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♪♪♪
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman.
My guest today is Mark Andreessen.
Mark is an entrepreneur, venture capital investor,
and software engineer.
He co-founded Mosaic,
which was the first widely used internet browser,
as well as Netscape.
He also co-founded Opsware and Ning.
He's on the board of Meta,
and his most important achievement is that he's the first
billionaire to ever appear on this podcast.
Mark and I talk about venture capital as a whole,
and why it is that VC firms on average
fail to outperform the stock market.
We talk about the role of hierarchy in companies
and the possibility of having a truly flat structure
where every employees of equal rank.
We talk about George Orwell's book,
Homage to Catalonia.
We talk about why corporations go woke
and why Mark resists that trend.
We talk about the maladaptive qualities
that have helped him succeed in the VC world,
and we talk about his long-term vision
for his VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz.
This conversation was recorded live in front of an audience
at a conference that Mark and his partner Ben put on,
and unfortunately, the recorded audio and video
turned out to be really subpar.
So your listening experience won't be what you're used to
on this podcast for this one episode,
but the conversation itself was very interesting.
So I encourage you to bear with it.
So without further ado, Mark Andreessen.
♪♪
Mark, thank you so much for doing this episode
of Conversations with Coleman.
Great.
And obviously here you need no introduction,
but you may also need no introduction just in general.
I saw on Twitter the other day,
someone from San Francisco tweeted,
I just want to meet a girl in San Francisco
who doesn't know who Mark and Driessen is.
I mean, it's a real problem for young men
all through the Bay Area.
I mean, I don't, I mean, I wish him luck.
I mean, that sounds like a real challenge.
Girls are actually putting in their Tinder bios.
I do not know who Mark and Driessen is.
Yeah, I don't know.
You just can't trust everything on Twitter.
Right.
Yeah, that's right.
So the first question I want to ask you
is about the VC landscape.
So the Kauffman Foundation released a report recently
saying that the average VC fund does not do better
than index funds.
One looked at over the past 20 years.
Is that something you agree with?
And if so, why does Andreessen Horowitz stand out?
What is the special sauce that makes you the elite of the VC world?
So I would say that part of the statement
from the analysis is correct.
So the average venture fund is terrible.
So the average venture fund is terrible.
It will return less than stock market returns
with much higher levels of volatility,
which is a very bad combination.
Like that's what you don't want.
It's the quadrant that you don't want when you're investing.
Well, the reason for that is venture capital
is perpetually overfunded.
And we know venture capital is perpetually overfunded
because we see the result in the returns,
which you basically see as venture capital as an asset class.
It's like there's 10% of venture capital firms
that make money make better than market returns.
And enough returns to compensate for the higher volatility.
And then there's like 90% of venture
that is just a bad investment.
And so venture capital is basically permanently overfunded.
It's been overfunded like this for at least 50 years.
It shows no sign.
It shows no sign of not continuing to be overfunded,
arguably it's even more overfunded now
that it's ever been.
There's lots of theories for that.
One theory is just as somebody said,
it's the triumph of hope over experience.
So it's the sixth marriage effect.
It's like, OK, maybe all the other venture funds
invest in are bad.
Maybe this one will be good.
But I think there's a deeper problem,
and this is the problem that is very hard for people
to talk about, very frustrating to think about.
But I think it's sort of the big dominant thing
about venture capital today.
In a lot of ways, the world economy today,
which is basically think about it as sort of Western economic
development over the preceding 200 years.
And then more recently, Eastern economic development
has generated many trillions of dollars of capital
from the first Industrial Revolution,
Second Industrial Revolution, now the Computer Revolution.
Huge massive capital.
That capital has pooled into what are basically giant pension
funds, right?
So these are giant national sovereign wealth funds
and these giant endowments and these giant company
pension funds and so forth.
All of this money is expected to be invested
to pay for the retirement of all of the people
in modern society who are aging and all of our societies
now are aging quite rapidly.
That capital needs to generate a return.
It needs to generate a 7% plus reliable annual return
to be able to pay for the retirement of basically
this giant wave of old people hitting all of our societies.
And there's just way more money that needs to be invested
that needs to generate that return than there
are investable opportunities to actually productively
invest that money.
Right, and so that directly translates
into why the average venture capital firm is not very good.
It's because there's just a shortage.
There are a shortage of literally good things to invest in.
Like that's the shortage.
The shortage is the number of great entrepreneurs,
the number of great business ideas,
and that's what drives the return zone.
And I think that mismatch between the available capital
to invest in new ideas and the actual number of new ideas
and people who can execute them, I think,
that mismatch is like wildly wide in scope.
I think it's bigger than ever.
I think it continues to broaden out.
And I think it's sort of the fact that this underneath,
the way a lot of people kind of think that,
you know, if they think modern societies stagnating
or science and technology aren't delivering,
I think that's the core thing underneath all of it.
They're just art.
What is creating that shortage of entrepreneurs and new ideas?
So this is the big question.
And I sort of call this the puzzle of the missing Elons.
Right, so like, okay, so there's Elon Musk.
Right, so there's Elon Musk.
And like he does the rockets and he does the cars.
And you know, now he's doing, you know,
he was the seed funder originally behind OpenAI,
which is doing AI, you know,
do a lot of these AI breakthroughs.
And he's doing Neuralink and he's doing, you know,
he's doing all these things.
And it's like, okay, like, you know, there's one Elon,
there's, you know, there's much of other people
he kind of put in that category.
There's a bunch of other people you kind of put,
maybe a category kind of a tear right below that, you know, but like, it's like, you know,
you can make a list of those people, right?
Like you can make a list and you could probably put it on one sheet of paper.
Why aren't there 10 times more of those people,
a hundred times more, a thousand times more,
a thousand times more, you know, why aren't they, you know, cars?
I mean, to build a new car company in America and, you know,
the 19, you know, in the 2000s, it's like this radical crazy idea that a lot of people,
you know, everybody basically thought would fail.
Same thing on rockets.
And yet he did both at the same time.
And so clearly it is possible to do bigger things than we're doing and to do a lot more of them,
you know, and look, you know, you can pass the blame a lot on this one,
you know, including, I'm sure you can blame, blame these for a lot of it.
But I'm just telling you, like, I mean, we seek these people out,
this is our job, like we're self-interested, you know, sort of capitalist,
we're seeking these people out, we're trying to find them, wear them more,
you know, then you get into all these really interesting questions about,
well, you know, are they, are they, you know, are they, are they born that way?
Like, are they, were they trained, you know, how much of it is, you know, inherent
capability, how much of it is, you know, choices along the way, how much of it is.
I mean, I can imagine two explanations. One is just regulation and red tape raises
the cost of every new idea. And this is something I've heard not only from big business owners,
from small, but small business owners. I have a friend that owns a restaurant in Greenwich Village
that he inherited from his father. And he said, looked at the landscape of regulation over the
past 50 years. And he said, I can't imagine starting such a business today, right?
But then there's also, is it that our society values entrepreneurship less than it used to?
Is it that entrepreneurship is seen as not as high status, a path as, as it used to be seen as?
Well, so yeah, I said, I think, you know, under both of those factors, the sort of this question,
do we want change? You know, do we want to be in a society that is dynamic? Do we want to be
in a society that's changing rapidly? Do we want the disruption that change creates? You know,
do we want existing systems of living and sort of structure and hierarchy and patterns of who has
power and who gets to make decisions? Do we want that kind of arbitrarily overturned?
I mean, I can tell you, like, the CEOs of all the other car companies very much do not want
Elon to, like, they would very much prefer he not exist. They would very much refer that that
company fail. You know, it's much better for the consumer, right? And for the world at large,
that company has exceeded. You know, he's really, he's really caused them a huge problem. And
that's a micro example of, you know, that question sort of exists at every level of society.
Yeah, you know, and, and, you know, here you kind of get into this, you know, sort of question
of likes, you know, basically the future shape of society. And then, you know, to the extent that
you think we're becoming more risk-averse as a society or less prone to support, you know,
disruption or change, you know, it's like, is decline a choice, right? You know, did we decide
that? Was that decided for us? You know, was there ever really a conversation about it? By the way,
is it even any sort of directed processor? Is it just a side effect of sort of bad incentives,
sort of bad micro incentives all in the way? I mean, there's lots, lots of interesting questions
in there. It does seem to be trending in that direction. I find that where you started just
very interesting on this, because if you just look at the money flows and you look at the returns,
you can, it's just, it's like statistical evidence for what is this sort of long-run sag,
in, you know, basically dynamism, contra, you know, the amount of money that's actually available to
invest. By the way, there's an optimistic interpretation of this, which is the money's out there. Like,
so here's, okay, here's an amazing thing. If you just, if a space alien arrived, you know,
if this guy comes from Mars and basically says, well, you guys have all these problems,
but you have all this money, right? So there's these trillions of dollars of capital sitting
there that like desperately needs a better return. You've got all these really big problems where
if you solve them, you can build these really big businesses around them. Like, isn't this just
like a trivially easy thing to solve? You just get the money connected to the people, they build
the thing, they solve the problem. It's all fantastic. And you basically say like, what's wrong with
your people? Did he have a good point? So I looked at your book recommendation list that you put out
recently. And one of the books recommended was George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, which is his
memoir account of his time in the Spanish Civil War fighting with the anarchists. And that was
interesting to me because one thing he points out is that, you know, with the army, the anarchist
army, there was no hierarchy. He points out that, you know, he's fully aware that in an army,
it would seem like the perfect situation for a chain of command, right? And just yes, sir,
and that's how you get things done, which is very much what your partner Ben Horowitz was
saying a VC firm needs to be. And yet he found that in this particular instance, there was a
subculture of a flat horizontal structure, which actually sort of worked well. At least he had a
nuanced view on whether it worked well, but it was not merely a disaster, as one would expect,
on his account. So I guess that leaves me to the question. I assume that you agree with Ben on
that the VC firm has to be a chain of command, like a one node of decision making. Do you see
any successful examples of flattening the hierarchy? Well, so we'll come back to the venture thing,
because that's an interesting question. I mean, the obvious, but I'd love to talk about Orwell
for a little bit first. So the obvious question is, you know, did the anarchist win? And I, as
spoiler alert, for those of you who haven't read the book in the phrase in the 90 years since it
came out, the anarchist lost quite badly. They actually lost, actually, specifically they lost
twice. They lost twice. They they overall, you know, the left overall lost that war, the right
one. But even within the left, a big part of the theme of that book is actually the competition
among the left wing forces. And it actually became a three way civil war within the left,
which was the anarchist versus the socialist versus the communists. And again, spoiler alert,
the communist won, the communist won, because they were being basically funded and supported by
Stalin, who was famously not a fan of flat. He was quite fond of centralized control. So more
seriously, I mean, look, this is like an endlessly fascinating question around the structure of
society. And by the way, the structure of creativity and, you know, do what extend his hierarchy and
circlewise decision making an impediment to sort of, you know, sort of creative freedom,
creative expression, or, you know, to what extent is lack of hierarchy and impediment to
actually executing and getting things done? There's another essay, there's another writer unrelated
to Orwell from the 1960s who wrote this thing. And it's called the tyranny of structurelessness.
And it's this fascinating thing. It's actually very Orwell-like kind of thing. And it's this
woman named Joe Freeman. And she at the time, this is the 60s, 70s. And at the time, it was like a
suit. There was like the super vibrant, call it like radical lesbian feminist collective
thing movement kind of underway. These sort of people trying to, basically women trying to
create these kind of radical female only kind of radical, you know, kind of, literally spaces,
including communities, basically, like communes. She was one of these people. And so she signed
up for basically this radical lesbian feminist commune, which was going to, you know, overthrow
the patriarchy, overthrow all of hierarchy, right, be a full, be a full cooperative. And of course,
everybody knows what, you know, men are like hierarchical, but like women when they're together,
they just all get along. Everything is very, very peaceful and everybody cooperates. And so,
and so they did this. They ran this, you know, they had many others ran this experiment. And so
anyway, she wrote this essay coming out the other side called the tyranny of structuralistness.
And basically what she said is what you observe, for example, in companies that run this experiment
where they try what sometimes call hypocrisy, where they have this sort of flat, flat structure.
And she basically says what you, she called the tyranny of structuralistness. Like what you get
is not democracy, what you get is tyranny, right? And so, which is basically a hierarchy forms,
like a hierarchy naturally forms, but it forms in like a weird, unnatural, and unspoken way. And
she says the way that it forms actually is it starts with clicks, right? And so you basically,
like within the so-called flat structure, you start to have a lysis form. Those lysis start to
fight with each other. They start to basically grab her power. And before you know it, you actually
have a power hierarchy. It's just a very deeply, you know, dishonest, you know, it's undeclared,
right? So it's dishonest, right? It's manipulative, it's cynical, it's deceptive. Everybody's lying,
oh, I don't have any power. But by the way, if you, you know, say or do the wrong thing,
like you're out of the community, you know, kind of thing. And so basically her argument was,
the only thing worse than formal hierarchy is informal hierarchy. And I do, I do feel like
that's a lesson we kind of learn over and over again. And they're like I said, we've had companies
that have gone through this, you know, where they kind of think they could have everybody vote
on these things. I mean, we'll look, the state of California, we go through this. We, you know, we
actually, you know, there's this classic debate in the construction of government, right? Democratic
government, which is are you a democracy or are you a representative democracy with a hierarchy,
right? Which basically has an oligarchy. And, you know, in California, we run both experiments,
you know, we have, we have the, you know, we have the legislature, the governor, which is hierarchy.
But we also have this referendum process, right, where we have literally direct democracy. And I
think most people who observe that are horrified by the results. So anyway, it turns out, and then
just back to homage to Catalonia for a moment, the most fascinating part of the, or another
fascinating part of that book is he actually describes to your point, he actually describes
there was an anarchist society, according to his description, in Spain, sort of in the beginning
of that period. And it was like a couple years long. It is what the Chas, for those of you from
Seattle, is what the Chas was trying to replicate. And he talks about how every elite and rich
person sort of pretended to be poor. They started dressing like the poor very quickly. When there
was this moment, like there was this moment, it's a little bit like what would happen if like,
you know, a group of people crash-landed at a desert island. It's like there's this moment
where everybody's in it together. It was what he talks about in the book. There was this moment
in Spain where there was these anarchist communities where it literally was, everybody was like very
fired up and passionate to finally have a community that was going to reflect kind of true justice
and true egalitarianism and true democracy. And there was this moment where it worked. And if you
were hungry, someone would give you food. And if you were cold, somebody would give you clothes.
And if you didn't have a place to sleep, you know, sort of, and it was this, like, either way,
he describes it as it's this magic moment. And of course, one of the things that made it so magic
is it ended. It was very short, right? It was very shortly ended very quickly. And so I think you
can get these moments. And by the way, you see this in companies sometimes early on,
where there'll be a handful of people, you know, often just the founders of a company who are
actually really cooperating and they're really running in kind of a peer structure, you know,
families run, run, run like this, right? Families are kind of inherently socialist,
kind of in this way. It's just like it works for a small number of people for a certain amount of
time. And then at some point, you know, human nature being what it is, animal nature being what
it is, you're going to get a hierarchy. It's just a question of whether you have a good one or a bad one.
I'm Kevin Miller, former pro athlete, author, father of nine and self help guide. I broadcast
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So a few months ago, there was a paper released by two academics called Why Do Companies Go Woke?
And sometimes when I speak about wokeness recently, people ask me to define it, right? So...
Well, there's two things we know about wokeness. One is it doesn't exist. Yeah. And the other is,
it's really good. That's right. It doesn't exist, but we should want it to exist. Definitely. Yes, 100%.
So I mean, this is how I would define wokeness. Tell me if you agree. I think it's a belief system
which takes all of the foundational ideas and systems of Western society. We're talking markets,
the rule of law, meritocracy, free speech, and says all of these things are actually built to
benefit straight white men and to harm minorities and women and LGBTQ, etc. And so they need to be
destroyed. And anyone who disagrees with this needs to be treated like a religious heretic,
like old school Christianity or fundamentalist Islam would treat an atheist, right? So that's
the package of police I call wokeness. Now, you and many others have observed that many major
corporations, which historically would be the last people to embrace a revolutionary ideology,
right? We're talking about the corporations that get criticized for running sweat shops with child
labor are turning around and speaking all of the shibileths of this ideology. And the question is,
why? Is it because it's actually profitable, in which case, you know, it just makes perfect sense?
Is it because the decision makers at the firm are true believers in this ideology? Or is it that
there is some fear involved where it's sort of like paying the mob to do business,
except the mob is your own employees, right? So what do you make of this? Why do companies go
woke? Yeah, so there's a big underlying, we can talk about the kind of underlying movement that
got us here. But I look, I think there's three basic theories, I guess, at least that I would
see. They're sort of what you might call this very cynical theory and the cynical theory,
and a lot of people on the left believe this theory, the cynical theory basically, well, the
full cynical theory basically is like basically, we call it radical egalitarian social revolution
used to be an economic phenomenon, right? So, you know, Marxism flowing into sort of socialism
communism into the 20th century, you know, it used to be the key struggle, the axis of oppression
and sort of left wing egalitarian thought was economic class, right? And in that structure,
of course, you know, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the bosses were oppressing the workers, you know,
and then therefore the labor movement and therefore the need for communist revolution and kind of
all the rest of it. And so the cynical explanation for companies going woke is companies in the
capitalist class and the evil, you know, the evil capitalists in bourgeois, you know, kind of
powers of society, you know, that was definitely bad for them, slash us, right, which is because,
you know, that's we get our heads on pikes at the other end of that revolution. And so if you could
kind of magically transform that energy from an economic class based struggle into an identity,
race and gender based struggle, right, then all of a sudden like the capitalists are off the hook,
right? And then the capitalists can take up the banner of like racial and gender, you know, equality,
without like personal threat to themselves, right? And then this is what sometimes call,
is sometimes in left wing political thought, it's called like the racial realignment or the racial
turn is sort of this turn, it basically is the 1960s when this happened, when sort of the main
vector of left wing radicalism went from economic oriented to identity oriented. And so the full
cynical view is yeah, like it's great, like for the M&M, M&M Mars company, they can sell woke M&M's
with Rainbow, you know, it's great, like it's all good. If you Morgan, you know, Jamie Diving can
BLM, you know, like it's, it's great. It's good. Because as the cynical view, as long as the
oppression access is on race and gender and not on economic. It doesn't affect our bottom line.
It doesn't affect the bottom line. And in fact, you could argue some companies would argue some
people would argue that it's actually good for the bottom line, right? Because it's like, okay,
now we have a new marketing hook, right? So the cynical view would be like one of the genie,
one of the perverse geniuses of American capitalism is being able to absorb political
dissent and then resell it, right, to the consumer market as a luxury good, right? Right. And so,
like, and you know, there's, I mean, you know, fashion houses, you know, fashion houses will
happen, you know, they're all during, you know, 2020, 2021, you know, high, high-culture fashion
houses would sell you $500 BLM t-shirts all day long. Like, what a great idea. Like, how great is that?
I mean, one of the strangest manifestations of this for me was during 2020, you had basically,
you had a black man from the hood, poor, murdered, and you had all these, you know, rich people saying,
put me on a board in response to that. Now that would make no sense except for the fact that I
happened to have the same skin color as that guy, right? That, so, and yet people viewed this as a
legitimate response, right? Companies viewed putting more black people on your board as a legit response
to a problem that is totally different in character, right? A problem of police interaction with
someone in a high crime community. And this is how I view race as something that just warps people's
moral sensors, right? They start believing that things, that X addresses Y when X may actually have
very little connection to Y outside of the superficial element of skin color. So... That was, I would say
theory number two. And theory number two is that the capitalist class that has embraced, you know,
the sort of management class that's embraced, will cause them the, basically, they're true
believers, right? They, like, they full on, believe exactly what you just said. They, like, 100% full
on, believe it when, you know, Jamie Dimon's kneeling at the bank branch, like he fully believes it.
When he's putting, you know, when black people are running boards, it's like, it's exactly that.
Like, they're fully embracing, in some cases, like the most radical views of racial essentialism.
And they fully believe it, and they fully believe that it's like their job as leaders in society,
you know, in powerful positions to be able to basically enable the revolution, the necessary
revolution to progress. And, and, you know, look, there's a very simple reason to believe that,
which is most people just say what they think. I mean, most people just say what they think. I mean,
most people have a hard time lying, or in a sustained period of time. And if you just listen to what
people say, a lot of the time, they just tell you what they think. And this is what they're telling
us they think. And, you know, if you deal with a lot of these people, a lot of them are, in fact,
true believers. And then there's the third explanation that you alluded to in the beginning,
which is, is fear, right? And some of that is fear of, yeah, getting roasted, getting castfuls,
getting fired, getting purged, never working again, and having your employees turn on you,
right? And then there's the actual, like, the other kind of fear, which is actually legal,
right, in regulatory fear, which is we do have this, we do have a giant legal apparatus,
which is very interested in all of these questions, and, you know, has this very interesting,
standard of disparate impact, right? Where if you have, you know, if you have imbalances by,
by identity groups on the other side of a hiring or promotion process, it is sufficient to convict
somebody on civil rights, you know, legal violations and potentially, you know, destroy companies,
destroy, destroy careers. And, you know, that was put in place very deliberately, you know,
over the last 50 years in that, that is kind of a big, dominant legal regime that every company
deals with today. And so that's the third explanation. How to calculate which of these three, you know,
but what the pie chart is, yeah, that I don't know. So given everything you just said, much of
which is controversial, you know, some people would expect to look at Andres and Horowitz
and just see a bunch of white guys investing in a bunch of white guys. That's actually not the
case. You're actually one of the more racially diverse funds out there. So, you know, I guess my
question is, how do you manage to speak your mind on these sort of critiques of racial
essentialism and woke capitalism, while also, you know, actually achieving this substantive result
that many of those ideas claim to want, which is we don't want, we don't want the American elite to
look like it did in the 1950s, right? So how do you, how do you balance that as a, yeah, so I,
my partner, Ben, you know, I think it gets, gets, gets almost all the credit for this. And so I'm
mostly just going to kind of echo, you know, kind of things that he says and does in the firm. But
I mean, just, we just, we just gave kind of the old fashioned view, which is you should value
people as individuals and you should value them for the strengths of who they are as individuals.
And every individual brings a mix, by the way, every individual brings a mix of strengths and
weaknesses to the table, you know, including, including me. And so, and what we do at the firm
is we basically try to say, well, look, we're not, you know, we try to help people, you know,
maybe, maybe improve their weaknesses a bit. But like, mostly what we're doing is we're looking
for people with very strong strengths. And then we're looking for basically identify the
distinctive strength of each individual, right? And then, and then add it to the, add it to the
collective group effort. And so, you know, look, it's, you could argue maybe we have the easy
version of the problem. It's a venture firm. It's not a big operating company. You know, we don't
have 50,000 or 500,000 employees. We have 500. And so maybe it's a more kind of tractable,
you know, domain domain to do this in. We get to very carefully cherry pick, you know, who we
bring into the firm, you know, generally speaking, people want to work in this kind of environment.
So we have have a lot of applicants for positions. We have a lot of time. We run a very long time
scale. So we have a long time to, you know, develop talent, go, you know, go try to find the
right people and try to bring them in. And so, but I mean, that's basically what we try to do.
You know, I guess, I guess it's a look, there's a market check. Like we really view
ourselves as subject to a market check. But I can tell you this, like startup companies do not
succeed or fail based on their political views. Like there are any of these startup
succeed or failure if they've built something people want, right? Like the customer decides
whether our company succeed or fail. And then the customers by extension of our companies
decide whether we succeed or fail. So it all has to be subject to a market test, right? Or it
doesn't work. You know, look, another thing that we think about a lot about and we're actually
going to be, we're going to be doing more on this in the next few years. We're very excited about,
which is look tech used to be tech used to be, I was almost a just tech. Like tech, tech used to
be literally like a picks and shovels tools business. Like tech literally was for like 50
years was a business of, you know, you make computers and routers and switches and databases and
kind of all of these esoteric, you know, technical kind of products. And then, you know, you're
primarily selling them to other technical people or you're selling them to these big companies.
You know, tech in the last 20 years has broadened out to be a broad based cultural phenomenon,
right? And, you know, tech is becoming pervasive in basically every area of culture, every area of
creativity, right? Sort of every area of the human experience. You know, which, by the way,
which is why people are so mad about it, right? Because it's having such a such a broader effect
than it used to have. But as a consequence, like tech is intersecting into fields where you have
very different populations who are very dominant in those fields. And so you have a much broader
kind of base of both of domains you're operating in and then forms of talent, specialized skills,
expertise, right, that all of a sudden irrelevant, right? So cultural fluency is very relevant.
Ability to basically, you know, communicate with very many very different kinds of people,
different kinds of markets, right? You know, to kind of intersect with different kinds of cultural
change. And so I think that's also helpful. I think that's also helpful in just thinking much
more broadly about talent. And I think that's something we're also trying to take advantage of.
Okay, so let's talk about Twitter and the culture wars a little bit. So for someone like me,
I weigh in on cultural issues on my podcast. I write about them. I tweet about them. And
as rough as that can sometimes be, I view it if I really care about the issue as a good use of my
time. So for someone like you and for Elon, you just tell you just, you know, I'm going,
yeah, it's just, you guys are, you know, every hour that you spend, you know, you are dealing with
investing and creating the technologies that are going to determine the future of civilization for
the next several hundred, maybe thousands of years. And so it would seem as an outsider,
the opportunity cost for you of, you know, spending the marginal hour on the next Twitter
culture war issue might be very high, right? Your time might be better spent identifying the next
entrepreneur, developing the next miracle technology, etc. And I know even to a greater extent, many
have viewed Elon's participation on Twitter as a huge opportunity cost for him, given that he could
be doing just, you know, neurolink, SpaceX, Tesla, etc. How do you view your choice to spend some
portion of your own time weighing in on cultural issues and Twitter and the shitstorm of debate that
we call a national discourse? Well, first, would you like a job as an under-headed communications
or possibly in house executive coach, my partner clapping in the audience? So first of all, I guess,
maybe what we could talk about is let's separate Elon, I think Elon and I think are quite a bit
different in a lot of ways. And so I don't want to speak for Elon, but I maybe describe maybe a
little bit about he thinks about this, but it's a little bit different. He's doing a different
set of things. So the way I think about it is I'm generally not trying to, I'm trying very hard,
I don't know if I succeed, I'm trying hard. Like we as a firm prioritize, like we're not trying to
pick political fights, we're not trying to pick culture fights, we're not trying to like get into
these things. In fact, we very explicitly have a value inside the firm and how we operate where
we're a big tech environment internally. We have people with lots of different views and lots of
issues. If it's not relevant to the business and building a great firm and working with our
companies and our founders, like we don't, we don't like our firm doesn't take positions on
law. But as just an example, like our firm doesn't sign open letters, our firm doesn't take
positions on lots of public issues, social issues that have become kind of very popular to take
positions on. So we're, and then we try to not have that happen inside the firm. So we're,
at least I'm trying to keep my own impulses contained. Having said that, we, we as a firm,
and I do have strong points of view, and it is key to how we function in our values. Like we have
very strong points of view about what it means to, what, what technology means in society,
what companies mean in society, what capitalism means in society. By the way, how companies should
get built, right? How companies should get run? Like what it means to have an effective company
versus a dysfunctional company, right? So, so the actual mechanics of what we do and what our
founders do, like that, that stuff is relevant. And there, and there, I go through that, because
there are sort of quote unquote culture war issues that kind of intersect. Well, we just
talked about one, like there is a branch of sort of cultural activism that says there should not be
hierarchy, there should be flatness in the name of equality or egalitarianism. And there's a,
there is literally a corporate management style called hypocrisy, which basically says companies
should be flat with no managers. And every once in a while, we have a company that decides that
might be a good idea to try. And we do it as our responsibility to explain to them, you know,
basically like why, the problems, the things that are going to happen is the dysfunction is
going to happen as a result. I send them the essay that I told you about. They, they don't read it.
They run the experiment. They end up all, you know, in all states of, you know, confusion and chaos,
then we come in and try to help them, you know, kind of untangle it. But, you know, like that,
that matters, like that matters directly. And so we're, we're going to have a point of view on that.
And so, so I think to the extent that we're taking strong points of view on the role of
technology in society, how companies get constructed, what corporate culture means,
then it's actually integral to what we do. I mean, as you know, like these, these questions
and issues have become central questions and issues in our society. And so, so they're going
to be controversial. I mean, I don't want to speak for Elon. I would say, I think he has decided
to engage, I would say, I would say more directly. And he's very, the good thing with Elon is he
says exactly what he thinks. He says it in public. But I can tell, you know, I get to talk to Elon a
lot now. So we're working together because we're involved in the Twitter, but you know, like,
everything he tells me in private, he's either already said in public or he's about to say in
public. Right. So we'll be talking about something and he'll, you know, he'll say something. I'll be
like, wow, that's, that was like a bold statement. And then he'll tweet it five minutes later, right?
Like it's not, it's not, there's no, there's no hidden, I can tell you there's no hidden agenda.
Like it's all, well, this goes back to his whole thing, right? To everybody's like, you know,
companies all have secret plans. And so when he first started Tesla, he unveiled Tesla secret plan,
right? And the secret plan was what is the logic behind it? Is everyone else doing it wrong? Because
the common wisdom would be there should be some distance between what you reveal publicly and
what you plan privately. Like, so what's the meta strategy behind that? Well, again, I don't
want to speak for him. I'll impute what I observe, which is just, I mean, I guess he is a force of
nature. I mean, he has a force of nature who is able to attract, you know, enormous resources to
be able to accomplish huge things. He's able to attract, you know, enormous amounts of talent,
like incredibly bright people working for him and really working incredibly hard, you know, on these
huge missions. And then he's able to attract enormous amounts of capital and enormous amounts of,
you know, attention and support. I mean, look, he built the most amazing thing about Tesla in a
lot of way. I mean, like, the cars are amazing and the self-driving is amazing. But maybe the most
amazing thing is he built the most valuable car company on the planet. He didn't spend a dollar
on marketing, right? Like, he's not, Tesla's never run on ad. Right? Every other car company is
like shoveling money out the door just to do desperately try to sell their cars that nobody
really wants to buy. Like, Elon's like, yeah, I've got the car. I've got my Twitter account, right?
He famously fired, you know, he famously fired his PR staff, right? He was like five years ago now,
he fired his PR team. And he's like, yeah, no, look, now on, it's just me and my Twitter account.
There's this great email that came out during one of the lawsuits around all of his stuff. And
it's this great email for, you know, his board is like, on him is like, you should start, oh,
this tweeting is causing us all these problems. You know, you should stop doing this. And they
have this long discussion email. And then he finally says at the end, he's like, look, all I can
tell you is I'm going to tweet whatever I think. And I'm going to let the chips fall where they may,
right? And so it's this thing. And then as a consequence, there is this method of leadership,
which I think he embraces, which is there's this thing you observe when you're running a company,
which is this very often the case that people in the company take the things that are set outside
the company more seriously than the things that are set inside the company. And so at least some
CEOs have had the experience that they can get up in front of their employees and they can give a
big speech about the vision of the company or whatever. A week later, like the employees have
forgotten it. But like, if there's if it's like headline news in a major newspaper, like it's
burned into their brains and they're like, ah, now I understand. Right. So nobody at any of Elon's
companies is confused about what the mission is. And so look, he's very, you know, this is like,
when I when I argue with Elon's critics, I always say like, look like whatever you think of him,
like he's totally honest, like he's completely honest. He's completely transparent. He says
exactly what he thinks. There's no secret anything in there anywhere. And like, you should like that.
Like, even if you're a critic of Elon, you should like that, right? And of course, it's just like,
people hate actually knowing the truth, right? They really, really don't like it. And so I think
perversely, even his enemies would rather like not know. So let's pivot a little bit and talk
about it, which of course makes Twitter the perfect company for him to run. Because he,
I mean, he's the paradigm addict user. Yeah. Well, this is what's so amazing. And one of the
reasons we got involved in his deal is like he is the ultimate Twitter power user, super user.
So maybe he understands the psychology of his consumers better than
incredibly well, like just incredibly, you know, for whatever puts other puts or takes people
have, like he gets, he gets all of that like incredibly well. And there's a lot, look, and not
everybody obviously can do what Elon does, but I think there's a lot to learn. What he does is so
different than any of the traditional corporate communications marketing playbook. And the results
are so vividly just like completely outstanding and like amazing. There are lessons to be learned
in there that I think a lot of, including me, I think a lot of us, we talk about this in the
firm all the time. I don't even think I process my way through this. I don't even know what
conclusions to draw, but it's very striking. Okay, so with our limited time, let's just pivot to
another topic that's big right now, which is AI and specifically generative AIs, chat GPT,
Dolly, to mid journey, the whole land and music LM, which is more in its infancy, but the whole
landscape of AIs that are generating to an extent creative work and encroaching on the part of
ourselves that we thought was most human, which is our creativity and our ability to create art
and poetry and so forth. People expected truckers to be put out of work sooner than graphic designers
certainly, but it looks like the opposite may be true. What do you see happening in the next,
say five years with regard to these generative AIs? Are they going to displace Google? Where
are you looking to see the most advances in this area? Yeah, the thing that's so remarkable
what's happening now is if you talk to the leading experts in the field, they will tell you they
are shocked. Like they were not, at least many of them were not, including people who were deeply
involved in this stuff, they were not expecting what has just happened to happen. And so it feels
like one of those really rare Eureka moments that you kind of read about when they figured out how
to split the atom or something where it's just like, oh my god, we thought maybe someday we'd be
able to do this kind of thing and all of a sudden it's working and now we know how to do it.
Right? And then of course the next thing, the next thing that's happening is,
splitting the atom, at least you need plutonium to do it. Like with AI, this is a general purpose
technology. Now that we know how to do this, a lot of people are going to know how to do this.
It's just software and so a lot of people are going to figure out how to do this in a lot of
different ways, apply it in lots of different ways. And by the way, the startup rush has begun.
Right? So now there's all of a sudden there's this massive ramp up of AI startups, for example,
that we're seeing. And so it's one of those most where it's just like, oh my god, we now have a
capability of this thing that we can do that's like, and potentially very powerful across many
domains of human activity that we never imagined would work. You know, it's expressing itself in
many different ways. You know, the art actually the art hit, the art thing actually hit kind of first,
right? The sort of dolly and mid-journey stuff hit and then chat GPT came out and that kind of
has catalyzed the text side of this. I think the art stuff is fantastic. I think the text stuff is
the biggest thing that's happening. And the reason it's the biggest thing that's happening is it
actually goes to the nature of text and culture and society, which is it just turns out like we
communicate most important things that we communicate. We communicate many important things through art,
visual art, musical art, and so forth. But we communicate like science and medicine, right? And
mathematics and software code and law are all communicated in, communicated in text, right? And
so if you have a computer that is really good at processing text and creating new text, all of a
sudden it is just like, if it's good at that, it's therefore really good at writing software code.
It's also therefore really good at basically doing law. It's also very good at doing medical
diagnosis. By the way, it's very good at doing like dinner recipes. It's very good at doing
vacation planning, right? Like it's very good at doing therapy. Like just because it's text,
like all of a sudden it's good at all of those things and that's basically the common pattern.
It's really good at writing newspaper articles, like out of nowhere, right? And so we have this
magic basically text manipulation machine. You know, on the one hand you could say look,
it's just text, like how threatening can it be, right? It's just text. It's just basically like the
simplest explanation for what chat GPT does is it's just like a very fancy autocomplete, right?
Whereas like a normal autocompleting like your word processor autocompletes a word,
chat GPT today will autocomplete the entire page, right? The next future versions of this will
autocomplete a chapter. There will be a version of this that will autocomplete a book. Like there
will come a time when you'll decide to write a book and you'll type out the first three or four
sentences and it will autocomplete the rest of the book for you and say, okay, like here's a draft,
right? And then by the way, you use the author can look at it and you can say, well, what do I
want from this, what do I want to do? And by the way, you can change the prompt up front. You can
say, well, I want it to be funnier. I want it to be darker. I want it to be whatever. I want more
historical references and it's like a puppy, right? It'll just say like, oh, great, I'll give you a
draft of that book. And so on the one hand, it's just like it's just this text autocomplete kind of
puppy thing that just like wants to make you happy by autocompleting everything you say.
On the other hand, it all of a sudden it's relevant in all these domains and it's really good.
And so it's going to be a big deal.
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So like when GPS technology came out, some people found themselves just getting worse at knowing
where to go, right? People used to have this set of skills, a bear right at the second,
you know, and just quickly picking up on and then you didn't need you didn't need that anymore.
I mean with chat GPD and that seems innocent, right? But I find as a writer that I think
much better when I've written about something. So not needing to write about something seems
like it could come with an actual cognitive cost which is that our thoughts degrade in quality.
And so is that something you would worry about? So you may know this is the Socrates argument
against against writing. So Socrates famously, pretty smart guy at the time, about 500,
you know, 2500 years ago, he was a guest written language. And this is when they were figuring
out written language and he was a guest written language. And he said this is a bad idea. We should
not be writing these things down. The reason we should not be writing these things down is he
actually was actually the same argument you just made but he was making it about oral communication.
He said, look, he said at that time and in Greece at that time, and sort of western culture at that
time, you know, 2500 years ago, he said, look, the way that we process information and conceive
ideas and communicate to generate principles of how to live and communicate those to, you know,
later, you know, later generations, the way that we do that is through oral retelling of stories,
right? And he said, basically, if you write down these stories, you're basically going to kill
their spirit, right? Because when you tell a story, it's like an like, when you tell a story
verbally, right, it's an engaged two way process. The listener is actively involved. By the way,
there's then communication around the story, right? You can actually argue about it, right? So,
so he said basically, orally communicate stories are alive. And then he said, basically, if you
write them down, you flatten them out, you make them linear, you make them permanent, there's no
more, they're not dynamic anymore, right? There's no more evolution, like culture's gonna stall out.
And so, it's actually interesting in that like he was like, yeah, we this writing thing is a
bad idea. You know, everybody's now going to take that exact same idea, they're going to apply it
to what follows writing. So anyway, we did okay. By the way, maybe Socrates was right, like, we
actually don't know what was lost. Right, I mean, people do that and make that argument, you know,
like, in the Epic of Homer, people just memorize that, right? You could just say the whole thing
top to bottom. And now, very few of us have that kind of a skill set. That was a great, that was
a great thing. So, another great example, which is, yeah, it's like, look, if it's oral, you have to
memorize it, right? And if it's written, you don't have to memorize it. Like, the whole thing of
written text is it's like a memory augment, right? Like, and so you, to human memory, and so you
don't have to memorize it. And it's right, exactly. If you don't memorize it, how can you know it,
right? And now that's just such an alien right concept for most of us that we never
have been to care to us to make that argument. So, and again, it's not to say that he was wrong,
like he very well might have been right. And we just didn't get to see the counter-fessional
play out. Look, having said that, we found writing to be incredibly useful, right? Like,
writing without writing, we would have never gotten the enlightenment. We never would have gotten
scientific, the scientific method, right? We never would have gotten technological development. We
never would have gotten financial markets. We never would have gotten modern government. We never
would have gotten modern law. Like, those all flowed, like, straight out of writing, right? And so,
and I think most of us probably would not want to take the risk of the trade-off of getting rid
of all of those things to go rediscover what happens if we're all still memorizing Homer, right? So,
I think there's a little bit of this is one of those, like, this is one of those transformations
where we have to think about it. The way that I think about it, like, in the work that I do,
including like writing work that I do, the way I think about it is actually, the temptation is to
basically have this be a competitive dynamic where it's like, right, either the machine's going to
write or the human's going to write. And by the way, there is a fun thing you can do on this. I've
been doing this now. Occasionally with some people who I think will not get overly offended,
which is this, like, read a story in the newspaper, right? Or an op-ed piece. And you just take the
title of it and you paste it into chat GPT and you just have it write the thing. And then you do
the compare and contrast of, like, which one is better? What percent has been better, Fruci?
I don't, well, it depends on your criteria. Well, here would be the other one is, can you even tell,
right? Like, you know, can you even, like, a Turing test kind of thing? Can you even tell which
one is better? I mean, you know, look for short from, for sort of classic journalism,
or op-eds, like, this thing is pretty good. So, so there's a natural competitive dynamic and
people are going to get, you know, kind of worked up about that. I think the more sophisticated view,
and I think the one that I would suspect that you will have and the one that I would try to have,
is no, this is an augment. Like, this is a partner. So this is already happening in software coding.
So the first big sort of realization of this idea was this thing, sort of derived from OpenAI,
that Microsoft built called CoPilot, which works with their software coding system. And the idea
basically is, you know, you're writing software code, which is kind of analogous to writing an
essay or writing a novel. You're writing software code as a programmer, and then you've got this
other thing, you have this other pane on the side of the screen that's called CoPilot. And it's
basically like a helpful assistant making, so it's like, my default basically is just making
suggestions. It's like, oh, I see you've started to write this code. Are you trying to do a whatever
sort or display this kind of UI or whatever? You know, if so, here's code that you can just use,
or you can just ask CoPilot a question, right? You can say, well, I'm stuck at this point, you know,
basically tell me how to do this thing in code, or I'm stuck in this, for example, I'm writing an
essay, I need a historical reference, give me 10 example historical references to CoPilot to,
you know, this idea. And it gives you those, and you pick the one you want. And in fact, you might
even say, oh, I didn't even know about that third one, can you tell me more about it, right? And
instead of having to go to the library or to Google or what, it just like tells you, you know,
just explains it to you. And so it's basically, like, I think it's the best tool that, I mean,
I think writers of the future are going to use this all the time, because the idea, the idea of
not using this would be like cutting off your arm. Like, it just like, why would you do that?
And in fact, the whole idea of artificial intelligence is maybe a bad term, like it may be the wrong
term, it may be a better term might be augments and intelligence, or basically like instead of
human versus machine, it's human sub, you know, subiotic relationship with machine.
So I agree, there's definitely going to be lots of symbiosis and augmentation, but there, I think
there are going to be some domains where it is zero sum. So if Andries and Horowitz wants a new logo,
you know, how much money do you want to spend on a graphic designer? How long are they going to take
to generate 50 options, as opposed to the next generation of dollar year mid journey,
which you and Ben could just sit down and play with prompts for 10 minutes and get hundreds of
options, right? And that, I mean, that would seem possibly to put certain people out of work. Do you
think there will be any level of zero sumness in certain domains? Yeah, there is. Well, look,
the Luddites had a point, right? So the, you know, this, this argument goes back to the so-called
Luddites, which were an actual movement. There were actually people called Luddites at one point.
And what they were mad about was they were mad about automated spinning machines for
textiles, right, as opposed to weaving by hand, because there were hand weaving that took place
that, you know, that all of a sudden wasn't, wasn't necessary. And then so they,
they legendarily they smashed the machines in the hopes that that would stop progress,
which it turned out it didn't because people just built more machines. So this is an old debate.
And look, it is, it is true. Like, you know, the people don't, you know, there used to be lots of
people hands, you know, weaving wool, and that just doesn't happen anymore. So, you know, so,
so there is that there used to be a lot of blacksmiths who would put shoes on horses, right? And now
that doesn't, you know, those jobs, there's many fewer blacksmiths jobs today as a consequence of the
car. So that that's definitely true. That will happen. Like, if the job is to hand design, you know,
many logos, you know, basically on demand, like, yeah, that's, that's going to change. What's going
to happen though, and this, this is, there are many prior examples of this, including in clothing
and in blacksmiths we'll talk about, but what happens is the job new jobs get created. So,
new jobs get created that are higher level jobs, right? And so all of a sudden you have a different,
you have a kind of designer all of a sudden who's basically a designer on steroids or a designer
with superpowers. And they're not just designing their logo, like they're thinking like basically
holistically about the entire design process about designing, you know, designing company,
the culture, the relationship with the customers. And this is what the top designers actually do,
by the way, they're not just writing logos, they're actually thinking very creatively about the
whole design experience. By the way, we have designers at our firm, among other things,
they designed this conference, right? And so everything that you see walking around and how
it all works like that was all designed, right? And just the fact that the logo on this thing
was designed by a machine that's just such a small part of that larger job, right? And now,
now becomes much more possible. The other thing that's going to happen is handcrafted human
experiences are going to rise in value when they're very high quality, right? And so the most valuable
logo in the world is going to be the one where somebody can say, Oh, no, that one wasn't designed
by a machine. That one was actually hand drawn, right? In the same way that the best, you know,
the best art in the world is the stuff that was, you know, the most, you know, the most valuable,
famous painting in the world was not painted by a computer who's really good at painting,
you know, as a human being. The best shoes you can buy are handmades, you know, the best
casualness letter you can buy is handmade. By the way, there are still box myths because like super rich
people still like horses. And you know, they pay their box myths and they're, you know, people
will take care of the horses like a lot of money. So, so there will be this kind of recalibration in
a lot of these fields, but healthcare is an obvious example. So medical diagnosis, the machines
are already as good at doctors as medical diagnosis. They're going to be better very quickly here.
They're going to be much better very quickly. But medical diagnosis, if you have a good doctor,
the actual diagnosis is a very small part of what that doctor does for you. And so the doctor of
the future will have the machine do the diagnosis so that the doctor can spend more time with the person.
So this is more of a personal productivity question. You are an incredibly productive person who
absorbs just an amount of information that a typical person would find dizzying. I'm curious
what aspect of your personality, what trait that you have, which is actually maybe maladaptive
for happiness is most useful in your career. Oh, stubbornness. Yeah, good old-fashioned
Midwestern farming. There's an old joke, there's an old midwest farming joke. Farmer wins a million
dollars in the lottery. You know, big news in small town. The TV camera crew shows up
interviewing him on his front porch. You know, he's been farming his whole life and he's like,
you know, they're like, what are you going to do with the money? He wants money. What are you going
to do? And he's like, well, I'm going to keep farming until it's all gone. Yeah. So just, I just
think, yeah, maybe just raw. Yeah, just raw. How does that stubbornness show up on a day
to day level? I just hate giving up. And so, and this has become actually-
Moving up on an investment on a company on a- Yeah, kind of anything.
This comes across. So there's, there's, you know, out of your-
On an argument with your wife? Slightly more evolved level of wisdom when it comes
her father gave me an early talking to that, that helped, helped me zero in on that one. But
it was actually a big debate in Silicon Valley. There's this, there's this, you know, in the
startup world, like, like some startups work, some startups don't. And so there's this endless
debate about like basically when to quit, right? And then there's this idea of the so-called lean
startup. And the idea of lean startup is you run an experiment. And if it doesn't work,
you basically just like stop and you figure out a different idea. And, you know, we used to call
that fucking up. Now we have this fancy word pivoting. And, and then that, at least there's
this culture in the valley in tech, which is so-called fail fast, right? You're kind of proud
of yourself or failing fast. Google incarnated this into their Google X program where they have
this- When they, when a Google X project fails, they have a big party celebrate its failure
under the theory that it's better to like, if it's not going to work to chop it off and work on
something else as opposed to just being stubborn forever, I've never been able to do.
I mean, I could see a downside to that because if you know you could just fail fast, you will
approach the problem in a subtly different way than if you feel you have everything invested in it,
right? Yes. And sometimes things just take a long time, right? Like sometimes things take a long
time. So I was giving an interesting kind of fact about how our world works, which is, and we,
this is true across venture so that we've talked to many other VCs and they all validate this.
A venture firm cannot predict the order of returns, like the order of companies from
success or failure, which companies will succeed, which companies will fail within a fund, which
is invested over a two or three year period. We can't predict the order of returns, the
success or failure of the companies within that fund in the first five years, right? And so,
and there are many, there are many companies, there are many cases, right, where companies come
out of the gate really strong and then something happens, something goes wrong and then they turn
out to be very disappointing. There are many other cases where they start out very slow and they
may have years of development. I mean, Patrick talked a little bit about this, you know,
sometimes these biotech things can take like 20 years. And so you can have this thing where they
take a long time and then at some point they catch and they really go. And I, you know, if you look
at the data on that, it's just like, yeah, there's a mix there. It's hard to figure out whether one,
you know, one of those leads to better outcomes than the other. Sometimes things just take time.
I will say one of the really things I'm really gratified about with our firm is that I would
have thought starting the firm, the fail fast thing had gotten so endemic to the valley when we
started the firm in 2009. I was worried that like we'd have too many founders giving up too quickly.
Like if anything, we've had the opposite problem, which I really appreciate,
which is most of our founders, they really genuinely don't want to quit.
That can lead to difficult conversations of their own because, you know, there is a time when you
have to draw the conclusion that it's just not working. But we've generally speaking, I think,
our founders, like we've had far more that have just said, no, I'm not giving up. And that's been
I'd say a very pleasant surprise given the cultural norms, you know, how they were evolving.
Okay, so last question. If you look at the next, you know, 20 years, let's say, what is your vision
for your firm? Is your vision simply to maximize returns by whatever means necessary or do you
have a mission that transcends the mere maximization of returns? And if so, what is that?
Yeah. So basically, like, if you just look at the whole sweep of economic history, there's
basically only two ways that economies grow and standards of living improve. There's only two
ways in which human life gets better off. One is natural resource extraction, pulling stuff out
of the ground. And then the other is technology. And those are basically the only two things you
can do, like everything else is just like a rounding error on those things. And technology
broadly defined technology being basically applying human ingenuity to develop new solutions to
problems, right? Typically involving technical means, right? Some sort of, you know, application
the scientific method, application of technological innovation, right? Literally creating a new
idea or formula or recipe, right? To be able to do things. So when some people say a third ways,
you know, expanding the circle of human rights and justice and equality and so forth.
Oh, that's great. It's just like to translate that into, that's great, to translate that into
economic gains, to translate that into something that is going to cause an increase in the material
standard of living, right? Then it requires application of effort. Ideally, what I would say is those
are the same thing. Ideally, you're expanding the pool of basically say free people, people who are
able to fully express themselves, people who are fully able to participate in everything from
education to business to everything else. Ideally, you're then getting a lot more people who can
contribute to the process of economic and technological development. Ideally, those are the same thing.
And by the way, that is the story. Like a lot of the last 100 years, like that, you know, that has
200 years, that has in fact happened and it's still happening. Yeah, so like technology is the lever.
Like technology is quite literally the lever that we have to make the world better in like
important and material ways. Does it do everything? No, you know, does it solve spiritual crises? No,
really? Like does it, you know, does it create spiritual crisis? Does it create quite possibly,
right? Or at the very least, you know, maybe it makes old spiritual crises outmoded, maybe it creates
new ones. Right, so I'm not a believer in what Thomas Sowell called that, but it's what was the,
the what do you call it? The unbounded vision, the unconstrained vision. Like, I'm not a utopian,
right? I'm not a believer in the unconstrained vision. I'm not a believer that we achieve
utopia, utopia of perfection on earth. But, you know, we can make things better, right? And we can
raise standards of living and we can improve medical outcomes and we can improve, you know,
we can provide many, many, many more people around the world to access entrepreneurship and the ability
to create companies and build ability to create products, be able to make money, be able to provide
for their families. And, you know, that remains a very pressing global challenge, right? Like,
the way I think about it is like most people in the world, like, we all sitting here today and most
of the people listening to this live probably pretty comfortable upper middle class, you know,
you know, sort of Western lifestyles. And then the percentage of people in the world who live a
comfortable upper middle class American lifestyle, 1%, 2%, right? And so like, most people are not
able to participate fully in what we would consider to be sort of a fully, you know, basically like a
fully modern economy and then all of the benefits that kind of flow out of that. And I have the
corresponding level of wealth and material success to be able to provide for their families, right?
To be able to have, you know, kids who then do even better than they do. And so, you know,
these are just these, we just have lots and lots of these things and the way to go after these
things are at least the way we can contribute, right? It's to basically harness capitalism to do
that. All right, Mark and Jason, thank you so much for coming on my show.
Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you enjoyed it,
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Stoicism. What do you think about when you hear that word? Do you think of a bunch of old
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