Chris Dixon & Tyler Cowen on Crypto, AI, and Philosophy

23:02It's called Lights Park. It's doing exactly what you're describing, which is sort of a payment system built on the top of Bitcoin. And his argument is Bitcoin is preferable because it's not the dollar that a lot of countries will want some, it's sort of the only crypto asset that is credibly globally neutral, that no country sort of sees as sort of a US thing or some other country thing, and therefore should be kind of the currency of the internet. And I guess interesting argument. I wonder sometimes if the AI's won't create their own crypto tokens and say, well, basically, the seniorage from Bitcoin has gone to early humans.

23:38We can design one better because they're already smart, but they're going to be really smart. And we'll have to learn how to trade their stuff. People have done experiments like that, but yeah, once they have sort of emerging capabilities, I guess it all depends on what we allow them to do and what systems we plug them into. If there's anything where there's a clear cookbook, and you can do it digitally online, No one built crypto for the AIs, but if you had wanted to build a money for the AIs, I'm not sure you could have done much better than crypto. I think that's right. How will the AI change how the web is organized?

24:19Will it just be totally different in five years? That's a great question. A couple of things I'll say on that. And all of this obviously in the context of our firm does a lot of AI and best meeting. I think it's generally a great thing. The technology is amazing and impressive in every day. You see new amazing things. There's these debates around whether it's going to slow down. My guess is it's not going to slow down. There's so many smart people and so much money and so many different ways in which it can improve. It was pre -training and now it looks like it's reasoning. It's probably a compass method in a year that does that.

24:58and we haven't even begun to scratch a surface around humanoid robots and haven't gotten deep on video and other forms of media and modalities. I think one thing I think a lot about though is the sort of economics of the internet. And specifically, I have a chapter in the book on this. I think of the internet as having an implicit covenant right now between, so you have these These five to ten companies, Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., who control almost just like 90 % plus of the traffic and the money. Just to take Google as an example, then there's the rest of the internet, the long tail of the internet.

25:36My blog, your blog, cooking site, a travel site, whatever it might be. For 25 years or so, there's been this implicit covenant between the kind of distribution centers like Google and the kind of content providers like us. right? And that covenant is, hey, you let us sort of fair use, you let us take a snippet of your content, you know, index it, put it in our search results, and you know, and we'll sort of, or let us let people share it on my social network or whatever it might be. But the, you know, and the trade is we'll put a link there and you'll get some traffic back and then you can have ads or subscriptions or make it for you or whatever you choose to do, right?

26:13So that's been kind of the equilibrium state that evolved, you know, it wasn't like if people sat down and decided that, that it evolved into that. And it's worked reasonably well. I think it's worked more to the favor of the distribution side to the Google's, the world. And you see that in like, you know, we're per Murdoch Fox sued Google over at a bunch of, I think Facebook just removed news in Canada because they're upset about it. So it's not that happy, but it sort of worked. Okay. What happens in a world where you just get the answer and there's no need for a link, right? Which is kind of the world we're in now.

26:42I don't know, but I'm using, I'm probably using, you know, Claude and chat GPT and all these things more than I'm using Google. And I read fewer books also. It's not just media sites. Why read a book when you can ask for a 10 page printed report on the history of Edward III? Yeah, exactly. And so, and so, yeah, books are whole another thing, but just the rest of the internet. Like, I'm not going to click, like, why am I going to click through? I mean, look at Stack Overflow. I actually used to be on the board of Stack Overflow. They got acquired. And I love the service. And Stack Overflow is a programmer, Q &A site.

27:13Right? And the traffic is down, I think, I don't know, 80 % now, because of, you know, because of these new, what basically happened is the AI's went out, trained on chat over, stuck over flow on GitHub, and then created these amazing services like Copilot and Cursor, right? Which are, by the way, amazing. I usually use these on the weekends and stuff. I use Cursor. It's an unbelievable product. You can type of English sentence and get code out of it. But it obvietes the need to go to these websites, right? And the traffic is down and my concern is Stack Overflow is the canary in the coal mine.

27:47This is the first thing to go, of course. But what if, in five years, are we ending up with just the rest of the internet atrophying and we have five to ten services? And this is all, I love the AI stuff, it's better, I use it, but I worry that we're going to look around in five years and realize we just recreated a structure that looks looks like broadcast TV in the 1970s, you have four channels. And sort of the beauty of the web, the serendipity, the diversity, the ability for somebody to just spin up a blog, and this is like how a lot of my career got started, I think you've been blogging for what, 20 years or something every day.

28:33Like is that kind of the ability to do that gonna be lost because there's now no way to sort of get discovered anymore because links aren't really needed, right? So I mean, on the one hand, look, it's great for people. I'm not, you know, I'm by no means anti -AI or technology, but I do think we need to think about, and I'm a little bit surprised more people aren't thinking about, you know, what kind of internet do we want? And are we creating the right incentive systems to maintain that? And like, by the way, more broadly, like, look at these, just today, the new chat GPT was a 4 -0 image thing came out, which looks amazing.

29:07Scorges, yes. And there's gonna be, I'm sure, more great stuff like that. like what are we, you know, I mean, look, it's all again, it's great, but like, what's our plan for graphic designers? What's maybe there'll be emergent and new jobs will pop up and what's our plan, you know, two years we're gonna have the ability to make a Hollywood movie, one person, you know, what's our what's our plan for all of these other, you know, jobs, parts of the internet, parts of the, you mentioned books, like, look, I agree with you too. It's easier to get that thing out Henry the third, on the other hand, do you want to, do we want a shrinking book industry?

29:40I think it's already kind of shrinking too much in my opinion book, the book industry, and do we want that to go further? I don't know. Let's say a media company calls you in. Somewhere like Atlantic, the economist, New Yorker, I'm sure you know these products, of course. And they say, well, this is happening. We'd like some commercial advice from someone who knows the sector. I mean, what would you tell them to do? Yeah, I mean, it's hard because I think it's a systems problem. It's a tech problem in the systems, I'm not sure that a single node in the system like the Atlantic has a lot to do.

30:11I think that Yeah, so I mean it's I mean, so it's really a structure. Yeah, it's it's a I mean look I think this was a personality driven content survive like is that the innovation rather than so -called facts? Well, okay, like one very common pattern with technology is death of the middle barbelling Right, and so just to give you, give you maybe, you probably know this, but to give your listeners context, what that means is, you know, you have, so the internet pops up and before the internet, you had a lot of mid -size retailers, like JC Penny and Sears and other sort of, you know, those kinds of things.

30:46Internet pops up and what happens is you get this barbelling effect where you either want to be really, really big like Amazon and Walmart and take advantage of scale or you want to be boutique, high touch, high brand value, Gucci, Hermes, and so forth. And in fact, the two sort of biggest winners of this era from a stock perspective were Amazon and LBMH, which is a private equity style roll -up of those high -end brands. And who lost, it was the people in the middle. It was Kmart Sears, all those sort of companies that went bankrupt. Why does that happen? because technology tends to unbundle.

31:25Because basically they were Kmart and Sears were kind of this artificial bundle in a sense of distribution merchandising. You know, you could bring the stuff to them, but not all the way to them. The way Amazon does. And you had a little bit of service and you had sort of all this stuff in the middle, right? And once you had this new tech, you could kind of unbundle this and you can go all scale or all high touch, right? I think the same thing has happened in media. We've had a barbellying effect. And the winners have been either like like 30 second dopamine hits of TikTok and Instagram Reels, or three hour podcasts, right?

31:58Or high end severance and high end long form content, right? And what's suffered generally has been the 30 -minute sitcom, the middle, right? The 30 -minute game show, right? So it's either, and that matches human needs, right? Like you're in line for to buy something and you want a couple dopamine hits and you watch TikTok and then you want to lean back and get something and you want a three hour, I think that surprised a lot of people how popular three hour podcasts are like Joe, we're going to like Friedman, right? And it's because that sort of that's the other kind of need. And this turned out these 30 minute things, which is they're kind of artificially because of the constraints of the medium of TV and things.

32:34So I think to your question, I don't have deep thoughts on this, but I think that my default answer for media would be, you're going to have a barbelling effect. You're going to have highly automated scaled out AI driven content. And so somebody comes up with a new Star Wars thing, and you have a whole Reddit community, and they're all building these AI created, serial movies and things, right? And then my expectation is you'll have, on the flip side, you'll have rising demand for very bespoke human things. That could be, like we've seen, it's like live concerts have become more popular in an age of machine creative music.

33:16you know, fine art, like the sphere, right? The books, you know, like, I don't know, like, right? I mean, you know, people say this all the time that chess is now more popular than ever, even though AI is, you know, better than humans in chess. Like there is, in the end, we're monkeys who like other monkeys and like, you know, like there is this sort of fundamental human nature that doesn't change. Machines can do very powerful things and can be useful, but I think, you know, that would be my naive default assumption, is that, is that, I think, like I think the other really interesting thing with media that I think about.

33:49So when film came along, like the first cameras and photography, you know, there was this, these famous essays like, I was at Art and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but Benjamin and like, there was all this kind of discussion of like what is the future of art now that we can take a picture like, what's the role of the artist, the representational artist, and of course, you know, the rise of photography coincided with art becoming abstract and, you know, all those sort of modern art movements. And so in some sense, the camera did replace, did replace the representational art, but another thing happened, right?

34:24Which is a new medium was formed, which is you take a photo and you take a series of photos and you make a film, right? And so you had two things happen when the camera developed, right? You had the old medium get sort of replaced and of course the high art then sort of pivoted into abstract art. But then you had a brand new medium that simply couldn't exist before, right? And that was filmed. And a whole industry created around it. So like one thing I like to think about is when I think about media is, you know, so maybe AI will be like the camera and it will replace it. It'll replace illustration.

34:59The role of the illustrator will go away and AI will replace it. But on the flip side, maybe we'll enable a new sort of AI -native form of media that couldn't have existed before. What will AI competition for A16Z look like? You have an AI competitor. What are they like? Well, it's funny. It's a good point. I mean, look, I think what is venture capital, right? Venture capital, I mean, that's a good question. Like there's different sort of a venture capital today as a bundle of services. It's a, there's obviously this sort of choosing, what we raise money, and then we go sort of, there's some picking aspect of like choosing what to invest in.

35:35And I think in that picking aspect, I think AI could do a very, very good job and probably be humans in a lot of ways in the near future. There's another aspect, and this is I think one of the smart things about what, you know, my founders of the firm Ben and Mark did, is there's a very human aspect to what we do, right? There's a high -touch human aspect. So a lot of what we do is, and a lot of how we think we succeed, is we create a culture in a group of people where entrepreneurs decide they want to work with us. game we provide all these sort of, and we spend a lot of our fees that we make instead of on our own salaries on a set of people that help them.

36:12And so - But can't they eyes do that? They're great therapists, right? They can, but at some point you always need, like I said, you're always going to need somebody to design and, or at least for some foreseeable future, you're presumably going to need someone to help you build and design the robots and think of us as playing the role of advisors to the people that are building the robots. and hopefully there will be some role for that at least for some period of time. If an AI applied for funding, let's say it was legal in terms of the bank transfers. I mean, would you consider the proposal?

36:42I think right now they're limited and they can't do stuff. Like they can't open a bank account, they can't send money. But yeah, I think it's super interesting. Well, they'll do it with crypto, right? And maybe this is in two years from now. You'll get a proposal from an AI and you'll get the AI quote -unquote on the phone, the Zoom call. I don't even know how you would do it. Maybe you just refer to your AI. Yeah, we've been actually talking about it, semi -series. I mean, we haven't done anything yet. I also had this mark in JSON I were talking about, should there be a nonprofit that's built on a blockchain that is sort of like what, were you involved with the fast grants thing?

37:23Yeah, yeah. I thought that was really interesting and inspired by that. But imagine fast grants, but it's a blockchain version that uses AI to give out the grants. As an example, that's actually something that we were just, I mean, it was just like a brainstorm. I'm not like a serious idea, but that type of thing, right? Like... You could call it a faster grant, right? That's it. Yeah. No, I thought what you did was really inspiring. And like, I had this whole, I actually wrote out a business plan. I haven't done it, but... And it was like you have a DAO. So this is like a entity on a blockchain, sort of an autonomous entity on a blockchain.

37:54And it's sort of like, think of like an endowment does. So if you go to Yale or Ford Foundation and Down, it's like, first time I learned this is when I raised venture capital, I walk in there and I'm like, Ford Foundation, aren't there this organization that gives away money? Well, they have this other side, right, which invest money. So in Down, it's sort of two things, right? There's investment money and giveaway the money. And they're very different and like the investment money, they wear suits and giveaway the money they don't. And it's just like two different organizations. And so the idea was, could we create a blockchain, autonomous AI entity that is like an endowment?

38:23And so half of it is like investing. and you're investing in tokens and this and that, and the other half is giving the money away all of fast grants, right? So that's actually an idea. I think it's pretty cool, and if someone did it, I'd be excited to help out. I haven't gotten around to it, but I do think that might be like a future thing. And so, and the idea, right, what's cool about an endowment is if it invests well, it can kind of just snowball and just get, have more and more money, and then you use the kind of, some portion of the returns every year to give that out. And hopefully it just becomes this kind of self -sustaining thing, the way that the like university and diamonds have.

38:54If I ask you, how will AI change politics? What's the most confident prediction you have? That's a good question. Well, generally, I'd love to ask your question on this. I say, well, a couple of things. One, I think there's going to be a lot of political drama around AI in the next couple of years, first of all. This is not AI changing. Politics is politics, potentially changing AI. Maybe it's a little bit of a different question. And like I think that's going to be issues around copyright, safety. I believe these are not going to be settled in the court. They will be settled in Congress. Like they are too important.

39:33I just sort of went through this with crypto. Like we just had four years of kind of regulatory struggles in the courts. And now it's going to probably be decided in Congress. And I think ultimately the same thing will happen in AI because it's just too important. So I just think that that's one topic. I guess I would say another thing is I would say is I wonder. One thing I think about is how many problems in the world their intelligence problems versus political or coordination or regulatory problems. So building housing is a hot topic right now. Does more intelligence help us build better housing?

40:05Probably the opposite, because the smarter people, lobby harder to stop it. So I would argue, right, housing is more of a regulatory or you could argue a collective action problem. Probably, I would say collective action and I think it's a collective action problem. right? And you know, does AI help with that? Maybe, you know, I don't know. I feel like I think AI can do a lot of really, really interesting things. I do think a lot of the most challenging things we have in the world right now and a lot of the kind of gating factors to productivity growth, economic growth are actually, and just human well -being, I believe, are kind of collective action problems, coordination problems, getting people will do a great job.

40:48I can look at the internet. How did the internet change politics? The internet changed politics by changing the way information flows. And I think we're only beginning to see the effects of that. I think one way to think about the internet is there's always technology that has first order and second order effects. The first order effect of the automobile was you can get from point A to point B faster. The second order effect was suburbs, trucking, highway system, you know, sort of all the next 50 years, right? The first order was like, go somewhere faster, that's 1900 and 1930 or something, and then I don't know when it was.

41:27And then like the next era was like all of the sort of second order things, right? So I think it was the internet, the first order thing was social media, I can tell people I had a burrito for lunch or something like this. The second order is you suddenly have a whole different political dynamic, right? that you can have an insurgent political movement, like Trump or Bernie Sanders or something that sort of bucks the system and counters the establishment. You can have a whole narrative universe that counters you have COVID and you have the establishment's world and then you have the podcasting version of it.

41:55And it restructured how information flows and people obviously will debate whether that's a good or bad thing, but it's clearly had that. And I think we're in the very beginning of that of how my view is, like we're probably really the social media didn't become mainstream thing until smartphones probably, mainstream is a sense of like 3 billion people, probably until 2012 or something. So we're still relatively early in that development. Now AI, I think a big question, for example, it's very possible in five years that people get all their news and political information from an AI. Who created that AI?

42:28Was it created by someone with a political agenda? Was it open source? I think AI, open source AI, if I can pick one issue that will make the AI future better. My own belief is that we have very strong open source AI so that we can have, it can be, you know, people can have a choice, it can be audited, it can be open. Our kids will be top AI, the news will be formed by AI. So to your question on politics, I mean, politics is downstream of culture and information flows and AI will reshape, that and who controls that, reshaping. It seems like the key question. As you know, not many countries have serious AI companies, and even those in Europe may or may not last, right?

43:18They're not obviously mega -profitable. So let's say you're the government of Peru, and you can turn over your education system to some foreign, maybe American, AI's. You can turn over how your treasury is managed to the AI's. You can turn over your national defense to the AI's. And none of these are Peruvian companies most likely. And the final analysis, are we even left with the government of Peru, or is in some sense been pseudo -privatized to the companies that are running the structures and indeed to the AI itself? Well, this goes to open source, right? I think you're the answer to that. But even open source is managed by someone, right?

43:57Like a version of DeepSeek is embedded in perplexity. That's worked great. It's still someone's company. Yeah. I mean, I guess I do think it's, I think you have a great question. I do think it's different if they can get the open weights of deep seek and the Peruvian people and government can fine -tune or change those weights and decide on. I do think that matters. So just, I'm not trying to dodge your question, but I do think that architecture really matters, right? Are you getting, maybe not every country has the ability to do that. But maybe without open source, we only have two countries left in the world, US and China.

44:33Look, I think it's possible. If you want an argument for open source, economic planning seems like an obvious thing that you would involve AI in. And that seems like one of the first things you'd want to do in government eventually is have AI do set your interest rates to the extent your central planned economy decide on your production schedules and pricing and such. And that if you bought an AI up, an economic planning AI module off the shelf, presumably it would be pretty opinionated on how to do that. And the person who creates those opinions would have immense influence.

45:13So again, though, I think those countries will insist that one of the reasons that open source will eventually be a dominant, one of the two dominant model, it will be competitive with proprietary AI is partly because of the questions like this. I think these governments and a lot of companies will demand open source. But even then, it seems there's room for intermediaries. So if you just passed deep seek or llama over to a relatively poor government, you know, again, take the case of Peru, they need a McKinsey -like entity, which is maybe the AI company itself to come in and tell them how to use it, how to integrate it with their systems.

45:52Does this mean American soft power has just one? Like it's either America or China? These are hard questions.

46:02Look, I think there's a, I think there's a... It might be a good thing too. If everything in Peru is run by American AI companies, the quality of life will be much higher, I think. They may not like it. I do think Peter Teal said, crypto is what he say, crypto is libertarian and AI is socialist or... I think what he meant was... I don't think either of those is right. No, I think that the twist I would put on it is AI. It tends to be centralizing. It tends to be consolidating power, I do think. And I think you're making that point, which is the people that produce these things, if they're very powerful things that manage much of the world, being one of the countries and companies that produces them seems to give you immense power.

46:48And I think that's what makes the China move into deep sea content very interesting. Well, I mean, there's a number of interesting things about that. like one is the fact that they are so competitive so quickly and with a relatively small team and all the other things. I mean, I guess we shouldn't be surprised. There's a lot of brilliant people there. But the second one is a strategy. It seems like, you know, sort of taking this kind of counter strategy of doing open source. We'll see if that lasts. But, you know, I'm like, we haven't seen yet. I would expect India is going to have some interesting stuff.

47:25Russia, I mean, there's a lot of smart people in the world. And the fact that deep seek with what is it, like, 150 people, I mean. Right. It may be, it may also be, there's another, I think there's another thing which we may be trending towards, which is AI is incredibly important, but it's also just kind of a commodity. The foundation models, it doesn't mean there won't be businesses. There'll be businesses at the, I think actually the emerging consensus sort of, and at least that people I talk to is that the value, you're gonna have cloud providers like AWS and such. And you're gonna have, of course, like end user applications like cursor and whatever, some lawyer will have their law firm thing and every sort of vertical will have their product.

48:09But it may just be the foundation models end up being like, you know, Pytorps or whatever, like math libraries. Essentially it's large -scale statistics. It requires heavy engineering, of course, to do the training, but the sort of tricks and secrets and a propagating and a bunch of people know them. And it sort of becomes kind of very large -scale, statistical analysis of data sorts sets, right? And just a lot of people have it. It may be. What do you, if that comes about? What do you think is then the dimension that determines which companies dominate. So one argument could be, well, meta and Elon, they just have a lot of resources.

48:49They can be in this for a long time. Another argument is, well, open AI has the most powerful brand name with JGPT and so on. But what's your commercial intuition on what other factor sets into play? Well, one framing I would say is, so if you compare the internet to mobile, right, both were smartphones, right? So, it rises the internet of the 90s, it rises smartphones in late late 2010s, early 2010s, both were massively important tech movements. A big difference was with the internet, I would say something like 90 % of the net new value sort of market cap value went to startups, went to new organizations that didn't exist before the internet, Amazon, Google and such, right?

49:33With mobile, on the flip side, 90%, I, something like 90%, I haven't done the exact study, went to incumbents, right? The biggest sort of pure mobile startup was, it's probably Uber, I think it's like 100, whatever it is, $150 billion, there was Snapchat, Instagram got off for a billion, but the vast majority of market cap kind of value actually went to incumbents. If you look over what it did for Apple, Google, Facebook, and all the other Amazon, they all did fine in that era. They created mobile apps, they leaned into it. And their user base went from whatever desktop was at the time, home desktop, let's call it 400 million to 4 billion, so 10 X'd and if you look at the stock, by the way, the best, it's very hard, almost no venture firms over the 2010s be the strategy of buying Apple stock.

50:21Or the Boston Celtics. So that turned out to be the winner, the mobile era with the incumbents. And so I think one way to frame your question is, it will AI be like mobile or like the internet. Will it be a techno? And the concern would be the concern quote unquote, I work in venture capital, I'm biased, the concern that we've been investing small companies, the concern would be it's more like mobile and that it just ends up reinforcing the strengths of the big companies, Google and Microsoft and Facebook, they have more data, they have more money for the training, they have the infrastructure, they have the distribution, right?

50:56They, you know, how is somebody gonna create a competitor to Facebook, they'll just make, you know, Lama's already great and they'll pump it through all their channels. and so we'll Google and they have more data and so forth. So that would be the sort of the, I don't know, the degenerate outcome from the venture capitalist perspective. It's like, it could be great for the world though. You know, it could be, I think it's, I think it's, a lot of this will be consumer benefit, consumer surplus, I think. And that's good. And I'm happy about that. And, you know, and we'll always find things to, you know, there'll always be some vertical thing or some other thing for VC soonveston.

51:29So I think that might actually be a really good societal outcome. Do NFTs have a future? I think of the, let me say with an NFT. So one of the things a blockchain allows you to do is to create digital assets. This is one of the unique things that you can create a Bitcoin as a digital asset that exists on a blockchain. And those digital assets can be either fungible or non -fungible. Fungible means interchangeable. It's like a currency, any Bitcoin can be changed for another. Non -fungible means it's a distinct asset. And so, do blockchains have a future? Of course, I believe yes. And then on those blockchains, will you have some assets that are fungible and some that are not?

52:13I think definitely. When people think NFTs, they think people buying JPEGs. That may or may not come back. The idea that people will have digital assets that for example could represent a movie ticket, an NFT. It can represent a physical lot of people doing a lot of people doing this now, but they represent like a pair of tennis shoes or a piece of fine art or some other housing deed or some other, if we have a future, which I hope for and I'm pushing for of people transacting with digital assets on blockchains, I think very much that some of those will be non -fungible. And I think some of them will be also purely digital.

52:56We're seeing a bunch of these people doing make video games and you have a sword or a gun you can buy and it's NFT and you can resell it and do other things. And so as the digital world becomes more and more important, you'll have virtual worlds, you'll have metaverses, you'll have these kind of worlds like Roblox and many more variations of things like that. You will have I think digital assets in those worlds and I think a better, you can have those either locked inside of the game owned by the game maker, or you can have them on a blockchain, where the user can move them around and control them, I think that's a better architecture.

53:28So the answer is yes, but in the true sense of NFT, not in the kind of caricatured sense that people think about associating with the kind of 2021 bull market. Well, didn't NFTs become the property rights system for the AI's? I think that's a good outcome. I think it's the right way to do it. It's basically what, the reason my book's called Read Right Own is, is to read, sort of read and write is a common phrase referring to the first two years of the internet. And my argument is that if this era, if blockchains are successful, this era will be about ownership, digital ownership. And so blockchains enable digital ownership.

54:02And that ownership can be something digital, something this digital that represents something non digital, like a, I mean, non digital, like a stable coin, whatever, like something in a, something off blockchains, like in a bank, can be something in the purely digital world. I think it's the right way to represent digital ownership. One way to think about the internet today is it's sort of this world in which, you know, it's sort of like imagine the offline world where you could never own something. And every time you go to a new venue, you have to change clothes and use all their stuff and you can't take it anywhere else.

54:31It's this weird structure on the internet now. You go to Twitter and you gain followers and yet they own your followers and you can't take them with you and you go to play a game and everything stuck inside that game. And the idea is sort of, one of the ideas, in the blockchain world is we can ship that power back, and the user can actually sort of have this persistent inventory of things that they own and control. That's what a crypto wallet is. And you can take that to different services. And you unbundle the ownership of the data from the provision of the service. What's your favorite book in philosophy?

55:03I've actually been getting back into philosophy lately. I did it philosophy years ago in grad school, favorite book, man. Do you read to your into philosophy? Of course. Yeah. Play those dialogues, quine, word, and object, perfect reasons in person, no sick. Those are what come to my mind right away. Yeah. So I did analytic I did analytic philosophy. I actually was in a grad school program and dropped out. I did analytic philosophy. So actually a quine was one of my favorites on that word and object and like two dogmas, been piercism and all those kinds of things. I liked Donald Davidson, no sick.

55:34I loved Anarchy State, Utopia, reading that with Rawls is a great pairing.

55:42I used to love Vic and Stein, so both early and later. Yeah, I was into logic, so like, Frega, Russell. But now, this is a grad school. Now, I'm actually, I'm trying to finally understand continental philosophy. I never understood it. And I've actually spent the last three months in philosophy phase. I've been watching a lot of videos, highly recommend. Brian McGee, I'm a... Sure, yes. I watched all of his videos. This guy, Michael Sigru, as a Princeton professor, great videos and continental philosophy. I'm in reading, that's the town pretentious. Look, I'm not saying I understand this or I'm an expert on it, but I'm struggling and reading it.

56:16I'm trying to read Being in Time right now, Heidegger. And so I would say, when I did analytics, I mean, probably like, they're interesting. I would like, Kripke, Paul Kripke, I liked his books a lot, Nelson Goodman's one of my favorites. But it's like the fact fiction for has funny enough, I just bought it again, fact fiction forecast. Crypt key, there's a naming in necessity is it's kind of legendary book on reference and language. I've never been persuaded by that one. It always felt like slight a fan to me. He's very, very smart. He might be the sharpest philosopher, but I like the book on Vidconstein.

56:53He basically invented a modal logic kind of, you know, that story. He was like in high school. He was 15 years old. I've heard. Yes, it's a true progy. But, well, naming and necessity, I mean, like a lot of philosophy, you have to take it in the context. Like, naming and necessity, I think of it as a response. Gosh, I'm forgetting all the whole history of it, but it was kind of a, as I recall, it was a response to the descriptive theory of reference, like Russell, you know, so you would have, anyways. And so it's kind of like you have to read, I think you have to take these things in appearing.

57:27I was just actually last night I was with a group of people, a guy I lecture on philosophy and it was great because he went through, it was Hume Kant, Hegel Nietzsche. And like, I don't want to go too much into vlog, but I've always struggled with Kant and then he then he went into Hegel and explained this sort of, the Hegel kind of struggle with Kant in the same way that I did and then improved on it. And so for me, these are I'm not trying to go into the details of this as too much, but the point is for me, a lot of it has to be taken in as a dialogue between thinkers over multiple periods. And so...

58:06Are you getting anything out of Heidegger? Because I sometimes say, I've looked at every page of that book, but I'm not sure I've read it. It's a good question. And I have a friend who's really into it and we spent many, spending time together and he's trying to teach me. Yeah, I guess, I would also, if you want, I'll send you some videos. That'd be great. I think are really good, so that they've helped me a lot. I get it. I've always got it from like an intellectual history point of view. If you want to follow kind of the history of postmodernism, so like there's like Heidegger and then Derri Dahl and just sort of, you know, what's going on in the academy today with relativism and discourse and hermeneutics and just like, yeah, I think there's modern political implications to that were really probably kicked off by Nietzsche and then Heidegger, right?

58:59And so I've always sort of understood in that sense. I think what I struggle with, and I understand him as a theory of psychology, I think of like describing the experience of the design and being in the world. and to me it's an interesting theory of psychology, sort of how do I experience it? Like you're thrown into the world. You don't know that this whole idea is really appealing to me. And then just that whole kind of story he tells. You're thrown into the world ready at hand versus present to hand. I think this idea of knowing how versus knowing that, different kinds of knowledge is a very interesting idea.

59:31Do you watch John Verveiki? No. I highly recommend he's got this 50 -part video, 55 -0. So you'd like him. He's a philosopher, cognitive science, really smart guy. And he's got a 50 -part video on the, it's called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I've watched like 30 of them or something. But, and the idea is sort of, you know, that modern, the modern world, we sort of lost religion and lost philosophy and now people are seeking meaning in their lives and they're finding it through drugs and I don't know what video games and whatever. And then we should go back and look at all the great thinkers and see how do we find meaning and sort of his mission of it.

1:00:13But he's very sophisticated on the philosophy stuff. And he goes through the 50 parts, like Aristotle, Plato, you know, Buddha, Jesus. Like it's just like literally every great thinker. And how do they think about how you find meaning in life? Very interesting. And what was I saying this? Excuse me, I lost my... Oh, oh, and so a big part of his thinking is sort of there's many different ways of knowing. And one of the things that we've done in the modern world as we've forgotten that there's more than just propositional knowledge, more than just knowing that. There's knowing how, right? There's knowing, and like religious traditions are very good at knowing at embracing multiple kinds of knowledge.

1:00:49That's why you don't just have, right? Like, it's the mistake that the redditor makes about analyzing Christianity. Look at it as a set of propositions. When in fact, it's a way of, it's a form of life. It's about a community, a community code development and meaning, rituals and like, you know, so I think the Heidegger stuff is very interesting on those topics of like different kinds of knowledge. And I guess I just am very interested in like, in, you know, we all, you and I, I'm sure, have this sort of default naturalistic, physicalist, scientific worldview. And I'm interested in sophisticated thinkers who have a different worldview and trying to understand it.

1:01:26And I think, I think about John, you know, John Von Neumann had this great phrase. He's like, you don't, someone asked him about set theory. He said, you never understand set theory. You just get used to it. And I think that's true of a lot of these other alternative philosophies is like, it's not like it's going to be like one argument. You're going to read a Pydiger and you're going to be like, oh my God, my worldview changed. You just kind of have to submerge yourself in it. That's what I'm trying to do of like a year. You just kind of keep seeing it from different angles. And then hopefully you eventually get kind of a good shawl switch and you start to see the world maybe through a different lens.

1:01:56And if you had to say, not what you like in philosophy as philosophy, but what in philosophy has stuck with you when you make venture capital decisions. What would you say? Well, I think the, like, I do think the mode of, I think it just, one thing I like about philosophy is like the mood, just like the literally the moves they make is almost like a chess game, right? Like, like, they're just very like nuanced argument style. Like, I, like, I, I only recently hesitated on how much you want me to go down this path, but like, babies, nerdy as you are. Okay, okay, okay. We'll like, okay, so like, cons, you're familiar with the cons,

1:02:43the synthetic opiori. Sure, yeah. Right, okay, so like, like this is just a really interesting, so like, so, so, so, so, Hume comes, so actually was really in the lock, but then Hume comes along and says, okay, like, let's, let's analyze how we get knowledge. And he says, there's really just two ways you get knowledge. You get knowledge through what he called relations of ideas or matters of facts. So it's sort of, you know, math, right? It's just like you can kind of, you could sit in a room and think about the numbers and decoder. All bachelor's are on marriage, the famous example. Like it's embedded inside of the words that to be a bachelor is to be unmarried.

1:03:12That's relations of ideas. And then there's empirical matters of fact, right? And that's things we go out and see in the world. And so, Hume asks this, you know, the famous skeptical question, okay, well, that's the case where does something like induction fit in, right? Where does causality fit in? Where does time and space fit in? Because they're neither purely true based on the relations of ideas. And it would be circular if we learned induction through induction, right? Like how do we know that the sun will rise tomorrow? Well, it's always risen in the past. Well, how do we know the future futures will be like future past and kind of goes through the whole skeptical argument, right?

1:03:49And then Kant comes along and says, okay, that's right. but what that means is there are other preconditions for knowledge, which is a really interesting move, because what he's saying is, I mean, this is what a transcendental argument is, right? Is your not kind of going from premises to conclusion, you're going from premises to preconditions to those premises, right? So I'm just giving you an example, like that move, that kind of plasticity of thought, like that is just a very, like, I almost, when I first saw that, I was like, can you do that? Like, you can go and like, so he says, like, you can't fit.

1:04:21I'm not sure you can do it to be clear. Well, no, I know that you don't either. But he's like, you can't fit causality, this cons favorite, I think, but then induction, a whole bunch of things that we just, that are modes of intuition, you can't fit them into fumes to buckets. And so then he argues, of course, 300 pages and very nuanced, that therefore there must be another bucket, right? There must be this other precondition of thought, the modes of intuition. And then he derives this whole kind of beautiful system outside of, out from that. And then, you know, Hagle comes along and changes some of the preconditions.

1:04:50So I think just the, I just feel like I learned when I did at least in grad school, just like this kind of, just this freedom and I guess I use a plasticity, I don't know, just like the kind of, like you kind of learned how to do these moves and meta moves, like intellectually, that I find really interesting. And it just forces you to really think, like you can just sit there, I've spent like an hour just sitting there and trying to understand these ideas and sometimes I feel like I don't. And it just really forces kind of intellectual honesty on you. I don't know. I saw it's almost like meta.

1:05:24Like honestly, I've read philosophy for years, and I don't know if I've ever actually gotten any conclusions at it. I think there's just like, you can sort of see both sides. And you can, I could feel like I can argue both sides. I feel like that about a lot of things in like politics too. And things I feel like I can argue, I can give a pretty good argument for a bunch of different things. And you know, I don't know. I think you get better at analyzing and understanding all the things, and that philosophy helps you with that. I don't know if you actually get answers. Before we say goodbye, I'd like to recommend Chris's book again, Read Right Own, Building the Next Era of the Internet.

1:05:58Chris Dixon, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. That was a lot of fun. Thanks for listening to the A16z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast .com slash A16z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time.