on this that I think about a lot is Curtis Yarvan, who's also a good friend of mine. And he. He. The way he describes the American system that's running the people, the way he describes it is we are. We are living under FDR's personal monarchy 80 years later without FDR. Right? And the reason he describes that, he says, look, when, when, when before fdr, the federal government was actually very small. Like, the tax rates were, like, super low. The federal government didn't do very much. The FDR dramatically, you know, by orders of magnitude, increased the size and scope of the federal government. He did that for two reasons. One was the New Deal, and then the other was World War II. And so the federal government that Franklin Roosevelt Left behind in 1945, when he passed away, was the government that he had built, which he had run the entire time from 1933 to 1945 himself, in which he had staffed himself, and he had overseen himself and everything. And he built this basically this giant structure. And as Curtis basically says as long as you had FDR running, that it could run really well. And you know, we won World War II and saved the free world and like it worked and pulled the US out of depression. Like the whole thing worked and it was great. But if you let an organization of that size and scope run without its founder, CEO for 80 years, you end up with what we have now, which is just like, basically an out of control bureaucracy. Like an out of control system in which people can't even make positive change even if they want to.
- [91:32]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [91:32]
Marc Andreessen
And again, that's why you could have, in the US you could have reason for optimism, which is. Okay, what do you need? Well, you need another FDR like figure, but in reverse. Right. You need somebody and a team of people around them who's actually willing to come in and like take the thing by the throat and make the changes, by the way. Make the changes that FDR would probably make if he were here to make them, but he's not. Right? And so somebody else has to step up and do that. It has to be a president, because nobody else conceivably has the power to do that. But we will see how much this president can do. But that's a lot of what this administration plans to do in the uk. Look, the UK government maybe grew up in parallel with the US government. So maybe FDR is also partially responsible for it by inspiring the general modern western style of governance. But also, of course, the English system grew up for, you know, many centuries before that. You know, it, it may be time for an FDR style transformational leader to come in and like really get a.
- [92:25]
Chris Williamson
Path, the path dependence. I always, you know, we always talk about the, the wonderful heritage of the uk, but you don't necessarily think about the einstelling effect that has got you beholden to all of this bullshit that came before. I learned last year that the distance between the two front benches in the House of Commons is a broadsword held out at arm's length from either side. Which just tells you kind of everything that you need to know about what our current government and political institutions in the UK are inheriting. Like, if you've got a country that's thousand years old, a couple of thousand years old, you're like, bloody hell, like really lovely history there. And you say, yeah, but what else comes along for the ride? And sometimes it's stuff you want to get rid of. Mark, let's bring this one home. Dude, it's been a long time coming. You're so great. I'd love to bring you back on it some point soon. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing.
- [93:14]
Marc Andreessen
Oh, go to X. Go to X. P Mark. A P, M A R c a on x.com and also on Substack.
- [93:21]
Chris Williamson
Mark, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate.
- [93:23]
Marc Andreessen
Good. Fantastic. Thank you, Chris.