The Techno-Optimist Manifesto with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz

Originally aired in October 2023, this episode centers on Marc Andreessen’s essay The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which lays out his vision for the future of technology. The piece sparked widespread discussion across traditional and social media by challenging the prevailing pessimistic narrative around technology and arguing instead that it can be a force for growth, progress, and abundance. In this one-on-one conversation, based on listener questions from X (formerly Twitter), a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz and Marc discuss how technological advances can improve quality of life, support marginalized communities, and shape how we think about humanity’s long-term future. Read the full manifesto: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ben Horowitz?

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

• 0:09Marc Andreessen?

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

• 0:13Ben Horowitz?

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

• 0:21Marc Andreessen?

  Do we want more Manhattans and Apollos? On the one hand, it's hard to say no. On the other hand, do I want a society that is that much more militarized? If that's what's required, I don't know.

• 0:29Ben Horowitz?

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

• 0:38Marc Andreessen?

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

• 0:41Ben Horowitz?

  And PlayStations.

• 0:43Marc Andreessen?

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

• 0:56Erik Torenberg?

  Following the publication of his essay, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, in October 2023, Marc Andreessen sat down with his A16Z co-founder, Ben Horowitz, to talk through what sparked the piece and why he felt compelled to write it. Along the way, they take on audience questions, including whether there's such a thing as effective pessimism, why victimhood so often dominates the conversation, how dependent we risk becoming on technology, the difference between being pro-business versus pro-market, the role of private and public capital in driving progress, and which part of the essay Mark thinks was the most controversial. Let's get into it.

• 1:31Ben Horowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Marc and Ben podcast. Today, we're going to talk about a post that Marc recently wrote called The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. And like all good manifestos, many people loved it, many people hated it, and so that's given us a lot to talk about. I just want to actually point out, my favorite of the people that hated it was an article that was published in TechCrunch called, "When's the Last Time Marc Andreessen Has Spoken To Poor People?" Or a poor person, or something like that. And the thing that's so funny about it is that Marc, of all the people I know, I probably don't know anybody who's more self-made than Mark because he grew up

• 2:15Ben Horowitz?

  in a tiny town in Wisconsin. He went to public schools, like not good public schools, like probably some of the worst public schools in the country and like never got any money, you know, from home. Not because his parents had loved him, they didn't have any money to give him. And then the people who wrote the article all went to like the fanciest schools I've ever heard of and, you know, Ivy Leagues and wonderful private high schools and these kinds of things. So now we have people who grew up rich telling somebody who grew up poor and massively succeeded, what's good for poor people who want to succeed? So I just thought that was so funny. Anyway, so this one's gotten a lot of kick to it. So we're going to get right into it. The first question-

• 3:00Marc Andreessen?

  Can I, hey Ben, can I, can I weigh in on that?

• 3:03Ben Horowitz?

  Yes, sir.

• 3:03Marc Andreessen?

  Can I weigh in on that? You, you can't start that way and then let me talk and let me say something.

• 3:07Ben Horowitz?

  Sorry.

• 3:10Marc Andreessen?

  So it's too tempting. Look, that response is, it's a classic example of what the author Robert Henderson calls luxury beliefs, right? And so the definition of luxury belief is it's a belief that can be held by somebody who's in sort of an elite position, a position of power, a position of wealth and comfort about how society should be ordered that is incorrect and the consequences of which would be disastrous, right, for the people that would be subjected to the consequences of that belief. But the people who hold the belief are insulated from the consequences, right? They live in, you know, kind of fancy places and have very good lifestyles and aren't going to suffer directly as a result. So, so anyway, it's a classic, it's a great example of luxury belief. The sort of facile response to it, of course, is that capitalism and free markets are the machine that has lifted people out of poverty for, you know, 500 years.

• 3:50Ben Horowitz?

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

• 3:53Marc Andreessen?

  Many, many, many times, you know, and we, this is one of those things, you know, some amazing things. Exactly to your point, we ran this experiment hundreds of times in the 20th century and the results are very clear. And you know, look, most recently in China, you know, there's a direct correlation between the degree to which the Chinese Communist Party kind of takes its boot off the throat of the people in terms of their ability to engage in markets and engage in trade and the extent to which their quality of life rises. And so you kind of still see that, you know, playing out today.

• 4:16Ben Horowitz?

  And how quickly it progresses when they move to central planning.

• 4:19Marc Andreessen?

  A hundred percent. And so, and you just see this over and over again. And then, you know, you see it happen in other, other parts of the world also. And so, you know, it's this thing where you just like more times running the same experiment are not going to generate different results. And then the result of this, of course, is that this is kind of so obvious and well established at this point that you have to go to, you know, one of our finest elite, you know, private high schools and private, you know, universities to really get inculcated.

• 4:39Ben Horowitz?

  Into the luxury belief system that's going to try all trying to help. Yeah.

• 4:44Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. So.

• 4:46Ben Horowitz?

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

• 5:02Marc Andreessen?

  You know, look, this is really tough, right? You know, let's start by conceding the kind of giving the devil his due, kind of conceding the strength of the other side's argument on this, which is like, look, as I say in the essay, like, you know, I'm not a utopian, you know, technology is not purely a force for good. Technologies are tools and they can be used for both good and bad. And, you know, virtually every technology that man has ever invented has been used for both good and bad. And so it's not that there aren't downsides.

• 5:22Ben Horowitz?

  Starting with fire.

• 5:24Marc Andreessen?

  And the what's that? Yeah, starting with fire. I mean, look, like, you know, this is a reference in the, in the piece, you know, the myth of Prometheus, which is kind of the origin myth in Western society of sort of implications of technology. And, you know, in the Prometheus myth, you know, Prometheus is the god that brought fire to man. And, you know, for that he was punished by Zeus by being chained to a rock and having his liver pecked out every night by a bird. And then it would regenerate in the morning and then it would happen again the next day. So, you know, a very exquisite form of torture that Zeus came up with. And, you know, the reason that myth is so powerful is because, look, fire, fire was the enabler of heat and light and cooking food, right? And defense and shelter for early man. But it was also a weapon, you know, from the very beginning, it was a weapon of war, right? And if, for example, you're engaged in siege combat and you're

• 6:07Marc Andreessen?

  going up against a fortified, you know, castle or city, the way that you win is you burn them out, right? And by the way, the way they retaliate is they heat up oil to oiling temperatures and they pour it on your head, right? So. Most sides of these are true, and this continues to be the case to this day. You know, actually, the effective pessimism is a clever framing. You know, these are kind of the two kind of valences that you can apply to this question, which is you can apply one valence is basically fundamentally, over time, net, you know, everything, technology has been primarily a force for good, primarily a force for progress. And basically, you embrace it and support it and accelerate it as much as you can. And then you deal with the issues as they arise, which is the story of the development of modern civilization. There is another valence, and some people incline more naturally to the pessimistic position, which is basically, and this is true, by the way, both technologies and markets.

• 6:48Marc Andreessen?

  People also apply the same kind of negative valence to markets, which is, well, primarily, you know, technology or markets are a generator of bad things, right? Technology is a weapon of war. You know, technology is something that has unanticipated negative consequences. Markets have winners and losers, right? And so, you know, you start out focusing more on the winners or on the losers. And so, you just kind of have to decide where you go in. You know, the accusation, of course, from the pessimists is that optimists are too optimistic. You know, the counter accusation, of course, is if you start out with a pessimistic frame, it's very hard to hold that in a moderate position, is what I observe. The pessimists sort of slide into greater and greater levels of pessimism quite quickly. And, you know, they end up very angry and bitter and hostile, and they end up advocating for extremely, you know, I would say draconian and kind of senseless policies.

• 7:32Marc Andreessen?

  And so, I think it's hard to be an effective pessimist. Yeah, I think it seems to be much easier to become a, I would say, you know, either ineffective pessimist or just a flat-out dangerous pessimist.

• 7:41Ben Horowitz?

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

• 8:03Marc Andreessen?

  Well, then you

• 8:04Ben Horowitz?

  seated at that, you're going to get frustrated.

• 8:06Marc Andreessen?

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

• 8:11Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Marc Andreessen?

  And so, you know, the pessimists, I mean, look, like I mentioned in the piece, you know, I think the single biggest policy mistake of my lifetime was the decision in the 70s, effectively in the 70s into the 80s, to ban, essentially ban civilian nuclear power. And, you know, for sure throughout most of the US and then, you know, throughout certainly most of Europe as well, with, you know, maybe France being the big exception. And then by extension throughout, you know, a lot of the rest of the world, because it would have been Western, you know, countries and companies that would have brought it to the rest of the world in that time period. And, you know, look, I think the consequences for that, like, I think if you're an environmentalist and you kind of are looking at things dispassionately, as Stuart Brand and others have been doing now for a while, is you kind of say, you know, look, we had the silver bullet for a sort of unlimited zero emission energy. And we had it and we chose not to use it. And, you know, with everything we know today, it's overwhelmingly both the safe, effective,

• 8:55Marc Andreessen?

  and kind of zero risk of mass death, zero risk of contributing to carbon emissions and so forth. But, you know, look, we collectively made a political decision to ban it, and we're, you know, paying the price for that today. And quite frankly, it's one of the reasons why Russia is able to do what it's doing in Ukraine, is it has this flow of money from oil, you know, which in a counterfactual universe where the world by now had cut over to civilian electric power, they wouldn't have that. They wouldn't be able to do what they're doing. So the, the consequences of that decision play out decades later. And I think that's a great illustration of the risk of, let's say not the risk of effective pessimism, let's say the risk of dangerous pessimism.

• 9:23Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. And dramatic example of narrative defeating data, because it's very obvious from the data that nuclear is far safer than, say, oil or coal. All right. Second question. And this is from your friend and mine, Shaka Sangor. How can we distribute transformative philosophies like yours to marginalized communities where a culture of despair and victimization predominates? Yeah, so this is a really interesting question for me, because I think that it does get to the heart of, like, one of the reasons why victimization predominates is because it's a techno pessimistic world in those communities, in the marginalized communities. And I would

• 10:07Ben Horowitz?

  say I go back to, there have been some very kind of interesting and successful leaders. Marcus Garvey comes to mind. And I think it starts with something that he really was heavily behind, which is this idea of self-determination, that an individual can change their own lives, change their own circumstances. And then he had this idea at the turn of the 18th to 1900s, which was a kind of much more difficult time to do that, particularly for kind of black people in America. But, you know, he himself succeeded at it greatly. And I think it really starts with that mindset where if you don't believe that you can be successful

• 10:50Ben Horowitz?

  in life, or with the new technology, or with kind of moving the world forward, then you can't. And Henry Ford's famous line, there are two men, one believes he can do it, the other believes he can't do it, and they're both right, I think is the key to that whole thing, is it just starts with the belief that you can succeed. And look, the odds are harder for some than others, but you always end in despair if you believe you can't do it.

• 11:15Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, and I just add, building a little bit on the sort of, look, on the consumption side, so this is sort of one of the amazing things about free markets. Free markets are the most beneficial to the lowest income and the most advantaged. And that's a counterintuitive mind bender for a lot of people who have been traded.

• 11:27Ben Horowitz?

  And the opposite.

• 11:28Marc Andreessen?

  Capitalism, but the truth is, it's the best for the poorest. It's the best for the people who have the least. And by the least, I mean the least existing wealth, but also the least access, or the least social status, right, who are kind of on the receiving end of not a lot of advantage in their lives. And you can kind of look at that on two sides of their lives. You can look at that for them as producers and as consumers. So on the production side, markets open up opportunity, right, for people to be able to make their way in the world, and to be able to have jobs, be able to make money, and then ultimately be able to support a family. And so, again, the counterfactual is not a poor person, right, trying to navigate their way through the hell of a capitalist economy versus somehow in a socialist or communist system, maybe kind of handed everything they need, right? The reality is, it's the other way around. It's the more capitalism, the more opportunities are, the more available jobs.

• 12:10Ben Horowitz?

  The more.

• 12:13Marc Andreessen?

  Right, the more lines of work, the more openness and freedom and choice to be able to figure out how to succeed and how to make money and what work to do. You end up on the wrong side of an authoritarian or communist regime, or socialist regime, or an authoritarian regime, right? You are screwed. Like, there are no jobs for you, right? Nobody's hiring, there are no private employers. You know, if the state, for whatever reason, doesn't want to hire you, like, you're out of luck. If you're in a disadvantaged class category, if you're in a disadvantaged race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, any of these things, or just political views, or whatever, or just that you're poor, and people look down on you, like, that's it. Like, you're done. Like, at that point, you're a ward of the state, and whatever small amount of grain they want to feed you to keep you alive, fair enough, but like, you're not going anywhere. Right?

• 12:58Marc Andreessen?

  And that was the story of low-income people in most societies over, basically, the entirety of human existence up to the point of the invention of markets. And so, so that's on the one side. And then on the consumption side, I talked about this also in the essay, is one of the big things that technology does in the free market context is it drives prices down. And this is a big thing on inequality, and especially income inequality, that people, I think, miss, which is, like, one form of, like, determining the level of, like, income inequality, or the value of one's income, or whatever, right, is to look at it in terms of, like, you know, what, literally, as demarcated, measured by units of currency, right? And so, I'm either making more money or less money. Look, the other side of that is, what is money used for? It's used to buy goods and services. And so, if the price of goods and services is falling, that's the same effective thing to you from a standard-of-living standpoint as if you're getting a natural raise.

• 13:41Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And so, what markets do, and technology does, is they drive prices down. And the more they're allowed to operate, the more they drive prices down. The traditional way that economists talk about this is they make the observation, which is, as follows, which is, the Queen of England always wore silk stockings, right? Like, the super-rich throughout all of society, throughout all of time, have always had access to the best of goods and services, the best of available food, and the best of available healthcare, right, and so forth and so on, of their time and place. It was traditionally, like, that stuff was all just silk stockings, and everything else, right, were just completely out of reach of most people. And it is precisely the engine of free markets and technology that bring down prices, so that regular people can afford these things as well.

• 14:20Ben Horowitz?

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

• 14:58Marc Andreessen?

  Let me give you one other one on that, and I find this totally mind blowing. So Ben, you'll remember when we first started working on the internet in the 90s, there was just this endless kind of hand wringing at the time about this concept of the digital divide.

• 15:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yes.

• 15:08Marc Andreessen?

  Right? This concept of basically digital technology, the internet, computers, PCs and the smartphones were going to basically widen inequality because it was basically well off people that were going to have them and then poor people wouldn't.

• 15:17Ben Horowitz?

  Right.

• 15:18Marc Andreessen?

  And then this was maybe the effective pessimism of its time as people were very worried about that. Look, sitting here today in 2023, the following is true. More people in the world have computers in the form of smartphones specifically and internet access than have electricity or running water in their homes.

• 15:33Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, amazing.

• 15:33Marc Andreessen?

  Right? So the digital technologies people worried about are actually the most egalitarian, right? Of all technologies that have ever been produced, even more than running water and electricity. So, I mean, we should still be worried about like literally the gap in access to fresh water, like more than the gap in access to the internet. And again, there's exactly one. The water divide, right? The electricity divide is like still a thing. But the digital technology divide actually turns out to not be a thing. And again, the reason for that is very straightforward. The reason for that is falling prices. The reason for that is as the global smartphone market went to 5 billion people, the price of a smartphone collapsed to, I don't even know today, in sort of the developing world, it's, I don't know, 10 bucks or something. And then same thing, internet access has plummeted in price over time because of Moore's Law and competition and innovation. And so the paradox, the flip side of this is if you wanted a plan

• 16:17Marc Andreessen?

  to be able to drive something, any form of good or service that is important to lots of people, to have it be available to everybody, the thing to do is to lean harder into markets and into technology, right? Not further away.

• 16:27Ben Horowitz?

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

• 16:44Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so I would say there's kind of the full dystopian version of this, which is sort of the Wally scenario, right? In the movie Wally, for those of you who haven't seen it, mankind in the future basically is all just obese and literally sitting in these big, like, zero-gravity suspension chairs and basically binging Netflix and slurping.

• 16:57Ben Horowitz?

  Some of that going now.

• 16:59Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, this might sound a little familiar in our times. But yeah, look, there is this sense of like, okay, we kind of, at some point, like, we live in sort of this automated, I don't know, farm environment or something, and we're kind of farm animals, and we're being kept fat and happy, but we've kind of lost agency, we've lost real will, we've lost choice, we've lost any sort of sense of self-reliance, self-sufficiency, any sense of adventure. Like, I think there's certainly some argument in that direction. You do see examples of that. What I tried to do in the essay, and what I believe on this is a little subtle, which is, look, there are really big questions about the meaning of life that people have today and have had for a very long time, right? And a lot of the history of human civilization has been debates around religion and which

• 17:40Marc Andreessen?

  gods to worship and moral principles and how to order a society and what the role of the collective versus the role of the individual is and all these policy questions that flower from this. And like, the story of human civilization is in some way the story of trying to figure out all those questions. And of course, these questions are still, at least for a lot of people, still unanswered or are still open questions or are being opened anew all the time. I think it's putting, frankly, too much of a burden. Like, I'm an enthusiastic proponent of technology and markets, but it's putting a little bit too much of a burden on technology and markets to expect technology and markets to answer all those questions for all people. So I think if you're looking to technology and markets to answer those questions, I think you're probably looking in the wrong direction. I think you probably need to look inside, quite honestly, inside the human soul, where all the hard questions lie. And then the observation I make is rising technological capabilities and rising standard

• 18:24Marc Andreessen?

  of living, right, through markets, open up the room, right, individually and collectively in our society to be able to ask those questions, right? So, and the most obvious example of that is, like, when people are hungry, they don't ask any of these questions. The only question is, like, where's the meal coming from? Right. And you can kind of elaborate that all the way up and you can kind of say, look, like if the ultimate human problem is that we have full bellies, our children are going to live great lives, we're able to support our family, we're able to do all the things that technology is able to give us, and we still have these big unanswered questions about the meaning of life, then basically what technology will have done is to open up the aperture to be able to actually spend more time trying to figure out those big questions.

• 18:59Ben Horowitz?

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

• 19:32Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. Well, look, technology gives you the way, oh, here's the other kind of serious observation to make is technology increases resilience to natural disaster. So, for example, this comes up actually a lot in the climate debate, which is basically, and I'm not, this is not a question of climate change, I'm making a different point, but one of the questions over time is basically, is nature getting more or less dangerous, right, over time, right, as the world changes, as humanity changes and so forth. And basically, that deaths from natural disasters have been in systemic decline for a century plus at this point.

• 19:58Ben Horowitz?

  No.

• 19:59Marc Andreessen?

  Right. It used to be that if you were confronted by, you know, basically, any kind of, what's that?

• 20:04Ben Horowitz?

  Cold.

• 20:05Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 20:06Ben Horowitz?

  There's no heat.

• 20:07Marc Andreessen?

  Yes. People, yeah, if it was cold, you freeze to death. If it was hot, with no air conditioning, you might, you might die from heat stroke, or any kind of tornado, flood, mudslide. I mean, look, it was in Boston, like 150 years ago or something, there was like a molasses, basically a mass tragedy, right, where people like literally drowned in a molasses flood. Like, nature is vicious, right? Nature really has it out for you. And if you're unprotected in a state of nature, like it, the old, the old thing is life in a state of nature is, was it, nasty, brutish, and short?

• 20:32Ben Horowitz?

  Poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbs.

• 20:35Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. And so, so look, the flip side of the question is, technology is now buffering us against sources of mass death that used to be far more common. And so this is not to sort of try to get away from the kind of the doomsday question of like, what happens if it literally all stops working? But like, how do we build defenses against the really bad scenarios in which that would happen? It actually turns out technology's our friend on that.

• 20:54Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Yeah. And our friend Elon is protecting us against everything by, I think it's an interplanetary species, which also deals with the asteroid problem.

• 21:03Marc Andreessen?

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

• 21:05Ben Horowitz?

  Nope.

• 21:07Ben Horowitz?

  Turns out. So John asks, how can economic systems evolve to prevent human corruption from infiltrating advanced technologies that surpass our capacity for understanding? Yeah, Ben, what do you think? Or maybe you might narrow on the question a little bit. Yeah, you know, I'm not sure if I totally understand what he's getting at here, but I think human corruption, there is this agency problem, and I think that you kind of alluded to it on the kind of nuclear fission issue where as these systems evolve, how do you keep the human interest from fouling them? And this kind of gets to a heart of a lot of the things that you spoke about in the

• 21:48Ben Horowitz?

  manifesto, which is, for example, we had this banking crisis and everybody's intention was to basically lessen our reliance on giant banks that became as powerful as many governments in the world. And of course, because of this Baptist and bootlegger issue where the banks were the bootleggers and the government was the Baptists, we basically got the opposite. We got much bigger banks, much more powerful, and that trend is kind of continuing forward. So I think that when we look at how systems get corrupt and create real crisis, we really have to beware of the agency problem.

• 22:28Ben Horowitz?

  And we're going through a few of those now, I think, both on AI and also on crypto, where actually a lot of the answer to some of these like huge, powerful monopolies, like what do you do about tech companies getting so big and becoming monopolies? What do you do about banks getting so big and becoming monopolies? We actually have a magic technology that decentralizes power, actually creates a real form of stakeholder capitalism where all of the participants in the economy get rewarded for building the economy. And the biggest

• 23:07Ben Horowitz?

  Adversaries of that whole movement end up being the kind of Baptists and the government conned by the bootleggers and the big banks and so forth, kind of over highlighting small, real but small dangers of the technology and trying to stop the technology in its tracks and kind of lead to this horrible agency problem where you have these very corrupt systems. So I guess my big thing would be like, be really careful when somebody goes, oh, this is a problem with a new technology. So therefore we have to stop the new technology. Like that, I think, is the pattern that's repeated over and over again and hurt us

• 23:49Ben Horowitz?

  so badly on energy and it threatens to hurt us on intelligence and threatens to hurt us on decentralization.

• 23:56Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah. One of the ways to think about this for people who haven't run into this in their lives is there's a fundamental difference between pro-business and pro-market.

• 24:04Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 24:04Marc Andreessen?

  And they sound like they're the same thing and they're not because pro-business kind of begs the question of which businesses and then sort of, okay, what's the structure of the market?

• 24:11Ben Horowitz?

  Crony capitalism.

• 24:12Marc Andreessen?

  Are we talking about like?

• 24:12Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 24:13Marc Andreessen?

  Right, exactly. Are we talking about lots of companies having to compete and earn their way in the world? Or are we talking about ultimately crony capitalism? And basically, this is the pattern of basically what happens. This is kind of the point of the Baptists and bootleggers idea. What happens, which is basically a new technology, something changes in the world. You have big incumbent companies that very much are opposed to that change or want to control it and want to control it, want to lock it down. And so what they do is they go to the government and they basically say, oh, you need to regulate this. And they don't go in and say, you need to regulate this for our benefit because they would get laughed at.

• 24:40Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Marc Andreessen?

  So what they say is you need to regulate this.

• 24:42Ben Horowitz?

  That would be a dead giveaway.

• 24:44Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that would be a dead giveaway. So instead they say, you need to regulate this to protect basically the little people. But what they're shooting for 100% of the time, what they're shooting for is basically government sanctioned barriers to competition for themselves.

• 24:55Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 24:55Marc Andreessen?

  And I would even argue like, I'll do a little effective pessimism. We don't in America today, in most industries, actually live in what you call a free market system. We live in more of a captured kind of big business cartel. Ecosystem and you look just across sort of sector after sector, what you see are sort of two or three or four companies that have overwhelming market share in each sector and generate an overwhelming percentage of the profits and have this extremely incestuous relationship with the government. By the way, often to the point where they're actually writing their own regulations, right? Like it's their lobbyists actually writing the regulations. I see industry groups that they run. Well, the classic example is-

• 25:27Ben Horowitz?

  I think that's the majority of regulations works exactly.

• 25:30Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right. And of course, and then there's this other form of corruption, right? Which is the revolving door, which is like, okay, if you're a regulator, it is extremely tempting, just out of pure self-interest, to kind of do what these big companies want, because they'll hire you, right? After you're done doing that. And so this is sort of this corruption after the fact that happens with the revolving doors. So basically, you could be pro-business and be completely in favor of all of that, right? Because it is still businesses doing everything at the end of the day. Pro-market, right, says, no, none of that, what I just described is acceptable. That's not how things should work at all. The last thing any government should be doing is giving any particular company some special right or privilege, some ability to block out new competition. And in fact, what you want is more competition. You want more competition, more markets, more capitalism, is actually the answer to that, precisely to keep the big companies from basically just taking over and not having to compete anymore.

• 26:13Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And actually, that leads very well into the next question, which is, how exactly will markets prevent monopolies? Please elaborate on your point. And I think this is so key, because what the nature of companies, even monopolies, is that the older and larger they get, the less adaptive they become. And we look, we've seen this with Google, who invented most of the new AI technology and then was a little bit asleep at the wheel. When OpenAI released GPT, they missed it, just because like they're big, they're complicated, they're slow, they're not as good anymore.

• 26:53Ben Horowitz?

  And so if the new AI companies are free to compete, if open source AI is free to compete, then all of the sun, that's the best kind of way to break that monopoly. Similarly, there's a lot of chatter on like, social networking monopolies and banking monopolies and these kinds of things. Again, we already actually have a technology that's a great insurgent technology to defeat those monopolies. And the thing that prevents that is, as you say, not a pro-market, but a pro-business, a pro very specific business, businesses that have enough money to bribe, corrupt, lobby the government into creating regulations that prevent the new company from competing.

• 27:37Marc Andreessen?

  Right, that's right.

• 27:38Ben Horowitz?

  And we're seeing a lot of that right now. I find the heart to be terribly corrupt. With that in mind, can you elaborate on your statement, "Love doesn't scale"?

• 27:54Ben Horowitz?

  I don't know if you meant because the heart is corrupt, but perhaps you do.

• 27:59Marc Andreessen?

  Well, so I didn't say the heart is corrupt. So, I mean, look, I think what that question is alluding to there, I would assume, is sort of this perennial debate about human nature, which is, is man primarily good or bad, which we could talk about. But I think on the thing about love not scaling, let me hit that one directly and then we can maybe go to the bigger topic. So, the formulation here is from a guy named David Friedman, who's an economist, Milton Friedman's son. And the thing that he said that really stuck with me is, look, there's only three ways to get people to do things for other people, right, fundamentally. One is love, and you see that in people's families and their friend networks, like, "I'll do things for Ben without him having to pay me", right? And so, that is an important force, especially-

• 28:32Ben Horowitz?

  Or without me, friend, and you kick your ass.

• 28:36Marc Andreessen?

  Coming to the other one, yes, exactly. So, without force. So, so there's love. Without love, there's basically two other choices, and they're basically money and force. Right, money's the carrot, the force is the stick. Look, money is capitalism's answer, force was communism's answer. And again, going back to just beat up on the communists a little bit more, like, this was the big realization of all the communist societies in the 20th century and today, which is like, basically what communism and its derivatives, socialism and so forth, expect, they expect love to scale. And so, they expect that you should work in whatever the Siberian salt mines, or whatever it is, the fields, or whatever, and you should do that out of love for your fellow man, and you should do that for love of the society and so forth. And by the way, look, like, the Nazis are the national socialists, like, they have their own spin on this, you're supposed to do things on behalf of the German people, is the same thing, like, you're supposed to love this macro unit, because love doesn't scale.

• 29:19Marc Andreessen?

  The problem is, people just don't naturally love people they don't know, right? And by the way, my view, that's not because there's something morally wrong with them, it's because they don't know the other people, right? And it's like, okay, are they being loved back, right? And like, are the other people gonna be pulling their weight, right? Or is there gonna be a free rider problem? And of course, the answer is, at any level of scale, of course, there are free rider problems if people aren't required to work. And so this is the irony of the heart of the whole thing. A society built on the idea that love scales becomes an incredibly dark, dystopian, hostile, and ultimately brutinous place because love doesn't scale. Force is one way around that, which is, okay, the way you get people to work, even though they don't want to because they don't love people in some remote area that they'd be working on behalf of is put a gun to their head.

• 29:56Ben Horowitz?

  Yep.

• 29:56Marc Andreessen?

  And then the third option that falls straight out of that is, okay, how about money? And then sort of money, of course, is a proxy. Money is a tool for sort of, you know, what they call sort of rational self-interest, right? Or enlightened self-interest, which was like, okay, I'm going to get paid money to do this. It's going to benefit these other people. I'm not primarily doing it because it's going to benefit people I haven't met. Look, maybe I love everybody and maybe I would love to meet all my customers. And by the way, look, when you walk into a restaurant and you've never met the owner or the host before, like, they're thrilled to see you, right? And so do they literally love you or are you their new best friend? No. Are they excited to see you? Yeah, well, they have a very positive sentiment towards you because they know you're going to pay, right? Anyway, so that's the best solution that we've come up with.

• 30:31Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 30:32Marc Andreessen?

  Barring some profound change in human nature in which people all of a sudden become far more generous and then they've been historically, that seems like it's likely to be a stable state.

• 30:39Ben Horowitz?

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

• 31:24Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right. Hite made this point and Deirdre McClellan has made this point also, which is like, look, we do live in a superposition of the two systems. Right? Because like you don't want to be the asshole who like, you know, runs your family like it's a capitalist enterprise. Like you charge your kids for rent, like for sleeping in their bunks when they're eight. We all grow up and, and in our family and friend environments, like we're all communistic in that context. Right? But then there's this kind of schizophrenia to it, which is like, okay, we got into the world and the world doesn't act like that. And all of a sudden there's a different way to exchange and a different way to relate. And so I think ultimately, you know, the answer lies in the superposition of the small and the large. And let's just say, yeah, the people who are too abstract on this, I think get derailed.

• 32:00Ben Horowitz?

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

• 32:32Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So I'd actually say there's actually three models. I would say there's private, there's public, and then there's a third that I'll come to. So look, like a couple of things I think are true. So one is again, I'll give the effective pessimists they're doing on this one also, which is look, like straight capital R research that is sort of the time honored way of like discovering the principles of the universe and so forth. The best of that has no idea if or when it will ever commercialize, right? Because by definition, it has no idea whether or not the experiments will even pan out, right? Or the theories are even correct. And so there is this kind of research that historically has been publicly funded. And then, and look, in the US, we have had these agencies like the National Science Foundation that have done a lot of that for a very long time. And whatever issues NSF has, if you look at the totality of spend in their existence and then the results, you would say, yeah, that was absolutely an outstanding investment from a societal standpoint.

• 33:15Ben Horowitz?

  Right, right. Very long time horizons and investments. Yeah.

• 33:18Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right. And again, to be an effective pessimist, a lot of that research may not have been researched that would get done by private companies. Look, on the other hand, I think private companies carry their weight more than people think. And look, part of it is, the questioner alluded to Bell Labs, but there is this thing that happens when these companies, you know, that when the best of the big companies get big and powerful, they do more of this. They open these labs, right? And so AT&T did it, IBM and Hewlett Packard and Google and Microsoft and many others across many industries have done this. And I think quite honestly, part of that is PR for them. They like to show that off. I think part of that is, look, they start to think in terms of longer time horizons and they do want ultimately new products at some point. And part of that is it's a recruiting and retention exercise to get the best and brightest technical minds to stay there. Is to tell them that they can do research and publish their research. And so there is

• 34:01Marc Andreessen?

  that. And look, Ben, you mentioned like, look, the breakthrough on AI just came out of Google, right? It came out of a private company, which is a great example of that. So yeah, look, there's some tension there.

• 34:09Ben Horowitz?

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

• 34:14Marc Andreessen?

  They did. And in fact, that's been a long running source of tension, actually, between the tech companies and the universities for the last 15 years or so, which is as these new tech companies have built these big research labs, they have pulled a lot of the good faculty out of the universities. And by the way, that process, I think, is accelerating in AI specifically because the capital needs to actually do modern AI are so big that actually universities can't afford to do it right now. So you get this kind of issue of like, are you draining the universities that they're remaining competent professors and leaving only the other kind? And you could debate, and we could have a long debate about the present concept, public versus private. There is a third model, and this is the one that people often talk about, you know, as sort of an aspiration, which is this idea of these very large societal projects. And in the US, you know, we talk in particular about the Apollo project and the Manhattan project, right? And we say, this is kind of a frequent lament from kind of declinists, right? Which is, why can't we have more Apollo projects and Manhattan projects? But I think that's

• 34:59Marc Andreessen?

  actually a third model. And the third model is military and militaristic, right? Manhattan was just a straight up military project, right? To build a bomb run by the military. Apollo was a sort of a civilian thing, NASA, but it was in the context of a military arms race with the Soviet Union and a technological arms race with the Soviet Union in a much more militarized society than we have today. And of course, when the military gets involved, two things happen. One is they can do things at speed when they really want to, because they just tell people what to do. And then also they get access to a lot of money when things get rough. And so personally, I go back and forth a little bit on this. It's like, do we want more Manhattans and Apollos? On the one hand, it's hard to say no. On the other hand, do I want a society that is that much more militarized? If that's what's required? I don't know.

• 35:38Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that could.

• 35:39Marc Andreessen?

  What would that mean for what is happening in the world if we get back to the point where we're as militarized as we were in 1941, right? Or even 1960?

• 35:46Ben Horowitz?

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

• 35:56Marc Andreessen?

  Look, and hopefully that continues, right?

• 35:58Ben Horowitz?

  Yes. Okay, here's a good, simple question from Tux. How do you bridge the gap between being anti-statist and supporting America First policies? Or maybe American dynamism as we do? Yeah, so I look, I think that all these things end up being a question of

• 36:20Ben Horowitz?

  Power and how it works. So, the extreme form of statism is communism, where 100% of the power is in the public sector and no power is in the private sector. And that has the issues that we spoke of. I think that no public sector can quickly go to anarchy. And that's not, at least not something that I would advocate for. So I think, look, as a society, we kind of have this collective, there's a certain amount of collectivism in shared values, shared morals. What's okay, what's not okay. In America, we have things like freedom of speech, freedom to be who you are, kind of. And we're very anchored on these kind of free society ideals.

• 37:04Ben Horowitz?

  And you need, you need a state to do that. At least, I believe, I think there are probably some people that don't believe that, but you need a state for that. And preserving that, those values and that way of life, is extremely important. And that's primarily the role of the government, with all of us citizens participating. And we try to participate in that through our American dynamism efforts. And that's important. So, when I say I'm anti-statist, I'm really saying I'm anti-communist and anti-too much weight on the public sector at the expense of free markets and basically freedom for the citizens.

• 37:44Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, Ben, I think you probably mean, broaden out anti-communist also, or by extension, anti-authoritarian.

• 37:49Ben Horowitz?

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

• 38:30Marc Andreessen?

  So I think it's, I never know whether you use this as a, it's such a great metaphor. I'll go ahead and use it. So it's a, Paul Romer uses this metaphor. He says, "Ideas have sex." Let's say ideas reproduce. They go through the same reproduction evolutionary process.

• 38:41Ben Horowitz?

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

• 38:44Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 38:45Ben Horowitz?

  Now that we have birth control and all these things.

• 38:47Marc Andreessen?

  Longer, longer form is probably better. So the argument is basically ideas beget ideas in quite the same way that people beget people. So basically, it's like the more ideas that you have, the more combinations of ideas you can have. And those combinations of ideas are themselves ideas. And then based on that, then they can further kind of replicate, you know, they can kind of crossbreed and have offspring. And you see this anytime, of course, you're building any kind of technological product is you're pulling in ideas from like all over the place. You're getting inspired by all the different technologies that are blow you in the stack. You're getting inspired by all the other applications anybody has ever tried to build. You're getting inspired by all kinds of things. You know, look, AI is inspired by the neural structure of the brain, quite literally, right? Driving from biology, crossbred over into computer science and mathematics. And so basically, if this process is working the way that it should, you should see sort

• 39:32Marc Andreessen?

  of this accelerating explosion of variety, and sort of speciation and reproduction and scaling of the number of ideas in the world that sort of catalytic feeds on itself like a chain reaction. By the way, this was also the argument to connect this back to the idea of human population. So this was the argument for this guy Julian Simon, who I admire a lot, who wrote this book called The Ultimate Resource. And a lot of his work was in the 60s and 70s when there were all these pitch battles, of course, around natural resources, environmentalism. And he was kind of the avowed enemy of this guy, Paul Ehrlich, who was the guy who predicted mass famine and death from kind of increases in technology. And so Julian Simon said, "No, actually, what you want is you actually want a lot more people in the world. Humans, people are the ultimate resource, right? Not any kind of raw material, but literally people." And he said, "Why do you want more people in the world? Because if you have more people, you'll get more ideas."

• 40:13Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 40:14Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And so more people means you'll have more ideas, more ideas in combination with ideas leads to more ideas. Those ideas lead to ways to make things better in the world. Among the things that those ideas make possible are ways to support more people on the planet. Right. And so he said like that, quite literally, the answer to natural resource consumption, right? For example, or natural resource, whatever limitations or environmental considerations or whatever, the answer is not the Paul Ehrlich approach of depopulate, right? Reduce the human population, therefore reduce the number of ideas, both the number of people and the number of ideas. The answer is to actually put the pedal forward, more people, more ideas, more solutions. And yes, clearly, I agree with him in that argument.

• 40:49Ben Horowitz?

  Amazing. But by the way, Julian Simon is probably one of the most underrated economists and philosophers of the last 100 years. So if you're not familiar with him, that's a great one to read.

• 41:02Marc Andreessen?

  Done that real quick. A great point that he made that really blows people's minds when they read it for the first time is he made the argument that you'd never run out of any natural resource.

• 41:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. He had a bet on that, right? Like,

• 41:11Marc Andreessen?

  He did. He did. So he had a famous, he had a 10 year bet with Paul Ehrlich, the population bomb guy. And it was a bet on the price of the basket of natural resource commodities 10 years in the future. And Ehrlich was, of course, 100% convinced.

• 41:21Ben Horowitz?

  That's the first, peak oil, da, da, da, yeah.

• 41:25Marc Andreessen?

  The whole peak oil thing, exactly. Is that same thing? And he let Ehrlich actually define, I believe, the basket of the commodities. So he kind of loaded it in his direction. And the bet was, will the price of this basket be greater or less than it is today in 10 years? And everybody who's kind of in the sort of conventional thinking on this was like, well, obviously, the prices of all this stuff are going to go up because there's more people, there's more consumption.

• 41:42Ben Horowitz?

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

• 41:47Marc Andreessen?

  Right. And then the kicker is Julian Simon won the bet. The price of that basket was lower in 10 years. The point was, we never run out of natural resources. His point was, with markets, the way that we know that a natural resource is becoming scarce is its price starts to rise. As its price starts to rise, self-interest says we should figure out ways to not need as much of that natural resource.

• 42:05Ben Horowitz?

  Right.

• 42:05Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And so as the price of oil rises, then all of a sudden, we have an economic incentive to develop alternative energy, ranging, by the way, from solar to wind through to things like nuclear, and then maybe in the future, even nuclear fusion. And so it's actually markets working at their best as the price of something rises, your incentive, your self-interested incentive to come up with the alternative rises and alternatives that were not previously price effective actually become price effective. Right. So this was the rise of fracking, right? Fracking worked because oil and gas started to get expensive enough where all of a sudden the additional cost of fracking was actually worthwhile.

• 42:36Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Marc Andreessen?

  And then fracking brought the price wrap back down and fracking was a classic example of an idea. It was a technological innovation born by human creativity. And so basically what Julian Simon says is that's the homeostasis kind of in the system. And this is not a dystopian scenario in which we are doomed to run out of everything and everybody's going to freeze and die. In fact, it's not necessarily utopian, like it's still like natural resources still cost money, but it's a fundamentally positive view, which is it is human ingenuity that is going to cause us to not have the problems that the doers say are going to have, which, and again, 300 years of this and so far, so good.

• 43:05Ben Horowitz?

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

• 43:22Marc Andreessen?

  Yes. So primarily what's preventing us from enjoying the insane gains from fishing. And by the way, they are insane, like the level of energy that we could be producing from modern nuclear fission reactors and the safety of it is like just.

• 43:32Ben Horowitz?

  Right. France is doing it right now.

• 43:35Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah. France is doing it. By the way, France just got, I mean, the European politics are so entertaining on this because France is so pro nuclear and the rest of Europe is so anti-nuclear. France just had to get a waiver from Germany to continue to run their nuclear reactors, which they finally just got.

• 43:49Ben Horowitz?

  The moral of the bet on going in France is their fission reactor.

• 43:54Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And the German greens have been determined for 50 years to turn those reactors off. So, yeah. So, look, the big reason why we don't have widespread nuclear fission power today is because of the precautionary principle, because of the, basically the fear of disaster, which basically makes people emotional. And then turns out here, the emotional decision is a very damaging, bad decision because the alternatives turn out to be things like gas and coal. And so that's overwhelmingly it. Now, having said that, back to the question is, yeah. So the new thing that you can say if you're trying to fight nuclear fission is, oh, we don't need it because we have fusion right around the corner. And by the way, look, I was start by saying, I hope that's right. I hope fusion really is right around the corner. It's been right around the corner for a while. I hope it's right around the corner. That would be great.

• 44:30Ben Horowitz?

  It turned out to be harder than fission by quite a bit.

• 44:34Marc Andreessen?

  It's quite difficult. And then, look, I think what's going to happen is I look, I think we'll get fusion to work at some point. There's very smart people working on it. I think they'll get it there. I think the same forces and ideas and people that have prevented the deployment of nuclear fission will immediately prevent the deployment of fusion. And so I think this idea that all of a sudden-

• 44:51Ben Horowitz?

  The same kind of bad narrative, corrupt pessimism.

• 44:55Marc Andreessen?

  It'll be the same arguments. It's this incredibly dangerous thing, and who knows if it goes wrong, and like, what if it this and that and the other, and like, we can't take these risks, and can they prove it's going to be safe forever, infinitely? And it's going to be the same arguments. And these nuclear fusion companies are going to start out being very optimistic, and they're going to hit this wall of sort of regulatory and emotional and political and ideological resistance. And I hope they punch through it. But, look, Richard Nixon did two things in the early 70s around this. One is he declared something called Project Independence, where he said, "We, the US, would build 1,000 new nuclear fission power plants by 1980, become completely energy sufficient, be able to withdraw completely from the Middle East, be able to be zero emission." And then he created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which then prevented that from happening.

• 45:34Ben Horowitz?

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

• 45:40Marc Andreessen?

  Zero new plants in 40 years. So-

• 45:45Ben Horowitz?

  Not good.

• 45:46Marc Andreessen?

  Well, and again, here, you go back to incentives. Okay, now imagine, okay, now, again, get the devil his due, like, imagine that you're the newly appointed regulator, you're the newly appointed chairman, you know, Ben Horowitz, you're the newly appointed chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1973. What are your incentives? How much glory are you going to get, right, if we build some new reactors versus how horrible is your life going to be if there's another nuclear accident?

• 46:07Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, right, right, right. Another kind of incentive agency problem, yeah.

• 46:11Marc Andreessen?

  Right. And then, by the way, you've got the existing energy companies in there doing their thing, right, saying, "Oh, no, don't worry about it, oil and gas, and by the way, we're going to do-"

• 46:18Ben Horowitz?

  We're going to clean, we're going to have clean oil.

• 46:22Marc Andreessen?

  Clean oil, we're going to clean the Volkswagen, we're going to have clean diesel, right? Like, just let us continue working on the clean coal and the clean diesel. And then, again, by the way, fusion's right around the corner, and that'll be better. And then you're like, wow, these companies, like, they're so big and powerful and successful. And by the way, they seem like they're kind of hinting there to give you a job when they're done here.

• 46:39Marc Andreessen?

  And you're back to square one.

• 46:40Ben Horowitz?

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

• 46:57Marc Andreessen?

  So there's these two, look, like, again, no utopianism here, right? Like, not all jobs are fun. Like, look, a lot of people work jobs that they really don't like, and they're doing it because they have to, and they're doing it because they're trying to support a family or support themselves. And so certainly, nobody promised everybody a job everybody loves. My analysis is if you close your eyes and imagine somebody who doesn't have to work, right? And I'm not talking about like, stay at home mothers. I'm talking about like, somebody who like, in our system today, would be working to be able to make money, support themselves. And then there's a future ordering of society in which they can elect not to work, and they will have the same or similar level of material comforts that they have today, and they can just kick it. You kind of close your eyes on that and imagine that person. And there's kind of two possible versions of that person you can imagine.

• 47:39Marc Andreessen?

  One is the person who is now, by the way, as Mark said, liberated to what was Marx's whole thing. We're all going to be fishermen in the morning, literary critics in the afternoon, poets over dinner, and musicians at night, right? Like, we're going to be able to like, self-actualize into all of these things that don't involve money, and we're going to be, we're going to all be creating this and that, and we're going to be doing all these amazing things because we have all this time free. And look, there are some people for whom that's the case, right? There are certain people for whom I'm sure that would be the case. There's the other scenario, and I would just call that one the Cheetos and meth scenario, right?

• 48:07Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Marc Andreessen?

  Which is.

• 48:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. And PlayStation.

• 48:11Marc Andreessen?

  And PlayStation, right? And like, and I like Netflix. I'm a fan of Netflix, but like, maybe not 12 hours a day.

• 48:17Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And like, sit on the couch and get baked, and just like, there goes all your motivation, right? Straight out the window. And this is where I use in the essay the fairly provocative term, like, farm animal. Like, that's a farm animal existence.

• 48:28Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 48:29Marc Andreessen?

  Right? That's the existence of a cow.

• 48:31Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 48:31Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And like, cows are great. Cows are great. But like, I don't think we should be cows. Like, I don't think we should be farm animals. I don't think that is an advance. You're back to the Wally scenario we were talking about at that point. And I think we just need to be realistic about that. And again, this is very much one of these luxury belief things where kind of the class of people who imagine themselves as being the poet in the morning, fisherman in the afternoon, musicians at night, think that's a general life. And maybe that's true for them, by the way. Maybe if you went to one of these Ivy League universities and you hate your job as a barista, you'd be much happier and you'd be writing poetry if you didn't have to do your day job. Maybe that's true for them, right? But like, the consequences of that misjudgment, if that's wrong, on the other eight billion people, I think are very profound and possibly extremely negative.

• 49:14Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. And then actually, we've run this experiment in the US to some extent, and I've been studying this more lately, but, you know, perhaps there were a lot of kind of bad things that happened with the pilgrims and the Native Americans, but I think the worst thing may have been the reservation system, at least the longest lasting. And the reservation system is essentially UBI. It's $65,000 a year, I believe, per resident. And anybody who's spent time on a reservation knows like, that just hasn't worked that well. Like, removing purpose from people's lives, generally. There are people who can deal with it, but that's, I think, certainly the minority. And it's, I mean, at least in my view, that's not been great for the Native Americans. And to kind of scale that

• 49:57Ben Horowitz?

  to society, as many are proposing these days, it's probably not the best thing. The other thing I'll add is, jobs have actually gotten much better over time. So, not all jobs are great, but like, for many hundreds and thousands of years, every job was farming. And like, not every human is suited to be a farmer. I know you weren't, Mark, because there's a lot of farming in your hometown. And then the thing that came after that first was these assembly line jobs, which it's always kind of amusing to see politicians say, oh, we need more good jobs like these manufacturing jobs. Like, doing this all day, like a robot, is not like, the greatest job in the world. It may pay well, but it's not the most fulfilling.

• 50:38Ben Horowitz?

  And so many of the people on those lines are on drugs. And in fact, Henry Ford famously doubled the minimum wage. But the reason he doubled the minimum wage was, he had so much attrition, because people hated those manufacturing jobs so much. And so I think that the jobs that we're producing now have been increasingly interesting. And they're not all great. They're not all great for everybody. But one thing is for sure, is we have a much broader variety of things that people can do. So, you have many choices. And hopefully, people can find the job that's right for them. Oh, this is interesting. Coinfluence X. So that's a pretty neat name. How do you perceive the contrast between rigorous technological and mathematical

• 51:20Ben Horowitz?

  education seen in countries like China, which emphasizes relentless advancement with evolving educational paradigms in the West, which prioritizes intersectional perspectives and social values?

• 51:34Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, Ben, why don't you start? I agree, that's an interesting one.

• 51:38Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that it's tricky, you know, like, and it's been a long time since I've been in school and my children are all adults, so I'm a little far away from the actual thing that's happening in schools now. Having said that, boy, I think that there is kind of education that you can use, where you can go make something or build something, or figure out how large systems work, or perform like a in-demand function in society. And then there are a whole class of other things, like you can teach people about anything. And now they even have lots of like rap education in college and this and that and the other.

• 52:22Ben Horowitz?

  And, you know, it's interesting because the great musicians I know, and I know many of them, never took any kind of class like that. Most of them didn't take any class in music, by the way. It's funny, like, my friend Kanye taught himself music. He was an art student, and he taught himself music. And I think that for, you know, the great creatives, I don't know, studying to become a virtuoso in those things is necessarily even the best path. And then you have these other things, which are these social theories, unproven social theories that a lot of people are teaching these days, which I think those are fine hobbies, and you and I pursue them as hobbies, studying these social theories and new ideas

• 53:06Ben Horowitz?

  on how to organize society or whatever, how that all works. I don't think it makes sense to charge people $300,000, or whatever college costs these days, to teach them a hobby. That like, that seems really absurd to me. I know people have different views on this, but I think that the purpose of... The education that we funnel young people into ought to be to enable them to make significant contributions back to society. And that probably, I don't know if it's as narrow as the Chinese education, but it's probably not as broad as some of the things that we're doing.

• 53:43Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, and then I might just pop the question up one level, which is, look, education itself is an industry, it's a field and an industry, a business. And look, both the nature of the American education system, and for that matter, a system like in China's, they're primarily centralized and government controlled. And so the American system is, you know, K through 12 is primarily government monopoly with occasional offshoots.

• 54:03Ben Horowitz?

  And the offshoots are very restricted.

• 54:04Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, and very small in number. And then, look, the college system in the US is a cartel. It's quite literally a self-regulated cartel by virtue of the fact that it requires, it's on the sort of federal student loan drug to work financially. And then the accreditation agencies that determine which colleges get federal student lending are run by the colleges themselves. So it's a self-reinforcing cartel, which is why you don't see a lot of universities ever. That's why the major universities in the US are older than the country, right? And so, the same thing, you know, obviously in China, the system's government-controlled, inherently completely government-controlled, is commonly true around the world. And so, we've sort of backed into where this idea of education is like an abstract good. And then we have the specific implementation of these highly centralized authoritarian, non-market-based approaches to it. And then you can argue the pros and cons and the results, and I thought the question

• 54:47Marc Andreessen?

  set up this very interesting aspect of it, which is like, okay, when does it become kind of too much rote memorization versus when does it become kind of too much, kind of wild theorizing? With maybe a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. You know, look, the education as a system can't really respond and adapt to changing needs of people because it's primarily not market-based. And so, we kind of just get the system we get. We send our kids to it. We don't think we really have a choice, for the most part. And I would just say, like, the big thing is, it's just, in all these societies, it's just stuck. And then there are all these signs that it's becoming dysfunctional across many societies. We could spend hours on that. And so, I would just, at least, when I kind of put a placeholder and say, I think we should also squint and kind of wonder, like, is there a different kind of system that could get built? That would be much more market driven, much more technologically sophisticated,

• 55:31Marc Andreessen?

  that would be much more better suited to modern needs and would be much more subject to actual competitive pressure and the need to be good. There are some very good education startups working on this and there are some very good charter schools and there are some very good new startup universities. And so there are some people taking swings at this, but at a macro level, like we're not there yet. And I think maybe we should think over time about trying to get there.

• 55:49Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, and that's interesting because we are in the middle of this very interesting crisis, the student loan crisis, and President Biden has kind of proposed, and I don't know how much of it has actually gone through all the legal objections and so forth, to kind of forgive some portion of the student loans. But the interesting thing about that is that's kind of the ultimate treating the symptom and not the cause, because why can't any of these students pay back their loans? And the obvious answer is college isn't worth the money you pay for it. And then it doesn't translate into a job that enables you to pay back what you borrowed to do it. And that's a much bigger problem for young people and an ongoing problem that

• 56:31Ben Horowitz?

  like you either kind of subsidize college in its entirety, or you have to fix that problem. And I think that, given what colleges are willing to do with their tuition, like grow it double the rate of inflation and hire more administrators than they have students and all these kinds of things, if they have free money, another incentive problem, that it's a pretty dangerous idea to make college free in that way. We do need a better mechanism for sure. Maybe now is the time, hopefully. Okay, Sam Arnold, to what extent do you believe we really control what technology does after its release? Can we exert any meaningful control after invention?

• 57:15Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. So one is obviously we do control, I mean, there are pretty strict controls in a lot of areas, right? As we just discussed in the nuclear case. So one is it's not quite that there aren't any, you know, I think maybe the underlying question here would be, can we predict what the consequences are going to be? And by the way, this is a very hot topic right now because you have this thing where there are a bunch of AI kind of practitioners who are making these very, in my view, very extreme statements about what AI is going to do, that's going to be horrible. And there's this very strong temptation on the part of people to make what seems like a very logical kind of assumption, which is that the people who invented the technology are in the best position to be able to predict what happens. With it afterwards and then are presumably also going to be in the best position to propose whatever regulations or controls are required to prevent those things from happening. Yeah. I have not in my life, and I have not in my reading of history, seen a lot of examples

• 57:59Marc Andreessen?

  where the inventors of technology are very good at this. Yeah. The example I like to cite is Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and he was completely convinced that the use case for the phonograph was going to be to listen to religious sermons. He was a very pious man and he took religion very seriously and he just assumed that if you owned a phonograph, the point of it would be you'd get home at the end of a long day at the office or in the factory, you'd kick off your shoes, put on your slippers and you'd have your dog by your side and your kids gathered around and you would put on religious sermons. You wouldn't have to go to church and bother with all those people, which for Thomas Edison was a big thing. Exactly. And by the way, and then you could do this every night, right? You didn't have to wait till Sunday. This is great. You could do this all week. And I don't know, like, look, a few people do that. Most people don't. Most people listen to music. And Ben, you'll recall that what was the first form of music that went kind

• 58:42Marc Andreessen?

  of was kind of the big hit, hit genre of music on phonographs was jazz. Okay, sure. And you'll recall what people said about jazz at the time. Well, they said many things, but it was in real music. It was the devil's music. It was very bad. It was channeling of all kinds of unholy impulses. It was going to cause young people to fornicate. Like, they just had basically all the same things that people say about rap music. I was thinking of something that there was some racism involved too, I'll just say. Oh, of course. It was absolutely. It was, it was going to be, yeah, all of a sudden you use a channel for these black musicians to show up in the homes of white people, like, no question. And so, so anyway, like, it turned out that people had like all kinds of issues with the technology. It just turns out they weren't remotely the issues that Thomas Edison predicted that they would have. And if you look at this historically, you're kind of like, well, of course he didn't know, because yeah, he's a techie. He just invented

• 59:25Marc Andreessen?

  the technology, but he doesn't have like the crystal ball. He doesn't have some special foresight. And in fact, he's a particular kind of person. He's the kind of person who spends all his time in a lab. Yeah, right. He's unusual. He's unusual, right? And he must maybe speculate, you know, he might be psychologically a little bit different than most people, right? And he draws satisfaction from different things and he doesn't spend a lot of time, right, with like regular people. Yeah. And he's certainly not an expert on like politics and society and psychology and sociology and all these other things. So anyway, I think where I would start back to the original question is just like, I actually don't think it's that easy to forecast these things. And then specifically, I don't think it's any easier for the people who invented it to forecast these things. And I think they carry a lot of unjustified credibility. This also came up in the Oppenheimer movie, the same thing. It's like these physicists, all of a sudden, right, are convinced that they're the ones who are going to be working on like

• 1:00:09Marc Andreessen?

  the game theory and the philosophy and the morality of the deployment of nuclear bombs. Well, they were. Well, they tried, but you know, that was the nature of it.

• 1:00:17Ben Horowitz?

  There was a lot of that, yeah.

• 1:00:19Marc Andreessen?

  It was, but I mean, it was, this was the scene with Truman, which is something that actually happened, right? Which is like Oppenheimer shows up to kind of wring his hands about the morality of the atomic bomb. And Truman is just like, get this guy out of here. I'm the elected president of the United States. Like, let's listen to me.

• 1:00:31Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:32Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And by the way, Truman, and again, I know that Truman made all the right decisions or whatever, but Truman was the duly elected president of the United States. Like, he is the guy who should have been making that decision, not the guy who invented the thing.

• 1:00:40Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40Marc Andreessen?

  And so I just think like, I guess my big appeal here is just like humility. Like, I think we as technologists need to be very careful. We're not, but we should be very careful about kind of crossing the line and deciding that we're going to do societal engineering kind of in our spare time. And then people who hear technologists kind of doing these things should be very skeptical that the technologists deserve any kind of unwarranted credibility on this.

• 1:01:00Ben Horowitz?

  Right.

• 1:01:01Marc Andreessen?

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

• 1:01:06Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Marc Andreessen?

  And I think the alternative to that is to just not do new things. And so I know where I come out on that.

• 1:01:10Ben Horowitz?

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

• 1:01:24Marc Andreessen?

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

• 1:01:36Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Marc Andreessen?

  And this was the American physics community of the 1920s and 1830s that basically, like, most of them went like hardcore communist, like Einstein was Stalinist.

• 1:01:44Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Marc Andreessen?

  Like, we don't talk about these things anymore, but he was. These people end up like very radicalized. And this happens with other groups of people, right? Maybe this, at certain points, this happened in other areas in our public life. But, you know, it definitely, intellectuals go straight for it. Thomas Sowell's talked about this a lot. He's like, look, he's, I see the problem of people who are hyperverbal and like working ideas is they can get kind of arbitrarily unhinged.

• 1:02:04Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:04Marc Andreessen?

  And they kind of talk themselves into crazier and crazier things. And their level of disconnection from the real world means that they no longer have any governors on how crazy their beliefs can get. And so I think that's what's happening in AI right now. And I think we need to be very cautious about who we listen to.

• 1:02:15Ben Horowitz?

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

• 1:02:35Marc Andreessen?

  So what did I think was the most, I don't know, Ben, let me ask you that. You read the drafts. What were you predicting was going to be the most controversial thing?

• 1:02:41Ben Horowitz?

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

• 1:02:56Marc Andreessen?

  Those are kind of time honored crowd pleasers when it comes to making people mad.

• 1:02:59Ben Horowitz?

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

• 1:03:04Marc Andreessen?

  That's a good question. I don't know. Yeah, I would say, I don't know, like, and Ben, you tell me if you think I'm missing this. I think most of the attacks, I think like a lot of artists, I aspire to have a better class of critic. So this is one of these things in the modern climate, like a lot of the attacks have been on me.

• 1:03:20Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:21Marc Andreessen?

  More than on the ideas.

• 1:03:22Ben Horowitz?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:03:23Marc Andreessen?

  And if I were, including the one that you started out with earlier, like the smug interpretation of that on my part would be, wow, the ideas must all be great if they're reduced to just attacking me.

• 1:03:33Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Ad hominem attack.

• 1:03:36Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, like if that's all they've got, like I must have otherwise made outstandingly excellent points and they must not have counter arguments. I would say I would love to see more, there have been a few, but I would love to see more substantive responses that are legitimately like carefully thought through.

• 1:03:48Ben Horowitz?

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

• 1:04:31Ben Horowitz?

  And I think people wanted you to be more on one hand and on the other hand, but it's a manifesto. So, you know, do that in a manifesto.

• 1:04:42Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. I thought there was one piece of feedback on Twitter. I thought somebody made a really smart point. One really smart point I saw was, in fact, that love forced money thing. Somebody said, boy, like, isn't it the case that actually a lot of innovators, like, a lot of creators of new things actually are doing it out of a sense of love?

• 1:04:55Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:56Marc Andreessen?

  By the way, broaden this out beyond technology, but like, a lot of artists, a lot of musicians, a lot of writers, this is the concept of the labor of love, right? Is like, they really feel like they're contributing something. And, you know, like, love of society, love of their fellow man is in fact a motivation, even if they would also like to get paid.

• 1:05:10Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Marc Andreessen?

  The accusation basically was, I was presenting too kind of cramped a view of human nature when I narrowed down love that much.

• 1:05:15Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I think that's right. Although, if you invent somebody and then you need to hire a bunch of people to work for you, that's where love runs out.

• 1:05:22Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 1:05:24Ben Horowitz?

  They're not all gonna join on that. And similarly with a musician, your publicist, your makeup artist, you're this and that, and the other, they seem to need money.

• 1:05:34Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z, and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 1:06:00Erik Torenberg?

  As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.