Marc Andreessen on Learning to Love the Humanities

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm chatting with Mark Andreesen, known to many as P. Marca. Mark, welcome.

Hey Tyler, great to be here.

Simple question, have you always been like this?

Yes, I believe that my friends would say that I have.

So let's go back to the junior high school Mark Andreesen. At that time, what was your favorite book and why?

That's a really good question. I read a lot, you know, probably like a lot of people like me, it was a lot of science fiction. One of the few people I know who thinks that late Robert Heinlein was better than early Robert Heinlein. So that had a really big effect on me. What else? Omnivorous at an early age.

And why is late Robert Heinlein better?

So he has, to me, at least to young me, see if older me would agree with this, but a sense of exploration and discovery and wonder and open-endedness. For me, it was if he got more open-minded as he got older. And so I just, I remember those books in particular being kind of very inspiring. The universe is a place of possibilities.

And what's the seminal television show for your intellectual development in, say, junior high school?

Oh, junior high school. I mean, it's hard to beat Knight Rider.

Why Knight Rider?

There were a wave of sort of these sort of near science fiction shows in the late '70s, early '80s that kind of coincided with, you know, some of it was the aftermath of Star Wars, but it was sort of the arrival of the personal computer and the arrival of sort of computer technology in the lives of ordinary people for the first time. And so, you know, there was a massive wave of anxiety, but there was also a tremendous sense of possibility. And so there were a set of these shows that basically propelled you. I think the line they would always use is 20 minutes into the future. You know, Knight Rider's like this, Airwolf was like this. There's a whole bunch of shows like this where it was our world, except advanced technology had just arrived. And, you know, really like what that meant, how it would fit in, how it would change things. These very compelling fictional portrayals. I still get a little fired up whenever I get into a modern car today, you get in and it actually looks like the Knight Rider car on the inside. I still get a little, you know, jolt of excitement that that actually happened. And in fact, the car, if you want it to, it will talk to you.

So we fast forward to high school. I mean, what is it in high school you hated the most and also did the worst at?

Classes.

What was the biggest tax of high school? Classes.

But which?

Chemistry lab?

No, I went to a very small high school. So, you know, I have friends who went to all these, you know, very fancy, you know, magnet, whatever schools and science schools and, you know, all these things. It's actually really funny. I read all these debates about, you know, Lowell High School or whatever. What is it? Stuyvesant? All these places. And I don't know, my high school was like the opposite of all that. So, you know, no AP classes, no advanced, you know, kind of work of any kind. So basically just, it was an endurance competition to see who could outlast who, me or them.

And was there a teacher who understood what you were about or just no one?

You know, there were a couple, there was a computer teacher in particular. We actually got a computer lab with, I think, I don't know, 2 or 3 computers towards the very end. And then there was a teacher, a young teacher who came in and, you know, we dialed in a little bit, but I was mostly just in a holding period until I got off to college.

So no slight intended to University of Illinois, which is a good school, but why didn't you go to a better school?

So, so for where I grew up, I grew up in rural Wisconsin. And so everybody just assumed if you went to college, it just meant you just went to college in Wisconsin. You just went probably to University of Wisconsin. I actually found out later they had rolled up all these little tiny like teacher colleges into what they call the University of Wisconsin system, you know, but it was really a bunch of little colleges and then it was Madison. And so that was sort of the default path. And so From where I grew up at that time, crossing state lines to go to University of Illinois was a gigantic move, a very big change.

You didn't have a passport.

Very uncommon. It's amazing how fine people can subdivide groups. There's a Wisconsin-Illinois rivalry that's like a very big thing. I wouldn't go so far as to say East Germany, West Germany, but maybe a little bit. And so it was a big deal to jump the fence.

In what sense are you still a thinker of the rural Midwest?

Yeah, so I thought I was a fluke, right? So I thought I was a fluke. I thought I was strange. It's like, okay, you know, you leave the Midwest, you go to the coast, you get involved involved in, you know, tech, very kind of different path than the people I knew. I just assumed that I was sort of weird and different. And then I got out here to Silicon Valley and then I started to kind of get oriented. And then I read this profile that I recommend everybody, which is Tom Wolfe, the great novelist, journalist, wrote a profile of Bob Noyce, who was the original founder of Intel and basically the father of the chip industry. And I read this profile and I don't mean to compare myself to Bob Noyce, but basically Tom Wolfe describes an archetype and the archetype is the Midwestern tinkerer. Right. Who basically comes out of a sort of very practical kind of farming-oriented mechanical, you know, kind of dirt under the fingernails, working with machines with your hands, you know, kind of culture and background, you know, literally for farming, for light mechanical work. And then basically ends up in advanced technology. I went in one shot after reading that profile from thinking of myself as a fluke to thinking of myself as a cliché. And I think the cliché definitely applies.

And as a moralist, are you still rural Midwest?

I really struggle with that. I would say I've lived my life on the two polar extremes, I guess, of what I would consider to be at least like whatever you might call it, if it's the morality scale or the personality scale or the cultural scale, which is, you know, I've lived in a sort of extremely conservative, repressive, you know, right-wing and very, you know, let's say, how to say, traditionalist, you know, probably the most traditionalist environment, you know, in the country, or at least one of them in kind of the rural Midwest. And then I've lived the other part of my life in the sort of extremely open-minded, libertine, liberated, progressive, you know, far-left, you know, sort of milieu. I don't live in San Francisco proper, but I live close enough where I feel the gravity well of sort of this most extreme form of progressivism in the country. I've sort of experienced both extremes. I think, you know, I'm sort of, I don't know, maybe it's again the tinkerer in me or the practical person. I sort of incline more towards the middle on that stuff. I see the issues with both sides over time. I see the advantages of both sides, and I think probably the extremes are both probably bad ideas.

So let's say you had done a very rural Midwest kind of thing and had a bunch of kids in your 20s. How would your life have been different, if at all, other than having the kids?

You know, I waited a long time. I have, we have one kid now, the 7-year-old, and you know, I waited a long time, you know, to do that into my forties. My answer for a very long time would've been, you either have, you know, basically work or kids. For the kind of career that I do, it's like you have a choice and it's like really hard for people to be able to do both. For a long time, I would've said that that was the case. And so the answer to the question would've been, you know, I wouldn't have been able to do what I did. I will say I was really struck, my business partner and friend Ben Horowitz, you know, who's had a very kind of similar career to mine. He had 3 kids when he was very young in his early twenties. And when he had no money, and was under a lot of stress. And he had kind of the polar opposite life trajectory in that dimension that I did. You know, I've got a 7-year-old. His kids are like fully grown. They're off in college. They're beyond college. They're graduated and they're off in their careers. And what he told me was, you know, having 3 kids at that age, he said he wouldn't necessarily wish it on anybody in terms of like the stress that results. But however, he said that it was a very focusing, motivating thing and it caused him to be like laser focused, hyper-focused at work. The cliché in tech, right, is the workers are like, you know, it's foosball. And then it's time for the yoga class and it's time for the massage and it's time for volleyball and it's time for the beer bus. And I knew this, I knew him when the kids were little. I've known him for 25 years now and I worked with them starting in the early '90s. It was just always very clear. He was hyper-focused. Every minute at work really, really counted. And so in retrospect, I don't know whether I could have pulled that off, but there is a different way of working that that level of pressure puts you under that, at least in his case, worked very well.

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

Well, let's see, do I get to be a Medici or not?

If you want to be, but they're just plain bankers, right?

Well, yeah, so yeah, sort of, so people don't know that the Medici ruled Florence. They were plain bankers. Cosimo de' Medici, that's sort of the line when he sort of had to take over the state in order to preserve the banking business. And then the family became, you know, very politically important. And then of course, you know, was the sponsor for, you know, the arts and basically sciences, da Vinci and all these amazing people, Michelangelo for decades and then centuries that followed. And so, yeah, aspirationally, I would have been a Medici. Had I not been a Medici, I would have tried to get as close to the Medici as I possibly could. You know, I would like to think I would have been some form of either kind of proto-scientist, proto-engineer. You know, da Vinci's notebooks are full of engineer— you know, he was an engineer. They were full of engineering diagrams and plans, you know, including things that have to this day never been built. He actually built military machines at one point. And so, you know, maybe there was like a proto-engineering going on there. And then, as you said, like finance, they created an entire world of finance and trade and really sort of helped develop the economy as we know it today from a very early stage. And so, you know, being part of that kind of banking system, I think, would have been very exciting at that time. So I hopefully would have been able to talk myself into one of those. Sculpting, I think I lack the talent. So maybe banking instead.

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

Hopefully finding a niche. You know, aspirationally, I'd probably want to be a hunter. We would see very quickly whether I had the aptitude for that. Probably witch doctor would have been a bit of a stretch, although maybe I could play cult leader when I have to. You know, at some point they started writing things down, like they started having poetry, they started to have kind of, you know, not really science per se, but they started to kind of explore nature and they started to build cities, you know, kind of come together. And so maybe I could have done the irrigation system. So that would have been a good way to get the rest of the tribe to put up with me.

Moving ahead to the current you, which books have you reread the most?

Let's see. That's a good question. I've read a lot of business history. I've read a lot of technology history. Sort of, I've read a lot of finance history. I've covered that. That stuff I don't tend to read more than once. It's almost entirely, I guess I would say broadly speaking, it's sort of political theory. It's history. It's economic theory a little bit, although it's probably more economic history.. And so I think I probably keep circling around the same small set of topics around basically how do people organize and then what happens when they do and then how do they behave. And so I keep circling around that. I've been reading lately, rereading James Burnham's books that are a particular fascination for me for the last few years. I'm actually finishing a reread of those books right now. So it'd be books like that.

How are those different on the reread?

So I guess the way I would describe it is I spent the first 25 years of my life trying to understand how machines work. And then I spent the second 25 years so far of my life trying to figure out how people work. It turns out people are a lot complicated. It turns out there's a lot more moving parts. There's a lot more history. And so I find for the really good books now that I read, I don't understand. And then I don't have any formal training. Like I don't have any formal training in history. I took one history class at University of Illinois. Very good engineering school. They let us take one humanities elective. I took a history class, one class. So I don't have any formal foundation in history or philosophy or economics or, you know, political science, sociology. And so a lot of the times it actually reminds me of learning technology. I don't understand a lot of what they're talking about the first time., and then I will read like 6 other books and the pieces will start to fall into place. I'll read the history, the pieces will start to fall into place. And then I go back and I read it again and I'm like, okay, this is what they're actually talking about. And so it's kind of reconstructing this sort of, for me, it's sort of a 500-year tradition, you know, kind of piecemeal. And so those books tend to get reread a lot.

What is the scenario like where you end up as a deeply committed advocate for the humanities? Or are we already there?

Yeah. So I think I'm getting there. Tell me what you think of this. Maybe we can have a different conversation, a different interview. I can interview you on this sometime, which is there was the humanities pre the 1960s. Maybe even the humanities sort of pre the 1930s and what they thought about and talked about and worked on. And then there's sort of the humanities as we know and understand it today. And I think they're pretty different, might go so far as to say very different. And they might go so far as to say they really have no resemblance to each other. There's an older tradition in the humanities and, you know, I'm not discovering anything here. It's like, you know, the sort of, you know, history of philosophy, you know, sort of philosophy pre the 1960s. It actually turns out I've quite fascinated through Burnham. I've gotten quite fascinated with like sociology in the 1910s, 1920s. —was a very different kind of—

It's much closer to economics, right?

This is the other thing, is economics pre— what was it, like the 1950s, 1960s? It wasn't all these formulas. It wasn't a branch of physics like it seems like it is today. It was descriptive. It was verbal. You read Keynes, you know, it's like this. And even the people that preceded him. I found a book— I got fascinated by the Second Industrial Revolution a while ago, and I found this book on Google Books about David Wells, who's like an economist in like the 1880s or something. And he basically just like describes how the Second Industrial Revolution kind of rolled out at that time. And he just like tells a story. He just like goes through like, here's what's happening. And that was like an economics book. Right. With like no formulas. And so, yeah, it was like the form of humanities that resonates with me is just like that. It's like history, economics, philosophy, politics merged, you know, and then there's sort of, at least in my case, you're trying to find the people who are sort of analytical and descriptive as opposed to prescriptive. But it was a different kind of thing. And, you know, you could argue that they were not rigorous. I mean, you could argue that they were storytelling and not, you know, being scientific, but I think they were being scientific kind of in their way at that time. I mean, they had their issues, they had their issues, but they didn't have our issues. And so, you know, Everything today is filtered through our politics. It's really hard to understand, in my view, how people thought, especially before the 1960s, and again, I think even before the 1930s, through our political lens. You have to kind of go back and you kind of reconstruct, like, what they actually talked about at that time, and it turns out to be more interesting than I would've thought.

And we learned from Twitter that today's supposedly rigorous thinkers are often not very rigorous at all. They often use rigor against themselves, in a sense, right?

Yeah, so the great miracle of Twitter, everybody looks at Twitter as, like, this mass, as an engine. These different machines, engines or cameras. Like, is the stock market an engine or a camera? It's like something that economists will debate. Third thing about Twitter is, is Twitter an engine or a camera? And this prevailing view is that social media broadly, but Twitter specifically, because it's kind of where the elites are, you know, sort of the intellectual elites, the social elites. And so the prevailing wisdom on Twitter is that it's primarily an engine, which is, you know, it's sort of changing behavior for better or for worse. I actually tend to think it's at least as much a camera. It's like a giant X-ray machine. And you've got this phenomenon, which is just fascinating, where you have all of these public figures. All of these people in positions of authority, like in a lot of cases, great authority, the leading legal theorists of our time, you know, leading politicians, like all these people, business people, and they tweet and all of a sudden it's like, oh, that's who you actually are. These are the things you actually think. Like, to your point, this is your actual level of thought. You know, oh, these are the delusions you're operating under. Our friend Martin Gurri has this thesis of the sort of collapse of authority in the modern world. And I think a lot of it is the authority figures just basically showing up and exposing that, like, you know, the emperor quite literally in a lot of cases has no clothes. The fact that that phenomenon is so widespread and not more recognized, and then that it continues, I just think is absolutely fascinating.

So all this extensive reading of history of earlier social science, how does it affect your daily practical investing decisions at the conceptual level? Yeah.

So what I'm trying to get to sort of the broad patterns of human behavior, and you get very practical on this, right? So what we actually do in both entrepreneurship, both starting and running these companies, designing products, building products that don't exist, bringing them into being. And then also in venture capital and actually funding these efforts. There's a guy I wrote a book referring to, this kind of investing, says the last liberal art, which is to say, you might think it's basically an application of business or finance, and it is to a certain extent. You might think it's an application of technology, and it is to a certain extent, but really what you're dealing with is a large amount of human behavior. And you're dealing with human behavior on the part of all the people in the industry and all the things that we're doing and our own behavior and our own biases and our own ability to think clearly. And all the people we coach and work with. But then, you know, these products launch and like they have to take in the market and to take in the market, they have to get, you know, the sort of a large number of people, you know, who are kind of busy already in their daily lives, you know, out in the world to basically take something new seriously and to want to use it and want to buy it and pay for it and, you know, have it really affect how they live. And so I think what I'm sort of figuring out over time is sort of the psychology, sociology kind of elements are, you know, as important or more important than the business finance elements or the technology elements. And like I said, like, it's not something that comes natural. Like those of us like me, a lot of us came up through the engineering background. Like we were quite literally never trained in human behavior. We were never trained in sociology or psychology or any of these things. And so we kind of back into this through kind of harsh experience over time. But I'm always curious, like if people act a certain way, it's like, okay, is that new behavior or is that actually a very kind of old form of behavior? Is this something new people are only doing today or have they been doing this kind of thing for a long time? And if they've been doing this kind of thing for a long time, then there's something deep about it. And then, you know, for me it said, okay, read backward and try to figure out like, okay, what actually is this form of behavior? Is it actually that deep? Because kind of the Lindy thing, if people have been acting a certain way for thousands of years, they're highly likely to continue acting a certain way for thousands of years. You can't predict people per se, but at least you can start to predict the patterns of behavior. And at least I feel a lot more comfortable when I have that kind of grounding, as opposed to just trying to deal with people in the moment.

So let's say we take Curious Mark, put him in a backwards time machine, give him all the languages he needs. And immunities against all disease. Where in history do you wish to spend a month?

A couple of big, obvious, tempting ones. You know, Athens, you know, the trial of Socrates would have been exciting to see. Socrates had it coming. It would have been fascinating to see that play out. The first modern cancellation. I think the era of the Medici, a month in the court of Lorenzo would have been fascinating. Or I think the Second Industrial Revolution, Edison's lab. J.P. Morgan, J. Pierpont Morgan, the original J.P. Morgan, was a banker and he operated primarily with debt. He financed large-scale industrial enterprise like the railroads, but he actually was also a venture capitalist kind of in his spare time. And he financed Edison's efforts in a significant way. And in fact, was the first customer of Edison's light bulb system for the house. And Edison came and installed the first indoor lighting in the world in J.P. Morgan's library. And then it caught on fire and burned the library down. And then J.P. Morgan, to his enormous credit, rebuilt the library and hired Edison to do it all over again. And so sort of that moment extending through like the 1920s, you know, we're in a lot of ways, in my view, like the most relevant origin of what we're living through today. And so to kind of be in that sort of 1880 to 1925 period, I think would have been really great.

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

I love the little BlackBerry that had the 4-line LED display and the keyboard and ran on AA batteries. I love that little guy. I still miss him. I could type like crazy on that guy. I took notes on a 4-line LED display for years.

So it was better for typing than the current product?

It was better for me for typing. So yeah, I've, I've missed it ever since. What else no longer exists? I mean, it's really fun to drive old cars. It's very, very fun to drive old cars. The '60s muscle cars are super fun to drive. It does very quickly educate you as to why modern cars are what they are, because it turns out old cars were more like pickup trucks, even if they look like sports cars, but those are a lot of fun.

Do you still use an RSS reader?

Hmm. I do. This is actually an exciting moment on that topic for those of us who love these things. So I use Feedly. Which I like a great deal. And the guy who does it is a guy who used to work for us and a wonderful guy. I think it's a great product. It's sort of the inheritor of the now lost Google Reader, the ruthlessly executed Google Reader. And then, you know, this is talking about my book, but Substack, you know, one of our companies has a new reader and it's primarily for reading Substack, but it basically is recreating, in my view, the best of what Google Reader had. That's the other one that's getting a lot of use right now. And I use both of those.

And why is RSS at least seem to be so much less important than before?

Yeah. So RSS is one of those things. I would say this gets into a broader overarching kind of huge debate fight happening in the tech industry right now. Now, which is the sort of internet got built on two models, which are kind of diametrically opposed. One model was sort of open source, open protocols and networks. And this was originally TCP/IP. And then there was, you know, HTTP for the web and there was SMTP for email and there was NNTP for Usenet once upon a time, you know, discussion groups and so forth. And sort of, I, you know, in college and then coming up and a lot of the work we did at Netscape was around those protocols, SSL, we even created at Netscape, another one of these. And so these sort of protocols, you know, computer languages, if you will, you know, sort of open, like not tied to a company, anybody can implement, you you know, kind of against them and say, well, anybody can be on the internet. Anybody can exchange email. Anybody can be on the web. The reason that those statements are true is because those are open protocols. And then there's this other kind of diametrically opposed kind of world, which I'm also very involved in and very excited about, which is this world of the internet companies. Right. And sort of, you know, the actual, you know, Google and Facebook and all these companies over the years, you know, many with us today and long gone that did, you know, built all these incredible services that we live in and get huge amounts of value out of, you know, the internet companies build internet services. They don't tend as much to build internet protocols. They tend to build kind of these walled gardens. These, you know, these kinds of contained environments, you know, they exercise a lot of control. There's huge debates over that control. We have a long discussion about that. There are big virtues to that level of control in terms of, you know, their ability to kind of maintain a very consistent kind of user experience. And so I think basically I go through that to say, I think RSS was from that first world of networks. It was a protocol. It got supported by a lot of people. It didn't quite get to the level of critical mass that was required before basically the social networks took off. And the social networks, right, were on the other side. They were from companies like, you know, Facebook and Twitter. And MySpace and others at the time. And so I think basically in essence, the social networks sort of stole their lunch money, stole RSS's lunch money. The social networks, they got so good so fast, they just absorbed a lot of the energy that was going into blogging and going into RSS. By the way, podcasts is the other area, right? Podcasts, they were podcast companies, but nobody ever really got to critical mass. Podcasts, you know, actually have done quite well as a network. They're doing pretty well. It's still not quite what you want it to be like. Podcast search is still like a big problem.

Maybe that's a good thing. It segments the market a bit. You have to know what you're doing to find your way to a podcast. People are less willing to court stupid listeners.

But we're also back to that same tension again, which is, okay, now we have YouTube and Spotify, right? And so you've got these major players in the form of YouTube, Google, and then Spotify, and YouTube doing, you know, videos, and then Spotify doing podcasts, you know, and a lot of people cross-post between those. And both YouTube and Spotify have very highly prioritized, you know, this kind of, you know, spoken word content, interviews, podcasts, and so forth. And so like, there's the potential that we're sitting here 5 years from now and the sort of open podcast world has kind of really diminished the same way that the blogging RSS world diminished, and then YouTube and Spotify have taken over podcasts in the same way that, you know, Facebook and Twitter took over, you know, you know, text content or whatever. To your point, like maybe that would be good direction in some ways. Maybe that'd be a bad direction in other ways. This whole thing, I want to go through it because this is why we're so excited about this new kind of Web3 idea. Let's go to these collaborations of these technologies, so-called crypto and blockchain, is like there is this new way of envisioning this kind of thing, which basically is as a network, but with money, right? A network, but with trust, right? These sort of open protocols, open networks. But built on this new kind of Web3 infrastructure that gives you a very different way to kind of realize both a high trust environment and also to realize actual economic incentives. And so what I'm hoping and what we're actually seeking at the firm, what we're trying very hard to fund, for example, for podcasts, I'm hoping 5 years from now, there will be these thriving, you know, call it Web3 podcast environments that will be open, will have this sort of anarchic, uncontrolled kind of element that I think you and I both like. However, we'll have a higher level of trust and we'll have a higher level of monetary incentive and economic incentive than the open networks of the past usually did. And so there's this, third way. And you know, this is still early, but like, we're quite optimistic that there might be a new way to build these systems. And I'm excited to see what happens.

But what's the concrete advantage of Web 3.0 for podcasts? So right now, you and I may not feel like it, but we are anarchic and uncontrolled, right? Like, we can say something, some external force isn't going to censor us. Why is this a better podcast if it's done through Web 3.0? Why can't we just put it out there?

Yeah, well, the most obvious thing is just money. You just, you don't get paid, right? And so like, YouTube has built-in monetization, Spotify has built-in monetization. A big way that they're able to sort of entice creators over is by paying them. And I mean, you know, famously Joe Rogan, only see the published reports, but you know, a very large amount of money to take his content out of the open ecosystem and put it into a closed ecosystem. And, you know, good for Spotify. Like, I think that's tremendous. It seems to be great for their business. You know, that's all good. And I'm glad that Joe Rogan is making money, but like, in my view, like, Joe Rogan should not have to choose. He should not have to choose between being part of an open internet and basically not having a way to make money and then kind of going into a silo and then having that be the way that he makes money. Like, that's the binary choice that we've had with all of these internet architecture decisions now for 30 years, 40 years. And it shouldn't have to be a choice. People should be able to get paid. Will strike you as an obvious statement, but a lot of people, it's still a controversial statement. Incentives matter. Economics matter. It is better, you know, in general, when there is a way for, you know, there to be monetary value assigned to, you know, productive work. You know, more interesting things happen. I mean, Substack is a great case study of this. I mean, the quality and the level of writing on Substack is just absolutely extraordinary. And it just, it turns out it's the kind of this great kind of amazing thing, which is if you let people like write for money, it turns out they write a lot of really good stuff. That's the most obvious and immediate thing.

How does someone like Rogan, it doesn't have to be him, but a well-known podcast host, how does that person get paid in a better way through Web 3.0? Make that more concrete for us.

I mean, they can pick their business model. They can decide, you know, subscription-based business model, microtransactions. They can pick whatever model they want. You know, they can also have indirect, you know, there's this whole new rise of this kind of the non-fungible token, you know, kind of this idea of unique digital assets. There's, you know, completely different monetization methods that are opening up for media. You know, it's entirely possible in the future, for example, you'll have entire, you know, forms of media like video games and sporting events and music and so forth that will monetize in completely different ways through the creation of, you know, unique digital property, you know, that gets sold in trades. It's injecting economics. It's injecting at a very fundamental level, kind of internet-native money, internet-native economics and incentives into a system that simply hasn't had that. And of course, this isn't to say that everything needs to cost money. This isn't to say that lots of people won't choose to have things be free. But put it this way, the hard decision between, let's say, total independence and no money, and then having a traditional contractual relationship with one company, like, that shouldn't be the trade-off. There should be lots of room in the middle for experimentation, and that's the zone we're heading into now.

But is the key difference easier micropayments? Is the key difference sort of being able to sell collectibles more readily, say, with the NFT model rather than signed t-shirts? Those don't sound very big to me. They both sound like possible advantages. Advantages, but as a percentage of GDP, they sound like really tiny advantages.

As a percentage of GDP, I mean, as a percentage of GDP, like, everything is tiny compared to, like, healthcare. The media industry is quite small, right? Like, if you look at the size of percentage of GDP, like, it actually turns out— it's actually really interesting. Like, video games, it turns out, is actually quite large. But, like, you know, television, print, newspapers, you know, have always been a tiny slice of GDP. Like, magazines have always been a tiny slice. Book publishing has always been a tiny slice, you know. But they're tiny slices that really matter. I don't really look at it top-down. I don't really look at it as like, okay, this therefore has to lead to like an expansion of 100x in the media business. I think it grows the media business, but it doesn't have to like cause it to explode like that. Having it be a better proposition for creators, having it be a better proposition for consumers, having content come into existence that didn't exist before. And then also just as you think about scale, scale on these things is really hard to forecast as it turns out. And the reason is just we live in a world now very different than prior worlds. We live in a world where we now have 5,000 5 billion directly addressable consumers online at any moment for any new thing. And so one of the things that we're finding in our day job is it's getting really hard to forecast market size for any of these new things, because if they don't kind of have kind of uptake in sort of consumer psychology, then of course they're going to be small. But when these things run, they can really run, right? And if you just look at like just, you know, the most recent example is TikTok, you know, who knew that short-form videos were going to be that big? And it just turns out that 5 billion people as a significant percentage of like short-form videos, all of a sudden it's this huge business. And so I think these things are unpredictable in the scope, the scale that they can reach. And I think we might be surprised to the upside about what happens when you start to make some of these things possible.

What prevents a lot of intermediaries from reemerging in Web 3.0 and making it in some ways a lot like Web 2.0, which could be okay, but actually re-centralized? There are gatekeepers again, there are censorship issues again, and it's not actually that different, but with marginal improvements. Why isn't that the scenario?

Yeah, so there will be some of that. Let me give you an example of how that did happen in the old world. Gmail was fully open in many ways, by the way, is at least in theory still fully open. On emails, there's an SMTP protocol in email that lets basically you or I or anybody could write an email client, email server, and we exchange email with all the other email servers on the internet, you know, and then they're basically webmail emerged and then you had Yahoo Mail. Now you have Gmail. Gmail is an example of what you're talking about, which is Gmail's a sort of a, call it a semi-walled garden. Like it's an environment that you can live in. It's complete UI. It's got all these features. It does give you the ability to send email. You can still send and receive email with Gmail with other email clients. That's using SMTP, it's still in there. But what users experience, to your point, is they experience kind of this new intermediary. And then Gmail has its own anti-spam algorithm. And Gmail is not censoring content yet that I know of, but I think it's like basically any day now. They could start at any moment. And the people, you know, living and working inside Gmail are going to start to have the same experience that they have in sort of any intermediary gatekeeper that starts censoring content. Actually, uh, like online retailers deal with this already. Like online retailers are always fighting basically all of their email, you know, to their customers getting classified as spam. And it's the Gmail spam engine that does that. It's not SMTP. So the gatekeeping function and so the argument basically is basically email is no longer open. It's now closed. It's been moved from that first category of network to this kind of second category of company. And we've lost the sort of anarchic and freewheeling aspect of it. And look, there, there is some truth to that. Notwithstanding that, you can still build your own email system. And in fact, Google built, you know, at one point everybody was on Yahoo Mail. Now everybody's on Gmail. And so I would describe it as it's a little bit the sort of loyalty, voice, exit, you know, kind of Hirschman framework, which is if you're just in a walled garden, like you have loyalty or voice, but you really don't have exit. And again, it's people blame themselves and other people blame this on policies of the companies, whatever. And that has something to do with it, but it's also, it's an architectural observation, which is the difference between something getting built just by a company versus something getting built by a network. If there is an underlying network, then there is exit and all of the Web3, you know, technologies in a lot of cases, the Web3 things that we're backing, they're not even companies. They're projects. They're Web3 projects out of the gate. We're not even buying equity. We're buying tokens. They're decentralized from the very beginning. They're open protocols from the very beginning. And so it's this alternate way of looking at the world, alternate way of designing systems, and then it kind of opens up this exit kind of option. And I think that, as usual with any human system, it turns out that that matters a lot.

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

I'll pick on science fiction. So the movie The Kingsman is kind of a funny spy movie spoof, but the conference room scenes in there, all the British agents are meeting around a conference table, and it turns out they're all virtual. They're all wearing their augmented reality glasses. So they're all kind of seeing holograms of each other. You know, there are going to be technological approaches— virtual reality, augmented reality— in the future that give you basically the recreation of a physical meeting environment. I mean, they already exist. I mean, these things already exist. Our friend Balaji is teaching courses right now in VR, in a virtual classroom. So like, these technologies do already exist. That will happen. You know, I think that will be a big deal. Having said that, I don't think that's necessarily the goal, or that— I don't think that a hybrid meeting is necessarily an equilibrium. Or at least a primary equilibrium. I'm not sure if it's something we need to center in on. And the reason I say that is because one is it's sort of reductive or it's kind of looking backwards, which is to say we used to have in-person meetings and now we have some people remote, so now we need hybrid meetings. You know, it's kind of working backwards from that. Well, there's another way to think about that, which is, well, actually, maybe we shouldn't try to have hybrid meetings. Maybe in fact hybrid meetings are the exact wrong idea and maybe they're the wrong idea because maybe instead of combining the best elements of being local and being remote, maybe they combine the worst elements of being local and being remote. And maybe instead what we want to do is shift more to the edges, and we want to have— number one, we want to have communication systems and management systems that are really built for remote work first and primarily. And we have some of those, and some of those now work really well. And then maybe when we get people together, we don't want to have meetings. Maybe we want to have like very immersive, very social, you know, very human bonding, much more intense level of actual human interaction and relationship building than you have in a meeting. And take a step back on this, like the office is an artifact of the technology of a time and place. I mentioned the Second Industrial Revolution, like The office is sort of a derivation of the factory. There was sort of the factory and the idea of sort of mass production. And then there was the idea of like all the time and motion studies and all these guys who did that. And then out of that, go back, look at the history. You've got schools, you got jails, you see them today, and then you got offices. And it's this idea that you have to bring people together in this kind of highly orchestrated, mechanistic, you know, kind of mass, you know, kind of way, you know, empires. Fun historical fact, like the Roman Empire was not run out of offices. They ran the world. And yet there was no office. There was no office building. The Roman aristocrats, they worked out of their homes and then they went to the Senate and then they went to their country house. There was no office building for administering the Roman Empire. I don't know about the British Empire. I'm guessing they probably didn't have a lot of offices, maybe a couple offices in London, but they probably didn't have a lot of offices either. This office construct is a time and place kind of thing. Punch card, you need to get people in at 8 o'clock, they need to leave at 5 o'clock. The calendar is regimented by half-hour, hour-long meetings. In a school or prison, the bell goes off at 8 AM. In the office environment, it's the iPhone alarm goes off and it's time for me to go to my meeting. Like, that's an artifact of a time and place. We now have all these new technologies they didn't have 100 years ago. We've got video, we've got Slack, we've got text, we've got WhatsApp. We've got, you know, this endless array of all of these new technologies making it possible to be more portable. The cell phone was obviously a huge breakthrough. This was actually Craig McCaw's vision for the cell phone, which is that, you know, it's just crazy. The desk phone, like, why are you at your desk? Well, a big part is because that's where your phone is. And, well, it's like, that doesn't make any sense. Like, your phone should be in your pocket. So anyway, so we've been on this technological trend to liberate ourselves from this sort of artificial construct. But you know, again, human nature being what it is, you know, the artificial construct makes sense at a moment in time, 100 years later, it doesn't, but somebody actually has to step up and reinvent it. I suspect the best-run companies over the next 10 years are not going to be the companies that are the best at hybrid. I suspect they're going to be the best companies that are great at remote, or they're going to be companies that take the choice of having people have actually a much deeper level of human interaction much more frequently. They're going to kind of push it on those extremes as compared to kind of half-hour, hour-long meetings in the office.

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

You know, the big one now, it goes built right off what we said. In a lot of ways, this is like the biggest topic in the world, or at least in the developed world right now, and probably the developing world also, that kind of, it's hard to kind of overemphasize, which is like, if everything I just said is correct, and if kind of in the post-COVID world, this basically, this presumption that remote work is now viable, you know, which is a new presumption, you know, if this sticks, then, you know, it represents the first decoupling of economic opportunity from geographic locality in, you know, thousands of years. Like, you know, it's potentially a civilization-level change. I'm getting quite excited about this. And so, you know, kind of go through the history on this, right? For thousands of years, if you were a sharp, ambitious young person, you know, this is true of the Medicis and it's true of the Greeks, like, you had to go to the city, like, you had to go to the city to basically get opportunity. If you don't have to do that, and in particular, if you don't have to all go to the the same city, and if you don't have to go all to the same city that hates you, and if all of a sudden economic opportunity is decoupled from that, then people are going to be able to choose how to live at different stages of their life in a fundamentally different way, much less dependent on the sort of physical requirement of colocation with economic opportunity than they have in the past. I think that's just potentially an earthquake, like it's potentially one of those things in 100 years people could look back and say, could say like, that was a real turning point. For how society developed. In that case, like, the definition of the home changes, right? It's like, because, you know, well, the first thing is like, number one, you're working out of your home, right? So a lot of people did not plan their home or did not plan whatever their, you know, apartment buildings or whatever, never got built with the assumption that you're working out of them. And so one is just all of a sudden it's this live-work thing, which again is a Back to the Future thing, because that's how the Roman aristocrats lived and they ran the world. And so apparently you can do that. And actually, the Romans actually had a whole system on this that we could talk about. They thought this through quite carefully to work out of their houses. And so it's a place that you work work. You know, second is like, you know, this whole idea of the nuclear family being detached from the extended family, again, because of the need for young people to move for economic opportunity. Should the home really be, you know, two parents and a couple of kids, or should the home really be, again, a Back to the Future thing? Should it be three or four generations of people, you know, and a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles, and then a lot of kids running around? And if everybody could still have access to great knowledge work jobs, you know, online, like maybe that's like a fundamentally better way to live. Or, you know, maybe young people— I just, I talked to a founder today, he's got 8 people in his company, and they literally go city to city every 6 months, and they get a group house together, you know, they're exploring the world while they're, while they're building their startup. And so it may be that we're in this time of being able to sort of recreate a lot of the assumptions around how we can live, and a lot of that will show up right back in the house.

How much do you worry about AI and alignment issues? Skynet. Skynet. But it could be intermediate, right? Just master criminals who use crypto to hire hitmen to achieve nefarious ends. They're master AI criminals, to be clear.

Yeah, at least historically, the problem with criminals is they're not that smart. There are not a lot of real-life Moriartys running around. But so I guess I would say what I don't worry at all about— maybe I'm just short-sighted, but I just don't get it. What I'm not worried about is kind of the sort of macro AI, like AI comes alive and, you know, Skynet or the paperclip optimizer or the Grey Goo or whatever the different formulations of these problems where all of a sudden, like, the machines turn on us, like they get conscious and they turn on us. And I just probably am too much of an engineer or something. It's like, you know, what is AI? It's math. It's basically elaborations on linear algebra. And I just— I have a hard time getting worked up about linear algebra. It's math. We'll be able to keep the math under control. So I'm not as worried about that more. And I wouldn't say it's a specific worry, but I think it's more what you just alluded to, which is look like— and we see this today— a world of ubiquitous, you know, information, communications, computation, a world of everybody, you know, being connected. I mean, you know, there's whatever hive mind, global brain kind of concept where everybody's plugged in all the time, a world in which, you know, people have the ability to marshal, you know, enormous economic resources potentially very quickly in a collaborative way. You know, yeah, these dystopian views, the old idea I think you're alluding to, the whole idea of a— the essay was called Assassination Politics, which is sort of, yeah, crowdfunding assassinations. And then the concern with futures markets, the concern with Robin Hanson's idea that always gets put at him as if you can bet on, you know, a public figure getting assassinated, you're creating an incentive for a public figure to get assassinated. So, yes, like all of those things are real. There are going to be all kinds of issues. You know, they sort of emerge, you know, from basically connecting the world and wiring everybody up with computers and information systems. But it's like, okay, we've been doing that for a long time now. We gave everybody spoken language that, you know, maybe it was a mistake. We gave everybody written language. They did a lot of bad things with that. We gave everybody, you know, machines. They did a lot of horrible things with machines. You know, we figured it out. Like, we gave people cars— like, history— we gave people automobiles. And what's one of the first things that happened was, you know, there was a rash of nationwide bank robberies. You know, the Dillinger Gang went out and, you know, they took automatic weapons from World War I and they took the car from the 1920s and they started knocking over the banks. And it was a huge crisis. —led to the creation of the FBI. And so it's like, yeah, you know, these are the new tools, these are the new systems. For me, it goes back to the human dimension, which is, yeah, people are going to use these things for all kinds of good purposes, all kinds of bad purposes. We're going to figure this out as we go. We're going to figure out how to deal with it. Again, maybe I lack vision. I, I don't see the discontinuous jump where all of a sudden we're in some world in which this stuff is just out of control and there's just no way to cope with it.

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

So I think that the thing that is so fascinating about his method— and if I reran my career and I used his method instead of my method, whatever my method is, would I have been more successful? And I'm not positive. I think maybe. The thing about his method, there's a talent-picking aspect to it, but I would actually put in front of that, and maybe even more importantly, there's a talent-attraction aspect to it. So my mental model of what Peter does is I use the metaphor of the bat signal. Peter puts out the bat signal and then he basically sees who shows up. Right. And his method— and he's basically been doing this since college. That's very interesting. Like, this is kind of what he did at Stanford with the Stanford Review. You know, it's a Stanford Review. He's like, okay, we're going to have a new newspaper. Let's see who shows up and wants to work on, in that case, you know, the right-wing newspaper on a very left-wing campus. And it turned out it was a lot of very smart, very, you know, idiosyncratic and very contrarian people who— many of whom he continues to work with today. You know, let's put out this clarion call with Founders Fund with the 140— you know, we were promised Lionheart's tagline. And, you know, basically see who shows up with flying car startups. And he's founded— Spence has been a very successful firm based on attracting, you know, some very unusual and very compelling founders. It's interesting. Peter doesn't really use social media, but he gives talks and he writes. And again, I think that's part of it, which is he's looking for who reads his stuff or who shows up at his talks. I don't know what you're like as a public speaker. When I give public talks, I'm like, I give the talk and then I'm out the back door. And then I'll like go online and see what people think.

But you've got to stick around. You've got to stay. That's the whole point. The talk is irrelevant. Just show up for the end of your own talk, right?

Here I am. Exactly. So I don't know, I think it's like, it's one of these things you learn in venture capital. It's like 90% of the battle is over by the time it starts. 90% of the talent picking process is over if you're attracting the right people up front. Then the filtration just becomes a lot easier. And he, he has that down to an art form that's just like absolutely amazing to see. And it continues to run.

He does it every day. So putting aside product-market fit, What's the question you're most trying to figure out about who makes a good founder?

Yeah, so the biggest question, you know, and again, this is sort of the macro human behavior kind of question of all time, right? But the biggest question is, I think, and continues to be, and will probably always be, it's a little bit the nature-nurture question, or let's say it's inherent capability of whatever form for whatever reason, and then training. Right. And that training is less formal training for entrepreneurship, but it's, you know, it's on-the-job training and hopefully it's coaching and, you know, hopefully, you know, we can help people with that. So start by saying the presumption is there are not enough great founders in the world. I think that's obvious. We could have a big discussion as to whether that's the case or not. I think it's pretty clear there isn't. If there isn't, how do we get more of them? Right. Where do they come from? And, you know, should you be starting with, you know, 100 million people and trying to train as many as you can or 10 million or a million or 100,000 or 10,000? What's the upfront criteria? Like, what do they have to show up with by the time they become engaged in the activity and open to the training? And then how much can we train? Like, maybe it's much more nurture than we think. Maybe it's actually not nature. Maybe it's much more nurture. Maybe we just need like much more comprehensive and rigorous training, you know, much more freely available to, you know, to a lot more people. And I think that's like in Florence that remains, I would say, surprisingly open question.

So let's say you speak with 5 people tomorrow, they're founders or potential founders. What is it you would like data on? That you don't have data on now, waving your magic wand?

It would be great to have like the psychometric tests. But you can do that.

They don't seem that useful, right?

I don't know. Yeah, they're not exactly in fashion. I would like to have videotape of what they were like under adversity, of what they were like under pressure. I would like to know how many great people they've worked with in the past are willing to follow them and come to work with them today. I would like to know how many people they've worked for who are willing to come to work for them today. That's one of the interesting things you see with the really best founders. You'll find is often people who they have worked for will come to work for them. It's like, okay, yeah, this person is so good that I should actually be working for them. Like, that's an extraordinarily powerful statement. You do see that occasionally. I would like to see that more often. You know, we learn these things once they're up and running. We learn all these things. It would be great to have the scrying device that let us see all that stuff up front.

Why has venture capital been so concentrated in tech, to some extent biomedical, and in the old days, whaling voyages, but not so much in many other things. Like, private equity is much bigger. So why is venture capital limited? And conceptually, how do you think about those limits?

Private equity— and this is not a value statement, it's just a very different way of operating— private equity comes into industries and businesses that already exist. It attempts to optimize them or turn them around or consolidate them or whatever it does. But there's always the businesses already there that exist. I like to say we do value investing, but it's value that doesn't exist yet, hasn't been created yet. It's blank sheet of paper stuff. The history, with some exceptions, the history, as you said, basically is that computer science-based venture capital has done very well. Biomedical, biotechnology-based venture capital has done about, you might say, half as well or a quarter as well. And then everything else is kind of a rounding error. It hasn't really worked. Now, having said that, we'll come back to this. It's like Tesla. Nobody in venture— there were a few VCs, but like most people in venture capital land didn't think there was like a ripe opportunity to build a new car company. I can tell you that. Nor did most VCs think there was an opportunity to build a new rocket company. I can also tell you that. You do have these very striking counterexamples, which let's come back to, but the pattern has been, as you said, it's computer tech or it's biotech. I think it's the Bill Janeway thesis that he wrote about in his book. I think the book is called Doing Capitalism and it's his history. He's a legendary VC in his own right, trained economist. And he basically says it was the foundational science and advanced technology developed in the computer world for 50 years by DARPA and its succeeding technological agencies, and then by big industrial research labs like IBM Research and others that sort of created the preconditions for sort of computer-based startups. And there was like a 50-year backstory to that by the time Silicon Valley really got going. And then he said also biotech, he said the reason biotech is like half as successful is because there was like 25 years of biotech, you know, NIH and all these kind of very aggressive biological science investing programs. And so his claim— and this is why, like, I think he's always been leery, for example, of clean tech. Tech, environmental tech, for example, is he's like, look, maybe there should have been a DARPA of clean tech and started in 1950 and ran for 50 years that we were all drawing new technologies off of, but it didn't exist. And so therefore it's just going to be much harder in all these other fields. I think that's probably right. And the reason I think that that's probably right is because at least the history in the Valley is if we have a sharp entrepreneur with the ability to attract a team and the ability to tell a story and have a vision, and then they've got insight into a technological dislocation,— right, an actual change to the technology kind of foundation of the field that they're working in, then you have a shot for a successful startup. If you don't have a technological dislocation, it's really hard to just do a cold start. Now, again, having said that, Elon did this in both cars and rockets and actually developed many technical breakthroughs subsequently in both of those companies. But at least I didn't see that going in. And, and I would say the case studies of Tesla and SpaceX— this is something we're spending a lot of time on in our firm— really leads me to wonder if the Janeway thesis is actually wrong and if actually we should be much more open-minded about this. I have a set of ideas as to why that might be the case, but that's one of the things that we're going to try to explore.

This issue aside, what have you been most wrong about in the last 10 years?

So the prior decade, from 20 years ago to 10 years ago, my errors were almost all mis-evaluations of ideas and in particular false negatives. You know, oh, this won't work. And then it turns out it worked. And basically, you know, in my line of work, after you do that a while, you learn to stop lying. Subtracting value by imposing your own opinion on whether something will work. And I have a whole different theory on that. I don't have that problem anymore. You know, necessary kind of disclaimer on that: in my line of work, a false negative, right, saying something is not going to work and then it works, is a much bigger mistake than the false positive of saying something's going to work and then it doesn't work. And it goes to the asymmetry of returns. So the big mistakes are always missing the big winners, like almost 100% of the time. So anyway, I've cured myself of that. The last 10 years, my biggest mistakes have all been in the dimension of, okay, this might work, work, but if it does, it just won't get that big. And this goes to the conversation we had earlier, which is things have changed. Here's something where things have changed. 5 billion people connected, being able to click and use something new. For the things that work, they're getting to be much, much larger than I would have ever thought possible, just much bigger by orders and orders of magnitude. And again, this goes back to in the day job, it's like, okay, is it responsible to do what's called market sizing? Are we supposed to estimate market size, which is what all the textbooks tell you to do? Or should we just kind of say, you know what, maybe it's not actually so easy to forecast market size anymore. Maybe we should just basically say, look, if something's going to work at In this new world of 5 billion connected people, maybe just everything gets really big, or all the important things get really big. That's the one we're trying to work out right now.

Whom do you admire the most?

Yeah, the people I admire the most— two-part answer to this. In the abstract, again, this goes to the patterns of sort of human behavior. Social conformity is so strong. People are so motivated to conform with the environment around them and to get the agreement of their friends and to be part of the group. It's so incredibly strong that the number of people who are willing to go out on a limb and actually take controlling position anything is just a very— that's just never going to change. Like, and if anything, that's, that's going backwards. Like, this might be an area where social media has caused, you know, conformity to rise, or at least among a lot of populations, cause conformity to rise. You could argue it's probably also leading to more contrarianism as well, but it certainly is a lot of conformity effects that you can see in plain sight. You know, it's like the old Apple Think Different thing. Like, everybody kind of wants to be Gandhi or, you know, Martin Luther King or, you know, Bob Dylan or Miles Davis. It's great to be those guys once they're things worked and everybody thought they were geniuses and heroes. It's a lot harder up front when everybody thinks you're an idiot and everybody's laughing at you. And so it's the people willing to withstand the scorn. That's on the one hand. And then the more practical answer— and this maybe is artifact of getting older— but the more practical answer is, you know, there's another big dimension to what we do and what I do, which is, you know, working with these kind of very special people and working with kind of the people around them and their families. The other side is like people who take care of other people, people who really take care of other people, and people who really care about other people and really try to help help them succeed and try to support them, these crazy efforts, or, you know, or sign up to be part of these crazy efforts. I'm enjoying more and more spending time with people who care deeply about other people, which was not how I started.

If it were safe, would you go to Mars?

No, definitely not. Why not? 100% of my adventure needs are satisfied online and being able to meet people and talk to people here on Earth.

Unless it's after one of your talks, right?

Yes, exactly. Yeah, no, I do not heliski, I do not parasail, and I will not be going to Mars.

Have you ever wanted to write a book?

Yeah, I have, and someday I will. Someday I will. Not anytime soon.

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

Does it have to be solvent? No. Can I simply subsidize it for 50 years, and if nobody ever comes, then that's fine?

The token will have some value, so let's figure it breaks even, and you can do with it what you want.

First of all, look, it would have to have a coffee shop on the one side and a bar and lounge on the other side, and so it would have to be a physical gathering place. Place for people. Maybe I need to think more broadly than this. Maybe it also needs to be in VR or something. It needs to be a virtual gathering place, you know. But look, it should be a place for the exploration of ideas. And then, you know, it should be extremely comprehensive. I would want it to be, you know, very focused on, yeah, sort of history, politics, philosophy, economics. So the evolution of human society, how we got here, why we're not all still living in mud huts. They're really big questions, you know. A lot of it probably organized by era. And then of course I would want to just, like, in this case, I would want to ruthlessly censor. It would be an arduous gauntlet to actually get a book into the book Last question: What is your favorite movie and why? Favorite movie— can I answer it with a TV show?

Well, movie and TV show, give me both then.

Movies are hard because they're so short. Love movies, I watch a lot of movies. I don't even know if there are particular— oh, okay, all right, I'll give you one, I'll give you one. Real Genius. Have you seen Real Genius? I'm not sure I have.

What's it about? It's actually a good movie for you.

It was a comedy, it was a sort of mid-'80s comedy, but it was actually— it's like the MIT MIT movie. So it's basically this kid basically ends up testing off the charts on his aptitude test and ends up essentially at MIT. It was Val Kilmer's first big starring role. It's a very funny movie but also very sweet. And so it's about kids actually, you know, kind of discovering their full potential. Takes place at a recreation of MIT at kind of that time with that kind of level, you know, the sort of level of experimentation and then sort of pranks and the humor and kind of the uncontrolled anarchic kind of aspect of it, which I think does not really exist anymore, but was, you know, was very special while it lasted. That's a great movie.

And TV show, TV show favorite?

So that one's easy. Deadwood, by far, by a mile. Deadwood's the product of an auteur named David Milch, who's a legend, who I've had the pleasure of meeting one time and really enjoyed. Deadwood is, in my opinion, is the closest thing that we're going to get to Shakespeare out of our era. It's an absolutely extraordinary creative accomplishment. The language is unbelievable, but the content, it really sticks with me. In fact, I'm due to rewatch it. I need to rewatch it. It is, as far as I'm concerned, it is the actual telling of the creation of America through the development of the frontier. And, you know, for good, bad, and ugly, like, it's all in there. You know, it's the entire process. It's a story of carving out basically the mining colony of Deadwood and then, you know, ultimately the creation of the state and, you know, essentially the creation of the modern America that we live in. And I wasn't there, so I can't attest to how accurate it is. And of course, it's dramatized and so forth, but it's a very visceral recreation of what it must have been like to be in a place like that at a time like that.— in a lot of ways, this is sort of the emergence of human civilization, not being able to rely on, you know, law enforcement is not necessarily there. The military is not necessarily there. You know, if you have a contract dispute, like, it might get solved with a fistfight or a gunfight. Like, what it takes to basically carve what we would consider civilization out of the wilderness. And by the way, and again, the complexity of it with all the complications and all the controversy and everything else that, you know, revolves around the creation of the country and the creation of the frontier. I think a lot about the frontier idea. I think I work in the frontier. I think basically the American frontier went west as far as it could. It reached the Pacific coast. It stopped. People weren't quite sure what to do next. And then eventually we figured out that we should just keep going, but in the virtual frontier. And I think that's why California has the tech industry in the north and has the media industry in the south, is because those are the two kind of parts of the virtual frontier, the networks and then the content, the imaginary worlds. I live kind of post the exploitation of the physical frontier. That show puts me right in the center of what that must have been like, kind of halfway through that.

Mark Andreessen, thank you very much.

Tyler, a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.