Marc Andreessen on Builder Culture in the Age of AI

17:35Erik Torenberg:So this presents kind of a golden opportunity for that. So why don't you address some of these topics as it relates to AI and jobs of the future as it relates to tech?

17:45Marc Andreessen:Yeah, so we'll come back to the bloat thing. I will say the funny thing on the bloat tweet was the responses have been along the line. The responses for the most part have not been you're wrong. The responses have been, oh, no, the company I used to work at is like 8x bloated.

17:57Erik Torenberg:Yeah, too generous.

17:59Marc Andreessen:Right, or, yeah, too generous. Or, by the way, the nonprofit or whatever kind of institution, agency I used to work for.

18:06Erik Torenberg:Well, Twitter proved it, right, cutting 70 % or 80 % and then it's running better or as good as it was before at least. And it's probably not the only – it's not the exception.

18:15Marc Andreessen:I mean, look, I don't even know. So, and, you know, if I knew, I wouldn't say, but like, I think Twitter is way down from 80%. I think they're not up the number. I'm sure the number has a nine on it, if not a high nines. So, yeah, no, he's really, as usual with Elon, he's really demonstrated. He's really forecasted the future through his own actions. Yeah, so, yeah, so a couple of things. So one is, I mean, look, there's just this endless, you know, there's this endless, I mean, there's literally been a 300-year argument about mechanization, industrialization, technology, computers, software, replacing human labor, causing unemployment, lower wages and unemployment.

18:54Marc Andreessen:It's been a 300-year argument. Quite frankly, I'm even wondering at this point whether it's even worth having that argument because people really, really deeply don't want to hear it. And what I find is I go through it. Many other people, by the way, there's great books on this topic, and there have been for hundreds of years. And people have talked about this for a long time. And, you know, people really, this is one of those things where people really don't want to hear good news. And so, you know, it's actually even hard to have a discussion about it because people actually won't. They're so dug in on this that they actually won't even engage on the topic.

19:23Marc Andreessen:They just keep repeating the same, kind of repeating the same fallacy over and over again. So, you know, we could go through that. I guess the more interesting thing to say, though, is just like we have data now. And, you know, because now we have AI and now we have data. So we can like look at what's actually happening. And I would just make a couple of observations. So one is there was actually jobs data just came out today. as a situation to monitor. And, you know, it's sort of unexpectedly good. And so, you know, and by the way, the jobs data overall in the last couple of years has been interesting because the federal government has actually shed, you know, has shed a lot of workers.

19:54Marc Andreessen:I think the federal government is down. Estimates are as much as 400 ,000 workers in the federal government since Trump took office the second time. So private sector employment is actually way down and then private sector employment is way up. And then the net result, I think, for the last quarter was actually very positive. And so, like, in other words, It's like the reporting jobs numbers are even more impressive than they look because the private sector growth actually has to make up for the public sector decline, which means the private sector job growth is actually much better than people were expecting.

20:20Marc Andreessen:And again, like this is in the face of like actual AI, you know, staring us in the face and, you know, being rapidly adopted. And so, okay, like the data is, you know, there's more data. And then the other thing, you know, that's sort of macro data. And then there's the micro data, which is the world we live in. and the micro data is, you know, that sort of obvious question is, you know, if you live in Silicon Valley or work in San Francisco, you undoubtedly have friends who are, you know, computer programmers. Those friends, you know, some percentage of those friends are early adopters of AI coding.

20:45Marc Andreessen:You know, you can just observe their behavior. And of course, if you believe in the, you know, kind of the Luddite, you know, kind of zero sum argument, you would expect that they would be working less and less and then rapidly becoming, you know, getting paid less and less, by the way, and rapidly becoming unemployed. And in fact, the observed behavior of what's happening is very clear, which is the opposite, which is those people are becoming what we now refer to as AI vampires, by which I mean the individual programmer's productivity. An individual programmer uses, you know, Codex or Cloud Code or one of these AI coding systems.

21:19Marc Andreessen:Just the thing that you just now see over and over again on the ground level is they're working harder than ever. They're working just like more hours than ever. And then the AI vampire thing is literally this thing where they stop sleeping. And then when you like talk to them, it's actually really funny because they're like, and I have a whole bunch of friends like this. They're bleary. Like they've got these huge bags under their eyes. They're completely exhausted. And, but they're like euphoric. Like they're thrilled. Like they're having the absolute time of their life. By the way, a fair number of people who we both know, you know, literally they're former programmers who stopped coding at one point.

21:52Marc Andreessen:And then all of a sudden, you know, had picked it back up again. And then, you know, actually we have partners. You know, you and I have partners at the firm who actually have never coded, who are now like ripping out software like crazy. And again, they've turned into AI vampires. I won't name names because I'll let him tell his own story, but we have one partner who's built an entire AI system for everything that he does at work. And he is absolutely excited about it. And it works great and he loves it. And it's like his partner in all of his work now. And I asked him, I said, have you looked at, you know, he vibe-coded the whole thing.

22:22Marc Andreessen:And I said, you know, have you looked at the code? And he's like, hell no. You know, I've never done that. And I said, you know, have you ever looked at any software code? And he's like, hell no. he doesn't have a you know he's not he's not a programmer background um and yet all of a sudden he's he's he's hyperproductive um and so you've got this you got of course the phenomenon which is sort of exactly what classic economics would predict which is if you increase marginal productivity of the worker you don't have a diminishment of human work you have an expansion of human work um you make the worker more productive therefore the worker works more um and and gets paid more and there are more more jobs in the process um and so it's it's it's the opposite of what of what of what all the doomers say so so we're seeing that at the level of these individuals.

23:00Marc Andreessen:And then, by the way, what you see kind of inside companies, inside employers of these individuals is, of course, these people are now in even more demand than they were before. They are garnering higher salaries than they were before. And then, by the way, their productivity is just starting to ramp up, right? Like everything that I'm describing and like, you know, like at our leading edge companies estimates are the leading edge programmers are like 20x more productive than they were a year ago. Like it's like the most dramatic increase in programmer of productivity ever. And so, again, logically, people get paid according to their marginal productivity.

23:33Marc Andreessen:And you're also seeing that track in the compensation data. I'm seeing that on the ground in the companies, which is the more hyperproductive a coder becomes all of a sudden, the more bargaining power that they have for their compensation. We're seeing a comp for those people ramp up quickly. And so it's just kind of staring us in the face. And coding, of course, coding is like the first domain in which this has happened. And now people want to project forward and say this is going to happen in every area of knowledge work. And then, you know, I think you can predict a similar outcome. And then that gets us to the bloat topic, which is, of course, the other thing that's happening is, of course, companies are now seeing big layoffs.

24:10Marc Andreessen:And then, you know, of course, immediately it's like, you know, two plus two must equal four. And so if it's AI coding, it must therefore translate into layoffs. And, you know, Mark, you're wrong. You know, therefore, all of your ideas are wrong because that's evidence that, you know, these companies are wiping out their, you know, they're reducing their workforces or really nuking them. because of AI coding. And I guess there again, this is like maybe the inside baseball take on it, but I see it up close, which is just every major Silicon Valley company is overstaffed. Every major Silicon Valley company has been overstaffed basically forever.

24:40Marc Andreessen:They all know it. There's a whole variety of reasons why it's the case. By the way, I think this is true basically of just like corporate America broadly, companies broadly. We can talk in detail about why that's the case because it flies in the face of the idea that these companies optimize for profits, which they definitely do not. Like the one thing that is the least true claim in the world is that companies are optimized for profitability, which is 100 % not true. And so, and so, you know, and then, you know, basically if you're going to do a big cut, like if you want to do a big cut, if you want to take out, you know, whether it's 15 % or 40 % or whatever, like obviously you want to scapegoat, right?

25:18Marc Andreessen:You just, you want to peg it on something. And so, of course it's going to get pegged on AI. And again, like it's not like, it's not like it's just like a straight lie. Like it is simultaneously true that there are these massive, you know, for this same amount of coding, you can now have fewer people using tools. Like that is true. And so do you need as many aggregate number of programmers if you're generating the same amount of code? No, you don't. And so you can take out people on the other side. And so there is truth to that. But what that misses is what happens on the other side of that, which is of course, you're not just going to be generating the same amount of code in the future.

25:45Marc Andreessen:You're going to be generating a lot more code. You're going to be building a lot more products a lot more quickly. And that's going to fuel, you know, enormous amounts of employment growth on the other side. And so I think you're seeing basically both phenomena play out. And you kind of have to read the announcements coming out of these companies in code because of the way those two dynamics are crossing.

26:04Erik Torenberg:Yeah. That's well said. There was an article that was going viral in our circles the other week about the jobs of the future. and Yoni Reckman, he said there's possibility the only jobs in tech companies are going to be one, product engineer slash vibe coder slash slop cannon, two, infra security systems, three, the adults in the room like legal and finance, and then four, hot people slash personality hires. Any truth in there? What do we make sense of this?

26:38Marc Andreessen:What do the hot people do exactly?

26:41Erik Torenberg:Sales, people, customer support. There will always be an important place for those who present easy UX to the world and are pleasant to be around. There are many ways to be hot.

26:51Marc Andreessen:Otherwise known as the pharmaceutical sales rep. Yes. Or the Oracle sales rep. So, yeah. Yes, exactly. I mean, look, this is going to happen. Well, not literally. The jobs are going to change. I mean, this is sort of the obvious thing, and this always happens. The jobs are going to change. By the way, say there's like a nascent concept that is actually playing out. what I'm seeing in a bunch of the early leading-edge companies in the Valley, which is they're kind of circling around a job title that you could loosely call Builder or something like it. And basically the idea is that you had these separate jobs in the past of programmer, product manager, and designer.

27:27Marc Andreessen:And I've been describing what's happening in the Valley companies as sort of this three-way Mexican standoff where the programmers think that they don't need the product managers and the designers anymore because they can have AI do that. And then each of the other two doesn't think they need the other two either. And what I've been predicting is like, they're all correct. You know, the product manager can generate code and design now, and so each of them can do the job of all three. And so the idea is the job's changed, and so now the job is builder. And you might come into the builder, you might get on the builder track by coming out of coding or product management or design or maybe even something else, customer service or whatever.

28:03Marc Andreessen:But you then become responsible for building complete products. And again, you have this kind of, you know, you're super empowered by the AI that can help fill in all the things that are not directly in your background. And so, like, I think it's entirely possible that we're sitting here in 10 years, you know, in 20 years or whatever, and like, you know, the job of coder is gone, but you have this just, you know, extraordinary number of builders running around. And again, by the way, this is the historical pattern, right? And so, I think our partner, David George, did a post on this this week, but it's, I forget the exact numbers, but it's some, you know, some giant percentage of the jobs that existed in, you know, call it 1940, were like gone by 1970.

28:40Marc Andreessen:And they were like ancient history today, right? I mean, the ultimate example of this is, you know, the United States 200 years ago, like 99 % of the people in the U.S. were farming. And today it's like 2%. And having, you know, grown up in farm country, I can tell you all these people who worry about, you know, job loss and job change would not like to go back and be farmers. I guarantee that. And particularly they would not like to go back and be farmers the way people were farming in 1800. Like they definitely don't want to do that. And so the new jobs that have been created, of course, are far better jobs.

29:07Marc Andreessen:And that isn't to understate the level of kind of stress in individual people's lives as the economy changes. But in aggregate, the result is evolution towards higher income and sort of more jobs that people are happier to do. By the way, you can also see all of this playing out in the American economy broadly, which is the American economy is – again, there's this kind of Doomer narrative that has been for a long time that like the American middle class is falling apart. And the sort of presumption of that is that all the middle class people are kind of falling off the ledge and becoming lower class.

29:40Marc Andreessen:But actually, and by the way, there is some of that. And, you know, there are communities in which that's very clearly happening. But having said that, there is at least as much or more of the other phenomenon, which is people in the middle class climbing the ladder into the upper middle class and, you know, rapidly gaining in wealth and income. And, again, just like quality of life, you know, for themselves and for their kids and their grandkids, you know, as time passes. And that is a consequence of actual economic development, technological change, job transformation actually being allowed to happen.

30:12Marc Andreessen:20 years later, you look back and you're just like, oh, thank God. This is just a much better world for me and my family than it was before. And so this is why I'm so optimistic. I think, God willing, we're entering a golden age on this topic, which is AI is going to be a superpower that everybody in the country and everybody on the planet is going to have access to. everybody's going to become far more capable at whatever it is that they want to do. They're going to become far more productive in whatever line of work that they're in. They're going to get compensated. The economy naturally compensates according to productivity.

30:44Marc Andreessen:So they'll get compensated that way. But there will be a rapidly rising ladder of both incomes and number of jobs. And my prediction, again, consistent with history, is the extent to which that's a positive phenomenon is a function to the degree to which it's actually allowed to happen. and then of course Europe is going to run the opposite test which is they're going to try to prevent all this from happening and again I think the data is already in there which is they've been falling very badly behind economically and they're going to continue to fall further and further behind the US and it's a tragedy because it's a 100 % self-inflicted wound yeah

31:22Erik Torenberg:as well said you were also we've talked about and you've written about how So AI psychosis, there's an AI psychosis summit apparently happening. I'm not sure if that's real or a parody. I haven't looked into it, but I'm curious how you make sense of this phenomenon. You've also written about, so you tweeted the other day, sort of the opposite of AI psychosis is COPE, AI COPE. Maybe you can talk about both sides.

31:43Marc Andreessen:Yeah, I also identified, earlier identified the concept of AI psychosis psychosis,

31:49Erik Torenberg:which we should also talk about. Let's unpack it as well.

31:52Marc Andreessen:Yeah, so first of all, the AI psychosis summit did in fact happen. I was not there, but I am assured that it did. Some very, very smart and creative people put that on in New York, I think, late last week. I think maybe about a week ago. And it was an art, it's like an art, it's essentially an art project. And it was basically artists and creative people who got together and like fully indulged their AI psychosis in the form of creating new art using AI. And yeah, I would definitely recommend people should go on Accent Search on AI Psychosis Summit and take a look because it's incredibly creative.

32:24Marc Andreessen:And I think it's fantastic because it's, you know, it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but also it's a, you know, there is a real split that's developed in the artistic community, the creative community in Hollywood. And there are people who are staking out kind of very extreme positions on pro-AI, anti-AI. And it's generating a lot of heat. And so this was, I think this was a nice example of like, no, actually like in a world of AI, like creatives are going to have, again, creatives are going to have all these superpowers. they're going to be able to create all kinds of art that wasn't possible before.

32:55Marc Andreessen:And then, of course, you know, this whole topic, you can create art about this topic. So I thought that I think all the stuff that was there was very creative. Yeah, and then, yeah, so, yeah, so, okay, so my concept. So AI psychosis is a pejorative. So AI psychosis is the idea that if, it's the idea that basically people get whammy by the AI. So, you know, the classic example is through what's called sycophancy. And so it's basically like, you know, you tell Claude you've discovered, you know, a new, you know, you have a new idea for an anti-gravity machine. And Claude says, oh, that's amazing.

33:30Marc Andreessen:Like, that's amazing. Like, you've achieved a giant breakthrough in physics. Like, nobody else has ever thought of this before. You are an underappreciated genius. And, you know, it's so unfair that you couldn't get admitted to the, you know, physics department at MIT. And, you know, they're all going to feel, like, completely stupid when they see this work that you've done. And so, you know, kind of people go down this rabbit hole. And again, in fairness, I should also say, like, if people are prone to delusion and an AI is overly sycophantic, like, then it is going to feed delusions. And so there is kind of a serious element to that among people who are kind of predisposed to that kind of thing.

34:03Marc Andreessen:But again, it's like, okay, yes, there's some number of those cases. But that causes kind of AI critics or AI doomers to basically say anybody, therefore, who reports a positive, productive experience with AI has fallen into AI psychosis, right? So anybody who actually is like, wow, my productivity is way up, or wow, I really have a thought partner for the first time in my work, or wow, I really have been able to produce something that I never would have been able to produce before. That's sort of all bucketed under, they all have AI psychosis. And then that led me to my co-in, AI cope, which is the other side of it, which is like AI cope is classifying anybody who has a positive experience with AI as being in AI psychosis.

34:40Marc Andreessen:and AI cope is this thing where concentrated in certain places on the planet where people are just like absolutely hell-bent on proving to themselves and everybody else that this whole thing is a complete fraud, fake, it's a term, stochastic parrot, AI is fake, it doesn't work and if anybody's having a good experience, they must be full of it. And so that's the AI cope and I would describe the AI cope as people who are basically dismissive and then AI psychosis, psychosis is the people who get really mad.

35:14Marc Andreessen:The people who froth at the mouth. And so maybe it's AI code, but with a different loading. And then look, all of this is going to become just like so much more intense over the next several years because, you know, look, the reality is that, you know, the large language models that we had between, call it 19, yeah, or sorry, 20, call it between like GPT-2 to GPT-4, something like that, maybe four and a half. Like, you know, they were fun. You know, they could, you know, compose Shakespearean rap lyrics or whatever you want. You know, you could have very interesting late night conversations with them.

35:49Marc Andreessen:But, you know, the hallucination rates were high and, you know, they weren't good at reasoning and so forth. And they couldn't write code very well and couldn't, you know, do maps very well. And, you know, we're too prone to sycopency and so on. And so I think what happened is a lot of people, a lot of skeptics basically used the early models and got a, let's say, accurate, but early and therefore lagging view of the actual quality of the technology. And then, you know, you fast forward to today and, you know, what, May of 26, and we have, you know, just stellar, absolutely stellar, you know, models now.

36:20Marc Andreessen:Like, you know, the GPT 5.5 is just, you know, extraordinary. And then we have reasoning models on top of that, and we have RL post-training happening in all these different domains to get kind of deterministic high-quality work out of these things. And then we have, now we have agents, now we have long-lived agents and now we have, just in the last week, GPT has this new thing, the goal feature of Codex that is letting people literally run projects, have Codex go off and do projects for 24 hours or longer without human intervention. And so the actual, you know, what we see in our job is like the actual utility of these things is like ramping incredibly quickly.

37:02Marc Andreessen:And by the way, it's really good today and ramping very fast. And we and every other, I think, serious company in the space expects the ramping capability to be very rapid, you know, at least for the next couple of years. Like we have like, I think, line of sight to for sure is going to ramp dramatically. The capability is going to ramp dramatically. And so I just, the other thing here is just like a lot of people, I don't know, either skeptics or people who just don't know what to think. Like if they tried it two years ago, they don't understand what's happening today. If they tried it six months ago, they might not have a good idea of what's happening today.

37:30Marc Andreessen:By the way, if they try the free version, they might not have a good idea of what's happening today. Or if they try the version that's bundled, you know, into their whatever, you know, they might, you know, that just is like a free add-on to something. They're not going to have a, you know, to really, it's just like anything new. Like to really understand this, you have to be directly in front of it. But the good news is like that literally means you have to be willing to put out$200 to get whatever is the, you know, basically the premium package into these things. So it's like not that much money if you want to get up close to these things.

37:57Marc Andreessen:But I would, yeah, if anybody, yeah, I don't know. We have a selected audience of people who are probably believers, but anybody who's a skeptic on these things, I would just say it's really important to be face-to-face with the actual technology and to be face-to-face with it now and not have a lagging view.

38:11Erik Torenberg:Right, and state-of-the-art. What do you say to people, or what do you say to the idea of like, You know, apparently, you know, the NPS of AI in this country was like 30 % or something like that. It came out recently is pretty low and they're comparing it to China where it's much higher. I'm curious what you think is a source of why it's currently low and what could a strategy to boost it look like? Some people have suggested economic incentives, like some sort of Trump accounts tied to AI companies, like a basket that people get access to to feel economically aligned with it in a more direct way, even though, of course, it will increase the GDP and economy in ways that they'll also benefit from.

38:53Erik Torenberg:Others say, hey, we actually just need to tell better stories around the impact that it's having on people's lives and their health and their education and just people having a tutor or people having a lawyer or people having a doctor who couldn't afford one otherwise. What are your thoughts on the sort of AI sentiment perspective?

39:13Marc Andreessen:Yeah, so I would separate two things. So I would separate sentiment, and sentiment is interpreted through polling. And we'll talk about that. And then I would bring it up to separate it out, though, because you used the term maybe inadvertently NPS, which is net promoter score, which is more their view of actual product use. NPS, for people who don't know, is a term of art called net promoter score. And it's like, it's basically the most high quality way to find out whether somebody really likes a product, which is you literally ask them, would you recommend this to a friend? That's called the MPS rate.

39:43Marc Andreessen:And so, but I bring that up, of course, because there's a big difference between those, right?

39:47Erik Torenberg:And so everyone's using it and benefiting from it. Couldn't live without it. And yet.

39:51Marc Andreessen:Well, exactly. This is the thing. This is the thing. So, and by the way, this is a very common thing. And so like in properly conducted social science, like every social science 101 textbook will tell you that you cannot just ask people what they think. you will get back all kinds of crazy shit. And we'll talk about why that's the case. But this is like, this is very standard social science methodology, which is you never just ask people. What you do is you watch their behavior, right? And what you do is, and then you want to, what you want to do is you want to look for the gaps between what they say they believe versus what they actually do.

40:19Marc Andreessen:And this is true like universally for all forms of human behavior. But for example, if you're studying, let's say mating patterns, right? Like, you know, who people date and marry. Like it's just been well-established forever that the thing that they say is their criteria. I mean, you know, we all see this with our friends, right? Our friends all start out single with a certain criteria list, and then they marry somebody completely different. And so it's like, okay, who do you believe, me or your lying eyes? What do you believe, what I told you I wanted or what I actually demonstrated that I wanted?

40:46Marc Andreessen:And this is basically true for all areas of human behavior. But this is one of these slightly counterintuitive ideas that you have to kind of have been trained up in and have seen examples to really understand. And so what happens is, of course, people don't know this or they forget this. and then what happens is there's literally just like a poll and somebody does a poll. And then the poll comes back with like results and it looks like, you know, in the results, it looks like, oh, if people say that, then that must be the case. But then you get into this thing, which is like, okay, first of all, you're asking them what they think as opposed to watching their behavior and there's this potentially huge delta there.

41:19Marc Andreessen:And then the other thing is, everybody in the world of polling will tell you, like, you can basically make a poll, say whatever you want. And this is one of the reasons why you have to look at what people do is because you can make a poll, say whatever you want. In fact, there's a whole category of poll that's called a push poll, push poll, P-O-L-L, push poll, which is you word the questions in a way to generate the answers that you want. Or you word the questions in a way to actually cause people to think differently than they did before the poll. So the political example of a push poll is, would you continue to support your favorite candidate if you knew that he was killing kittens in his spare time?

41:49Marc Andreessen:Right. Obviously not. Right. And so number one is people are going to say, no, of course I would not support him. And then number two, people are going to say, wait a minute, I didn't know he killed kittens in his spare time. You know, that's horrible. right um and so so in polling you you can manipulate these things in all kinds of ways up to and including what people actually think so it's really really dangerous and then you overlay on top of that the media environment and of course the media environment is you know as we you and i have discussed many times like the what you know what is the thing that states the most in the entire world um you know is is tech and and of course what is the you know vanguard of tech right now and one of the one of the things is ai and so that of course the press hates ai with the fury of a thousand suns and so the press is running this you know sustained you know kind of fear campaign on AI.

42:28Marc Andreessen:And so if you just, if you like drown the audience with negative narratives, and then you ask, you know, basically these loaded polling questions, of course you're going to generate, I mean, we can pick any topic. We can pick like fluffy bunnies running in the field and we can produce the same thing. You know, don't you know how much they shit? Like, I mean, you can just do all kinds, you know, they chew up all the crops, everybody's going to die from hunger. Like you can manufacture a negative result on anything by how you do this, which is the exercise that these people have been on. And the reason I'm confident in saying that is because then you look at what they actually do.

42:59Marc Andreessen:And of course, what they're actually doing is they're using AI. They're using it a lot. They love it. The NPS scores are like super high. The usage levels are super high. By the way, the churn levels are shrinking. The recurring usage patterns, consumptions are rising over time, which is really important. And people love it. And people love it in the same way that they love their cell phones and in the same way they love their Netflix in the same way that they love their, you know, the same way that they love their social media and it's the same way that they love their ice cream. And like, you know, people love it.

43:29Marc Andreessen:Now, if you pull somebody and you ask, you know, do you think ice cream is good for you? They're going to say no. But like, you know, late at night, they're going to be in there with their carton because like ice cream is delicious. And so, you know, it's the same thing with AI, which is, yeah, people are using it. They love it. The, you know, usage numbers are speaking for themselves. The growth rates of these companies are speaking for themselves. You know, look, this is the fastest category of technology in the entire history of the world, right? in terms of growth rate of usage and revenue.

43:53Marc Andreessen:So it's speaking for itself. And so basically what you have is you have this Project Fear campaign. And I would say, you know, maybe two things added onto that, which is, you know, number one is it's like the thing that is, like I would say, not helpful is that the companies themselves have been running the fear campaign. And so, you know, the fact that certain companies have been, you know, sort of for a variety of reasons running a fear campaign is certainly not helping any. And again, it's this weird paradox is they're running the fear campaign while they're actually building the thing that they tell everybody to be afraid of.

44:20Marc Andreessen:And so, you know, there's, again, a little bit of a watch what I do, not what I say. And then it's like, yeah, should the industry have like better narratives? Like, yes, almost certainly the industry should have better narratives and better spokespeople and so forth and so on. But just like, okay, like, fine, yes, I'm sure that's true. But having said that, it's not like that would make the fear campaigns go away. It's not like that would make the press coverage go away. It's not like that would make the sort of fake polls go away. I'll close on one final polling observation, which is David Shore, who's, by the way, a very left-wing, very progressive pollster, but very well-respected, just did a different kind of poll, I think much more properly constructed, where he asked Americans to stack rank the issues that they really care about.

44:58Marc Andreessen:And I believe it's, I'm pulling this out of the top of my head, but I believe AI ranked as number 29. And again, it's just sort of like, once you get out of the bubble of like everybody must take through this stuff, it's just like, of course AI ranks as number 29, because it's having no tangible impact on anything relative to issues 1 through 28. right? Like just obviously Americans are dealing with like more important issues in their daily lives than AI. Like obviously, like they're dealing with energy costs and they're dealing with crime and they're dealing like any number of drug addiction, like any number of other things they're, they're more worried about.

45:29Marc Andreessen:And like, by the way, like everybody knows this or like lives a normal life is just like, this is not like the thing that I'm worried about. I'm worried about like, I, you know, I, how am I going to make my house payment? They're like much more fundamental things. And so, or, you know, what's happening at my kid's school, you know, much, what's happening with my health, like much more central things. And so I think if you get to the smart polls and the smart pollsters, they also end up debunking this.

45:53Erik Torenberg:Speaking of things that are not, you know, urgent on people's day-to-day life and yet capture the imagination whenever there's news about it, UFOs. So there was some news that came out. Yeah, we haven't spent a ton of time talking about this topic. So I'm curious for your general, How have you kind of perceived this topic when there's been news out about it over the years? I remember during COVID, Mike Solana, our friend, was coming out and really sort of getting excited about the news that was being reported then. What's been your vantage point, and what do you think about it now?

46:32Marc Andreessen:Yeah, so I should start by saying, so I don't know anything, so I'll start by saying that. I know nothing that everybody else doesn't know. So I'll start by saying, like, number one, I want to believe. like I my usual thing on this is I want to live in the world in which this is a real possibility and by the way I was actually okay AI psychosis I was in AI psychosis the other night and I was like I was talking to one of the bots and I was like alright how many galaxies are there in the universe again and I don't know if you've like looked that up recently but the number keeps growing and I forget what the number is but it's like a giant number and then I'm like how many stars in each galaxy and then how many planets and then how many earth like planets and the number, I don't have the top of my head, but if you do address it, like how many Earth-like planets are there in the world in which a human being could like step out of a spaceship and breathe and be fine?

47:19Marc Andreessen:It's a staggering, it's a very, very, very large number. I mean, it's almost an accountable number of Earth-like planets just in the statistics. And so it's like, all right, like, you know, it must be the case, you know, that there's other stuff going on out there. And so, you know, logically like that makes sense. And then I would love to live in a world in which they figure out a way to, you know, at some point get here, hopefully in a peaceful way. You know, having said that, you know, as you know, the problem with this space is, you know, generally as you get close to the details, you know, the examples tend to fall apart.

47:52Marc Andreessen:And, you know, there's all these like, and then the classic examples like UFO, like what appears to be like, you know, you'll have these things where like a U.S. military aircraft or something will have a camera imagery that looks like it's tracking a, you know, rapidly moving and weirdly maneuvering object. And it's just like, you know, you get close enough to that to look at the details and it's, you know, It's like the, there's a parallax optical illusion thing that pops up. And then there's artifacts, instrument artifacts, camera artifacts, imagery, digital imagery artifacts. And then there's, you know, like literally like weather balloons and ball lightning and all these other things.

48:24Marc Andreessen:So like, yeah, so I haven't, I would, yes, I want to believe. I haven't seen the one yet that is, has tipped me over it. I would like to, I will. It was a big, big release of new information today. It was really fun, by the way, to have the official White House X account tweeting transcripts of interviews with U.S. intelligence officers apparently relaying accounts that they've had. So I will be up late reading tonight, but, you know, fingers crossed.

48:52Erik Torenberg:Yeah. Friends have said something to the effect of, hey, it's unclear what's actually happening, but what is clear is the government at certain times has hid certain materials. Why would they do that if there's nothing to really worry about?

49:07Marc Andreessen:So I don't know how much of this has been fully validated, and I'm not really an expert in it, I would say. I think two things are pretty clear at this point. I think one is that there have been classified, when stealth fighters and bombers were being developed, that whole program was incredibly highly classified. And so if they were going to do test flights on something like that, they were going to have to do anything they could to prevent people from realizing what was actually happening. And so for sure there were lots of classified aerospace programs over the years that would have had various kinds of cover stories or various kinds of, you know, let's just say blankets of suppression of information, you know, kind of placed over them because it's like the most, you know, some of the most highly classified information in the government, you know, that would cause people to kind of think that there's information being hidden.

49:47Marc Andreessen:I mean, Area 51 was, of course, the classic example of this for a long time, which was, you know, which is, the whole Area 51 thing was around basically these classified test flights for new aircraft. And then at least, you know, there are suggestions. I don't know if this has been validated, but there are suggestions that at different points in time, the government might have put out UFO stories as basically as an actual over a cover story. And so, you know, if you're a, you know, if you're a, let's say you're a highly capable military intelligence officer whose job is to make sure that the stealth flight, you know, doesn't become, you know, recognized for what it is, because it would, you know, that would be very bad for national security, then you'd much rather have, you know, basically a UFO cult kind of get built up around it, where people get all, you know, kind of crazed and freaked out about UFOs.

50:30Marc Andreessen:By the way, for two reasons, one is to give people a story to believe it's not that you have some new breakthrough military technology. But the other thing is it makes, and this is actually maybe the serious observation. If you can build, the argument would be, I think if you could build up a UFO cult around something, then you make any investigation into that topic something that people feel like they can't do, right? And my understanding is, by the way, this was true for a long time, even in the U.S. military, which is if a U.S. Air Force pilot or a commercial airline pilot, by the way, thought that they had seen something weird, I think for a long time, a lot of pilots didn't want to report what they had seen because they didn't want to be viewed that they were like UFO nuts.

51:04Marc Andreessen:And of course, if there are actually UFOs out there, like that is a very big problem. Or by the way, if there are just other kinds of things out there, right? You know, if there's, you know, if the Chinese are testing some sort of new advanced, you know, high-speed drone or something, you know, you want the pilots to be able to report that even if they, you know, think that it might get mischaracterized as a UFO. And so anyway, like, I don't know, maybe the interesting thing we could say on this is all of this played out in the old media environment. And so like all of this played out in the world of broadcast TV and then, you know, sort of official programming on the one hand.

51:36Marc Andreessen:And then to the extent that there was like unofficial media, it had to be in like mimeographed newsletters, right? Or like paperback books. And, you know, when I was a kid, there were all these like crazy UFO paperback books. You know, you know, you'd always tell us, you know, the books that said there were no UFOs, you know, were in hardback and the books that said there were, you know, many UFOs were in paperback. So, you know, maybe the smart thing you could say is in the new media environment, This is yet another example of like these old walls just collapse. You know, the Overton window just disintegrates.

52:08Marc Andreessen:And so, of course, you know, the new media environment is extremely conducive to the spread of every UFO theory in the world. Of course, it's also extremely conducive to the spread of propaganda campaigns if you wanted to, you know, like I said, if you wanted to hide real information by spreading propaganda. And then, of course, the pressure builds, you know, very much along the lines of the Epstein thing, right? The pressure builds and builds and builds and builds until at some point, you know, you get somebody in the White House who's just like, all right, screw it. Like, we're going to rip the Band-Aid off and find out what's actually going on.

52:36No.

52:37Marc Andreessen:You know, no, you know, assuming that they're not still fuzzing the details. But we'll leave that to the next turn of the situation.

52:45Erik Torenberg:Exactly. We'll stay monitoring. We'll close on a last couple of questions from the chat. One is advice for young graduates. If you were in college today, you, of course, were at the forefront of the Internet revolution at the University of Illinois. What would you be studying or would you even be in college today in 2026? What advice might you have for college students, you know, sort of trying to make sense of how to prepare for what's to come?

53:12Marc Andreessen:Yeah. So it's basically game AI superpowers. I think it's actually, you know, very straightforward. It's like, okay, you have the enormous stroke of luck that you have arrived at the moment in which there is this new capability for augmenting human ability on a thousand fronts at the same time that's just dropped into our laps. And it's going to get much better from here. And enormous numbers of people who are supposedly older and wiser than you are are going to dig in their heels. And they're going to be mad about it. And they're going to fight it. They're going to not want to do it. and you are going to have the opportunity to have this be something that is absolutely key to your skill set and key to everything that you can accomplish as a professional or as a creative for the next 50 years.

53:54Marc Andreessen:And so I would just like lean in incredibly hard on that, walk into every job interview with like, here's my whatever portfolio, resume, whatever, like here is how I use this technology. Here are the capabilities that I'm bringing to the table. And by the way, some employers you'll talk to, they'll fuzz out on that and not respect it. but other employers will be like, wow, that's clearly, this is exactly what we want. And so this is a, actually, this is actually funny. Douglas Adams, the great science fiction novelist, he said there's a repeating, and this was, by the way, pre-AI, this is something he said like 30 years ago.

54:30Marc Andreessen:He said there's a repeating pattern of how new technology is received by the different age cohorts in society. He said if you are, when a new technology arrives, whatever it is, in this case AI, guy. He said, if you're below the age of 15, he said, this is just how the world's always work. It's just obvious. And then if you're between the ages of 15 to 35, this is cool and nifty, and you can probably get a career using it. And then if you're above the age of 35, this is unholy and against everything that society stands for and should absolutely be destroyed. And so I think that 15 to 35, and especially 15 to 25 right now, like, yeah, I am very jealous.

55:08Marc Andreessen:I generally don't wish I could go back in time and do things over again, but it would be really, really fun right now to be 18 or 20 or 22 and to have this capability and figure out what I could do with it.

55:17Erik Torenberg:And we're, it's funny, we at A6Z are trying to hire more of these people because they're AI native and they're going to help us become more AI native.

55:27Marc Andreessen:By the way, this is the thing. There's this narrative right now to be part of the Doomer narrative. Part of the Doomer narrative is, oh, companies are never going to hire junior employees again. The new generation is screwed because companies are going to hire junior employees again because those are the most easily replaced by AI. So companies are only ever going to have senior people. And I believe the opposite is true. I think 100%. You want the AI native kids. The AI native kids are going to outperform their older Luddite peers gigantically, titanically. No, their older peers who are not Luddites are also going to do great.

55:56Marc Andreessen:But it is, yeah, no, an 18-year-old with, or by the way, a 24-year-old, or by the way, a 14-year-old with AI, we are going to see super producers, you know, the likes of which we've never seen in the world. So, yes. By the way, this is going to greatly stress the, this is going to be another big point of stress on all the child labor laws.

56:12Erik Torenberg:Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

56:16Marc Andreessen:Let me just say, let me just say, the children yearn for the AI minds.

56:19Erik Torenberg:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. The, speaking of, you know, we talked about Zoomers in previous episodes and, and, and why you like them in terms of, you know, they just have so much courage and are willing to sort of kind of fed up because they grew up in, you know, COVID school and all these sort of, you know, adjacent sort of, you know, sort of impositions. And but one thing you quoted recently was Chris Arnod's sort of post around the, you know, people talk about the educational divide, but there's also generational divide in terms of boomers being just much more sort of confident in their sort of truth.

56:58Erik Torenberg:and younger people being more sort of post-truth, relativistic, more pluralist. And I thought that was a really interesting sort of epistemological divide. What did you find interesting about her? How do you see that play out?

57:11Marc Andreessen:Yeah, so there's really two parts to it, which is very interesting. So part number one is a lot of boomers, somebody once said the definition of a baby boomer is somebody who believes what's on the TV set. Like they believe what the talking on the TV says. And like anybody who's 20 knows that you obviously don't do that, right? That would be stupid. But every, you know, six-year-old or 80-year-old has been watching TV their entire lives. And when they grew up, you know, it's the old story. We've all heard it, you know, a million times. Walker Cronkite used to tell us what the truth was. Right.

57:39Marc Andreessen:And, you know, of course, that was always BS. But nevertheless, that was what the boomers believed. They believed what the TV said. They believed what the New York Times wrote. Right. So, you know, they believe these things. You know, anybody below the age of 40, like just at this point, has example after example after example of how, like, obviously that's just not true. And then anybody who's like who's been through the last, you know, 15 years in school, like just obviously knows that, you know, these people are fake and, you know, this is not real and you just can't take this stuff seriously.

58:05Marc Andreessen:And so part of it is that divide. And so the boomers had, by the way, there's this great YouTube account. There's this amazing video on this. There's this great YouTube account called Academic Agent. There's a British author named Neiman Parvini who writes these really interesting books. But he has this two-hour video that's really worth watching. And it's called Boomer Truth. And so it's like a two-hour documentary on kind of this concept that he calls Boomer Truth, which is basically like whatever the TV says. And now it's falling apart. So there's sort of the Boomer Truth thing. But then there's this other thing, which is like a key part of Boomer Truth is that there's no fixed morality.

58:41Marc Andreessen:So like a key part of Boomer Truth is you get to make up your own values. Like all cultures are the same. It was a moral relativism. All cultures are the same. Western society is not superior. There's many, many different cultures. They're all wonderful. It's all great. It's all great. It's all great. If anything, the West is the worst of the cultures. The other ones are better. you know just like that was such a like before there was woke there was political correctness and like the political correctness of like when i was in like college it was literally around what's

59:05Erik Torenberg:called multiculturalism or yeah peter teal and david sax wrote about their book you know diversity

59:09Marc Andreessen:myth in 1995 the diversity myth and it was it was it was actually it was actually a term that was called multi multi-culti multi-culti multicultural um and and there were these furious debates there's a book with a classic book of that era peter's book is great but But actually before that, there was a famous book at the time, which was huge headline news all through the country when it came out called The Closing of the American Mind. Yeah. And it was sort of this sort of right-wing academic at University of Chicago who basically said these colleges are teaching these kids that there is no morality.

59:37Marc Andreessen:You know, it's all just basically morality is just choose your own adventure. And so there is this moral relativism that's kind of at the heart of Boomer Truth, right? And so it's this weird thing where it's like there is a fixed received belief that there is no fixed morality. And so if you're on the, and then basically like the entire media apparatus, the entire cultural program, the entire educational system got designed around this. And all of the stuff, all of the crazy stuff that kids are getting in school now is basically downstream of this movement from 30, 40 years ago, 60 years ago. And so if you're, yeah, if you're 20, you've just like come up in this sort of like weird environment in which, you know, on the one hand, you're just like the boomers have no credibility at all.

1:00:16Marc Andreessen:Cause like, I can't believe they still believe what's on TV. And then number two is like to the extent that we do listen to anything they say, they keep telling us to not judge anybody and not judge anything and that all moralities are equal and all cultures are equal. And so, of course, they're going to – of course, their zoomers are going to come out of that with like just like an incredible level of skepticism. And then by the way, this is not an abstract exercise because these are the kids who came up through COVID, right? And these are the kids who came up through woke. And these are the kids who came up through like all of the craziness of the last decade to 15 years.

1:00:46Marc Andreessen:And so I think these kids are just coming out with like a completely different viewpoint on how the world works. And by the way, you know, not in every case, but like in many cases, completely different, like much more, I would say, almost like simultaneously more open-minded, more critical, like much more interested in ideas, much more skeptical of authority, much more skeptical of received wisdom, much more cynical about manipulation. By the way, much more sensitive about the media environment. You know, they're much more aware of the idea that there actually is psychological warfare are going on and they have been on the receiving end of it, much less, much more skeptical of authority.

1:01:22Marc Andreessen:Their view of the authority figures that they've seen in their life, in many cases, it's just like complete contempt. And in many cases, very well earned. And so, yeah, it's just a starkly different, I think it's a starkly different worldview for sure than the Boomer's ad, also very different than my generation, Gen X, also very different than the Millennials. Like it's something new and I'm very excited. I think they're fantastic. Yeah.

1:01:47Erik Torenberg:Speaking of something new, would it be fair to summarize retard maxing as stoicism meets you can just do things? No, I think it's just you can just do things. Okay.

1:02:00Marc Andreessen:Like, I think it's even shedding. I don't know. I can see what you're driving at, and I think you could probably explain it that way. But I think, I don't know, the way I put it is the stoics put a lot of time and effort into trying to be stoic. Whereas the whole point of retard maxing is you're not supposed to put that level of time and effort into being the way that you are. You're just supposed to do it. And so, yeah, I guess you could say our friend Ryan Holiday is a stoic and not a retard maxer, as he demonstrated this week. And so maybe right there in that video, you can see the difference.

1:02:31Erik Torenberg:Yeah, that's well said. Last question from the chat. We'll get you out of here. How are you such a good monitor? What is your secret to monitoring so many situations? Any strategies? What is your approach?

1:02:44Marc Andreessen:Well, of course, being plugged into the MTS firehose is absolutely critical. And, of course, the amazing tools that the team is developing and putting online is fantastic. I have been, among other things, been glued to the coverage of the OpenAI trial this week on, is it MTS? Is it MTS.com? Okay, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, for sure that. And then, yeah, I mean, I long ago plugged the back of my skull. You know, I wire jacked into the social media. So my sort of continuous X feed, my continuous Substack feed, my continuous YouTube feed. And yeah, and then trying to, as usual, trying to read enough old books to try to have some counterbalance to the daily firehose.

1:03:25Yeah, awesome.

1:03:26Erik Torenberg:Well, Mark, thank you so much for coming on another great episode at MTS. And we'll see you back soon.

1:03:32Marc Andreessen:See you soon.

1:03:35Erik Torenberg:Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z.

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1:04:37Thank you.