--:-- Host: If you don't believe that you can be successful in life or with a new technology or with kind of moving the world forward, then you can't.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I think like a lot of artists, I aspire to have a better class of critic.
--:-- Ben 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?
--:-- Marc 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.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Be really careful when somebody goes, "Oh, this is a problem with a new technology. So therefore, we have to stop the new technology."
--:-- Host: If you listen to the A16Z podcast, I have a feeling you saw our co-founder, Marc Andreessen's new essay, "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto." This manifesto was a beacon among the sea of noise for fellow optimists that believe in the power of technology, markets, growth, excellence, and ultimately abundance.
--:-- As Marc raises the technology flag, he is joined in today's episode by A16Z co-founder Ben Horowitz. Together, they discuss the piece and its impetus, but they also address audience questions, including whether there is such a thing as effective pessimism, why victimization predominates the conversation, whether humans can become overly dependent on technology, the difference between being pro-business and pro-market, the role of private and public capital in driving progress, and even what Marc thought was the most controversial point in his entire essay.
--:-- Now, if you enjoyed this episode, Ben and Marc actually just launched their very own podcast, "The Ben and Marc Show," that you can find wherever you listen to podcasts by searching "The Ben and Marc Show" or by grabbing the link in our show notes. They've already released three episodes that you can binge today and have many more to come. In the show notes, you'll also find a link to the manifesto in full or you can find it on A16Z.com.
--:-- As Marc says in his essay, technology is the ultimate open society. And on that note, we are so happy to have you here taking part. 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.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Look, there's the other scenario and I would just call that one the Cheetos and meth scenario.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: And PlayStation.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: And PlayStation, right? And I like Netflix. I'm a fan of Netflix, but maybe not 12 hours a day. That's existence of a cow. Cows are great, but I don't think we should be cows.
--:-- Ben 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 point out my favorite of the people that hated it. There was an article published in TechCrunch called "When's the Last Time Marc Andreessen Has Spoken to Poor People?" or something like that. 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 Marc. He grew up in a tiny town in Wisconsin. He went to public schools, not good public schools, probably some of the worst public schools in the country. He never got any money from home, not because his parents didn't love him. They didn't have any money to give him.
--:-- The people who wrote the article all went to the fanciest schools I've ever heard of, Ivy Leagues and wonderful private high schools. 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. I just thought that was so funny. Anyway, this one's gotten a lot of kick to it, so we're going to get right into it. The first question.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Hey, Ben, can I weigh in on that?
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yes, sir.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Can I weigh in on that? You can't start that way and then let me talk. Now let me say something. Sorry. It's too tempting.
--:-- Look, that response is a classic example of what the author Robert Henderson calls "luxury beliefs." The definition of a luxury belief is a belief that could be held by somebody in an elite position, a position of power, wealth, and comfort, about how society should be ordered that is incorrect. The consequences of which would be disastrous for the people that would be subjected to them. But the people who hold the belief are insulated from the consequences. They live in fancy places, have very good lifestyles, and aren't going to suffer directly as a result.
--:-- It's a great example of a luxury belief. The factual response, of course, is that capitalism and free markets are the machine that has lifted people out of poverty for 500 years. We've run an experiment. The other systems don't seem to work as well. Many, many, many times.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Exactly to your point, we ran this experiment hundreds of times in the 20th century, and the results are very clear. Most recently in China, there's a direct correlation between the degree to which the Chinese Communist Party takes its boot off the throat of the people in terms of their ability to engage in markets and trade and the extent to which their quality of life rises. You still see that playing out today. And how quickly it reverses when they move to central planning.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: A hundred percent. You see this over and over again. It's just like more times running the same experiment are not going to generate different results. The result of this is that it's so obvious and well-established at this point that you have to go to one of our finest elite private high schools and private universities to really get inculcated into the luxury belief system that's going to be trying to help.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, exactly. So that's an excellent start. So this first question is from St. Louis of Techni. "What does effective pessimism look like? How can people who want to mitigate risks make sure not to waste their time on moral panic that stymies progress?"
--:-- Marc Andreessen: This is really tough. Let's start by conceding the strength of the other side's argument on this. As I say in the essay, I'm not a utopian. Technology is not purely a force for good. Technologies are tools and they can be used for both good and bad. Virtually every technology that man has ever invented has been used for both good and bad. So it's not that there aren't downsides. And it's not that there aren't risks.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: And the red bird.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Starting with fire. This is a reference in the piece, the myth of Prometheus, which is the origin myth in Western society of the implications of technology. In the Prometheus myth, Prometheus was the god that brought fire to man. For that, he was punished by Zeus by being chained to a rock and having his liver pecked out every night by a bird. It would regenerate in the morning and then it would happen again the next day. A very exquisite form of torture that Zeus came up with.
--:-- The reason that myth is so powerful is because fire was the enabler of heat, light, cooking food, defense, and shelter for early man. But it was also a weapon from the very beginning, a weapon of war. If you're engaged in siege combat and you're going up against a fortified castle or city, the way you win is you burn them out. By the way, the way they retaliate is they may heat up oil to boiling temperatures and pour it on your head. Both sides of these are true, and this continues to be the case to this day.
--:-- The concept of effective pessimism is a clever framing. There are two valences you can apply to this question. One valence is that fundamentally over time, net, technology has been primarily a force for good, primarily a force for progress. You embrace it, support it, and accelerate it as much as you can, and then you deal with the issues as they arise. That's the story of the development of modern civilization.
--:-- There is another valence. Some people incline more naturally to the pessimistic position. This is true of both technologies and markets. People apply the same negative valence to markets: "Technology is a weapon of war. Technology has unanticipated negative consequences. Markets have winners and losers." You have to decide where you go.
--:-- The accusation from the pessimists is that optimists are too optimistic. The counter accusation is that if you start out with a pessimistic frame, it's very hard to hold that in a moderate position. The pessimists slide into greater and greater levels of pessimism quite quickly. They end up very angry, bitter, and hostile. They end up advocating for extremely draconian and senseless policies. I think it's hard to be an effective pessimist.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, I think it seems to be much easier to become an ineffective pessimist or just a flat-out dangerous pessimist.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Andy Grove had a great line on this. Somebody asked him, "Was the microprocessor good or bad?" He said, "That's a crazy question. It's like asking, 'Is steel good or bad?' You're not going to hold back progress. What you have to ask yourself is how do you make it good? But don't try to do that by banning it, because you're going to get frustrated."
--:-- Ben Horowitz: The only thing I'd argue with Andy on that is they do get banned. Steel didn't get banned, but civilian nuclear power did.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The pessimists... I mentioned in the piece that I think the single biggest policy mistake of my lifetime was the decision in the 70s, effectively into the 80s, to ban civilian nuclear power. For sure throughout most of the U.S. and certainly most of Europe, with France being the big exception. By extension, throughout a lot of the rest of the world, because it would have been Western countries and companies that would have brought it to the rest of the world in that time period.
--:-- I think if you're an environmentalist looking at things dispassionately, as Stewart Brand and others have been doing, you say, "We had the silver bullet for unlimited zero-emission energy. We had it, and we chose not to use it." With everything we know today, it's overwhelmingly safe, effective, and has zero risk of mass death, zero risk of contributing to carbon emissions. We collectively made a political decision to ban it, and we're paying the price for that today.
--:-- Quite frankly, it's one of the reasons why Russia is able to do what it's doing in Ukraine. It has this flow of money from oil. In a counterfactual universe where the world had cut over to civilian electric power, they wouldn't have that. They wouldn't be able to do what they're doing. The consequences of that decision play out decades later. I think that's a great illustration of the risk of dangerous pessimism.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: A dramatic example of narrative defeating data, because it's very obvious from the data that nuclear is far safer than oil or coal.
--:-- All right, second question, and this is from your friend and mine, Shaka Senghor. "How can we distribute transformative philosophies like yours to marginalized communities where a culture of despair and victimization predominates?"
--:-- Marc Andreessen: This is a really interesting question for me. I think it gets to the heart of why victimization predominates. It's because it's a techno-pessimistic world in those marginalized communities.
--:-- I go back to some very interesting and successful leaders. Marcus Garvey comes to mind. I think it starts with something he was heavily behind: the idea of self-determination. An individual can change their own lives, change their own circumstances. He had this idea at the turn of the 18th to 1900s, which was a much more difficult time to do that, particularly for Black people in America. But he himself succeeded at it greatly.
--:-- It really starts with that mindset. If you don't believe that you can be successful in life, with a new technology, or with moving the world forward, then you can't. 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." That's the key to the whole thing. It starts with the belief that you can succeed. The odds are harder for some than others, but you always end in despair if you believe you can't do it.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Let me add a little bit on the consumption side. One of the amazing things about free markets is that they are the most beneficial to the lowest income and the most disadvantaged. That's a counterintuitive mind-bender for a lot of people who have been trained that the leaders of capitalism are the opposite. But the truth is, it's best for the poorest. It's best for the people who have the least. By "the least," I mean the least existing wealth, but also the least access, the least social status.
--:-- You can look at that on two sides of their lives: as producers and as consumers. On the production side, markets open up opportunity for people to make their way in the world, to have jobs, to make money, and ultimately to support a family. The counterfactual is not a poor person trying to navigate their way through the hell of a capitalist economy versus somehow in a socialist or communist system being handed everything they need. The reality is the other way around. The more capitalism, the more opportunities, the more available jobs, the more lines of work, the more openness, freedom, and choice to figure out how to succeed and make money.
--:-- If you end up on the wrong side of an authoritarian communist regime or a socialist regime, you are screwed. There are no jobs for you. Nobody's hiring. There are no private employers. If the state, for whatever reason, doesn't want to hire you, you're out of luck. If you're in a disadvantaged class category, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or just political views, or that you're poor and people look down on you, that's it. You're done. 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 you're not going anywhere. That was the story of low-income people in most societies over the entirety of human existence up to the point of the invention of markets.
--:-- Then on the consumption side, I talked about this in the essay. One of the big things that technology does in the free market context is drive prices down. This is a big thing on inequality and income inequality that people miss. One form of determining the level of income inequality or the value of one's income is to look at it in terms of what is literally measured by units of currency. "I'm either making more money or less money." The other side of that is what is money used for? It's used to buy goods and services. 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.
--:-- What markets and technology do is drive prices down. The more they're allowed to operate, the more they drive prices down. The traditional way economists talk about this is they make the observation that the queen of England always wore silk stockings. The super rich throughout all of society, throughout all of time, have always had access to the best goods and services, the best food, the best healthcare. It was traditionally all silk stockings and everything else, completely out of reach of most people. It is precisely the engine of free markets and technology that brings down prices so that regular people can afford these things as well.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Maybe the most profound example of that is the internet plus the smartphone. When you and I grew up, information was an elite thing to get to. The big reason to go to university was that the knowledge was all there, in books and libraries. You didn't have access to that otherwise. Computers, by the way, we didn't have computers for individuals. Now, 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. That's unbelievable.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Let me give you one other one on that. I find this totally mind-blowing. Ben, you remember when we first started working on the internet in the 90s, there was endless hand-wringing about the concept of the "digital divide."
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yes.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: The concept that digital technology, the internet, computers, PCs, and smartphones were going to widen inequality because well-off people would have them and poor people wouldn't. This was the effective pessimism of its time. People were very worried about that.
--:-- Sitting here today in 2023, the following is true: More people in the world have computers in the form of smartphones and internet access than have electricity or running water in their homes.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Amazing.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: The digital technologies people were worried about are actually the most egalitarian of all technologies that have ever been produced, even more than running water and electricity. We should still be worried about the gap in access to fresh water more than the gap in access to the internet. The water divide, the electricity divide, is still a thing. But the digital technology divide turns out to not be a thing.
--:-- The reason for that is very straightforward: falling prices. As the global smartphone market went to 5 billion people, the price of a smartphone collapsed. In the developing world today, it's ten bucks or something. Internet access has plummeted in price over time because of Moore's Law, competition, and innovation. The paradox, the flip side of this, is that if you wanted a plan to drive any form of good or service that is important to lots of people to be available to everybody, the thing to do is lean harder into markets and technology, not further away.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Great point.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: 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?"
--:-- Marc Andreessen: There's the full dystopian version of this, the WALL-E scenario. In the movie WALL-E, mankind in the future is all obese, sitting in big zero-gravity suspension chairs, binging Netflix and slurping.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Some of that going on now.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: This might sound a little familiar. There is this sense that at some point we live in this automated farm environment, we're farm animals being kept fat and happy. But we've lost agency, free will, choice, any sense of self-reliance, self-sufficiency, or adventure. There's certainly some argument in that direction. You do see examples of that.
--:-- What I try to do in the essay and what I believe on this is a little subtle. There are really big questions about the meaning of life that people have today and have had for a very long time. A lot of the history of human civilization has been debates around religion, which gods to worship, moral principles, how to order a society, the role of the collective versus the role of the individual, and all the policy questions that flow from this. The story of human civilization is in some way the story of trying to figure out all those questions. These questions are still, at least for a lot of people, unanswered or open to new ones all the time.
--:-- I think it's putting too much of a burden on technology and markets to expect them to answer all those questions for all people. If you're looking to technology and markets to answer those questions, you're probably looking in the wrong direction. You need to look inside the human soul, where all the hard questions lie.
--:-- The observation I make is that rising technological capabilities and rising standard of living through markets open up the room individually and collectively in our society to be able to ask those questions. The most obvious example is that when people are hungry, they don't ask any of these questions. The only question is, "Where's the meal coming from?" You can elaborate that all the way up. 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, and we still have these big unanswered questions about the meaning of life, then what technology will have done is open up the aperture to be able to spend more time trying to figure out those big questions.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: That seems like a very champagne problem for sure. It reminds me of when I was in elementary school, my brother was in junior high school. I went to the school play. Calculators had just come out. The whole play was about this society where nobody knew how to do math, and then the calculators all broke. Those kinds of fears go with technology, but they tend not to play out in very real ways. At least all the calculators haven't broken yet.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Technology gives you the way. Here's another serious observation: technology increases resilience to natural disaster. This comes up in the climate debate. One of the questions over time is whether nature is getting more or less dangerous as the world changes and humanity changes. Deaths from natural disasters have been in systemic decline for a century plus at this point.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: It used to be that if it was cold, you froze to death. If it was hot with no air conditioning, you might die from heat stroke. Any kind of tornado, flood, mudslide. In Boston 150 years ago, there was a molasses tragedy where people literally drowned in a molasses flood. Nature is vicious. Nature really has it out for you. If you're unprotected in a state of nature, life is, as the old saying goes, "nasty, brutish, and short."
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Exactly. The flip side of the question is that technology is now buffering us against sources of mass death that used to be far more common. This isn't to try to get away from the doomsday question of what happens if it all stops working, but how do we build defenses against the really bad scenarios in which that would happen? It turns out technology is our friend on that.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: And our friend Elon is protecting us against everything by making us an interplanetary species, which also deals with the asteroid problem.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The dinosaurs had no plan B.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Nope. Turns out.
--:-- So John asks, "How can economic systems evolve to prevent human corruption from infiltrating advanced technologies that surpass our capacity for understanding?" Marc, what do you think? Or maybe you can narrow in on the question a little bit.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I'm not sure if I totally understand what he's getting at here.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: I think human corruption, there is this agency problem. You alluded to it on the nuclear fission issue. As these systems evolve, how do you keep the human interest from fouling them? This gets to the heart of a lot of the things you spoke about in the manifesto.
--:-- For example, we had this banking crisis. Everybody's intention was to lessen our reliance on giant banks that became as powerful as many governments in the world. Because of this Baptist and bootlegger issue, where the banks were the bootleggers and the government was the Baptist, we got the opposite. We got much bigger banks, much more powerful. That trend is continuing forward.
--:-- When we look at how systems get corrupt and create real crisis, we really have to be aware of the agency problem. We're going through a few of those now, both on AI and also on crypto. A lot of the answer to some of these huge, powerful monopolies is: what do you do about tech companies getting so big and becoming monopolies? What do you do about banks getting so big and becoming monopolies?
--:-- Ben Horowitz: We actually have a magic technology that decentralizes power, actually creates a real form of stakeholder capitalism where all of the participants in the economy get rewarded for building the economy. And the biggest adversaries of that whole movement end up being the kind of Baptists in the government, conned by the bootleggers and the big banks and so forth, kind of over-highlighting small, real but small dangers of the technology and trying to stop the technology in its tracks and kind of lead to this horrible agency problem where you have these very corrupt systems.
--:-- So I guess my big thing would be like, be really careful when somebody goes, "Oh, this is a problem with a new technology. So therefore we have to stop the new technology." Like that I think is the pattern that's repeated over and over again and hurt us so badly on energy and it threatens to hurt us on intelligence and threatens to hurt us on decentralization.
--:-- Marc 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.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah.
--:-- Marc 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? And 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 what happens. This is kind of the point of the Baptist and bootlegger's idea. Something changes in the world. You have big incumbent companies that very much are opposed to that change or want to control it and lock it down. 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.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: That would be a dead giveaway.
--:-- Marc 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 is basically government sanctioned barriers to competition for themselves.
--:-- And I would even argue, 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. You look across sector after sector, what you see are 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. It's their lobbyists actually writing the regulations. It's the industry groups that they run.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: The classic example I think that's the majority of regulations works exactly.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah, that's right. And of course, there's this other form of corruption, which is the revolving door. If you're a regulator, it is extremely tempting just out of pure self-interest to do what these big companies want because they'll hire you after you're done doing that. So this is 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, because it is still businesses doing everything at the end of the day. Pro-market says no, none of 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. In fact, what you want is more competition. More competition, more markets, more capitalism. That's actually the answer to that precisely to keep the big companies from just taking over and not having to compete anymore.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, 100%. And actually, that leads very well into the next question, which is, "How exactly will markets prevent monopolies? Please elaborate on your point." And I think this is so key because the nature of companies, even monopolies, is that the older and larger they get, the less adaptive they become. 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 they're big, they're complicated, they're slow, they're not as good anymore.
--:-- So if the new AI companies are free to compete, if open source AI is free to compete, then that's the best kind of way to break that monopoly. Similarly, there's a lot of chatter on social networking monopolies and banking monopolies and these kinds of things. And again, we already 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.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Right. That's right. And we're seeing a lot of that right now.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: I find the heart to be terribly corrupt. With that in mind, can you elaborate on your statement, "Love doesn't scale"? I don't know if you meant because the heart is corrupt, but perhaps you did.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Well, so I didn't say the heart is corrupt. I think what that question is alluding to is this perennial debate about human nature, which is man primarily good or bad, which we could talk about. But on the thing about love not scaling, let me hit that one directly.
--:-- The formulation here is from a guy named David Friedman, who's an economist and Milton Friedman's son. 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, fundamentally. One is love. You see that in people's families and their friend networks. I'll do things for Ben without him having to pay me.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Or without me threatening to kick your ass.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Coming to the other one, yes, exactly. So without force. So there's love. Without love, there's basically two other choices: money and force. Money is the carrot. Force is the stick. Money is capitalism's answer. Force was communism's answer.
--:-- Going back to beat up on the communists a little bit more, this was the big realization of all the communist societies in the 20th century and today. Basically what communism and its derivatives, socialism and so forth, expect. They expect love to scale. They expect that you should work in whatever the Siberian salt mines or the fields or whatever, and you should do that out of love for your fellow man. You should do that for love of the society.
--:-- By the way, the Nazis are the national socialists. They have their own spin on this. You're supposed to do things on behalf of the German people. It's the same thing. You're supposed to love this macro unit. But love doesn't scale. The problem is people just don't naturally love people they don't know. In my view, that's not because there's something morally wrong with them. It's because they don't know the other people. Are they being loved back? Are the other people going to be pulling their weight? Is there going to be a free rider problem? At any level of scale, of course there are free rider problems if people aren't required to work.
--:-- This is the irony of the whole thing. A society built on the idea that love scales becomes an incredibly dark, dystopian, hostile, and ultimately murderous place because love doesn't scale. Force is one way around that. 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 you put a gun to their head.
--:-- And then the third option that falls straight out of that is, okay, how about money? Money is a proxy. Money is a tool for what they call rational self-interest, or enlightened self-interest. 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. Maybe I love everybody and maybe I would love to meet all my customers. When you walk into a restaurant and you've never met the owner or the host before, they're thrilled to see you. Do they literally love you? No. Are they excited to see you? Yeah, they have a very positive sentiment towards you because they know you're going to pay.
--:-- Anyway, that's the best solution that we've come up with. Barring some profound change in human nature in which people all of a sudden become far more generous than they've been historically, that seems like it's likely to be a stable state.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, that'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. I made some offhand comment that 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 a super systematic thinker, very intelligent." I was like, "Well, what went wrong? Why did he kill 20 million of his own people?" And he just said, "When you take away the carrot, all you have is the stick."
--:-- And that is so true. I think that's a lot of the point. At scale, in your family, yes, you can run a communist family. You can even run a communist kibbutz at that scale. It can work for sure.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah, that's right. Hayek made this point and Deirdre McCloskey has made this point also. We do live in a superposition of the two systems. You don't want to be the asshole who runs his family like it's a capitalist enterprise, charging your kids for rent when they're eight. In our family and friend environments, we're all communistic in that context. But then there's this kind of schizophrenia. We go out into the world and the world doesn't act like that. All of a sudden there's a different way to exchange and a different way to relate.
--:-- So I think ultimately the answer lies in the superposition of the small and the large. The people who are too abstract on this, I think, get derailed.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, I think that's the exact point that everyone gets confused on because who would want the country to run like their family? That would be so much better. The problem is it's impossible.
--:-- Next question. This is one that I think a lot of people have from Morton. "How do you see private capital versus public research budgets when it comes to fundamental progress? Aside from AT&T's monopoly that drove Bell Labs, I have yet to see systemic technological progress from private investment." I think I would disagree with the last part, but I'll let you start.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah, so I'd say there's actually three models. There's private, there's public, and then there's a third that I'll come to.
--:-- A couple of things I think are true. One is, I'll give the effective pessimists their due on this one also. Straight capital-R research that is the time-honored way of discovering the principles of the universe has no idea if or when it will ever commercialize. By definition, it has no idea whether the experiments will even pan out or the theories are even correct. So this kind of research has historically been publicly funded. In the U.S., we have had agencies like the National Science Foundation that have done a lot of that for a very long time. Whatever issues NSF has, if you look at the totality of spend in their existence and then the results, you would say that was absolutely an outstanding investment from a societal standpoint.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Very long time investments, yeah.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah, that's right. And again, to be an effective pessimist, a lot of that research may not have been research that would get done by private companies.
--:-- On the other hand, I think private companies carry their weight more than people think. The questioner alluded to Bell Labs, but there is this thing that happens when these big companies get big and powerful. They open these labs. AT&T did it, IBM and Hewlett-Packard and Google and Microsoft and many others across many industries have done this. Part of it is PR. They like to show that off. Part of it is they start to think in terms of longer time horizons and they do want new products at some point. Part of it is it's a recruiting and retention exercise to get the best and brightest technical minds to stay there, to tell them that they can do research and publish their research.
--:-- And Ben, you mentioned the breakthrough on AI just came out of Google. It came out of a private company, which is a great example of that.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: They've been pulling quite a few researchers out of academia to pull that off.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: They did. And in fact, that's been a long-running source of tension between the tech companies and the universities for the last 15 years or so. As these new tech companies have built these big research labs, they have pulled a lot of the good faculty out of the university. By the way, that process is accelerating in AI specifically because the capital needs to actually do modern AI are so big that universities can't afford to do it right now. So you get this issue of whether you are draining the universities of their remaining competent professors.
--:-- You can have a long debate about the pros and cons of public versus private. There is a third model, and this is the one that people often talk about as an aspiration: the idea of these very large societal projects. In the U.S., we talk in particular about the Apollo project and the Manhattan project. This is a frequent lament from declinists: "Why can't we have more Apollo projects and Manhattan projects?"
--:-- But I think that's actually a third model. The third model is military and militaristic. Manhattan was a straight up military project to build a bomb run by the military. Apollo was a civilian thing, NASA, but it was in the context of a military arms race with the Soviet Union in a much more militarized society than we have today. 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 they get access to a lot of money when things get rough.
--:-- Personally, I go back and forth a little bit on this. 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.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, that could be. 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? Or even 1960.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: No, it's actually one of the great things about the modern world is we have so many fewer wars, and that's a smaller scale. And every war is still horrible. Hopefully that continues.
--:-- 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?"
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah, so I think all these things end up being a question of power and how it works. 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. That has the issues that we spoke of. I think that no public sector can quickly go to anarchy. That's not something that I would advocate for.
--:-- As a society, we 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. We're very anchored on these free society ideals. 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. Preserving those values and that way of life is extremely important. That's primarily the role of the government with all of us citizens participating. We try to participate in that through our American dynamism efforts.
--:-- 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 freedom for the citizens.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, Ben, I think you probably mean the broadened out anti-communist also, or by extension, anti-authoritarian.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah, for sure, anti-authoritarian. And I think those go together because it's hard to be an authoritarian unless you have an amazing amount of power. Even if you wanted to be authoritarian in the U.S., and we certainly have had authoritarian tendencies from time to time from various politicians and leaders, it's really hard to do because you don't have enough power to pull it off. That's the greatest thing about our system, I think. You can't gather enough power to become completely authoritarian in the U.S. That's maybe the most fundamental thing we want to preserve.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Zach T., "Can you further define the law of accelerating returns and how it may play out in the future?"
--:-- Marc Andreessen: So I think it's, I never know whether to use this as a metaphor. I'll go ahead and use it. Paul Romer uses this metaphor. He says ideas have sex. Ideas reproduce. They go through the same reproduction evolutionary process.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: That's different than having sex, by the way.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah, you're right. Okay, that's bad. Now that we have birth control and all these things, the longer form is probably better.
--:-- So the argument is basically ideas beget ideas in quite the same way that people beget people. The more ideas that you have, the more combinations of ideas you can have. Those combinations of ideas are themselves ideas. Then they can further replicate, they can crossbreed and have offspring.
--:-- You see this anytime you're building any kind of technological product. You're pulling in ideas from all over the place. You're getting inspired by all the different technologies that are below you in the stack. You're getting inspired by all the other applications anybody has ever tried to build. AI is inspired by the neural structure of the brain, quite literally, deriving from biology crossbred over into computer science and mathematics.
--:-- So if this process is working the way that it should, you should see this accelerating explosion of variety and speciation and reproduction and scaling of the number of ideas in the world that is catalytic and 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. This was the argument for this guy, Julian Simon, who I admire a lot, who wrote this book called *The Ultimate Resource*. A lot of his work was in the 60s and 70s when there were all these pitch battles around natural resources and environmentalism. He was the avowed enemy of this guy, Paul Ehrlich, who predicted mass famine and death from increases in technology.
--:-- Julian Simon said, no, actually, what you want is a lot more people in the world. Humans, people are the ultimate resource, not any kind of raw material, but literally people. Why do you want more people in the world? Because if you have more people, you'll get more ideas. 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.
--:-- So he said that quite literally, the answer to natural resource consumption, or natural resource limitations or environmental considerations, is not the Paul Ehrlich approach of depopulate, reduce the human population, reduce the number of ideas. The answer is to actually put the pedal forward. More people, more ideas, more solutions. Clearly, I agree with him in that argument.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Amazing. By the way, Julian Simon is probably one of the most underrated economists and philosophers of the last hundred years. If you're not familiar with him, that's a great one to read. On 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.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: He did. He had a famous 10-year bet with Paul Ehrlich, the *Population Bomb* guy. It was a bet on the price of a basket of natural resource commodities 10 years in the future. Ehrlich was 100% convinced. This was with the first peak oil. The whole peak oil thing, exactly. He let Ehrlich actually define the basket of the commodities, so he kind of loaded it in his direction. The bet was, will the price of this basket be greater or less than it is today in 10 years? Everybody who was in conventional thinking said, obviously the prices of all this stuff are going to go up because there's more people, there's more consumption. Nobody was saying what Julian Simon was saying.
--:-- 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 as 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. As the price of oil rises, then all of a sudden we have an economic incentive to develop alternative energy, ranging from solar to wind through to things like nuclear and then maybe in the future, even nuclear fusion.
--:-- It's markets working at their best. As the price of something rises, your self-interested incentive to come up with the alternative rises. Alternatives that were not previously price effective become price effective. This was the rise of fracking. Fracking worked because oil and gas started to get expensive enough where the additional cost of fracking was actually worthwhile. Then fracking brought the price back down. Fracking was a classic example of an idea, a technological innovation born by human creativity.
--:-- Basically what Julian Simon says is that it's the homeostasis in the system. This is not a dystopian scenario in which we are doomed to run out of everything and everybody's going to freeze and die. It's not necessarily utopian, natural resources will still cost money, but it's a fundamentally positive view. It is human ingenuity that is going to cause us to not have the problems that the doomsayers say we're going to have. 300 years of this and so far so good.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: It's an abundance view of the world as opposed to a scarcity view of the world. It turns out the abundance view is right, which is good news for all of us.
--:-- Matthew has a question, which I think you have an unusual answer to: "Is the dream of fusion stopping us from enjoying the insane gains we can get from fission?"
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yes. So primarily what's preventing us from enjoying the insane gains from fission, and by the way they are insane, the level of energy that we could be producing from modern nuclear fission reactors and the safety of it is absolutely doable right now.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: France is doing it, by the way. France just got a waiver from Germany to continue to run their nuclear reactors, which they finally just got. The German greens have been determined for 50 years to turn those reactors off.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: So look, the big reason why we don't have widespread nuclear fission power today is the precautionary principle, the fear of disaster, which makes people emotional. The emotional decision is a very damaging bad decision, because the alternatives turn out to be things like gas and coal. So that's overwhelmingly it.
--:-- Now, back to the question. 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." I 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. It turned out to be harder than fission by quite a bit.
--:-- I think what's going to happen is we'll get fusion to work at some point. There's very smart people working on it. I think they'll get it there. But I think the same forces and ideas that have prevented the deployment of nuclear fission will immediately prevent the deployment of fusion.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: The same kind of bad narrative, corrupt pessimism.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: It'll be the same arguments. "It's this incredibly dangerous thing, and who knows if it goes wrong, and what if it's this and that and the other, and we can't take these risks, and can they prove it's going to be safe forever, infinitely." It's going to be the same arguments. These nuclear fusion companies are going to start out being very optimistic, and they're going to hit this wall of regulatory and emotional and political and ideological resistance. 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 the U.S. 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.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Dope.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah. How many new nuclear reactors have they approved? Zero new plants in 40 years. So. Not good.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Well, and again, you go back to incentives. Imagine that 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 if we build some new reactors versus how horrible is your life going to be if there's another nuclear accident?
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Right, right, right. Another kind of incentive agency problem, yeah.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Right. And then, by the way, you've got the existing energy companies in there doing their thing.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Saying, "Oh, no, don't worry about it. Oil and gas. And by the way, we're going to have clean oil. Clean oil. We're going to clean the Volkswagen. We're going to have clean diesel, right? Just let us continue working on the clean coal and the clean diesel. And then, by the way, fusion's right around the corner and that'll be better." And then you're like, wow, these companies, they're so big and powerful and successful. And by the way, they seem like they're kind of hinting they would give me a job when I'm done here. Yep. And you're back to square one.
--:-- [Transition to a new question]
--:-- Ben Horowitz: This is a fun one. Luke Croft says, "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?" So there's these two. Look, again, no utopianism here, right? Not all jobs are fun. A lot of people work jobs that they really don't like, and they're doing it because they have to, supporting a family or supporting themselves. Nobody promised everybody a job everybody loves.
--:-- My analysis is, if you close your eyes and imagine somebody who doesn't have to work—and I'm not talking about stay-at-home mothers, I'm talking about somebody who in our system today would be working to make money and support themselves—and there's a future ordering of society in which they can elect not to work. They will have the same or similar level of material comfort that they have today. And they can just kick it.
--:-- You close your eyes and imagine that person. There are kind of two possible versions. One is the person who is now, as Marc said, liberated to be fishermen in the morning, literary critics in the afternoon, poets over dinner, and musicians at night. We're going to be able to self-actualize into all these things that don't involve money. And there are some people for whom that's the case.
--:-- There's the other scenario. I would call that one the Cheetos and meth scenario. Right. And PlayStation. And like, I like Netflix, I'm a fan of Netflix, but maybe not 12 hours a day. Sit on the couch and get baked. And just like that, there goes all your motivation, straight out the window.
--:-- This is where I use the fairly provocative term "farm animal" in the essay. That's a farm animal existence. That's the existence of a cow. And cows are great, but I don't think we should be cows. I don't think we should be farm animals. I don't think that is an advance. You're back to the *WALL-E* scenario we were talking about.
--:-- I think we just need to be realistic about that. This is very much one of these luxury belief things where the class of people who imagine themselves as the poets in the morning, fishermen in the afternoon, musicians at night think that's a general idea. Maybe that's true for them. Maybe if you went to an Ivy League university and you quit your job as a barista, you'd be much happier writing poetry. But the consequences of that misjudgment if it's wrong on the other 8 billion people are very profound and possibly extremely negative.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah. And actually, we've run this experiment in the U.S. to some extent. I've been studying this more lately. Perhaps there were a lot 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. The reservation system is essentially UBI. It's $65,000 a year, I believe, per resident. Anybody who spent time on a reservation knows that just hasn't worked out well. Removing purpose from people's lives. There are people who can deal with it, but that's certainly the minority. To scale that to society, as many are proposing these days, is probably not the best thing.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: The other thing I'll add is jobs have actually gotten much better over time. Not all jobs are great, but for many hundreds and thousands of years, every job was farming. Not every human is suited to be a farmer. I know you weren't, Marc, because there's a lot of farming in your hometown.
--:-- Then the thing that came after that was assembly line jobs. It's always kind of amusing to see politicians say, "Oh, we need more good jobs like these manufacturing jobs." Doing this all day like a robot is not the greatest job in the world. It may pay well, but it's not the most fulfilling. Many of the people on those lines are on drugs. Henry Ford famously doubled the minimum wage, but the reason he did was he had so much attrition because people hated those manufacturing jobs so much.
--:-- I think the jobs we're producing now have been increasingly interesting. They're not all great for everybody, but one thing is for sure: we have a much broader variety of things people can do. So you have many choices, and hopefully people can find the job that's right for them.
--:-- [Transition to a new question]
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Oh, this is interesting. CoinFluence X. That's a pretty neat name. "How do you perceive the contrast between rigorous technological and mathematical education seen in countries like China, which emphasizes relentless advancement, with evolving educational paradigms in the West, which prioritizes intersectional perspectives and social values?" Marc, why don't you start?
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah, I mean, I think it's tricky. 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 what's actually happening in schools now. Having said that, I think there is education that you can use where you can go make something or build something or figure out how large systems work or perform an in-demand function in society.
--:-- And then there are a whole class of other things. You can teach people about anything. Now they even have lots of rap education in college and this and that. 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. My friend Kanye taught himself music. He was an arts student. For the great creatives, I don't know if studying to become a virtuoso in those things is even the best path.
--:-- Then you have these other things—these social theories, unproven social theories that a lot of people are teaching these days. I think those are fine hobbies. You and I pursue them as hobbies, studying these social theories and new ideas on how to organize society. I don't think it makes sense to charge people $300,000 or whatever college costs these days to teach them a hobby. That seems really absurd to me.
--:-- I know people have different views on this, but I think the purpose of the education we funnel young people into ought to be to enable them to make significant contributions back to society. That probably isn't as narrow as the Chinese education, but it's probably not as broad as some of the things we're doing.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, and then I might pop the question up one level. Education itself is an industry, a field, a business. Both the nature of the American education system and a system like China's are primarily centralized and government controlled. The American system, K through 12, is primarily a government monopoly with occasional offshoots. The offshoots are very restricted and very small in number.
--:-- The college system in the U.S. is a cartel. It's quite literally a self-regulated cartel by virtue of the fact that it requires the federal student loan drug to work financially. The accreditation agencies that determine which colleges get federal student lending are run by the colleges themselves. It's a self-reinforcing cartel, which is why you don't see a lot of new universities ever. That's why the major universities in the U.S. are older than the country.
--:-- The same thing is obviously true in China, where the system is inherently completely government-controlled, as is commonly true around the world. We've sort of backed into this idea of education as an abstract good, and then we have this specific implementation of highly centralized, authoritarian, non-market-based approaches to it.
--:-- You can argue the pros and cons of the results. The question set up this very interesting aspect: when does it become too much rote memorization versus when does it become too much wild theorizing, with maybe a sweet spot somewhere in the middle?
--:-- Education as a system can't really respond and adapt to changing needs of people because it's primarily not market-based. 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. The big thing is it's just stuck in all these societies. There are all these signs that it's becoming dysfunctional across many societies. We could spend hours on that.
--:-- I would at least want to put a placeholder and say, I think we should squint and wonder if there is a different kind of system that could get built—much more market-driven, much more technologically sophisticated, much better suited to modern needs, much more subject to actual competitive pressure and the need to be good. There are some very good education startups working on this, some very good charter schools, some very good new startup universities. There are some people taking swings at this, but at a macro level, we're not there yet. I think maybe we should think over time about trying to get there.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah, and that's interesting because we are in the middle of this very interesting crisis—the student loan crisis. President Biden has proposed, and I don't know how much has actually gone through all the legal objections, to forgive some portion of the student loans. But that's the ultimate treating the symptom and not the cause. Why can't any of these students pay back their loans? The obvious answer is college isn't worth the money you pay for it. It doesn't translate into a job that enables you to pay back what you borrowed.
--:-- That's a much bigger problem for young people. You either subsidize college in its entirety or you have to fix that problem. Given what colleges are willing to do with their tuition—grow at double the rate of inflation, hire more administrators than they have students—if they have free money, that's another incentive problem. It's a pretty dangerous idea to make college free in that way. We do need a better mechanism for sure. Maybe now's the time.
--:-- [Transition to a new question]
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Okay. Sam Arnold asks, "To what extent do you believe we really control what technology does after its release? Can we exert any meaningful control after invention?"
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah, a couple of things. One is obviously we do control. There are pretty strict controls in a lot of areas, as we just discussed in the nuclear case. So it's not quite that there aren't any.
--:-- I think maybe the underlying question is, can we predict what the consequences are going to be? This is a very hot topic right now because you have a bunch of AI practitioners making very extreme statements about what AI is going to do that's going to be horrible. There's a very strong temptation for people to make what seems like a very logical assumption: that the people who invented the technology are in the best position to predict what happens with it afterwards, and are presumably going to be in the best position to propose whatever regulations or controls are required.
--:-- I have not in my life, and I have not in my reading of history, seen a lot of examples where the inventors of technology are very good at this. The example I like to cite is Thomas Edison. He invented the phonograph and was completely convinced that the use case was going to be to listen to religious sermons. He was a very pious man. He just assumed that if you owned a phonograph, you'd get home at the end of a long day, kick off your shoes, put on your slippers, 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. And you could do this every night. You didn't have to wait till Sunday.
--:-- A few people do that. Most people don't. Most people listen to music. Ben, you'll recall that the first form of music that was the big hit genre on phonographs was jazz. And you'll recall what people said about jazz at the time. They said it wasn't real music. It was the devil's music. It was channeling all kinds of unholy impulses. It was going to cause young people to fornicate. They had all the same things people say about rap music.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: I was thinking there was some racism involved too, I'll just say.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Oh, of course. Absolutely. All of a sudden you have a channel for these black musicians to show up in the homes of white people. No question.
--:-- Anyway, it turned out that people had all kinds of issues with the technology. They just weren't remotely the issues that Thomas Edison predicted. If you look at this historically, of course he didn't know. He's a techie. He just invented the technology. He doesn't have a crystal ball. He doesn't have some special foresight. In fact, he's a particular kind of person—the kind who spends all his time in a lab. He's unusual. He might be psychologically a little bit different than most people. He draws satisfaction from different things. He doesn't spend a lot of time with regular people. He's certainly not an expert on politics, society, psychology, sociology, and all these other things.
--:-- So where I would start back to the original question is, I actually don't think it's that easy to forecast these things. Specifically, I don't think it's any easier for the people who invent the technology. I think they carry a lot of unjustified credibility.
--:-- This came up in the Oppenheimer movie. The same thing. These physicists all of a sudden are convinced they're the ones who are going to be working on the game theory, the philosophy, and the morality of the deployment of nuclear bombs.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Well, they tried.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: They did try. But there was that scene with Truman, which actually happened. Oppenheimer shows up to 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." Truman was the duly elected president. He is the guy who should have been making that decision, not the guy who invented the thing.
--:-- I think my big appeal here is just humility. I think we as technologists need to be very careful about crossing the line and deciding we're going to do societal engineering in our spare time. People who hear technologists doing these things should be very skeptical that the technologists deserve any unwarranted credibility on this.
--:-- There are going to be these big questions. What history basically says is we figure them out as we go. The alternative to that is to just not do new things. I know where I come out on that.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah. I'll give a plug for a great book that you recommended, *When Reason Goes on Holiday*, which is the story of how the great physicists and inventors did on politics, policy, and game theory. You take super high IQ people and put them in a research or university setting, they go crazy. They very frequently go very nutty on anything involving politics and society.
--:-- The American physics community in the 1920s and 1930s basically mostly went hardcore communist. Einstein was a Stalinist. We don't talk about these things anymore, but he was. These people end up very radicalized. This happens with other groups of people too.
--:-- Thomas Sowell has talked about this a lot. He says the problem with people who are hyperverbal and working ideas is they can get arbitrarily unhinged. They can talk themselves into crazier and crazier things. Their level of disconnection from the real world means they no longer have any governors on how crazy their beliefs can get. I think that's what's happening in AI right now. We need to be very cautious about who we listen to.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah. Trust in their own judgment is profound.
--:-- [Transition to the final question]
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Okay, last question. This is actually one that I would have asked. It's from Bird. "Before publishing, what did you consider the most controversial point? Now that it is live, what makes people shimp the most?"
--:-- Marc Andreessen: What did I think was the most controversial? Ben, let me ask you. You read the drafts. What were you predicting was going to be the most controversial thing?
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Well, I thought for sure when you wrote 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. Those are time-honored crowd pleasers when it comes to making people mad.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah. But it's just the nature of humans that they disagree on that. That's a good question. I don't know. Ben, tell me if you think I'm missing this. I think most of the attacks—and like a lot of artists, I aspire to have a better class of critic—in the modern climate, a lot of the attacks have been on me, more than on the ideas.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Right, right, right.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: If I were including the one you started out with earlier, the smug interpretation on my part would be, "Wow, the ideas must all be great if they're reduced to just attacking me."
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Ad hominem attack.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah. If that's all they've got, I must have otherwise made outstandingly excellent points and they must not have counter arguments. I would love to see more substantive responses that are legitimately carefully thought through.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: I agree with that. I think you've gotten a lot of emotional reaction. Some of the more thoughtful ones are probably on a misinterpretation of what you said. Some people interpret it as "technology gone wild"—like the Girls Gone Wild video of whatever era that was. Technology gone wild, just let it roam free. That wasn't what you were saying. It's more like, are we going to keep doing new things or not? Or are we going to nip them in the bud the way we did nuclear fission?
--:-- You build something, you've got bugs, you've got issues. The internet's had crime on it since the very early days. We keep working on that. But the benefits of the internet outweigh the negatives. I think people wanted you to be more "on one hand and on the other hand," but it's a manifesto. You don't do that in a manifesto.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I thought there was one piece of feedback on Twitter. Somebody made a really smart point. Back to that "love versus money" thing. Somebody said, "Isn't it the case that a lot of innovators, a lot of creators of new things, actually are doing it out of a sense of love?" Broaden this out beyond technology. A lot of artists, a lot of musicians, a lot of writers—it's the concept of the labor of love. They really feel like they're contributing something. Love of society, love of their fellow man is in fact a motivation, even if they would also like to get paid. The accusation was that I was presenting too crimped a view of human nature when I narrowed down love that much.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, I think that's right. Although if you invent something and then you need to hire a bunch of people to work for you, that's where love runs out. They're not all going to join on that. Similarly with the musician, your publicist, your makeup artist, your this and that—they seem to need money.
--:-- Host: As a reminder, if you got to the end of this episode, don't forget to subscribe to Ben and Marc's new show called The Ben and Marc Show. Be sure to subscribe in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss upcoming episodes.
