(2022-04-14) Marc Andreessen On Learning To Love The Humanities

Tyler Cowen: Marc Andreessen on Learning to Love the Humanities (Ep. 152). Without understanding the deep patterns of human behavior, how can you know what to build, or who should build it, or how? For Marc, that means reading deeply in the humanities

Let’s go back to the junior high school Marc Andreessen. At that time, what was your favorite book and why?

I’m one of the few people I know who thinks that late Robert Heinlein was better than early Robert Heinlein. That had a really big effect on me.

it was as if he got more open-minded as he got older

What’s the seminal television show for your intellectual development in, say, junior high school? ANDREESSEN: Oh, junior high school — it’s hard to beat Knight Rider.

There were a set of these shows that basically propelled you — I think the line they would always use is “20 minutes into the future.” Knight Rider was like this. Airwolf was like this

What is it in high school that you hated the most

All of them. I went to a very small high school.

No slight intended to the University of Illinois, which is a good school. Why didn’t you go to a better school?

I grew up in rural Wisconsin. Everybody just assumed, if you went to college, it just meant you went to college in Wisconsin

From where I grew up at that time, crossing state lines to go to University of Illinois was a gigantic move

I read this profile that I recommend to everybody, which is, Tom Wolfe, the great novelist, journalist, wrote a profile of Bob Noyce, who was the original founder of Intel.

I don’t mean to compare myself with Bob Noyce, but basically, Tom Wolfe describes an archetype.

The archetype is the Midwestern tinkerer. (tinkering)

and then basically ends up in advanced technology.

As a moralist, are you still rural Midwest?

I’ve experienced both extremes. I don’t know, maybe it’s, again, the tinker in me or the practical person. I inclined more towards the middle on that stuff

Let’s say you had done a very rural Midwest kind of thing and had a bunch of kids in your 20s

I waited a long time. We have one kid now, a seven-year-old. I waited a long time to do that — into my 40s. My answer for a very long time would have been, you prioritize

I will say I was really struck — my business partner and friend, Ben Horowitz.

he had three kids when he was very young, in his early 20s

What he told me was, having three kids at that age . . . He said he wouldn’t necessarily wish it on anybody in terms of the stress that results. However, he said that it was a very focusing, motivating thing

If you had grown up in Renaissance Florence, what would you have been doing?

Aspirationally, I would have been a Medici. Had I not been a Medici, I would have tried to get as close to the Medici as I possibly could. I would like to think I would have been some form of either a proto-scientist or proto-engineer

Say we put you back in the Neolithic period. What are you doing?

Aspirationally, you’d probably want to be a hunter.

Maybe I could have done the irrigation system. That would have been a good way to get the rest to try to put up with me.

which books have you reread the most?

I probably keep circling around the same small set of topics around, basically, how do people organize? Then, what happens when they do?

I’ve been rereading James Burnham’s books

What is the scenario like where you end up as a deeply committed advocate for the humanities?

I think I’m getting there

*I was fascinated by the Second Industrial Revolution a while ago, and I found this book on Google Books about David Wells, who was an economist in the 1880s. He basically just describes how the Second Industrial Revolution rolled out at that time. He just tells the story. He goes through, like, “Here’s what’s happening.” That was an economics book with no formulas.

The form of humanities that resonates me is like that. It’s history, economics, philosophy, politics merged.*

You could argue that they were storytelling and not being scientific, but I think they were being scientific in their way at that time.

They had their issues, but they didn’t have our issues. Everything today is filtered through our politics.

is the stock market an engine or a camera? It’s something that economists will debate. The thing about Twitter — is Twitter an engine or a camera?

The prevailing wisdom on Twitter is that it’s primarily an engine. It’s changing behavior for better or worse. I actually tend to think it’s at least as much a camera

you have all of these public figures, all of these people in positions of authority

And they tweet, and all of a sudden, it’s like, “Oh, that’s who you actually are. [laughs] These are the things you actually think.” To your point, “This is your actual level of thought. Oh, these are the delusions you’re operating under.”

Our friend Martin Gurri has this thesis of collapsing authority in the modern world. I think a lot of it is the authority figures just basically showing up and exposing the emperor, quite literally, in a lot of cases has no clothes

how does it affect your daily practical investing decisions at the conceptual level?

What I’m trying to get to is the broad patterns of human behavior

There’s a guy Robert Hagstrom who wrote a book referring to this kind of investing as the “last liberal art” (liberal arts)...these products launch, and they have to take in the market. And to take in the market, they have to get a large number of people — who are busy already in their daily lives out in the world — to basically take something new seriously, and to want to use it and want to buy it and pay for it and have it really affect how they live.

What I’m figuring out over time is the psychology-sociology elements are as important or more important than the business finance elements or the technology elements

if people act a certain way, it’s like, okay, is that new behavior or is it actually a very old form of behavior?

You can’t predict people per se, but at least you can start to predict the patterns of behavior

Where in history do you wish to spend a month?

Athens, the trial of Socrates would have been exciting to see.

the era of de’ Medici. A month in the court of Lorenzo would have been fascinating.

I think that the Second Industrial Revolution, Edison’s lab, J. Pierpont Morgan

That moment, extending through the 1920s, was in a lot of ways, in my view, the most relevant origin of what we’re living through today. To be in that 1880-to-1925 period, I think, would have been really great.

What’s your favorite tech product that no longer exists?

I love the little Blackberry that had the four-line LED display and the keyboard and ran on AA batteries. I loved that little guy. I still miss him. I could type like crazy on that guy. I took notes on a four-line LED display for years.

Do you still use an RSS reader?

I use Feedly.

Substack — one of our companies — has a new reader. It’s primarily for reading Substack. It basically is recreating, in my view, the best of what Google Reader had. That’s the other one that is getting a lot of use right now

Why does RSS at least seem to be so much less important than before?

Internet got built on two models, which are diametrically opposed. One model was open source.

Then there’s this other, diametrically opposed kind of world, which I’m also very involved in and very excited about, which is this world of the internet companies

The internet companies build internet services. They don’t tend as much to build internet protocols. They tend to build these walled gardens.

There are big virtues to that level of control in terms of their ability to maintain a very consistent user experience.

I basically go through that to say, I think RSS was from that first world of networks

basically, the social networks took off. The social networks were on the other side. They were from companies

By the way, podcasts is the other area. There were podcast companies, but nobody ever really got to critical mass.

There’s the potential that we’re sitting here five years from now, and this open podcast world has really diminished the same way that the blogging RSS world diminished, and then YouTube and Spotify have taken over podcasts

I wanted to go through it because this is why we’re so excited about this new Web3 idea. It’s going to do these elaborations of these technologies. So-called crypto and blockchain is like that. There is this new way of envisioning this kind of thing, which basically is as a network but with money, a network but with trust.

I’m hoping five years from now, there will be these thriving Web3 podcast environments that will be open

What’s the concrete advantage of Web 3.0 for podcasts?

The most obvious thing is just money.

Incentives matter,

Substack is a great case study of this

How does someone like Rogan — it doesn’t have to be him, but a well-known podcast host — how does that person get paid in a better way through Web 3.0?

They can pick their business model.

internet-native money

COWEN: But is the key difference easier micropayments? Is the key difference being able to sell collectibles more readily, say, with the NFT model rather than signed T-shirts? They don’t sound very big to me.

The media industry is quite small

video games, it turns out, is actually quite large, but television, print newspapers have always been a tiny slice

but having it be a better proposition for creators, having it be a better proposition for consumers, having content come into existence that didn’t exist before.

scale on these things is really hard to forecast,

we now have five billion directly addressable consumers

Just look at the most recent example, TikTok. Who knew that short-term videos were going to be that big?

What prevents a lot of intermediaries from re-emerging in Web 3.0

There will be some of that.

Gmail’s an example of what you’re talking about.

You can still send and receive email with Gmail, with other email clients using SMTP. It’s still in there, but what users experienced — to your point — they experienced this new intermediary, and then Gmail has its own anti-spam algorithm. I’ll give an example. Gmail is not censoring content yet that I know of, but I think it’s basically any day now.

If there is an underlying network, then there is exit

In a lot of cases, the Web3 things that we’re backing — they’re not even companies; they’re projects. They are Web3 projects out of the gate. We’re not even buying equity; we’re buying tokens

What’s the main problem that needs to be solved by tech for hybrid meetings or hybrid workplaces to really succeed over the longer run?

There are going to be technological approaches — virtual reality, augmented reality — in the future that give you basically the recreation of a physical meeting environment. They already exist. These things already exist. Our friend Balaji Srinivasan is teaching courses right now in VR in a virtual classroom.

I don’t think that’s necessarily the goal

another way to think about that, which is, actually, maybe we shouldn’t try to have hybrid meetings. Maybe, in fact, hybrid meetings are the exact wrong idea.

maybe instead, what we want to do is shift more to the edges, and we want to have — number one, we want to have communication systems and management systems that are really built for remote work, first and primarily. (collaboration)

Then maybe, when we get people together, we don’t want to have meetings. Maybe we want to have very immersive, very social

Take a step back on this. The office is an artifact of the technology of a time and place

The Roman Empire was not run out of offices. They ran the world, yet there was no office. There was no office building. The Roman aristocrats worked out of their homes, and then they went to the Senate, and then [laughs] they went to their country house

why are you at your desk? Big part is because that’s where your phone is, and that doesn’t make any sense. Your phone should be in your pocket.

So we’ve been on these technological trends to liberate ourselves from this artificial construct

I suspect the best-run companies over the next 10 years are not going to be the companies that are the best at hybrid. I suspect they’re going to be the best companies that are great at remote.

Putting aside healthcare innovations, for, say, the upper middle class, what is likely to be the biggest change in the personal home over the next 20 years?

if in the post-COVID world there’s basically this presumption that remote work is now viable, which is a new presumption — if this sticks, then it represents the first decoupling of economic opportunity from geographic locality in thousands of years.

It’s potentially a civilization-level change. I’m getting quite excited about this.

then people are going to be able to choose how to live at different stages of their life in a fundamentally different way

It’s potentially one of those things that in a hundred years, people could look back and say, “That was a real turning point for how society developed.” In that case, the definition of home changes.

The Romans actually had a whole system on this that we could talk about. They thought this through quite carefully, what it meant to work out of their houses. It’s a place that you work.

Second is this whole idea of the nuclear family being detached from the extended family, again, because of the need for young people to move for economic opportunity.

I talked to a founder today — he’s got eight young people in his company, and they literally go city to city every six months, and they get a group house together, and they’re exploring the world while they’re building their start-up.

How much do you worry about AI and alignment issues?

What I’m not worried about is the macro AI, like AI comes alive, and Skynet or the paperclip optimizer or the gray goo

for me — and this is probably I’m too much of an engineer — it’s like, what is AI? It’s math. It’s basically elaborations on linear algebra.

I wouldn’t say it’s a specific worry, but more what you just alluded to — and we see this today — a world of ubiquitous information, communications, computation. A world of everybody being connected.

We gave everybody spoken language. That maybe was a mistake. We gave everybody written language. They did a lot of bad things with that

What I just don’t see — again, maybe I lack vision — I don’t see the discontinuous jump, where all of a sudden, we’re in some world in which this stuff is just out of control, and there’s just no way to cope with it.

What has made Peter Thiel feel such an amazing judge of talent?

The thing about his method — there’s a talent-picking aspect to it, but I would actually put in front of that — and maybe even more importantly — there’s a talent attraction aspect to it.

This is what he did at Stanford with the Stanford Review

Let’s put out this clarion call with the Founders Fund with the famous tagline, basically, see who shows up with flying car start-ups

Peter doesn’t really use social media, but he gives talks, and he writes.

Ninety percent of the talent-picking process is over if you’re attracting the right people up front, and then the filtration just becomes a lot easier.

my presumption is, there are not enough great founders in the world

Should you be starting with a hundred million people and try to train as many as you can?

What do they have to show up with by the time they become engaged in the activity and open to the training?

Maybe it’s actually not nature. Maybe it’s much more nurture. Maybe we just need much more comprehensive and rigorous training, much more freely available to a lot more people.

the history basically is that computer science–based venture capital has done very well. Biomedical, biotechnology–based venture capital has done about, you might say, half as well or a quarter as well. Then everything else is a rounding error. It hasn’t really worked.

I think it’s Bill Janeway’s thesis that he wrote about in his book. I think the book’s called Doing Capitalism.

He basically says it was the foundational science and advanced technology basically developed in the computer world for 50 years by DARPA.

and then by big industrial research labs

There was a 50-year backstory to that by the time Silicon Valley really got going

His claim — and this is why I think he’s always been leery, for example, of clean tech, environmental tech, for example — is he’s like, “Maybe there should have been a DARPA of clean tech that started in 1950 and ran for 50 years that we were all drawing new technologies off of, but it didn’t exist. Therefore, it’s just going to be much harder in all these other fields.”

If you don’t have a technological dislocation, it’s really hard to just do a cold start.

Now, again, having said that, Elon Musk did this in both cars and rockets and actually developed many technical breakthroughs, subsequently, in both of those companies, but at least I didn’t see that going in.

leads me to wonder if the Janeway thesis is actually wrong, and if, actually, we should be much more open-minded about this.

what have you been most wrong about in the last 10 years?

the prior decade from 20 years ago to 10 years ago, my errors were almost all misevaluation of ideas, and in particular false negatives. “Oh, this won’t work,” and then, it turns out it worked

The last 10 years, my biggest mistakes have all been in the dimension of, “Okay, this might work, but if it does, it just won’t get that big.”

should we just say, “Maybe it’s not actually so easy to forecast market size anymore.”

*If it were safe, would you go to Mars? ANDREESSEN: No, definitely not. [laughs]

COWEN: Why not? ANDREESSEN: One hundred percent of my adventure needs are satisfied online and being able to meet people and talk to people here on earth.

Have you ever wanted to write a book? ANDREESSEN: Yes, I have. Someday I will. Not anytime soon.

If you opened an independent bookstore, how would you organize it?

it would have to have a coffee shop on the one side and a bar and lounge on the other side

Then it should be extremely comprehensive. I would want it to be very focused on history, politics, philosophy, economics

Then of course, in this case, I would want to ruthlessly censor. It would be an arduous gantlet to actually get a book into the bookstore.

What is your favorite movie and why? Real Genius.

TV show — favorite? ANDREESSEN: That one’s easy. Deadwood

it is the actual telling of the creation of America through the development of the frontier. For good, bad, and ugly

What it takes to basically carve what we would consider civilization out of the wilderness. By the way, again, the complexity of it, with all the complications and all the controversy and everything else that revolves around the creation of the country and the creation of the frontier.