How AI Will Transform Medicine, Entertainment, and Your Everyday Life | Marc Andreessen - PT 2

Summary

Podcast Summary: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: How AI Will Transform Medicine, Entertainment, and Your Everyday Life | Marc Andreessen - Part 2
Date: October 23, 2024
Guest: Marc Andreessen
Host: Tom Bilyeu

---

Episode Overview

In this deep and wide-ranging conversation, Tom Bilyeu sits down for the second part of a riveting interview with Marc Andreessen—legendary entrepreneur, investor, and tech visionary. Together, they unpack the cultural, organizational, and existential transformations being ushered in by advancing technology—particularly AI—and examine the shifting tides in politics, religion, economics, and work. The discussion is frank, nuanced, and often provocative, traversing the philosophical beneath the pragmatic, and offering both warnings and reasons for optimism about the future.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Pendulum of Censorship and Free Speech

[01:00-05:19]

• Marc traces the shifting demand for censorship throughout American history, highlighting how censorship pressure alternates between the political right and left depending on which group is culturally ascendant.
• “Whoever's in charge will not want free speech, and whoever's the rebel will want free speech.”
  —Marc Andreessen [03:03]
• Both Tom and Marc firmly advocate for free speech as a principle rather than a tribal position.

---

2. The “Elon Method”: Productivity and Impact at Scale

[05:19-13:43]

• Tom probes Marc’s view on what makes Elon Musk so unusually successful as a tech entrepreneur.
• Marc explains that Elon's core method is ruthless focus on weekly accomplishment and reducing bureaucracy—a sharp contrast to traditional large organizations weighed down by process and inertia.
• “The Elon method, boiled all the way down, is: what have you gotten done this week?”
  —Marc Andreessen [06:22]
• Elon’s insistence on first-principles thinking, direct engagement with engineers, and relentless weekly progress is highlighted as his main differentiator.
• Notable anecdote: Marc visiting Elon at Twitter HQ at 10pm, witnessing him move seamlessly from rocket design calls to solving database bottlenecks.
• Elon's emotional detachment in decision-making—such as his pragmatic approach to firing staff—is discussed honestly, as are the limits and challenges of replicating the "Elon archetype" in other leaders.

---

3. Organizational Decay: Bureaucracy vs. Agility

[13:43-21:05]

• Marc contrasts entrepreneurial dynamism with the bureaucratic stagnation of giant corporations, using stories from his IBM days to starkly illustrate the loss of nimbleness in large organizations.
• The emergence of “rubber rooms” and “concurrence” processes at big companies—where decision-making is so bogged down by layers of management and vetoes that it paralyzes innovation—underscores the need for radical organizational reform.
• Tom marvels at the effects of bureaucracy on ambition and output, as Marc names both the perils and (sometimes necessary) origins of corporate rule-making.

---

4. America: System vs. People & the Post-COVID Economy

[22:55-29:42]

• Marc introduces a distinction between "The United States" (institutions and government) and "America" (its people and spirit).
• He asserts that America’s economic resilience is driven far more by the energy and ingenuity of its people than by its governing structures.
• “America wants to grow. The American economy wants to grow... The engine that we have is unmatched.”
  —Marc Andreessen [26:16-27:22]
• Marc is highly optimistic on the trajectory of US economic growth versus stagnating Europe and other developed nations, attributing it to the unique, almost chaotic blend of ambition, immigration, and freedom in America.

---

5. The God-Shaped Hole: Fertility, Meaning, and the Challenge of AI “Families”

[29:42-36:57]

• Tom raises the philosophical and societal challenge of dwindling fertility rates and the possibility of people having AI “children” as meaningful companions.
• Marc observes that declining fertility is a civilization-wide phenomenon—cutting across varied cultures—highlighting a broader crisis of meaning or "God-shaped hole."
• He shares his personal insights about becoming a parent, underscoring the depth and uniqueness of parent-child relationships versus digital or AI surrogates.
• On technology and meaning:
  “At higher levels of material comfort, we have a better shot at figuring out the answer to the God-shaped hole.”
  —Marc Andreessen [35:45]
• Material abundance through tech, Andreessen argues, enables greater exploration of existential questions—not less.

---

6. Religion, Politics, and the Religious Impulse in Modern Life

[41:07-57:06]

• Tom and Marc discuss the resurgence and transformation of religious impulses in a secular, technologically advanced world.
• Tom hypothesizes that the “religious impulse” in humans is constant, but now gets directed into politics, subcultures, or video games—anything that offers belonging and shared purpose.
• Marc agrees:
  “Politics has become our religion... Both Republicans and Democrats in the US today exhibit that exact same kind of religious behavior around their politics.”
  —Marc Andreessen [51:27]
• Both note the potential volatility and danger of this transmutation—a driver behind tribalism, zealotry, and polarization in modern society.
• Marc references the “lump of labor fallacy”—arguing that despite fears, technology repeatedly creates more jobs than it destroys.

---

7. Job Displacement, AI, and the Myth of Mass Unemployment

[57:06-65:34]

• Addressing predictions (e.g., Kai-Fu Lee’s) of massive AI-driven job displacement, Marc calls out the "lump of labor" fallacy—the mistaken belief that there’s a fixed amount of work and advancing tech will lead to structural unemployment.
• He points to 300 years of industrial evidence: technology, productivity growth, and automation paradoxically result in more (and often better) jobs at higher wages in the long run.
• “Technology creates far more jobs than it destroys, and creates jobs that are better at higher levels of income.”
  —Marc Andreessen [60:04]
• Tom asks if there will nevertheless be people left behind; Marc acknowledges some but remains firmly optimistic about society’s adaptability and the economic benefits AI will unlock.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Whoever's in charge will not want free speech, and whoever's the rebel will want free speech.”
  —Marc Andreessen [03:03]
• “The Elon method, boiled all the way down, is: what have you gotten done this week?”
  —Marc Andreessen [06:22]
• “We have selected ourselves into the best. We've dealt the best possible hand in terms of the quality of our people.”
  —Marc Andreessen [24:45]
• “Material welfare is not sufficient because it still leaves this God-shaped hole. But... at higher levels of material comfort, we have a better shot at figuring out the answer.”
  —Marc Andreessen [35:45]
• “Politics has become our religion... Both Republicans and Democrats in the US today exhibit that exact same kind of religious behavior around their politics.”
  —Marc Andreessen [51:27]
• “Technology creates far more jobs than it destroys, and creates jobs that are better at higher levels of income.”
  —Marc Andreessen [60:04]

---

Key Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment | Start Time | Main Focus | |--------------------------------------------|------------|------------------------------------------------------| | The Censorship Pendulum | 01:00 | Cultural origins and shifts in censorship & free speech| | The Elon Method | 05:19 | Productivity culture and Musk’s approach | | Bureaucracy vs. Agility in Organizations | 13:43 | IBM stories and lessons for business | | America: System vs. People | 22:55 | Economic optimism and American spirit | | Declining Fertility & AI Families | 29:42 | Meaning, fertility, and potential of digital children | | Religion & Modern Group Dynamics | 41:07 | Politics, tribalism, and the religious impulse | | AI & The Future of Work | 57:06 | Job displacement myths and economic adaptability | | Andreessen’s Optimism and Final Thoughts | 65:34 | Tech’s promise & practical optimism |

---

Tone and Language

The episode maintains a lively, intellectually curious, and at times irreverently candid tone. Both speakers exemplify critical thinking, unafraid to challenge conventional wisdom or wade into contentious territory. Marc Andreessen’s style is analytical and historical; Tom Bilyeu brings both philosophical musing and practical concern.

---

Final Thoughts

Marc Andreessen offers a compelling argument for practical optimism: while the future will not be utopian, technological progress—if coupled with freedom and adaptability—can dramatically enrich both material well-being and the search for meaning. He cautions against complacency and tribalism, and both he and Tom stress the continuing need for community, critical thinking, and agility in a world being rapidly remade by technology.

---

Where to Follow Marc Andreessen:

• X (formerly Twitter): @pmarca
• Substack: Linked via X profile
• YouTube: Andreessen’s channel with Ben (sporadic but recommended)

---

This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the future of technology, work, economics, or the deeper philosophical questions underpinning them.

Transcript

[Grainger Announcer]

If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Grainger Hospital Procurement Announcer]

When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm Tom Bilyeu, and this is Impact Theory. Let's dive right back in to part two with Marc Andreessen. Why do so many people in society want censorship right now?

[Marc Andreessen]

Well, they want censorship if it's on their, you know, they want censorship if

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

it's on their side, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

So, you know, so my, you know, my version of this is. So when I, when I, you know, I told you I grew up in the, I wasn't really part of it, but I grew up in the middle

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

of the sort of great evangelical awakening in the 70s and 80s.

[Marc Andreessen]

And at that time, the sort of

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Christian conservatives in the US were the forces for censorship, right? And so the classic thing was it would be like religious groups that would try to censor movies or books, and then it was the coastal liberals who would be arguing in favor of free speech, right? And so it would be famously like the press, the Pentagon papers, they had all these stories about how great free speech was. And libraries were sacrosanct that have free speech and they weren't going to censor things.

[Marc Andreessen]

So the censorship pressure was coming from the right in that era. And my analysis of that is that's

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

because at that time the right was culturally ascendant. You know, American society was much more overtly religious at that time. And the Christian conservatives were very, very powerful from a cultural standpoint. Like, they got to like, write the textbooks and all these things.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so because they're, because they were

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

winning culturally, they wanted to lock down speech so that they would continue to win.

[Marc Andreessen]

And the left was the counterculture, right?

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Classically, the left, the Hippies, you know, the 60s, 70s, 80s, the left was the counterculture, right? And the press and so forth was the counterculture. And they wanted to challenge the dominant frame, right? And they wanted to disrupt the system, right? And so they were pro free speech.

[Marc Andreessen]

And then, you know, 30 years later,

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

it's inverted where, you know, the left owns the universities, they own the book publishers, they own the media, they own the press, they own the newspapers, they own most of the TV stations. You know, they own the Internet companies, they own the, you know, they, you know, they, they own the sort of these commanding heights of, of society and culture. And so now that they won and now that they're in charge, you know, they want to lock down discourse. And then the right has become, it's inverted. The right has now become the counterculture. And so, you know, the censorship pressure comes to the left and then the right wants to open things back up.

[Marc Andreessen]

If the right becomes culturally ascended again, I would expect that polarity to shift once again, right?

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

It'll flip, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

Whoever's in charge will not want free

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

speech and whoever's the rebel will want free speech.

[Marc Andreessen]

The principled position is I want free speech regardless. It's just very few people sign up for the principle because most people are

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

part of the tribe.

[Marc Andreessen]

But yeah, I'm an old fashioned Gen X libertarian.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Like, I actually believe in the principle.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, no, me too. For me, free speech is important because part of thinking is speaking out loud, having your ideas challenged. Also, facts have a half life. And so all the things that we believe, man, a lot of them call it 30, 40 years down the road, we don't believe them anymore. We've realized we had an approximation of the truth, but not the real truth. The example I always use on people is Newtonian physics versus relativity. It's like, hey, when we had Newtonian physics, we thought everything worked, we thought we understood it, and then we get to relativity and up. Actually, you couldn't have had GPS with Newtonian physics. So this was an update that was absolutely necessary. And as we mentioned earlier, we still aren't at ground truth. So we know that we're going to be revising that even further. And if you really internalize every time we get closer to ground truth, it unlocks things for us. Then it's like, okay, I just want my ideas to be challenged. And so I'll, because I teach young entrepreneurs a lot, I'm like, look, you've got to recognize that skills have utility. And so the reason you want your idea challenged is you can actually develop A better skill. Once you realize, oh, I was wrong about XYZ thing, I can now be right. And that actually has utility in the real world, lets me do something I couldn't do previously. And so when you lock that down now, all of a sudden people get stuck. You get stuck because you're not able to have the best arguments thrown at your own idea. It's that, that one is, is pretty traumatic to me. Now, speaking from a position of utility, Elon is somebody that has really demonstrated an obscene ability to get things done. You have bet on a lot of entrepreneurs in your career. You've obviously been very good at picking the best of the best. What, what is it that Elon does, either in worldview or action, that makes him so effective?

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, this is in my mind, this is the single biggest question. I'm really glad you asked it because it's the single biggest question in the world right now.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Like, it's the single biggest question in my world, right? Which is like, okay, how is it that he does what he does?

[Marc Andreessen]

And I would say, like, I don't, you know, there are people who have worked with him for a lot longer

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

who probably understand this better. But I've had, you know, an up close kind of look at it for the last, for the last several years now and have come to really, I think, really respect it and I think understand at least parts of it.

[Marc Andreessen]

Look, it's the, a lot of it. There was that famous text exchange. And actually he's a friend of mine,

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

a wonderful guy, Parag, who was running Twitter at the time when Elon first kind of tangled with it. And, and a wonderful guy. And he had literally just become CEO like a month earlier or something. And so he was just putting his plans in place when kind of everything, you know, the hurricane hit. But, you know, there was an exchange where Prague is talking about whatever, and it's the famous text exchange where Elon, all right, fuck it, I'm not having this conversation anymore. And then he's like, he said, you know, what have you gotten done this week?

[Marc Andreessen]

Right? And what I realized when I read that was like that, that is the Elon method. Like the Elon method, boiled all the

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

way down is what have you gotten done this week? Right?

[Marc Andreessen]

And that's very important because at anybody

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

who has ever been at a large company trying to do anything big, the

[Marc Andreessen]

big things happen over the course of years. You know, decades, years, months. Things don't happen in weeks. Like, you know, companies have like five year plans, right? They're like, you Know, cars take seven

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

years to design, right? Like rockets take like a decade. Fighter jets take like 25 years. Big software systems take five, 10 years.

[Marc Andreessen]

You know, any large scale effort anywhere in the economy.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

We've just all gotten used to this idea that things just take years and years and years. And then you've got like processes and procedures and plans and this, you know, documentation and, you know, rules and structure and strategies and like frameworks and PowerPoint

[Marc Andreessen]

presentations coming out of your ears. You know, Amazon's big breakthrough was to go from. Amazon's big breakthrough is to go from

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

having PowerPoint presentations to having like 15 page written documents, documents that everybody reads at the start of a meeting, which actually is an improvement off of a PowerPoint presentation. But like, you know, there was that.

[Marc Andreessen]

Elon's like, no, I'm not doing any of that. Like, I'm not doing any of that.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

We're not doing any of that.

[Marc Andreessen]

Basically, it's, we're going to like, staff these companies almost entirely with engineers.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

I, myself, I myself, Elon, am an engineer.

[Marc Andreessen]

I am going to understand every aspect

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

of every technical system that we're working on. I am going to be able to be in all the meetings on everything from rocket design to database design at Twitter and everything else.

[Marc Andreessen]

I'm going to only talk to the

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

engineers if I can, you know, have, you know, possibly avoided. I'm never going to talk to anybody who's not an engineer.

[Marc Andreessen]

I'm going to talk, I'm going to go, I'm going to talk to the person who's directly relevant to the project.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

I'm not going through layers. I'm going all the way down to the company to just talk to the person who's in charge of this thing.

[Marc Andreessen]

And then basically what he does is he goes to each of his companies each week, he identifies whatever is the bottleneck at that company this week, and

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

then he works with the engineers and he fixes it that week.

[Marc Andreessen]

So what happens is his companies move so much faster than everybody else's.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

It's like Tortoise and Rabbit.

[Marc Andreessen]

They just move so much faster. They're so much leaner. They don't have all these layers, they don't have all these systems and controls

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

and processes and all this stuff.

[Marc Andreessen]

But what they have is many of

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

the best engineers in the world who just absolutely love working with a CEO who understands the substance of what the product is and then is willing to

[Marc Andreessen]

actually work with them hands on. I mean, I've been in meetings with

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

him at edX where he's in there with 24 year old engineers and they're just. They'll just like walk through fire for him, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

Because he's like their idol and he's able to have a peer conversation with them and he cares about the work that they're doing and if they succeed at it, he is going to love them for it. And if they fail at it, he's

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

going to be very disappointed in them.

[Marc Andreessen]

And it's just a completely different relationship

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

than the CEO of one of these big tech companies has.

[Marc Andreessen]

It's just completely different. He does a. I went to see

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

him one night when he took over X and I was sitting in the sitting conference room.

[Marc Andreessen]

So, okay, so it's like 10 o' clock is the classic illustrator. So 10 o' clock at night. And he's like, yeah, meet me at Twitter at 10 o' clock night.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

I'm like, fine.

[Marc Andreessen]

So I drive up and I go in and I go to the conference room and it's Elon on his iPhone doing email and there's a dog on the floor. And I'm like, oh. And in retrospect, I was just like, oh, is that your dog? And he looks at me completely deadpan.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

He's like, I've never seen that dog before in my life.

[Marc Andreessen]

Like, what is it? Just like the company dog. He bursts out laughing because of course it's his dog. And then he's like, all right, I want to talk. But he's like, I need 15 minutes. And he's like, by the way, you

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

can sit and hang out if you want. I just have to take a call.

[Marc Andreessen]

And he gets on Zoom and he's on Zoom with the rocket engineers for

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

the Falcon rocket, the next generation rocket in Texas. And it's whatever, I don't know, 12 o' clock their time, midnight their time.

[Marc Andreessen]

And it's just him on his iPhone

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

on a Zoom call, designing the next

[Marc Andreessen]

rocket, which is probably the rocket that we just saw work, right? And he's like fully conversant in the. Completely conversant in that.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

And he and the engineers fix whatever the problem is that week with the rocket. And he's like, all right, now we're going to go fix the database here at Twitter.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so it's just like rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Do that every single week. I once offered him a place where

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

I thought he might want to take. I was like, I know you're under a lot of pressure. Go to this place for a week if you want. Because he famously doesn't own any.

[Marc Andreessen]

He sold all his houses.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

He doesn't own any houses, so he stays at friends houses.

[Marc Andreessen]

So I was like, you can go use my house for a week and if you need a vacation, you go use my house for a week. I got back five minutes later, one

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

line, I don't take vacations.

[Marc Andreessen]

It's like I'm going to frame and bronze that email, right? And so this is what he does. And he just does this at like an incredible hair rate of speed. He doesn't tolerate anything that stands in

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

the way of it.

[Marc Andreessen]

And this, by the way, this is the same thing that drives everybody crazy, right? And so this was the whole thing on the, you know, this is his whole thing. He's in this big fight with, with

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

regulators on like starship launches, which is

[Marc Andreessen]

like, you know, a normal rocket company would take whatever, you know, a decade

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

or 20 years to design a new rocket.

[Marc Andreessen]

You know, he's, he's going to put

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

out the prototype as fast he can. He's going to watch it and see what happens.

[Marc Andreessen]

You know, he's going to, it's going to explode in midair. There's, there's my, my nine year old. And I love watching the SpaceX rocket

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

explosion compilation videos on YouTube.

[Marc Andreessen]

They're hysterical because they just show these

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

larger and larger and larger rockets launching and exploding in midair.

[Marc Andreessen]

And his competitors all the way SpaceX, all the way SpaceX was on its way up. His competitors are like, he's crazy. He can't make rockets work.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

See, they're all exploding.

[Marc Andreessen]

And what he was doing was he was iterating on the rocket design so much faster than they were. And so he would run through five rocket generations of which four would fail, but he would learn so much. The fifth one would work and he would go through the five generations faster than his rocket competitors could do one generation. And he's just like, just like, fuck it, I don't care.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Of course some rockets are going to explode.

[Marc Andreessen]

Nobody's going to get hurt.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

It's totally fine.

[Marc Andreessen]

But a big company can't tolerate that because it's like headline news and everybody's going to get mad. And so anyway, it's just like this completely. It's a base level reality. He calls it first principles. You get straight to base level reality,

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

you get straight to substance.

[Marc Andreessen]

You spend no time on anything other than substance. And so anyway, like me, if you're an engineer and you kind of see this, I'm an engineer by training and so if you kind of see this, you're like, oh, my God.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

This is like, obviously the way that everything should be run.

[Marc Andreessen]

But if you see it from the outside, it just looks so wild compared to all of these other large systems and rules that we've all gotten used to.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

And therein lies the conflict.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So there's a lot of engineers in the world, and none of them are having the kind of success that Elon is having. How much credit do you give to the. The bundle of traits that he must have. You've already talked about several of them. Just getting to first principles, thinking, moving very quickly. But there's also something that seems, I don't know, never met him. But by things that I have read one of the early biographies, there's just a level of. This is not emotional for me at all. It's the. Your assistant asks for. This was in the original. One of the original biographies on him. Assistant asked for higher pay or something. He's like, take a vacation for four weeks. I'm going to do your job and see how hard it is. If it's hard, cool, I'll give you a raise. If it's not, you're gone. And she'd been with him for like 15 years or something crazy. And she comes back and he's like, yeah, it wasn't that hard. Bye. And people were gobsmacked by that. And I was like, yeah, I get it, I get it. How much is there something to that? Like, is sort of, you know, if. If that were your friend and your friend treated you like that, it would not feel good. But in terms of proportion of his success, his ability to just completely divorce emotion and just say, this is either right or wrong for the project.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, look, I think there's a lot to that. You know, by the way, I think Steve Jobs had a lot of that. It's just, it's, it's, you know, I mean, there's a lot of ways to look at it. And, you know, people can have lots of views on this, of course, but, you know, substance. I was a dichotomy. Substance versus style or substance versus social or, you know, substance versus protocol. Like, it's so easy to slide into a way of thinking and being in which you are thinking abstractly about things you are following.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

We talked about the goal.

[Marc Andreessen]

You're following rules that were established years ago. Most, most big companies are what most big companies are, you know, so our companies start as startups and then basically what happens is generally what happens as they either fail or they succeed. If they fail, they go away. If they succeed. What happens is they succeed by going through basically scandal after scandal, crisis after crisis after crisis. I always describe it as like a

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

process of falling upstairs.

[Marc Andreessen]

You're just constantly falling and smashing your face into the stairs, but you're gaining altitude as you go. And it's just like these companies are just constant internal crisis and the sort of normal response. And by the way, it's the thing that everybody in business is trained to do. It's what they train you to do

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

at Harvard Business School and Stanford Business School and all the books and all

[Marc Andreessen]

this stuff, all the CEO coaches, it's like, oh, you go through a crisis, you fix the crisis, and then you put in place a set of rules

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

to make sure that crisis never happens again.

[Marc Andreessen]

It's like the legal thing we're talking about. It's like, okay, that by itself would be fine, but you do that 20 times over 20 years. And you have buried a company in

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

bureaucracy to the point where it just

[Marc Andreessen]

basically, at that point, it's a company primarily that exists to follow rules, by the way. Rules that were in many cases defined by people who aren't even there at the company anymore. And so nobody at the company today

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

actually even understands why they were there.

[Marc Andreessen]

Toby Lucky has a version of this.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

The guy who runs Shopify, who's an

[Marc Andreessen]

amazing CEO, he has a version of this which is, it's like every whatever

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

year or something, or every six months, he just can't.

[Marc Andreessen]

He requires all standing meetings to be

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

canceled, taken off people's calendars.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so all management reviews one on ones planning meetings, like everything just gets taken off. And then he says, we only put the meetings back on where people are howling in pain because we don't have them. Right, but his point, and you have to do that over and over and over again because if you don't, everybody's calendar just decretes meetings and then everybody's sitting in meetings all day long and

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

nobody's doing anything right.

[Marc Andreessen]

And of course anybody listening to this who works at a big company knows exactly what I'm talking about. Because that's the day to day life, which is, oh my God, I worked at IBM. I worked on the other side. I've seen the other side of this. So my first real professional experience was

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

I was an intern at IBM in

[Marc Andreessen]

1989 and 1990 when they were on top of the world. As late as 1985, IBM was 80%

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

of the market capitalization of the entire tech industry.

[Marc Andreessen]

They were a giant. They were like fang combined into one company. They Were like, totally dominant. I was there 1989, 90, right before

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

they basically fell off a cliff and caved in.

[Marc Andreessen]

So it had been 70 years of success. They had never had a layoff. Everybody, by the way, lifetime employment. There were entire buildings full of people there who did not have actual jobs because you couldn't actually fire people.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, God.

[Marc Andreessen]

Oh, let me tell the story. So I got taibm, and my manager's kind of showing me around. And so I'm in this giant division

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

in Austin building these sort of, at the time, what are called workstations, these supercomputers, basically.

[Marc Andreessen]

And he's like, yeah, he's like, look, here's how it works. He's like, we're the development. We're development, and we have the development

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

building, and we have like 6,000 people doing development of the product.

[Marc Andreessen]

And then. And then they have what it's called,

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

they call marketing, but everybody else calls sales, which is the people who go sell the product.

[Marc Andreessen]

And then he's like, and then that building over there is the planning department. And I was like, oh, I get it. You know, in development, we come up with ideas and then we work with the planning department to have the plans

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

to be able to do it.

[Marc Andreessen]

He's like, no, we never talk to them. We will never visit that building because that's the department that we assign people

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

to when we can't fire them.

[Marc Andreessen]

Right. And so. Right. By the way, this is how, of course, public school systems work. You know, the public New York public school system famously has, I think, what they call the rubber room, which is. It's the place they send the teachers who are so terrible, they can't put them in a classroom, but they can't fire them. And so they just have them sit

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

and they do crossword puzzles all day.

[Marc Andreessen]

Right. It's the longshoremen who are sitting at home.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Right.

[Marc Andreessen]

So anyway, so big companies develop their

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

own version of this.

[Marc Andreessen]

And it just creates. By the time I got to IBM, two things. Number one, there was an app that they had that showed me the number of reporting, the number of manager layers to get to be the CEO. So if I'd stayed at IBM and

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

I want to become the CEO, how many layers would I have to climb?

[Marc Andreessen]

And I was 12 layers below the CEO, which meant that my boss's boss's boss's boss's boss, who was the big cheese, was still six layers down. So there was that. But the other part of it was they had a formal process of decision making they called concurrence. And Concurrence was if you're going to make a decision, IBM in those days, you had to make a formal list of every person in the company who

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

was going to be affected by the decision. Like every manager, every function.

[Marc Andreessen]

And for any sort of product related

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

decision that was like 35 names on the checklist and it was like the

[Marc Andreessen]

sales heads of all the different regions

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

and all this stuff.

[Marc Andreessen]

And to be able to get to a yes on the decision, you had to get concurrence from every single person on that list. Any one person at least could say the term. Was it deconcur? I Deconcur was the internal term and deconcur meant veto. And so you needed 35 people to agree and any one person could veto a decision. So decision making just simply stopped. And this is why the company fell apart, is because they couldn't adapt, because they couldn't make decisions, they literally couldn't act. And they had 440,000 employees.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh my God.

[Marc Andreessen]

So on a time adjusted basis for the growth of the market, it was like the equivalent of today would be

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

a million or a million two employees, something like that.

[Marc Andreessen]

So it's like a nation state by the way. This is the other thing is at IBM in those days, at IBM in those days, you could work there for years and you could work there for years and you would never meet anybody either at work or in your social life who didn't work for IBM. Right. Because it was so big and so all of your friends, so everybody works in the same company. The thing I always look at when I visit big companies is I always look for the signs, the signs in the parking area and the signs in the buildings. Because everybody who works at the company knows where everything is and so they don't rely on signs. And so when you go to a big company and there's no signs for

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

what the buildings do, it's a sure

[Marc Andreessen]

sign that they're losing touch with the market because it means they don't get visitors.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

Because they're completely insular.

[Tom Bilyeu]

More to come. We'll be back in a bit.

[Grainger Announcer]

If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always, always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for The ones who get it done.

[Grainger Hospital Procurement Announcer]

If the world were like a Sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body change, Sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now it's the final days of our everything's on sale event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses. Our Memorial Day event ends Monday. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com sleep number to a good life sleep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We're back. Let's dive right in.

[Marc Andreessen]

This is the natural trajectory for all these companies just to end up in this state. And that's the polar opposite of the Elon method. That's the barbell. Now, to your point, your example on the assistant, the big question is, why aren't there more Elons? And how do you make more Elons? The second question is, can you have a partial Elon? One of the ways I describe this, is there a unit of metric which is Millie Elons, like millimeters? So could you have 900 milli elons? Could you have 90% of Elon, but maybe not 100%? Or could you have the 50% version or the 10% version? Or maybe just the 1 milli Elon?

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Right.

[Marc Andreessen]

Maybe somebody who's just a little bit more like that. It's your question, do you need the whole package, or can people learn these techniques and be this way even if they're not Elon, Even if they don't have his natural capacities and even if they're not willing to go all the way to where he goes, can they go part way there? And I actually think that's an open question today. And I would say there are shockingly few CEOs I know who are even

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

asking that question or trying to figure it out.

[Marc Andreessen]

Now, in theory. In theory, if you've got one, in theory, you should be able to have 1,000. There's a lot of smart people in the world. So here's the other example is what would it do for our civilization if

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

we had 1,000 of them?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. I mean, at the rate that he's producing now. A lot.

[Marc Andreessen]

A lot. And what would happen in our civilization if every single industry had an Elon?

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Right.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's legitimately insane.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. So that possibility exists. You can see it.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Right.

[Marc Andreessen]

I find that very exciting, very optimistic. I don't know if it'll go, but I think that's one of the really big questions in front of us right now.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. No, Doubt be interesting to see if anybody can pull those principles out in a way that's metabolizable by other entrepreneurs. The economy. Did we just dodge a recession? Does debt make the recession inevitable and we just kick the can a little bit down the road? What's your health check on the economy right now?

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, so the way I think of. Okay, so let me give you a couple of things on this. So number one, I differentiate between the United States and America. I think they're two different concepts.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Say more.

[Marc Andreessen]

I think the United States is the system. It's the formal governance system. So it's the government and all the stuff we've been talking about. It's all the rules and all the processes and all the procedures and we all complain about, you know, we all have our various complaints about it. And you know, whoever we are on the political spectrum, we've got all kinds

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

of complaints about the government.

[Marc Andreessen]

But then there's America. And for me, America is the people, right? And you know, they're part and parcel of the government. The people are kind of part and parcel of a country. But like, they are different.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

They're not the same thing.

[Marc Andreessen]

And you know, we happen to be

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

a very large country with a very large number of very smart, talented, you know, driven, capable people.

[Marc Andreessen]

And then, you know, I'd also say my, my, my mental model of America

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

is like, we're just like a giant sprawling mess.

[Marc Andreessen]

Like, you know, we're just, you know, we're just like chaos. Like, and we have been, you know, for our entire 250 year existence. Like, we're the place people come when they're just like, too ornery to start out where they were. You know, they just can't tolerate it. And so we, you know, we get the most disagreeable people from all over

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

the world who come here because they get to, you know, they get to basically be wild. They get to do things that they wouldn't normally get to, you know, get to do.

[Marc Andreessen]

And of course I benefit from that

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

because, you know, that's, we get all

[Marc Andreessen]

the, we get so many of the

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

good founders from all over the world who come here to do it because

[Marc Andreessen]

they don't think they can do it

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

in the countries where they grew up.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so we're, we're, we are. America is a country of like, tremendously

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

talented, driven, capable, ambitious people from all,

[Marc Andreessen]

by the way, from all over the

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

world who have aggregated here and their descendants over many generations. And you know, we've just, we've selected ourselves into the best.

[Marc Andreessen]

We've dealt the best possible hand in

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

terms of the quality of our people.

[Marc Andreessen]

Like, you know, it's just extraordinary what

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

this country is capable of.

[Marc Andreessen]

And, and then most of what the country does is not done by the United States.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

It's not by the government. Most of it's done by the people. Most of it's done by. By America.

[Marc Andreessen]

And you know, you know, it's the old line of the business, of America's business, which is this, this, this, this whole line from the 50s. It's just like most of what most

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

people do every day is they go to work and they try to. They try to do things. You know, they try to do things. They try to contribute, they try to take care of their family, they try to, you know, build their companies. They try to do a good job. You know, they try to build good

[Marc Andreessen]

products, they try to take care of customers.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

And so, you know, most of what people do every day is actually really productive and really helpful.

[Marc Andreessen]

And then we're just the best. Ranked by that.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

We're just the best.

[Marc Andreessen]

We're the best country. Like, we have the best company. You know, we have this sort of. We have this sort of rule of law of, like, an advanced society, but we have less rules than, like, the European countries, for example. And then we have, like, all the energy of a new country, right, because of all immigration and because of all the talented people that we have. And so we're, you know, we're kind of the. We're kind of at the sweet spot

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

of sort of a combination, you know, big country, small country, old country, new country.

[Marc Andreessen]

Like, we're kind of in that.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

We're kind of in that sweet spot.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so I go through that to just say, like, America wants to grow, right? The America, the country, the people, we want to grow. We want to succeed.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

We want to build great things.

[Marc Andreessen]

We want to build businesses.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

We want to, we want to have economic growth. We want to have, you know, we want to, we want to just like,

[Marc Andreessen]

shock the world with all these amazing inventions.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Like, we, we want to do all these things.

[Marc Andreessen]

We are held back in all kinds

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

of ways by the United States, but

[Marc Andreessen]

America wants to do that. And so basically, if the government isn't too much on our throats, the economy

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

will naturally just grow forever. It'll just grow in perpetuity. And America will remain the best bet, you know, globally, it'll just be the, you know, it's the best. It will remain the best market to invest in. It'll remain. It'll produce the best, you know, the Largest number of high quality new companies and so forth.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so the American economy wants to grow. And that's what's happened, which is we

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

came out of COVID and if you

[Marc Andreessen]

just plot a chart of American economic

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

growth versus Europe and other countries, it's just there we are, we're off to the races and Germany's starting to shrink and the UK stack, a bunch of other countries have severe problems. They're not able to reignite growth.

[Marc Andreessen]

The new UK labor government just had,

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

the labor government just had a growth conference this week. Because it's now hit such a crisis point in the uk they don't know how to get ahead of economic growth.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so yeah, our economy wants to grow, it wants to do fine. Yeah, we probably did dodge a recession.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

And that's just because the productive energies of the American people just kicked in. It's all completely unpredictable from here. But fundamentally I feel really good about America.

[Marc Andreessen]

I feel really good about the people

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

and I feel really good about the engine that we have.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I believe that. I forget who said it. I actually think, you know, because I've heard you talk about this, but inside of all of us is a God shaped hole. And that hole right now I think is having a resurgence of people really trying to re embrace religion. From an interesting angle that's probably outside of, of today's purview, what we're going to talk about. But they have a need to fill that. And you're going to get the question of the soul. So what's going to happen is you're going to get somebody like me who doesn't have kids and I'm going to raise an AI child that is embodied. Because why not? I can rush through the terrible twos. I can pause when they're seven years old for a couple years and just enjoy that whatever. I can. If I want to go to a movie with my wife, I can literally put them in the kitchen and shut them down. Like it's just all of the upside and none of the downside. And then all of the sudden other people are gonna be like, yeah, that's dope. And people are either going to be in relationships with robots romantically or they're gonna be in a romantic relationship with a human. But they're gonna raise AI kids. And you will literally, at least for pockets, because there will be like the Amish or whatever. There will be the sort of super producers who keep their fertility high because cultural value says yes. There will be some that won't. And so those cultures will hit an existential crisis based on that, which I think will cause the religious element to really push and say, you know, this is an abomination before God and we just absolutely cannot do it. So that's where I feel like, huh, there's going to be this weird tension and then if people are getting augmented with neuralink, and obviously I'm talking these are 20 year time horizons, maybe 30, maybe 50. But this is going to play out for somebody in the not too distant future in my estimation. And just to put one more thing in the mix, you know very well that in back room conversations in the government, people are asking questions, should we be prepared to do airstrikes on data centers? Because we are so worried about AI breaking free. So there's already this ambient anxiety about it. You've got me talking like a sci fi writer, but it's a pretty plausible scenario. How do we stop that from happening? Or what is the automatic in the human mind kill switch that will stop that from happening?

[Marc Andreessen]

So start by saying there's a lot in there and I would love to talk about every part of it. And by the way, we should go as deep as you want with me

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

anyway on the religion stuff and so

[Marc Andreessen]

forth, because I agree with a lot

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

of the setup to the question.

[Marc Andreessen]

So let's see how to come at this. So, well, look, to start with, I would say we have a crisis of meaning already, right? And so you talk about like pop,

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

you know, talk about fertility, right? And you know, Elon's been talking about this a lot lately, but like fertility rates are crashing all over the world, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

And it's actually really striking what's happening, right?

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Which is it's happening across cultures, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

And so normally when there's like something happening in, you know, America or whatever,

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Europe or Japan or something, like you generally analyze and you're like, okay, what's happening in American culture, culture that's causing this? Or what's happening in Japanese culture that causes this.

[Marc Andreessen]

But like it's happening in all those cultures simultaneously. Populations growth is crashing here, it's crashing in Europe, it's crashing in Korea, it's

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

crashing in Japan, it's crashing in China.

[Marc Andreessen]

And by the way, like, you know, China, Japan and Korea have very different cultures than we do, and they have very different cultures between each other. Like, they're really different. Like the Japanese and Koreans are like really different.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

And yet it's happening in all these sort of advanced societies.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so I guess I would say it's like that's sort of a preexisting condition.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

You know, we just have that.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so that, and that's sort of a fundamental question. We have this, you know, this question of meaning, right, which, you know, the

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

God shaped hole, which is, you know, a process that kicked off, you know, probably, you know, basically like 150 years ago that, you know, has been playing out. And you know, people have been grappling with that for a long time.

[Marc Andreessen]

And you know, as you know, we've

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

been through various phases of religious revivals, you know, boom, bust cycles with religions over the last, over the last hundred years.

[Marc Andreessen]

When I was growing up in the

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Midwest in the 70s and 80s during the, one of the great awakenings, so the, you know, sort of comeback of evangelical Christianity and you know, kind of born again, the born again, you know, kind of phenomenon.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I remember it well.

[Marc Andreessen]

You know, I've seen, I've seen that happen. Yeah. So like, you know, I think that's all true. That's all super important, you know, and then look like, you know, tech is, you know, tech obviously changes culture. Culture, by the way, culture changes tech. It's a, you know, it's a positive feedback loop. Different cultures, you know, react to tech in different ways. Let's see where to take it. I think the counterargument and maybe the leash to put on it. I guess maybe I should start with, if you don't mind me asking, do you have kids yet?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't know.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. So one of the things that I was going to say, one of the things I find in my conversations with my friends who don't have kids and then have kids that I went through and it's almost like a little bit I have these conversations with my friends. I work in tech and a lot

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

of people don't have kids or they wait for a long time.

[Marc Andreessen]

And I had this conversation where it's like the people with kids sound like pod people. They sound like they got the brain

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

fungus in the last of us or something, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

It's like, oh, you don't understand. When you have a kid, everything changes. And my friends are like, what happened to you? What's wrong? You sound like you're in a cult. And I'm like, no, no. And it's literally like, that was me before I had my first kid. Was like, oh, I just whatever, I want to live my life.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

I don't know whether I want this additional responsibility.

[Marc Andreessen]

But basically I think this is true. It's almost a universal thing.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

If you talk to parents when you

[Marc Andreessen]

have first kid and you look in

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

the kid's eyes for the first time

[Marc Andreessen]

and you know, literally what you see. Like, you know, look, in the best case scenario, you know, you know, we've

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

got a blend, you know, literally a

[Marc Andreessen]

blending of DNA and you know, the person you know you love most in the world, you know, is combined with you.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

And then you know that, you know, the baby shows up with these eyes

[Marc Andreessen]

and the eyes look back at you and it's like looking at yourself and it's like looking at the person you

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

love the most in the world and

[Marc Andreessen]

it's like looking at this new soul

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

all at the same time.

[Marc Andreessen]

And like, it's like a, it's like a, it is, it's like a psychological reset. And so that's just, that's like such a. It seems so universal that parents understand that and non parents don't. Right. In fact, I have friends who are like, I don't know that I want to have kids because it sounds like it changes your psychology so much. Like I'm worried it's going to ruin everything I like about my life today. And I'm like, no, no, it makes everything better. And they're like, but you have to spend all your time with a kid. And I'm like, yes, but it's the thing I want to do most in the world. My friends are like, well, that's not what I want because I want to work all the time. And I'm like, you're missing out. It's like you're brainwashed and. Right, so, so that's a thing. I mean, look, I fully believe people are going to have AI pets, AI friends, they're going to have AI, all kinds of relationships, AIs, they'll have some form of proxy children. I totally buy that by the way. That will probably be based on their information. One of the things I think, for example, your AI kit is probably going to be a version of you basically

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

trained on your own training data.

[Marc Andreessen]

Well, so the concept actually that's starting to take off in the tech world right now is what's called the digital twin. So it's not the digital kit, it's the digital twin. But the idea is, look, for example, I haven't done this yet, but I might do this, which is I'm not available 24 7, but if I feed a language model everything I've ever written and everything I've ever said, then maybe if somebody we work with wants to ask me a question and it's the

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

middle of the night, they can ask

[Marc Andreessen]

my digital twin and they'll get back

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

a representative answer to what I would say.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so that's starting to happen. So, yeah, I think a lot of that stuff's going to happen. But the primal relationship that you have with another human being, and that could be another human being you're related to, or by the way, just another human being that you're not related to that, that there's a level. I mean, we are very, very, very deeply wired to have those relationships be

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

the center of our universe.

[Marc Andreessen]

And again, like I said, there's a big issue here, which is people aren't having kids. And so that's not getting transmitted. And there's very big questions that kind of come, you know, kind of flow out of that. But it's just different. Like it's just flat out different. When you have your first kid and certainly you should have, you should have like a dozen kids, they'd be great. I'm pretty sure. Like if we tape up, if we tape a show after that, like two

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

years later, you're going to be like, oh, y. I don't know what I was thinking.

[Marc Andreessen]

Like, this is just so different.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you think that's the kill switch?

[Marc Andreessen]

Well, let me broaden out the answer. Which is fundamentally technology AI all this. It has implications on lots of things for sure, but one of the things that it does is it makes us richer, it makes our society richer, it

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

makes our material comfort a lot better,

[Marc Andreessen]

makes it a lot easier, by the way, to provide for kids and family, be able to have a higher level of material welfare. There's this line of critique of new technology which is like, well, material welfare is not sufficient because it still leaves this God shaped hole. But the way I think about it is at higher levels of material comfort, we have a better shot at figuring

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

out the answer to the God shaped hole.

[Marc Andreessen]

If you're going to be confronted with existential questions about religion and philosophy and how to live your life, would you rather do that with material deprivation or with material Plenty. And it's really easy for people to say that they would prefer to. It's like, would you rather be a monk with a straw mat on the floor, right, eating bread and water, trying to figure out the meaning of life? Or would you rather be you with a nice fluffy bed and air conditioning and artisanal cheese from Whole Foods?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I love that. That's the one you pick.

[Marc Andreessen]

You'd much rather be you. Of course, I'm going to have a much better chance at figuring out the important questions in life if I'm not worried about where my next meal comes from. If I'm not worried whether the power is going to go out, if I'm not worried that I'm going to freeze to death overnight, if I'm not worried that my kid's not going to have access to a nail incubator, that if I have to worry about where my income's coming from, of course, with material planning, I'm going to have a lot more capacity to answer the deep questions. And so I think that's going to be the unanticipated payoff, which is as technology and as AI makes the world materially better off, I believe it increases our ability to address these big questions, not decrease it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Hold tight. We're going to take a quick break.

[Grainger Announcer]

If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Grainger Hospital Procurement Announcer]

When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery, so you can keep your facility stocked, safe, and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, let's pick up where we left off. Yeah, so I'll agree with you there, but there's one division that I'm going to make, which is the reason that religion is so impactful is because it addresses every intellectual circle, every person on the intellectual spectrum. So when I went through a phase where I was trying to explain to people, hey, think like this, act like this. It'll make your life better, these ideas just radically changed me. And I found that largely because as people age, they're just not able to be as intellectually nimble. But you also run into the reality that some people do not have the intellectual horsepower. Whenever I talk about this, I want to remind people it's entirely possible I fall below the line. I'm perfectly willing to accept that. That. But you have to understand that there are dumb people that cannot process some of these Ideas. And so religion becomes this catch all for hey, this is how you live a good life. And it will speak to highly intelligent people and it will speak to people who are just going to follow the Ten Commandments. I mean, the ten Commandments are basically the Bible's tldr, right? So it's like, hey, don't worry about reading that, just here are the 10 things. Go do these 10 things and you're going to be fine. Done in a story format. And so it really speaks to people. So I don't think this sort of intellectual approach to hey, this is why AI is going to be great for you and in the future it's going to solve all these problems. What's going to happen as a punctuated moment? I think on a long enough timeline, this is all great and it's wonderful and it brings about an age of abundance. So but I'm talking about the punctuated moment where people start losing their jobs and they don't want to make the transition. People get the sort of warmth and comfort from religion. They're being drawn back into it. I, I don't know if the data will support this exact statement, but this feels accurate that people are coming back into religion and sort of regionally large numbers, like higher numbers than regional, I'm not saying ever in human history, but you know, locally, time wise. And so we've got this massive influx into religion right now. You've got this massive thing that's going to disrupt all the things that religion is going to talk about. Taking care of people, the soul, a connection to God, the afterlife, all these things that AI and robotics are going to challenge. And now I think you have this collision of people that aren't able to navigate intellectually the nuance, it becomes problematic and, and I think that is going to have to be addressed now. Let's take the super boring version of this. And it just plays out as regulatory capture. And the government's just like, nah, my constituents don't want it. It gets mired, it gets super bogged down and now everything gets caught up in red tape. And the thing that I can already feel happening now where there's just so much regulation that it's hard to move forward at the rate we could say back when I was a kid, that gets exacerbated. That's my sort of mundane vision of how this plays out. But I don't see a world in which it just all happens in a sunny, rosy way, do you?

[Marc Andreessen]

It's complicated. So look, I'm a techno optimist not a techno utopian. And so like, I start by saying a couple things which I don't think technology, like, I don't think technology like

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

answers all these questions, right.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so I don't think technology or for that matter, economic growth, like, give answers to answers to most people for meaning.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Right. And so I don't think any of this is a substitute for religion.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so I like, like from that

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

standpoint, I maybe have a little bit of humility just on the scope of the importance of what we do out here.

[Marc Andreessen]

So like I said, I think this, I think even in a world of

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

technological abundance and economic abundance, material welfare, I think the big questions of meaning are still open questions.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so I will hesitate to make

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

sweeping claims on that.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, I guess I've just. Maybe the other way to come at this, maybe the way to think about this is I talk more about on the religion side. So my, my take on religion, I completely buy religious revivals. And I think we're actually in quite a religious time right now, which we should talk about because, for example, politics have become a branch of religion. We've invented a whole series of secular religions in the last 150 years and we continue to do that. And so the sort of form and

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

shape of religions keeps playing out even if they don't have sort of supposedly supernatural kind of elements to them.

[Marc Andreessen]

And you know, and I'm completely open to the idea of like, like I said, I live through a fundamentalist religious revival.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

I'm completely open to more of those. Those clearly are happening at various places in the world.

[Marc Andreessen]

You know, one of the.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Yeah.

[Marc Andreessen]

So I would certainly grant all that that said is we do like we moderns and postmoderns, like, we don't relate to religion the way that people did back before our times. So like the further you go back in history and for sure this is

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

like this was true like one ago back.

[Marc Andreessen]

The relationship that people had with religion was different than they have it today. And I way down the rabbit hole in this. But basically, for, for most of recorded human history, religion was not an a la carte thing. It was something that was a very

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

deep part of who you were as a person.

[Marc Andreessen]

And specifically they had the concept, the concept of peoplehood. There was a people and the people would have shared genetics, they'd all be related to each other. The people would have shared culture, the people would have a shared place, right. You know, their own land. And then they would have religion. And those concepts were all conjoined. There's this Great book. There's a great book called the Ancient

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

City that goes through basically the prehistory of Western civilization.

[Marc Andreessen]

It goes through the basically what are

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

called the old Indo European religions and cultures that sort of ultimately resulted in the Greeks and the Romans and then in Christianity.

[Marc Andreessen]

So it's sort of, it goes all the way back to the beginning of

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

basically like how Western societies form.

[Marc Andreessen]

And it was basically a three part structure. It was family, it was tribe, and

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

then it was city.

[Marc Andreessen]

And then these concepts of shared kinship, genetics, shared culture, shared religion and shared

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

geography were all conjoined.

[Marc Andreessen]

And if you told somebody in that era that, you know, oh, you can switch religions, they would have considered you completely insane. Because being of that religion with those gods was precisely tied to these other factors of culture, genetics and place. Of course, in our society we have completely disconnected those things. If I go out in public today and I'm like, no, I'm a part of a peoplehood where I have shared genetics, culture, religion and place, and I'm going to have an ethnostate for German Dutch people in the Midwest, obviously I get instantly tagged as a white supremacist

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

and I get shunned and ostracized from society.

[Marc Andreessen]

By the way, I'm not proposing that.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

I don't want that, just for the record.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so, so we live in a different time. We have abstracted religion away from those other things. And kind of, to your point, actually, as a consequence of that, we can now choose our own religion, right? And as a modern Westerner, you or I are completely free tomorrow to become

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

a Catholic or a Baptist or Jewish

[Marc Andreessen]

or Muslim or whatever we want, or by the way, to make up our own religions and by the way, proselytize

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

and go try to get followers.

[Marc Andreessen]

And we call those cults.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

And people do that all the time. And I would argue we live in

[Marc Andreessen]

a world of cults.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

And we've got all these new cults out here in California and some of them are, by the way, super involved

[Marc Andreessen]

in AI so it's a thing. But religion has become an a la carte. It's like the old choose your own adventure books you might have had when you were a kid. You can basically design the religion that you want. And so on the one hand you would say, oh, well, then this is going to be a time of tremendous invention of religious concepts and religious behaviors. And by the way, and I believe that's true, I do think that's happening. On the other hand, is this like, okay, is religion going to control our lives in the way that it did back when that concept was conjoined with

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

genetics, culture, and place.

[Marc Andreessen]

Place. It's hard. Like, we just don't take religion that seriously anymore. We could choose to take it seriously

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

again if we want to, but just observationally, we don't.

[Marc Andreessen]

And when it becomes inconvenient, we change.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right, I'm going to run something by you. Tell me how this lands. I know you have a broad historical context, so also being a student of history, I hesitate to say this, but I have a hypothesis that the religious impulse plays out at the same volume no matter what. It just becomes a question of what is the religious impulse aimed at. So, for instance, as a game developer, I am constantly awestruck by how toxic the communities can become. And so I sat down one day and I was like, what on earth is going on here? And I realized this is the religious impulse that's being met by a video game. So you are communing with the other players. You are committing a ton of your time to this. You are giving yourself over to this game game. You care about the lore, you care about the time that you've invested into it. I mean, this is a level of belonging to a game and a game community that you would only have gotten historically as a part of either a town, a family, or a religion. And so it meets that criteria. And so when you have this sense of tremendous belonging and you as the game developer, go in and mess with their thing, and the easiest way to explain it is, imagine I could go in and mess with the rules of football without consulting anybody. And tomorrow you roll up and it's just different. And now the player that you loved is no longer a good player, and you don't really like it anymore, it doesn't speak to your skill set, People would be outraged. Like, my dad was into this team, my dad was into this game, and I was raised on it, and now I'm here and. And you changed it and you're trash. And that's basically what happens. Now, if I'm right, that that's riding on the. The neurological architecture that makes religion so powerful. It's like, hey, that volume is still dialed to 11. Now, hopefully nobody's going to go kill in the name of their favorite video game. But I think that's a narrative question and not an architectural question. So if I were to get people to believe that by investing in this video game like a cult, somehow meant something about you and society, and we were all fighting for the, you know, insert now politics, and you get how suddenly, with the right narrative, whoa, like, people will go. And that's another area I think people are. Politics right now is triggering the religious impulse. So I don't think the volume is dialed down. Even if we, quote, unquote, don't take religion as seriously.

[Marc Andreessen]

Who.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think the outcome's going to be the same because this is the architecture of the human mind.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. So I 100% agree with everything you said. I just interpret the consequences of it differently, which is, imagine telling an Athenian Greek or a Roman or a Christian in 300 A.D. or a Christian, for that matter, in 1800 A.D. that your now religion is a video game. They would have thought you completely lost your mind. Right. Like, wait a minute. Like, you've now taken that entire religious impulse, which is every bit as strong as it was, and you've, like, now applied it to a video game. Like, you're like, you have completely disconnected the importance of religion from reality, from, like, actual physical reality. Like, it no longer is relevant to you in terms of, like, the shape and form of any aspect of, like, your actual anything of any traditional concept of community, city environment, anything like that family, by the way, does it guide your decisions about, like, you know, you know, things like reproduction, children, you know, are you indoctrinating your kids, by the way? Maybe you are. Maybe you're indoctrinating your kids in World of Warcraft. But, like, indoctrinating your kids in World of Warcraft is like, that's not the same as, like, indoctrinating your kids in Catholicism. Like, that's World of Warcraft. It may be equally intense, but it's not as comprehensive an impact on the worldview of how people live their lives. And so I agree with you, but I just think that leads to tremendous amounts of displacement. But then also let me say I really agree with your last point, which is the politics point, which I think is something that is extremely important because especially sitting here today, three weeks before a very big election, something that I often point to when I talk to people about this is if you look at the charts of the big general population surveys of would you be comfortable with your kid marrying somebody of a different X? There's the famous chart of a different race, and whatever, six, 80 years ago, that was 90% uncomfortable. Today it's like 10% and falling somebody of a different. And then another one would be somebody

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

of a different religion.

[Marc Andreessen]

And if you had polled people 80 years ago, when they pulled people on this, like Catholics, Jews, Protestants, all were like, no way.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

You know, you're not marrying outside the faith.

[Marc Andreessen]

And today, at least like in the US very few people care. And so like that chart is like, is like way down the chart of do you care if your kid marries somebody of the other religion of the other political party? That chart is up and to the right. Right. And so to me, that maps exactly to what you said, which is, yeah, so politics has become our religion. There was actually a very, very important thinker writer in the, in the 20th century, Erich Vogelin, and he's the best writer I found in this topic. And he basically started his work actually in the 30s and 40s, and he was basically trying to explain at the time the rise of both communism and fascism. And he's like, wow, these people are crazy. These people are really extreme. And then he's like, all right, what is leading Bolsheviks on the one hand and Nazis on the other hand to be this sort of fevered and enthusiastic

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

about these incredibly high impact social movements with all these consequences.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so he basically developed a theory very consistent with what you said, which

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

is, you know, which he called, I think, you know, political religions.

[Marc Andreessen]

And he did the mapping and basically said like, these are direct, these are

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

in fact direct standards for religion.

[Marc Andreessen]

Christianity, actually, both Christianity and Nazism, sorry, both communism and Nazism were legendarily very hostile to Christianity, you know, precisely for that reason, because Christianity was the threat.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

They were, you know, quite literally trying to displace the, you know, the dominant religion in Europe at that time. Time.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so again, exactly, you're right. I think the impulse is with us. I think many, both Republicans and Democrats in the US Today exhibit that exact same kind of religious behavior around their politics. On the one hand, it can sound, I think, patronizing to say that because people think that their politics are all carefully thought through, they don't think they're doing it. But politics are important to people in the same way that religion is and

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

was important to people.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so they're certainly acting like it and they certainly point in their politics to how political choices are going to

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

affect how people live, which is very consistent with the view of a religion.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah. And so I think they're displacing that religious energy into politics. I think if they displace that religious energy into video game cults, like that's probably an improvement.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Maybe, maybe. It's certainly more benign, I think, for the reasons that you said earlier. So what does the religious impulse done well, look like? So there's obviously just funnel it into a traditional religion that's lasted for thousands of Years probably going to be fine. But given that a lot of people are not doing that, how can you do that?

[Marc Andreessen]

Well, yeah, so the anthropological view of religion, I think is it's about group formation and cohesion. Right. And this is the role in the ancient city to talk about this. Like, this is the role that religion. So the original form of this and sort of, sort of prehistory, the original form of this was we've got the family, which is like up basic cousins. It's basically the extended family up through cousins and by the way, cousin marriage.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

You marry your cousins and so you try to keep the family in the family.

[Marc Andreessen]

And then the family has its gods. And then over time, the families aggregated, the clans aggregated up into tribes which

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

consisted of multiple families.

[Marc Andreessen]

And then the tribes would have its gods, and then the tribes would aggregate up into the cities and the cities

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

would have their gods.

[Marc Andreessen]

Right. And so as the member of a city, you had three tiers of gods

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

that you basically were required to basically to worship and to honor.

[Marc Andreessen]

And you literally had it with the hearth, you had the fire, the permanent fire, and you had to keep the

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

fire lit in sort of, you had to do sacrifices to the gods and so forth, forth.

[Marc Andreessen]

And then the original morality of it was if you meet somebody from another family, tribe, city, they worship different gods, Right? They have their own gods. And so your gods are inherently at war with their gods and your moral obligation is to kill them on sight. That's aggressive, right? Which literally. Right. It was literally like kill them on sight. So had you told them, had you told people from that era, from those many centuries? No. You're supposed to be tolerant to people from other religions. They would have said, are you out of your mind?

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

They're a threat.

[Marc Andreessen]

If we don't kill them, they're going to kill us, we kill them on sight. And so it was like the concept of human rights is like 180 degree inversion from the original form of society, by the way. A big improvement, I think, but a very, very big inversion. And so at sort of the most fundamental level. So why don't I go through that? At the most fundamental level, what's the religion for? It's for group cohesion. Why did it work that way? It's because that's what maximally bonded the family, the tribe and the city together at a time when physical survival was

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

very much up for grabs. Right.

[Marc Andreessen]

Like, is the family, the tribe, the city going to make it through the year? Tbd is there going to be a famine, a flood, a mudslide you know, a volcano eruption? Is another tribe going to come over and kill you?

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Are you going to run out of food?

[Marc Andreessen]

Like, those are all very important questions. The entire tribe, you know, city had to really pull together for physical survival. And so religion was like the bonding element that pulled together a group. And I would argue, you know, fast forward to today. That's exactly the behavior you see in video games. Games, right. Which is not just a member of a video game cult is not just an individual. They're not acting as an individual inevitably,

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

they're acting as a member of a

[Marc Andreessen]

group, and it's group cohesion. And then I also apply the Jonathan Haidt kind of theory here, kind of coming from psychology, which is. He has this great line he talks about in the book the Righteous Mind, where he says he uses the word morality, but you can basically equivalently, I

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

think, use the word religion.

[Marc Andreessen]

You said morality binds and blinds, which is to say a shared morality or a shared religion. It binds people together into a group. It identifies us versus them, friend versus foe in the way that it did also in prehistory. And then he said, and this is really important. The other part is it blinds. It sets up a knowledge framework, a perception framework by which you emphasize confirming information that's good for your group and you dismiss disconfirming information that's bad for your group, and you literally become blind. Right to the point. And you see this today with Republicans and Democrats where generally the more passionate the Republican or Democrat, the less able

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

they are to articulate the other side's

[Marc Andreessen]

point of view correctly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Fascinating.

[Marc Andreessen]

The less able they are to steal man the other side's view, which means they're literally giving up in psychological terms. They're giving up what's called theory of mind. They're giving up the ability to understand what it's like in somebody else's shoes because it's more important to be a

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

member of the group than it is to be able to understand the other.

[Marc Andreessen]

Anyway, so this is all very much in support of what you're saying. These are very fundamental primal behaviors. I think that they are very important today in our society as much as ever, which you see in the politics. And then I think they're going to be equally important hundreds of years from now. Hopefully this impulse gets channeled in productive directions.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, yeah, we'll see. So Kai Fu Lee has talked about how we could experience up to 50% of job disruption, displacement. It's not like there won't be new jobs, but you're going to have A very substantive percentage of people that are either just temperamentally or age wise, unwilling to make a change societally. How do we handle that?

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, so I don't, I don't think that's true at all. So I just. Yeah, that's. Yeah. So that's the classic in economics. That's what's called the lump of labor fallacy. So it's one of the, it's one of, it's one. And by the way, Kafu is a very bright guy, so, you know, he

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

may well be right on this.

[Marc Andreessen]

But, but what any economist will tell you is a fallacy. And it's actually the fallacy at the heart of Marxism, at the heart of socialism. And it's a very intuitive fallacy. It's one that people fall into very easily. It's called the lump of labor fallacy because, and there's a big great Wikipedia page in this people can read. The lump of labor fallacy basically is there's a certain amount of labor being done in the world today and that labor is either going to be done by people or it's going to be done by machines. And if it's done by people, then they're going to make money by doing it, be able to provide for themselves and it's done by machines.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Then the people are going to become unemployed and they're going to be screwed.

[Marc Andreessen]

Screwed. And what's interesting about this fallacy is this has been a fallacy that literally has been in place in basically political

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

thought and sort of Marxist economic thought, socialist economic thought for like 300 years.

[Marc Andreessen]

The Marxists really kind of packaged it up and turned it into a religion, actually. But this is kind of the pervasive thing. This was sort of the immediate kind of concern, panic at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which was you were going to have machines that were

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

going to substitute for human labor that

[Marc Andreessen]

were going to miserate everybody. This actually is sort of embedded in a lot of myths and legends that we, you know, that we kind of have in our kind of cultural DNA. There's a famous, I don't know if you've heard about, there used to be or is a famous ballad song of

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

the myth of this figure, John Henry.

[Marc Andreessen]

And kids are often taught this song. It's John Henry, the steel driving man. And the idea was it's the guy. This is like, this would be like

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

when the railroads are getting built.

[Marc Andreessen]

This is like the guy who's using

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

a hammer to drive spikes into the rail bed to put railroad tracks down,

[Marc Andreessen]

which used to be Something people did by hand.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

And it was this thing where one day John Henry is the famous guy who can drive in the most spikes. And then one day the foreman shows up with a machine that drives in the spikes and they have a contest where John Henry competes with the machine. Sure. Who can drive in most spikes.

[Marc Andreessen]

And it turns out John Henry wins

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

the contest and then drops dead from heart attack.

[Marc Andreessen]

Tech. Some kind of symbolic. The last gasp of human effort before

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

the machines take over.

[Marc Andreessen]

And that dates back to like, I

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

don't know, like 1870. Right. So that's like 150 years ago. People had this fear.

[Marc Andreessen]

And then basically what we've had is we've had 300 years of modern technology, industrialization, automation, computerization. Literally three centuries now, and sitting here today, there are more jobs than ever in the world than ever and at

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

higher wages for people.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so in practice, what's happened is

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

we now have three centuries of evidence that basically that's a fallacy. That's actually not what happens. What happens actually is the opposite, which is technology creates far more jobs than it destroys and creates jobs that are better at higher levels of income.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So do people adopt those jobs? Are there going to be people that just get left behind?

[Marc Andreessen]

There will be some. And look, there is some response. And I should also back up for a second and say, say conversations about this topic. It's very easy to come across in my experience, talking about myself. It's very easy to come across as like, judgmental and patronizing because it's very easy to come across basically saying, you know, basically. So, like, one of the things that I will claim is that one of

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

the things I will claim and what we're about to talk about is that there are some jobs that are better than other jobs.

[Marc Andreessen]

Some jobs are just better jobs. They're, they're like, you know, they're, they're physically less taxing, you know, they pay better, you know, whatever. But, you know, there may be a bar to be able to, to get

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

those jobs, or people may not want to do those jobs.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so people may get, you know, you can, people can get very resentful at the idea that they have to

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

give up what they have in order for the prospect of something that might be better, but maybe they don't want it.

[Marc Andreessen]

And, you know, who, who, who are these experts on TV or on the

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Internet to tell them that they should think in these terms.

[Marc Andreessen]

So, so I should start by saying, look, like people are going to have a lot of reactions. People always have, look, a lot of Our politics for the same 300 years

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

have been around this process of, of industrial change and then therefore, you know, job change and, you know, like, you

[Marc Andreessen]

know, the rise of unions and like,

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

there's all these things that happen in our politics as a consequence of these fights.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so I should just start by saying, like, you need to be able to talk clinically about this because you

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

do need to be able to talk about the big issues.

[Marc Andreessen]

I do recognize that it's very easy to come across as patronizing.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

I also recognize that people are going to have different points of view on this.

[Marc Andreessen]

Some people are going to struggle, some for sure. You know, look, when the, when the car came along, blacksmiths were not happy, right?

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Because, like, all of a sudden, you don't need as many horses. Like, they were not happy now.

[Marc Andreessen]

Now many blacksmiths became car mechanics, but

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

many blacksmiths maybe didn't want to become car mechanics and got very upset and resentful about that.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yes, all of the above is going to happen. Having said that, the basic mechanism of introducing new technology into an economy is not job destruction.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

The basic mechanism is job creation, net job creation, overwhelming the job destruction.

[Marc Andreessen]

And the reason for that has to do with this concept of productivity growth. And so the concept of productivity growth is very important. So the concept of productivity growth is the economic measure of the impact of

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

technology in an economy.

[Marc Andreessen]

And basically what it means is the

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

ability to generate more output with less input, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

And so, and you know, use the John Henry example. Can I, can I, can I, can I put more nails in the road

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

bed to build railroad tracks faster, right?

[Marc Andreessen]

With, at the same cost level, you know, can I build more cars at lower prices? Can I, you know, provide, you know, can I make more video games, you

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

know, more video game levels at lower prices?

[Marc Andreessen]

Like in, in any industry, there's always this question of, like, how much am I producing today? And then can I produce more output

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

at lower cost cost? And it's what every business logically wants to do, right? They want to expand output and they want to reduce costs.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so productivity growth is the metric by which economists track the impact of technology impacting the environment. And this is very important. The faster the rate of productivity growth, the faster the rate of economic growth, the faster the rate of productivity growth, the more prices of current goods and services in the economy fall. Because if you're able to produce more with less, then prices come down. And so just take food as an example. Food today is far cheaper than it

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

was 200 years ago because of all the automation.

[Marc Andreessen]

And so to buy an avocado 200

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

years ago would have cost the modern day equivalent of $100, and now it's a dollar.

[Marc Andreessen]

Productivity growth leads to declines in prices, declines in prices lead to increase in spending power. Because if as a consumer, I pay less for the things I'm already buying, right, because of productivity growth, then spending power is being unlocked. Without me even getting a raise, I

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

have new spending power.

[Marc Andreessen]

And then that new spending power then leads to the creation of new products, services and industries and jobs to fulfill that all of a sudden I can spend on. So what I'm describing is this is the basic mechanism of technological adaptation of an economy, and it's a basic mechanism of economic growth. And theories like the one that you mentioned, theories by which the introduction of technology has an immiserating effect as compared to a cornucopian effect historically, have not played out well because that's not actually how this works. Which is why the socialists are perpetually disappointed. It's like every socialist is super pissed all the time because capitalism works so well. It's really annoying that we live in a time of material plenty after all

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

of this runaway capitalism.

[Marc Andreessen]

It's Boris Yeltsin in the American supermarket in 1991, just completely shocked at how much food there is this. It's just like shit, they lied to us. The communists lied to us about how to do this. Anyway, so we can go into any aspect of this you want to in detail, but basically I completely convinced that's

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

exactly what's going to happen here.

[Marc Andreessen]

If AI works the way that we're imagining, what's going to happen is productivity growth is going to take off, prices of current goods and services are going to fall, volume is going to expand, more people in the world are going to be able to buy all the

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

things that they want to buy.

[Marc Andreessen]

But also it's going to unlock a lot of new spending power. That spending power is then going to create demand for new industries. It's going to unlock demand that we're

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

going to be able to satisfy by producing and buying many new things.

[Marc Andreessen]

And our Future digital children, AI children 100 years from now are sitting here. We're going to have a podcast saying, can you believe that our human parents

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

had this fallacy where they didn't think that this was going to turn out this way because it always did and it did again. Anyway, that's why I'm so optimistic about this.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I, I love it. For people that don't know you, he wrote a document basically saying technology is going to save us all and he went through in detail on a lot of these points. Very counterintuitive. Coming out of the Bay Area for sure. If I would think that.

[Marc Andreessen]

Yeah, please. I wouldn't say it's going to save us all. So I would say I'm an optimist, not a utopian. And so it goes this very important. It goes back to where we started, which is. I don't think this. Everything I just described does not answer all of life's deep questions. Right. Like it, it. It's not enough to just have material welfare. Like I'm 100% on that. But like having material welfare is better than not having material welfare. Right. And, and it's the best starting point to be able to answer the big questions. And so I just wanted to, wanted to qualify that. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. I, I am actually myself not proposing a new religion.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Mark, this has been incredible. Where can people follow along with you?

[Marc Andreessen]

Oh good. So I am on Twitter now called X. I am on there as P Marque. P M A R. That is probably one of my main presences. And then I have a substack which is linked to from the Twitter account and then we have a YouTube channel

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

and my partner Ben and I have

[Marc Andreessen]

a YouTube show that we do intermittently

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

but we get good feedback on. So maybe we can link to that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Awesome. Guys. I can definitely vouch for his content. It is amazing. I hope you guys will check it out. Speaking of things that I hope you will do, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

[Marc Andreessen (continued)]

Peace.

[Jake Stauch]

I'm Jake Stauch, co founder and CEO of Cervel. We built Servl to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding password resets, access to applications. My laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work. And that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And it's built.

[Jake Stauch]

No drag and drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Cerbal, it becomes the AI engine powering the entire company. This is a new way to run it. We guarantee you'll automate 50% of all tickets and we'll prove it to you in a free four week pilot. Go to cervel.com tickets. That's S-E-R-V-A-L.com tickets.