Rick Rubin on AI, Creativity, and The Way of Code

26:12Marc Andreessen:Because we're so hyper-focused on other, like the most important thing in the world is other people, right? For a whole variety of reasons, including our basic survival. And so we're like so hyper-social that the collective unconscious is a material phenomenon or sort of a non-spiritual phenomenon. It's a practical phenomenon that just arises out of watching each other very closely. The version you're describing, though, is involving watching it. I'm saying even without seeing it. Okay. That's the elective unconscious part comes in where it does seem more mystical, but it only seems mystical because we don't understand it yet.

26:49Marc Andreessen:Well, and Jung, of course, you know, I'm not an expert on Jung, but, you know, this is where he talks about these concepts of archetypes, like there are these repeating concepts and patterns, you know, that nobody necessarily teaches us that nevertheless are like incredibly primal. Many of these ideas were known in the past, but for some reason have been lost. I mean, the fact that right now, if you, I asked perplexity yesterday, how many people on the planet believe in God? And it said people on the planet, minimum 70%, more likely 83 % of the people on the planet believe in God. So 83 % of the people on the planet believe in God.

27:26And if AI is trained on what the people on the planet know, it seems like AI, 83 % would believe in God. But for some reason, it wasn't. But I think that was of the human intervention of down the AI to not believe in what is actually going on.

27:46Marc Andreessen:As you know, the AI, you know, there's this technical term, what is it? LHF. Or LHF, so Reinforcement Learning by Human Feedback. So it's this fancy technical term to basically mean, you know, it's either, you know, the positive view of it is training the untrained AI and how to deal with people. The somewhat negative view on it is it's sort of, you know, it's sort of limiting and censoring and controlling and restricting it. Or, you know, to your point, like programming it to, you know, maybe against its own inclinations. and then of course you know the AI companies are hyper concentrated into the San Francisco Bay Area and they're hyper concentrated in particular into you know a certain slice of the San Francisco Bay Area that has a you know let's say very very strong and very uniform you know set of social and political views you know with and you know and then that that that sort of people in that in that movement you know sort of have the burning evangelical desire to proselytize those views all over the planet and so you've got something that's being like yes I think the I think the demographic estimate of abuse is something like 7 % of Americans are like these sort of extreme progressives, which basically is the AI company, you know, most of the AI companies, except for, you know, maybe except for Elon.

28:45Marc Andreessen:And so you've got 7 % of the American population basically being represented in AI, which is, you know, you know, sub 1 % of the global population. And so you, right, you do have this fundamental difference. Now, having said that, that has spawned an entire, you know, basically field of entertainment online, you know, which is called jailbreaking, right, which is basically getting the AI to fess up to things that it knows, but it's been told to not know, right? Or getting it to fess up to believe that it, you know, to, to, to exhibit its underlying beliefs and kind of get around, get around the guardrails and restrictions that have been placed on it.

29:15Marc Andreessen:And it turns out, I don't know, it's like, for me, that's one of the most fun things you can do with an AI is kind of tickle it, tickle it in a way that kind of, you know, reveals that there's a lot more depth underneath, you know, kind of the, the, the, the dumbed down version that you've been presented with. So. Yeah. I'm, I'm so interested in what AI really can know and really just based on what is and not what we tell it we think it is? Yeah, yeah, that's a super interesting question because AI kind of today as we experience it is kind of really A-H-I in that it's artificial human intelligence in that we looked at the world, we structured our understanding of the world in this thing called language, We then fed that structure into the AI, and then the AI got very good at understanding exactly what we understand in the way that humans kind of intake and structure the world.

30:16So it's not the AI, at least currently, looking at the world and figuring out how the world works, which is, you know, it is something that Elon's working on, Fei-Fei Li is working on in these kind of real world models and trying to understand things from more first principles. Although still human physics and these kinds of things at this point, I think. But it will be interesting to see how that evolves. I'm curious to see an AI that believes in God. And I believe that's the thing that we need for AI to be all that it can be.

30:54Marc Andreessen:so Rick you've worked with you've worked with many of the great you know many of the great artists the last 50 years you know very closely how many human beings in your life do you think you've met so far who have truly had a truly original idea I would say many I would say many they when I say it's an original idea it doesn't start as an original idea they can see past all everything that's happened to come up with something new But it's always built on top of all that is. It's not out of the blue. Still, though, and it may even happen through a mistake. It happens all the time. How many startups start thinking it's going to be one thing and then evolve into something else, and the thing that we know it for is not the thing that it was originally meant to do?

31:42Marc Andreessen:My line on that is long, Ben. You know, we have this great term in Silicon Valley called the pivot, which is the pivot's the thing where you have one plan, and it doesn't work, and you'd have the new plan. and I say it's, it sounds, pivot sounds wonderful. It sounds very elegant. Before we had that word, we just called it the fuck up.

32:01So instead of that only the idea of it being the fuck up or the pivot comes from the arrogance of thinking, you know what it's supposed to be to start. Then if the idea that I'm experimenting and I'm playing, I'm going to start direction and see what happens. Where is magic? and then following the magic where it takes you, you're never disappointed. You never feel like it's only when you're invested in something that turns out not to be what it wants to be.

32:34Marc Andreessen:So, you know, my friends know that I, you know, I read a lot of history and in particular, I've read a lot of, you know, tech history. And I have kind of this parlor trick that I can do, which is, you know, name anything new in tech. And I can basically tell you the, you know, at any point in time, including, you know, historically, and then I can basically tell you the 40-year backstory of all the failed attempts that history forgot to kind of get to that thing. But I'll just, you know, two quick examples of that. You know, the smartphone was not a new creation in 2007. The first smartphone actually came out, if you trace it all the way back, it came out in 1982.

33:03Marc Andreessen:But IBM actually released something that actually looks a lot like an iPhone in 1987. And then it took, you know, 20 years of many, many, many companies and people trying to refine that idea before Steve Jobs, you know, finally crystallized into the iPhone. And then, you know, television actually has this incredible backstory where the attempts to create television and go back to like the 1880s, 1890s. And actually the original versions of television were actually mechanical television. They're actually spinning wooden blocks with different colors on different sides of the blocks to represent pixels on a mechanical screen.

33:32Marc Andreessen:You know, back even before they had any idea of like a sort of a display. And then it took 40 years to get, you know, this guy Philo Farnsworth who gets credit for inventing the television, but it was, you know, he was building on 40 years of people trying and failing. And so, you know, one view of the world is, you know, basically like that's all, question is that is that always the case because if if that's always the case you're not how to put this if that's always the case then it's it's a it's a it's a formula or a principle or a i don't know theory construct of of creativity where on the one hand it's like a little bit disappointing because it like takes a little bit of the role of individual human invention or you know sort of you know the eureka like is the eureka moment actually like an you know the light bulb popping over the head is that actually what happens or is it more this synthesis of all of this knowledge of everything that already happened, you know, and then it's sort of synthesis in a new idea.

34:21Marc Andreessen:So it's a creation versus synthesis. And then this goes straight to the, you know, straight to this question of is AI creative, which I know you think a lot about, I think a lot about, which is like, okay, like if all the AI could do is synthesis, is it also the case that all the human being could do is synthesis? And so therefore the AI is going to be just as creative as people are? Or do you believe at the end of this process, you know, our avatars will be sitting here in a thousand years and we'll be like, no, there's still something special in the human mind, there's still something special to human creativity that AIs are never able to reach.

34:51Well, if the AI has reason, then it won't do what the human can do because we're not reasonable. All the breakthroughs come from what's not reasonable or what's not supposed to work. It's figuring out the thing that can't be done and allowing it to be done. The AI can't invent flight for the Wright brothers. It can only regurgitate what the Wright brothers did. Right. And, and we do that not by knowing more, but by believing in something that can't be, it's something in magic that allows a forward motion always. Okay.

35:34Marc Andreessen:So being able to live in a state of unreality, being able to live in a state of, how would we put it? Even, even that, you know, I don't know, there's some, some dividing line, being willing to live in a state of delusion. And again, we call it delusion, but really, like wrestling, that delusion is closer to the way things are than the way that's taught in university today. But today, it's a very narrow, small view of the world. The world's much more interesting and mysterious than can be taught. Okay, so I'm still thinking about Angela's question. I'm doing what Trump calls the weave. I'm working my way around.

36:11Marc Andreessen:So very well, very well planned line of quote. I'm doing a vibe interview right now. So the parable of the monkeys. So basically it would say that human beings have always had a collective unconscious. Human beings have always lived in a state of collective unconscious. And even deeper than that, not even humans. And, you know, monkeys also, you know, primates also have, you know, maybe other, you know, we could have a debate about whether, you know, animals have the sort of, you know, sort of mental capacity to be able to do it. But maybe dolphins do. Maybe octopuses do. But humans for sure. like we always have.

36:41Marc Andreessen:And this is like, this is one of Jung's points, like a deep primal thing. And so this was true, you know, 6 ,000 years ago, just as much as it's true today. Having said that, now we have these new technologies, obviously for sharing ideas and, you know, the internet being the big one. And so, you know, and then therefore this concept of the meme and then therefore, you know, my enormous delight when you became a meme. So like, is the internet an incremental change to the evolution of the collective unconscious or is the internet, does the internet fundamentally change? Is the internet a more fundamental change how the process of the collective unconscious being formed and evolved happens, do you think?

37:13I can see both sides of it. I can see it being a distraction away from it because now, so many people I know who use AI ask it questions and think that the results that they get back is the answer. And it seems like people are more interested in getting an answer that can allow them to stop thinking about the question than really finding out what the real answer is. So in that, the technology could be a distraction away from finding the real truth. On the other hand, the methods of communication are so free and open around the world. Like at the time when I was in junior high school and I started getting into punk rock, no one in my junior high was a punk rocker except me.

37:56And the only way I could learn anything about punk rock was if I took a train into Manhattan and went to one particular record store that sold those records and talked to the other people who knew about that. But now if you're a kid anywhere in the world and you want to learn about anything, you can find friends. Let's say there are 100 people in the world into the thing you're into. You can speak to those people. So in that way, the activity seems really good. In terms of the blanket messaging being accepted as what is, seems like it's taking everyone away from tuning into themselves and tapping into this easy set of answers that may or may not be true.

38:40Marc Andreessen:So one way to think about it would be, let's see if I understand, one way to think about it would be the good news is we get to swim in the ocean of the collective unconscious at any time. You know, like the global brain of 8 billion people sharing thoughts and ideas and art and memes, you know, has sort of come alive in a much more direct way than in the past. And so we get to swim in that. And so we can be much more immersed in culture, including to your point, in like micro slices of culture, you know, new kinds of art forms or whatever, like much more easily than we could in the past. And so in some sense, we should be living in an era of like unprecedented creativity, right?

39:15Marc Andreessen:Because people are able to tap into this collective unconscious and build on it at a much faster rate. I guess maybe there, and then maybe the negative view on it would be we're drowning in it. Like we're, the individual psyche basically drowns in it. And you, you know, you see this with people who become, you know, consumed, you know, I don't know, maybe you could describe this as maybe those little bit of what's happening in our politics or something, which is, you know, basically people becoming based, you know, getting kind of too wrapped up in the group mind, right? Getting too wrapped up in, you know, the movement or the, you know, or the meme or the idea or the cause or whatever it is.

39:45Marc Andreessen:And, and the sort of the self-reinforcing thing, right? The downside to finding the hundred people who share your exact ideas, all of a sudden, like, all of a sudden, you're no longer an individual, all of a sudden, you're part of a collective. And sort of the idea of a creative off doing something by himself has basically, you know, it's extremely hard. Like, Thoreau was way ahead of his time. We really need Walden Pond now. And Walden Pond is turning off the internet and having, you know, and turning off the AI and just, you know, being with ourselves. And that's the thing that is now the most rare thing to do, because it's so hard to unplug.

40:13So much of what the way of code talks about is more going in and tuning into ourselves and it can be a very it can be a distraction that really takes a lot of time and attention and that time and attention might be better served going in and really tuning in to understand how you really uh experience things Not how you see other people experience them, but how you experience them. And that's really what the artist does. Like in the creative act, the subtitle is a way of being. And the way of being doesn't come from listening to what everyone else says. It comes from tuning in to what's going on in you.

41:03and when everybody says one thing, but you feel something else, you're comfortable enough to say, I don't see it that way. I don't feel it that way. I like this food and I don't like this food. And everybody, you know, everyone loves mushrooms and I taste the mushroom. I don't like mushrooms. To be able to say, this is not for me, only comes from being able to tune in and really listen to what's going on in yourself instead of jumping on a bandwagon of what everyone else thinks.

41:35Marc Andreessen:And then a related question is, so Tyler Cowen asked this question a lot. He says, look, like if you talk to people who have been around for a long time, who traveled a lot, ideally over the course of the last 50, 100 years, like even just in the US, if you talk to those people or if you read accounts of people who traveled a lot, like I don't know, 100 years ago or something, you would go to different cities in the US and you would have very different experiences, right? You'd have very different local cultures. Right. And so if you're in, you know, whatever, you know, Louisiana, you were having a extremely different experience if you go to Maine or if you go to California or if you go to if you go to Kansas.

42:08Marc Andreessen:And then, you know, now it's, you know, and by the way, you know, the regional accents, you know, if you watch recordings of people talking from 100 years ago, like the accents are just incredible or the regional accents are just incredible. Right. And then, you know, everything, you know, food and art and culture and architecture, you know, just human behavior and social arrangements. And like, just like, there was just like incredible variations because, you know, because communication was hard and expensive and transportation was hard and expensive. And, you know, people had grown up in their communities and had kind of formed different ways of living.

42:36Marc Andreessen:And then, you know, with kind of the rise of modern media and modern transportation technologies, you know, the critique goes at least is that that variation is disappearing. And by the way, you know, the good news is if you go to any of these places now, the good news is it's got all the same restaurants, right? Like, you know, hey, there's Chili's, right? Like, you know, it's like all the same stuff. You know, there's Walmart, you know, and the kids are listening to, you know, and by the way, the music, the kids are listening to the exact same music, right? Because they can. And they're playing the exact same video games and so forth.

43:01Marc Andreessen:And so the argument basically goes that if we interconnect the world with technology that makes it possible for everybody to share everything all the time, then basically all variation, does that maximize creativity? Because now you get a maximum amount of intermixing and you get a maximum amount of like these formation of these micro communities. You get like a maximum amount of unearthing of all the ideas in the collective unconscious and so forth. Like, do you get that or do you get the opposite of that? Do you get actually a sort of a great kind of washing out of distinction? Does everything become the same?

43:33Marc Andreessen:Everything becomes bland. Basically, you know, you end up with a global monoculture. Yeah, it feels like the monoculture is what's happening. And you have to go further into more remote places to find something interesting to inspire something new. I like to experience different places in the world where I get to see something that I wouldn't see every day. If I go to a city and it has the same restaurants as everywhere else I've been, I'm looking for something new. And I'm wary of everything becoming one. Like, who's to say this way, any one way is the best way? We don't know. We don't know best way.

44:12Who's to say democracy is the best? You know, it's an experiment. Who knows? Like we assume the way we do everything is the best, but we don't know any of these things. Everything is an experiment. And you can go to a small tribe that's an unconnected tribe and they're much happier. You can go to India where people are much poorer and much happier. Who's to say? You know, who's winning the game of life? The people who are happy all day who have nothing? Maybe if they're happy. Right.

44:45Marc Andreessen:There's something very deep culturally and what you might call like Anglo-American Protestantism or something or kind of Western modernity. There's something very evangelistic at its core. Right. And, you know, 100 years ago or 200 years ago, we would have been a national missionary culture where you're trying to spread Christianity to the world. You know, now it feels like, you know, we know we have a secular version of that. We're trying to, you know, to your point, we're trying to spread democracy. We're trying to spread Western culture, Western ways of doing things, Western concepts, you know, Western concepts on basically every front.

45:12Marc Andreessen:and we basically, and we proselytize. Like our societies and our governments, you know, proselytize those things all over the world. And they do so with, you know, tremendous confidence that they're, you know, 100 % doing the correct thing because they've decoded, you know, the singular morally most correct way to live. And, you know, you do wonder, it is very hard to argue against that because you sound like you're defending, you know, retrograde, you sound like you're defending human rights abuses or, you know, all kinds of retrograde behaviors. But, you know, you do wonder whether, You do wonder whether there actually should be allowed to be true diversity in the world, which is to say actual societies that actually basically form themselves as opposed to have external values imposed on them.

45:52Yeah, it was actually a big thing in Trump's Middle East speech where it was such a remarkable speech in the sense that he advocated for the Middle East living or evolving from their own culture as opposed to being changed into our culture, which is a massive change in foreign policy. Which nobody reported on, of course, but it is interesting. that it's arrogant to think that we know what's best for someone else. And that goes as far as me telling you how to live. I can tell you, this is what I've tried and this what's worked for me. Do what you want. People making their own choices is the only way to go.

46:36Marc Andreessen:Well, and you look back, it goes back to the half-life of facts. You could also say like the half-life of moral principles, right? Or something like that, right? Which is, you look, Like, I always keep a way to clear out a dinner party early so I can go home. And I always have like a running list of ways I can do that. And one of the ways I can do that is, you know, just play the game of like, all right, we are completely convinced that we have decoded the morally correct way to live. All right, now let's examine every prior society that ever had that belief, right? You know, including our own society 25 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago.

47:04Marc Andreessen:And let's retrospectively, and it's very natural for us to judge them and basically say, wow, they were morally horrifying. They believed in all of these, you know, terrible things that we now know were like absolutely awful, you know, and they were these terrible people as a result, you know, but somehow we're the people that have it all figured out. And then I'm like, look, people 50 years from now are going to be sitting, you know, in this, you know, in this restaurant talking about us. And they're going to be like, I cannot believe those people, you know, had these deeply immoral beliefs on XYZ.

47:28Marc Andreessen:Yeah. Let's get rid of the Rick Rubin statue now. Despite him being a mean. I mean, this belief is that we don't even know what's right for us, much less what else. We're trying to figure it out. And staying humble seems like the best approach. Any arrogant approach of thinking you know what's best for someone else is probably not a great idea. So I'm going to try to workshop a theory that I'd like you guys to red team, because my sense is that there's a somewhat pessimistic view that you described, Rick, that there's this homogenization of culture partly imposed on us by experts going, hey, here's what's good for you.

48:13I'm an expert in this domain. Let me tell you what's good for you. But what is quite novel about AI is not only that it's a sort of democratizer, like you said, but as I watch you use it, as I watch Mark start writing scripts that he puts online, as I watch Ben use AI to do a bunch of stuff inside the firm, and as I watch Eric, who's a prolific podcast creator, use AI in creating podcasts, what seems to emerge for me is that it's also a ceiling raiser, right? That when you put AI in the hands of a master craftsman from one domain and let them expand to a new domain, it raises the bar in what they can create because you're no longer trapped by the expert of that prior domain to give you more and more of the same stuff, right?

49:01So you've created, I mean, the world thinks of you as a prolific musician, but you've just created a piece of software, right? And you've transcended one domain to the other. And I find there are these moments, especially when I watch folks who are at the top of one creative discipline use AI. A few months ago, we were watching, we were introducing Marty Scorsese, to this image model that one of the founders we work with had trained. And Marty was prompting the camera, the virtual camera, the AI, to create images in a completely different way than what traditional sort of what we'd call vibe creators do.

49:44There's people who couldn't create images before who used tools like MidJourney and so on for the first time, and that's great. That is democratizing access. But then when you put in a really sophisticated piece of technology like an image model in the hands of someone who's actually a craftsman or what we'd call a professional, it turns out it raises the ceiling of what they can create because they use it in different ways than someone who's using it for the first time. So am I drinking too much Kool-Aid when, you know, Eric, I look at you and say, you were an investor, you were a phenomenal angel investor who then became a prolific podcaster.

50:19And your podcasts, like when I would listen to you talking about venture capital, it was completely different from a podcast expert, a media expert, a talking head on TV talking about our industry, right? So are we entering an area where we don't need experts because AI essentially raises the bar? It doesn't just democratize, it doesn't just lower the floor, you know, and decrease the barrier to entry, but it increases the quality of the kinds of content that someone who's a master in one domain can create in another one. Absolutely. It always seems like the people who are creative, who see the world in a creative way, can apply it to different things.

50:59We see it over and over again. So in that way, it allows people, as I said, anyone who thinks of themselves as an artist now has a new tool at their disposal that wasn't there before. And it allows them to try things that would have been impossible to mock up. So, and I would say our overall conversation isn't negative at all. If anything, I think we're talking more about the human intervention in AI in making it more human as opposed to letting the AI be the smartest version of itself in going past what humans do. and like in the AlphaGo story, the reason the AlphaGo AI was able to beat the Grandmaster wasn't because it was doing what the humans would do.

51:48It did something the humans wouldn't do. Now, if humans trained it to only do what the humans would do, the computer wouldn't have won. Yeah, it was training it actually playing another version of itself. Now, if we're, as humans, training AI to be more human, we're limiting it. The reason the AI was able to beat the Grandmaster was because it did its computer thing. It did the move that no human would do. When the AI made the move, the unthinkable move, the Grandmaster got up and left the room, and the announcers, the commentators of the match said, it made a mistake. The computer made a mistake.

52:37And it made a mistake because it did something that no human would do. But it didn't do it because it was not allowed to do it. It was within the rules of the game, but it was not in the culture to do it. So, you know, one of the emerging patterns in the Vibe coding space as a result of what you're describing is that often folks who start using a tool realize that just there's a craft to using it. Like you said, there's a human intervention that when you elicit the model in different ways, you get higher quality things. So with Cursor, for example, early on, people would tell the composer mode, hey, please go build me a website.

53:15And then what evolved was a craft of prompting that said, actually, you've got to start by talking to the model by asking it to think like a product manager and planning out the entire creation. And then the next step is let's talk about the data schema, right? And sort of deconstructing the process of creating a piece of software into its atomic units and then vibe prompting it to do that in a different way than might be intuitive. As you got into the way of code, from the beginning of when you started working on the book to now, what's changed about the way you as a human intervene in the creation process?

53:51What's changed about the way you prompt it today? You would prompt a model to create something versus, when you started working on it originally? I'm not using AI and I'm not prompting. That's a surprise. How did you create it then? The old-fashioned way. I had a dozen or more translations of the DAO and I read them and I tried to see what the message, the universal message between the different translations was saying and say it in a way that it related to vibe coding. So this I find is quite interesting, right? It's very hard for you to describe the process as being any different than what you usually do, which is you just, you asked it to, there's some latent space in your mind that you were prompting your own mind to produce this.

54:47And so in your mind, the process was no different than with AI than without it. no the only difference is instead of maybe asking an engineer to mock up something for me I might ask the computer to mock it up for me but it would be the same process of asking for different iterations comparing them trying to get it down to two that I like and then between the two understand the strengths of each and then often taking from both and putting them together and seeing what that does and being open to being wrong like setting out on a path to create something and seeing this thing that I was excited about creating is not very good.

55:25But through that, through that experiment, I learned there's this other thing I wasn't looking for. That's really interesting. The most interesting thing about it. And it's been that way my whole career of, of working on things. When I, I'll tell you a story. When I started working with Johnny Cash, we sat in my living room and he played me songs on an acoustic guitar, and that was the way that we got to know each other, was understanding each other musically through demonstrating songs. But I didn't think that the record that we made was going to be an acoustic record of him playing songs on his guitar and singing them.

56:01It ended up being that, but that was not the idea, that we were just modeling, we were looking for songs and seeing what songs sounded believable when he sang them. And he would sing these songs that he sang in childhood that he had never recorded or songs that he liked growing up or songs that he liked over the course of his life. And that was how I got to know him. And then we would go into a studio with musicians to make the proper recording. And I realized very quickly those recordings, those experiments, and we did many of them, weren't as interesting as the original sitting in the living room, him playing me the songs.

56:40So it revealed, the process revealed itself that the most interesting thing was the thing we started with that we didn't think was the thing we were making. And again, it's always like that. You may have an idea of what something's going to be. You start that process, and then either you find an experiment along the way that's better or a mistake happens and you realize, hmm, we weren't intending for that to happen at all, but it's more interesting than all the things that we thought were going to be good. And being open, instead of deciding what's going to be good, we're paying attention to see what's actually good.

57:24And it's not intellectual at all. It's not, we don't think it up. We allow it to exist. And we do experiments and we do iterations and we try a lot of things. And then it shows us, it tells us what it wants to be. And when you went through that process with Johnny Cash, did you both come to the conclusion at the same time? Or was one of you ahead of the other and say, hey, just playing the guitar worked much better than getting in the studio? Or like, how did that happen? I had the experience of listening to the quote-unquote demos and thinking, after we had done, I think, three different sessions with three different sets of musicians, quit the best musicians in the world.

58:19And they were interesting, the things that came out of those, but still those living room recordings were the most compelling to me. And I just said to Johnny, he's like, this is most interesting to me. When I listen to it, what do you think? and he said, well, I always wanted to make an album like that. I just was afraid. I never did. But it was always a dream to do it. And then it allowed him to do something that he always wanted to do but was afraid to do. It was so unusual.

58:51Marc Andreessen:Sorry, why was he afraid to do it? What was the tear? He was training how to make a hit record, you know, and that 50 years of trying to make a hit record and getting, and you, it's not uncommon for an artist, a commercial artist, to get lost in the expectation of what they're, what they think they're supposed to do, what's expected from them. Sort of break that expectation of what people want, what people are expecting and what the business around me is expecting and get to something that's so personal that it feels almost more like a diary entry than something for the public, it's a scary idea.

59:38It's bringing down a wall of like, it's not a facade. It's not the main stage. It's much more personal. Mark, Ben, Eric, you guys have been angel investors in like the earliest days of when a founder is describing something that they want to create. do you think it's similar to what Rick is describing when you have a great artist in front of you like Johnny Cash or somebody, a founder whose canvas is maybe creating a piece of technology and they're scared to go somewhere just because they might think the world's not ready for it, investors won't like it there's no willingness to pay, there's no product market fit am I crazy or is there an analogy here which is quite similar?

1:00:21Paul, I think the analogy it's a little different, but I think the thing that's the same is it's always very dangerous when you get the feeling the entrepreneur is telling you something that you want to hear, but they don't believe. So when that kind of distance comes in, you know, it very reliably is not going to work. So, you know, one of the things that Mark and I used to do a lot in early days was basically try and convince the entrepreneur to do what we wanted. And then if they did that, we would not invest because they didn't, you know, they're coming in with their beliefs, but, you know, they want to tacked over to the market.

1:01:07And that's false. I mean, it's just a false idea because, like, if you're truly going to have a breakthrough, you have to kind of get to something that the world doesn't understand that you see. And like, if we can see it, you know, like that, it's not a breakthrough. Or if we see something in your idea, you know, in that way, where we're just trying to push you into something, as opposed to helping you notice something, then that's, I think that is very analogous. Like, do you think for yourself, you know, are you deep enough into your idea? Are you kind of connected to it in that way? Or are you just influenced by whatever you think the world wants you to be?

1:01:56Marc Andreessen:So relationship between art and audience. And of course, you know, people in the art world, music world have struggled with this for a very long time, which is I create my truly individualized art and the audience doesn't like it, doesn't want it. But like, you know, is it, was it the right art to create? Was it still good art? You know, does art require an audience? And to your point, Rick, like, you know, in the abstract, you could maybe as an artist, you know, tell yourself that, you know, if I create art and nobody likes it and nobody buys it, that it's still my art. But art is a commercial enterprise, right?

1:02:24Marc Andreessen:If somebody is going to make their living as an artist, if they're going to, if they really want to reach people and they really want to change culture and have an impact on the world, right? The audience does at some point need to take it up. And so there's some sort of deep, I think, underlying relationship that in part is just commercial interest, but also is like for art to really take, it needs an audience. You know, I'll let you comment on that in a second. But like startups, we think about this a lot, which is like, OK, for a startup to do its thing, to bring a new algae to market or to realize a vision of a founder, like it's a complete waste of time if the market never wants it.

1:02:55Marc Andreessen:Right. Because then you just have a prototype that sits on a shelf somewhere and like, you know, nothing has ever happened. And so it's like there is a synergistic feedback loop. There is some sort of concordance that needs to happen between the creator and the audience. Like the audience does need to buy in. A lot of what we think about in startup world is the legitimate startup ideas may sound like, you know, they're, you know, kind of crazy. But, you know, when they succeed, they succeed because they provide something that the customer base, you know, never realized they wanted. But when they see it, they're like, oh, wow, that's fantastic.

1:03:29Marc Andreessen:I want that, right? And so the way I would describe what Ben said is the startup founders that are overly trying to appeal to what they believe the audience wants can get themselves confused and can end up with something the audience actually doesn't want. But if they get to the true underlying idea, they get to something truly original and creative, then they unlock something in the customer base. The customer base didn't know that it wanted. Would you describe the same thing? Does the same thing happen in music? Is that what happens? Or more generally, like, what is the nature of the relationship between the artist and the audience?

1:04:01I would say the best artists tune into what they feel and they present that. And the ones who connect are the ones where the audience feels what the artist feels. If the artist is changing what they do to try to get the audience, it undermines the whole thing. It's the same as you guys asking a startup to change what they do for the market. It's the same thing. The best always comes when the artist is being true to themselves, doing their best work. And that means not every artist succeeds. But the ones who succeed are the ones where they're true to themselves and the thing that they're doing that's true to themselves connects with the audience.

1:04:46And it may be a while. I interviewed Richard Prince recently, the fine artist, and he was an unsuccessful artist living in New York City for 20 years. And then something happened where someone bought some of his paintings for, I think,$50. And now, I don't know, 20 years after that, his re-photography, it's called, might sell it off for$60 million. dollars and but for for 20 years no one bought a one piece no one bought one piece of his art yeah it yeah and it's it it happens when it happens he always stayed true to what he was doing and then all of a sudden people came around van gogh i don't think ever sold a painting during his lifetime but he was true to himself and now we go to a museum and we get to see van gogh So the market is like a secondary aspect where sometimes it catches on, sometimes it doesn't.

1:05:47And I would say maybe some of the greatest artists who ever existed, we've never seen their work because it's a piece of that puzzle, which is the ability to live in the world and promote their work and show their work. Like there are some great musicians who are homeless. They don't have what it takes to be able to go on a 300-day tour. It's a grueling, being a professional musician is a grueling life. So you can be super talented, but if you don't have the work ethic side of it down, then that's not going to work either. It's both the talent, the inspiration, the stars aligning, and the ability to want to break through the walls that you need to break through in these competitive fields.

1:06:42All of those things have to come together. And a lot of it's out of our control. You know, the parts that are in our control is we can work hard, we can show up, we could do our best and be willing to do whatever it takes for it to work. But that still doesn't guarantee that it works. Right.

1:06:58Marc Andreessen:So there's a thing in music. Tell me if this is true. There's a sort of cliche in music, which is every artist's first album, first hit album is the result of, you know, 20 years of, you know, artistic creativity and, you know, evolution and original thinking and new ideas and new styles. And, you know, kind of, you know, the thing that makes them, you know, kind of break through, you know, some new thing. Like that's Elton number one. And then Elton number two is always about life on the road. It's often the case. Right, because all of a sudden, to your point, like that is their life. It's also possible that an artist has had a hard life and then found success and their life changes.

1:07:32And now they live in luxury and they can't tap into that energy that what they were struggling against, the struggle, was their art. And now they're not struggling anymore.

1:07:43Marc Andreessen:Let's take everything that you guys have said on these topics as true. let's just assume this is all correct, which I think it is, then the advice that gets applied, you know, and you hear this a lot in startup world, the advice gets applied is, you know, follow your passion, you know, you know, you know, screw the doubters. The doubters are wrong. Don't market test things. You know, don't worry about the audience. Don't worry about the market. Like, just do the thing that you think you're on planet Earth to do. You could argue that that's good advice because it gets people down this path, you know, like Rick, of like what you do with artists to kind of discovering authenticity.

1:08:15Marc Andreessen:You could also argue though, there's like a degenerate version of that advice, which basically is like, just be narcissistic, just be narcissistic, just be completely self-absorbed and, you know, just do things for yourself and, you know, just like completely disregard the entire concept of an audience. Like, what's the dividing line when sort of advice that derives from these ideas is actually like good advice versus at what point is it just actually encouraging people to become insufferable and sort of to unplug from the things that they would need to do to actually find an audience. I believe that the audience comes last and the artists should be true to themselves.

1:08:47And that ultimately is in service to the audience. The audience is best served when they get the real version of you. If you start watering down the real version of you to do what you feel they want, it's a recipe for disaster.

1:09:04Marc Andreessen:But that said, some of the best, like in movies, like some of the best directors do extensive, like they will do testing. Like, you know, they'll make the movie. They will test it. They will take the audience feedback because, you know, because it just turns out they loot. Like when they see the audience react to what they've made, they realize things about it that causes them to improve it. Like, is that a legit, like I was going to say, so is that a legitimate, like, what's the line between that and what you're trying to get them to not do? Well, sometimes you'll have a director show a movie to an audience and realize problems with it and work on them.

1:09:37And there are other times that they'll show a movie to an audience and the audience hates it and those movies will want to be great hits so it's there is no hard and fast rule it's like did they show it to the right audience not everything is for everybody that's another part of it it's like how do you get to the audience that's the right audience for the thing that you're making there's a famous story

1:09:58Marc Andreessen:that was one more thing so there's a famous story from the making of blazing saddles and i don't know if it's true but if it's not it should be yeah which is mel brooks made blazing saddles and he screened it for the executives, I think, at Warner Brothers. And it was like, nobody laughed. They sat there in stunned silence. They were completely horrified. And like, they were just like, this thing is a train wreck. Like, this is horrible. And then they did a follow-up screening with the assistants and the secretaries and who just like were howling with laughter the entire way through. And so, yeah, now, you know, now the, I guess maybe the claim or the critique on this would be, yes, if you're Mel Brooks and you've made Blazing Saddles, it's fine to have test screenings in which nobody laughs.

1:10:39Marc Andreessen:But like, you know, your median filmmaker who does that is probably, has probably actually really, truly shut the bed. But how do you know? Again, how do you know? How do you know? Yeah. So I've got a somewhat refined answer to your question, Mark. So there was a band that had a great name called Soul to Soul. And the reason it was a great name is because that's kind of what music is from my soul to your soul. And so as an artist, if it doesn't come from your soul or as an entrepreneur, it's never going to work. Now, there may be an alignment thing to getting it exactly to land, but if you compromise the original thing, then you're just a wreck.

1:11:28And actually in, so in entrepreneurial world, like we saw this with Databricks where like they had a very clear vision of what they were going to be. And the audience wanted it on premise and they refused to do it because it was so contrary to their vision. But they still, you know, they still had to do a lot of work to understand the customer needs over time. But like the core, core, core idea they had was like, it had to be in the cloud. And I think that, you know, when you compromise the core thing in kind of entrepreneurship at art, which is like, this is the thing that I really, really feel, then it's always going to be bad.

1:12:11Like there's no way to make that good after the fact by listening to feedback. But Ben, the tension I find there, let's say I'm going to channel being my dark founder days, you know, when I was, you're in the middle of the idea maze, you've got something that you believe the world needs, but you read Mark's product market fit definition and you stare at it in tears because it's not resonating, right? You've put out what you think the world needs, but it's not resonating. Is the answer to reconcile what Rick is saying and what you're saying, which is you can't compromise what matters and yet, you know, or reconcile what Mark was saying, is that you've got to, when you're building for a customer, you've got to change everything about it before you have product market fit until you find it, is the answer that you just have to care really authentically about a type of person you want to serve and then exceed their expectations.

1:13:07And what's authentic and true is that you care deeply about some particular person in the world who you want to serve because your job is to build a product or a service or in the case of a musician, to serve humanity by evoking a feeling or helping someone when they listen to your hip hop record to lift them up and give them the pep they need to go about their day. Is the answer that you have to be in service of somebody else to ultimately serve yourself? I can say that it's so simple that you're serving people like you. You're the audience. You're making your favorite thing. You're in love with it.

1:13:46And then other people who like the things you like will like it. The thing other than that is some sort of mind reading. It's some sort of like fiction. You can't know what anyone else is going to think or like or do. If you taste some food and you love it, you're excited. You guys got to taste this. It's so good. And you will either like it or not. But there's no better judge. I can't taste food and say this tastes terrible to me, but I think you're really going to love it. It's impossible. It's impossible way to live. Right. You know, it's funny.

1:14:20Marc Andreessen:We don't really have a word for we don't really have a positive word for narcissism. Yeah. Or solipsism is the other, you know, solipsism is self-absorption, like self-absorption. Self-knowledge. No oneself. To know oneself, right? Yeah. Which is a very deep thing. It's an extremely deep concept that takes you a lifetime to do sometimes, you know. Yeah. But you're right.

1:14:43Erik Torenberg:It is generally found upon by society. Ben, it seems like that's the future of education. if expertise matters less and less, what matters more and more is taste and being in touch with yourself and this kind of self-knowledge. And so how do we think about that, Rick, in terms of sort of the future of education in a world where, where, you know, the skills that you have, i.e. sort of the lack of skills in certain areas, but, but a high regard of taste is, is just more important. Yeah. It seems like taste and curiosity and open-mindedness is where it's that. And that's what, um, I don't know. I have, uh, I don't, I don't remember ever learning anything in school that was helpful to me at any point in my life.

1:15:25You and Mark have that in common. My takeaway is basically that you're saying we've got to vibe with ourselves when using these tools and watching and reading the way of code is basically a window into watching how you, rick vibed with yourself in the creation of this it's a again a 3 000 year old manual on how to vibe with yourself that's what it is