How Marc Andreessen Actually Uses AI

This is already probably the most democratic, you know, small D technology of all time in the sense of the very best they are in the world is fully available on the apps that anybody can download. This is just a completely different kind of computer that has these characteristics that are frankly more like a person, which is it's right most of the time, it occasionally gets things wrong. When it gets things wrong, he's able to self-critique. And you have to kind of work with it the way that you work with a person. You want to take advantage of the fact that it's creative and then you want to be tolerant of the fact that it's not always correct. AI basically has snapped everything right back into the 20 bucks per radius around where I sit to just an incredible degree. So I would say like almost 100% of the actually interesting AI companies in the West are happening in sort of ground zero right here in Silicon Valley. There's a bakery owner somewhere using the same AI as Google CEO. And according to Mark Andreessen, the bakery owner is winning. The man who invented the modern web browser and built multi-billion dollar companies just revealed something remarkable. AI is spreading backwards through society. Individuals, first, small businesses second, Fortune 500 companies third, government last. The exact opposite of how computers evolve from mainframes to smartphones. Mark says half a billion people already have the world's most sophisticated AI on their phones. So the question is, why are most using it to write emails while only some are using it to build empires? Today we're sharing a conversation Mark Andreessen had with Mark Halperin on the show Next Up. They talk about a specific prompts that transform AI into a world-class advisor, why Silicon Valley just snapped back into a 20 mile radius after five years of dispersion and the uncomfortable truth about America's AI race with China. We hope you enjoy. All right. Next up, Mark Andreessen, innovator, creator and damn successful businessman. Early on he invented the mosaic internet browser, co-founded Netscape. And since then he has been the animating force and investor behind a lot of very successful companies, including some at the multiple billion dollar level, co-founded his firm Andreessen Horowitz, a general partner there. And they do a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff and he knows a lot about a lot. Mark, welcome. Thank you, Mark. It's great to be here. Really happy to have you. So much about AI I want to talk to you about. So we're going to spend a lot of the time on that. First off, it's tempting to say right now, and I think about AI, I think about where are we now and where are we going? It's tempting to say it's between really smart, highly educated people who are adapting to it and then people who just don't have the capacity to do that in their jobs easily. But what I'm finding is at people who do what I do, people who are well educated, very privileged, there's a have-nots there. I'm a baby using it. I'm not using it very sophisticatedly very often, but I am Einstein compared to some of my counterparts. And I'm wondering, is that how you see it? And what do you think differentiates those who understand how powerful it is even now versus those who seem oblivious to it? Yeah. So I think there's kind of a fake story and then there's a real story. So the fake story is kind of the classic, the kind of Marxist story, which is only the rich people have it, only the fancy people have it, the big tech companies have it. Everybody else is kind of going to be left out in the cold. And that's not actually what's happening. And there's a lot of data on this now that has been released by these companies to justify what I'm about to say. So the real story is this is already probably the most democratic, small D technology of all time in the sense of the very best AI in the world is fully available on the apps that anybody can download. And take your pick, Chachi PT, Claw, Gemini, Grock, Mistral, any of these, by the way, Deepsea from China. You download any of these apps, you're getting state-of-the-art, like the full most sophisticated, powerful AI capability in the world. And the number of people already who download these apps is north of a half billion, honest way to a billion. And individual people are figuring out basically how to incorporate this in their lives. And what you see in the data is there's maybe what you'd expect, which is there are a slice of people who just use these new systems all the time, like literally all day for everything. And in a lot of cases, they're reporting that they're getting enormous benefits from that. And then there's a lot of people who are experimenting and trying to figure it out. And then there are people who are just not, for whatever reason, not interested or not engaged. But I would say it's incredible out of the gate how distributed this technology already is. And then I could just say, like, I don't have that, with all my resources and with all my connections, I don't have access to a better AI than the one that you just downloaded off the App Store. And so I think this is actually like just an incredible story of the most advanced technology in the world being available to everybody right out of the gate. You got to get people to use it to take advantage of it, right? So I've got a friend who's drafted a book and took it to his agent and the agent said, it's 140,000 words, you got to cut it down to 70,000. And I said, if you try to do that by hand, even if you hire someone, it's going to take you months, I can do it in an hour. And I can say to AI, don't change the style, don't change the tone, don't cut anything that ruins the story. And he said, that's immoral. The publisher will be mad that I did it that way. It's not right. How should I answer that person? Yeah, so the exact same arguments emerged years ago with the introduction of computers, right? I actually just, I've been watching a lot of old science fiction movies with my kid. And, you know, there's this famous science fiction movie Tron from 1982, you know, that had the first computer graphics movies, and it was disqualified for an Oscar for special effects because it used computers, right? And so there's this kind of long tradition of like, whatever the new tool is, the sort of legitimate, there must be something wrong with it. In this particular case, I mean, there's no doubt there are people who feel the way that your friend feels. That issue was actually litigated in the last Hollywood Strikes in a sort of, you know, the movie on the film and TV side of the creative profession. The last round of Strikes actually, it's actually funny, he started his streaming strikes and then AI, then they begin to AI strikes. But the sentiment with the studios actually with the unions was that the following, which is if you're a writer and you use AI, that's totally fine. What's not allowed is for the studio to basically use the AI and then claim it was a writer. But basically with the unions and studios and Hollywood decided was it's another tool, it's like the word processor, it's like the personal computer. It's like, you know, it's like using a printer instead of writing out a manuscript by hand. And so I think there are people who feel like your friend does, but I think the world is already adapting very fast to using it. And frankly, one of those reasons you probably pointed out to your friend is like, I don't even know that anybody could tell anymore, right? And so, you know, if you're going to have a moral prohibition on something that people can just do and nobody knows about, like, is that really going to work? And so I think those those sort of self-advanced barriers are probably going to collapse quickly. I hope so. Fortune put out a list of the top American companies using AI, Alphabet, Visa, JP Morgan Chase, top three. We talked about just now on an individual level. If you were the CEO of a company or advising a CEO, how important is it to be on that list? In other words, how important is it to get to your company to adapt whether it's for internal or consumer-facing? How important is it right now? Yeah. So this this goes back to actually where we started, which is, and in fairness, the old model of adapting actually computers and computers came out. The old model was the largest institutions get technology first, and then everybody else gets it later. And so, you know, the way the computer rolled out was the government actually got mainframe computers first, starting 1940s. And then big companies got computers and mainframes in the 1950s, 1960s. Small companies started to get computers. We were called mini computers at the time in the 1970s. And then we as individuals only got PCs in the 1980s. And so it took 40 years for basically technology to cascade down from the largest organizations in the world to small businesses and to the individual. This technology, AI, is going the opposite, which is like I said, the most sophisticated capabilities are available on the consumer app today. And then what we're finding is consumers are adapting the fastest, just individuals in their lives. The small businesses are then adopting right after that because, you know, small business typically is just, you know, a person who's, you know, making decisions for their own business, very, very easy to do new things. Big companies are then following small companies. And so, you know, the companies on that list, some of you know, obviously, some of them are doing interesting things, but in general, big companies right now are pretty tied up in knots internally, kind of in all their processes and in all their legacy systems and all their, you know, organization and training and, but their unions and like all the other issues they have to deal with, you know, they're actually relatively slow to adopt compared to individuals and small businesses. And then government is the late adopter, right? And so the governments are already trying to figure out, you know, kind of how to adapt to this technology, but they're not adopting it very fast because they can't because of all their rules and systems and bureaucracy. And so there's been a real inversion of how technology moves through our society that's really become, you know, AI is becoming a case study for. And so the answer to your question is, I think big company CEOs and, you know, many of them are doing this, but I think they really have to force the issue on this inside their companies because the, you know, these big companies are just such now giant bureaucracies with so many rules that like by default, they'll smother new ideas. And so it's a real active leadership to, you know, to get on a list like that and be able to, you know, actually stay kind of with pride like we're on the leading edge. So if your friend owned a bakery and he said, Mark, I want you to come in and help me if you're at how to use AI. Well, how could someone owns a single storefront bakery use it now? Yeah. I mean, so there's, I mean, there's, you know, there's dozens of ways, you know, obviously it depends on what your business goals are. They're, they're, they're baker dozens of ways. They are exactly. And so, yeah, I mean, look, the first thing you can do is just say, look, we, you know, do a performance review for me. Like just see Dan, you know, here's my, here's my staffing schedule. You know, what do you think of it? Give me a critique of it. You know, here's the last, you know, 100 emails we've got from customers. One of the one of the patterns of that, you know, here's the copy for the ad that we're going to place the local newspaper, you know, put up on Facebook or whatever, like, you know, what, what, you know, what do you think of this, you know, let it, let it do it, let it do a performance assessment. A lot of people find it very effective for personal coaching. And so, you know, the owner might use it that way or might, you know, ask the employees to use it that way. And then I think where the power really kicks in is you're up, you're up, you know, you're a small business owner, you've got one bakery. Now you want to have two bakeries, right? And you want to have a brand. And then maybe if that works, you're going to have five and then 50 and then 500. And then you're going to have, you know, package products, buying the new markets and so forth. And then there you basically turn the AI into a thought partner, right? And you basically say, okay, what, you know, what are the best ways to expand from a single, you know, output to, you know, to multiple and to, you know, turn this into a larger business. And, you know, the AI, you know, it's been, you know, because it's been trained on, you know, some large percentage of the total amount of human knowledge, like it has within and all the information on how, you know, Ray Kroc turned McDonald's from, you know, a single restaurant in McDonald's and how all these other, you know, entrepreneurs before actually did this. And so it can, you know, explain with you and help you, you know, figure out how to do this for your own business. And then, you know, the thing that you get into is use it as basically, it's just like, wow, it's like having the world's best coach, mentor, therapist, right, advisor, you know, board member, but it's like infinitely patient. And so it's like, it's happy to have the conversation. It's happy to have the conversation 50 times. It's happy if you admit your insecurities, it'll coach you through them. You know, it's happy if you run wild speculations that don't make any sense. It's happy to do all that at four in the morning. And so the people who are using it a lot are finding it's, you know, it actually turns out to be very supportive in their general lives. Could you say, here's the recipe for our best-selling cinnamon rolls? How could I make it better with that? Yes, 100%. Yeah, you can say, you can say, and by the way, part of the art of AI, right, is what questions to ask it, right? Because, you know, it turns out that, you know, it turns, it can answer, you know, many, many different questions. So you have to, you have to actually create it at this. Yeah. And so you could say, like, here's my current recipe, you know, how might I improve it? You can also say, you know, what's the best cinnamon roll recipe in the world? We're back for some math. And then you can also say, look, I want to make the best out of the world, but I need to do it at a sense of price. You know, what, you know, what are the ways to cost out of demise? By the way, the other thing you can ask it is you can ask it, what question should I be asking? Right. And so you can plug in, I run a bakery dot, dot, dot. What question should I be asking? And you'll find it's actually a thought partner in helping you figure out what questions to ask. Right, brilliant. So the other day I said, I want to know every Republican who voted against any of the articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton. Give me the list of every Republican. And it came back and it listed some Democrats in mixed in there. And it said they were Democrats. And I said, back, I only want Republicans. And it said, Oh, sorry, I inadvertently included Democrats. Now, I could understand a human being, a junior researcher doing that. But how could AI make a mistake, have it pointed out to it and say, Oh, yeah, how could that be in the model? Yeah. So, you know, this gets technical. And I'd be delighted to get deeply into the technical details. I'll try to resist. It's a new kind of computer. And the way to think about it is computers up until now have been what might call like hyper literal, right, where computers up until now, like they do math really fast, but like, they do the same thing every single time. They admit no creativity whatsoever. And if you expect them to exhibit creativity, like, you know, they just can't do it. And then if they make a mistake, it's because the human programmer made a mistake. And that has made computers, you know, super useful for running like, you know, large math exercises, you know, doing a lot of things that the computers do. But of course, computers have never been creative, right? You can't computers never been able to write you poetry, or work with you on your cinnamon bun recipe. Like it's just never even been a thing that we can think about. So it's never had kind of that human element of creativity to it. This is just a completely different kind of computer that has these characteristics that are frankly more like a person, which is it's right most of the time, it occasionally gets things wrong. When it gets things wrong, it's able to self critique. And you have to kind of work with it the way that you work with a person. And so you have to basically figure out as you use it, like you want to take advantage of the fact that it's creative. And then you want to be tolerant to the fact that it's not always correct, just like you're working with a person. Now, having said that, when it makes easily avoidable mistakes, where it's just like makes boneheaded fact mistakes, you know, we call those hallucinations. The latest systems are much, much, much better at not doing that. They're much more accurate. And in particular, for anybody watching this, if you want to kind of see this in action, just give an example. If you buy the full version of chat, GPT, there's a model called GPT Pro, GPT 5 Pro, which is the latest one. And then there's something called deep research, which is a switch that you turn on. And if you use GPT 5 Pro or deep research, you ask a question like that. Like at this point, I think it's, I wouldn't say it's bulletproof, but like it's really good as things vastly grounded. And literally, you've been watching it work. And it'll literally go out on the internet and it'll like check all the authority sources and it'll, you know, it'll go on commerce.gov or whatever and check the voting records and verify that. And so I think that problem is being hired out, you know, kind of as we speak. Yeah. For people watching, listening who haven't used it or not used it much, the thing you said about good prompts is so key. And that what does differentiate that, you know, the people really getting productive at it from not. And one of the things that you and I have talked about is it is hilarious. It can write, if you give it the right prompts, it can write stuff that is so funny. And, and where does that come from? How does it have the capacity to understand? Because humor involves metaphors and sophistication and humanity. How can, how could, how can it do that? Yeah. So this gets, this gets to this idea of how it's trained. So, so basically what these systems are is they're basically the accumulation of human knowledge over time, sort of. And by the way, most of the training data is just literally the internet, right? So one of the reasons that this is happening now in 20 years ago is because the internet finally got big enough, but just the web finally got big enough to have like all this information in it, right? And so if you go out on the internet today, you know, you can find, you know, all kinds of material online that's, you know, it's, you can find like, you know, classic screenplays from, you know, the gold age of cinema for a hundred years ago. You know, you can find, you know, literally, you know, people joking with each other on social media all day long, you know, you can find, you know, professional comedians doing oral histories of, you know, how they did great comedy. So there's just like, there's incredible massive information that are online about comedy and about what's funny. And then all of that information is in the training data. So it's all kind of fed into the AI during the training process. And the AI basically processes it through like any other kind of data and comes out the other end and just basically is like, oh, you know, now that AI is a world class expert in the humor, right? And of course, you know, look, you could be an expert in humor and not actually be funny, right? And they're, you know, they're probably professors of comedy or something like that in colleges who are very funny. But like, it just, it knows so much about what humor is. It knows so much about the pattern of jokes. It knows so much about what make people laugh. It has so many examples, you know, to be able to learn from. And, you know, the professional comedians will tell you, there are patterns to comedy, right? You know, there are, you know, I worked with a professional comedian once and something and he suddenly, you know, the key to it is specificity, like you need to get, you need to just like nail the reference, you know, another comedian will say the key is, you know, timing or pacing or the callback to the previous job or whatever, you know, the punchline, whatever it is. And so it just, it knows all that. And then it's just, you know, it's now so powerful that it's actually, yeah, I, yeah, quite honestly, I find, especially at like two in the morning, I find these things historical. Yeah. All right. Just a minute left before we take a break. What's your advice to an individual who's barely used it or hasn't used it? What's your advice to them to sort of how to get started? Yeah. So I mean, by far the best way to do it is just download it and use it. And like I said, you know, there's, there's several, you know, Elon's got cropped, you know, which is, which is now fantastic. By the way, you know, it's actually interesting how these things are being, getting built into products now. So the, you know, the new versions of X, you know, formerly Twitter, actually, if you go to any post on X, there's a little rock icon that looks like a little, a little black hole icon, the upper right corner of the post. And if you click on it, it actually calls up the Brock AI to explain the post to you. Right. And so like, it literally is like, it can explain to you that, you know, if there's some post on politics or something, you don't understand what's happening. You just, you know, lost the thread of the topic. You just like, bought that button and you get in a dialogue with AI, AI window pops up and explains the post and you can ask for more details. And so it's like built into that product. Google's actually built AI now into search. And so now when you do searches, it has this thing called AI mode and you bonk on it. And, you know, in addition to getting the 10 blue links for Google, you now get into an AI dialogue. And so you just start using those products, or you just download one of these apps and start using it. And like I said, a really big question is like, okay, how do I use you? Right? Like, or you can teach me works really well. You can say, you know, teach me how to use you in the best way, you know, teach, you know, teach, teach, you know, teach me how to use you for my business, you know, for this project. And it'll, you know, these things love to talk and it'll happily sit there and chat away and take you through it. Yeah. Just my sort of analog to the way you just said it is, ask it for what you want as specifically as possible. Don't hold back, be really specific, and it will do what you ask. All right. More with Mark Andrezen. That's next up. Stay tuned. If you're 64 years old or older, this is an important announcement. The Department of Justice recently sued three major Medicare brokers for claiming they were unbiased while allegedly pushing people into plans that got them the biggest kickbacks. It's true. So many insurance agents, they just can't be trusted, but you also cannot rely on the government to give you the best information that you need either. 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Again, that's Pound 250 and say Chapter Medicare. All right, welcome back. We're here with Mark Andriesen still. Mark, are you of the school that says that the United States is in an existential struggle with China? Do you subscribe to that point of view? I hope that's not true. I hope this is not going to walk all the way to the situation that we ended up in with the Soviet Union. Like you, I grew up in an era, I'm sure you remember this, growing up thinking there was a significant chance that we're all going to die from nuclear war. And so I hope it doesn't get back to that level of intensity, but I do think there are a lot of historical parallels to what happened between the US and the USSR in the 20th century happening right now. And you have two hegemonic superpowers that both have visions. They both have visions of how society should be structured and how the sort of global political systems should be structured. And obviously, I think America is better, but they both have visions. And they're both working to that end. And then they both have a national strength, so it's just militarily, technologically, economically, culturally. And there is that kind of geopolitical fight happening. So I hope we stay in this kind of, I don't know what you call it, mode of co-operative tension without military strife. I hope we stay in that mode, but it's a sufficiently fraught situation that we certainly need. And by the way, have a national strategy for how to win that. And we need to make sure that we do. Right. Do they have any one or two advantages over us in terms of AI? Yeah, they do. So they have two advantages. And by the way, I should say we have many advantages. I'm very bullish on the US. And I think we're in a better position. I wouldn't trade places with them. And we can talk about that. But having said that, they do have strengths. And in particular, they have two key strengths. Number one is they do have the advantages of a command economy. And generally speaking, 100%, like I'm on the side of free markets and the decentralization, and having a dynamic economy, and we have much better entrepreneurial ecosystem and so forth. Having said that, they do have this advantage where when their government, besides the something's a national priority, they just do it. And by that, I mean, not only does the government do it, but they just tell the private sector, you do the following. And so the thing the Soviets have, the entirety of society is able to go up against single missions. We're just a lot more fractious than that. And so we kind of navigate our way through this on our own way, but we don't have anywhere near that level of organization. So that gives them the ability to execute against specific areas of focus in an inarguably superior way. And then the other advantage that they have is we in the US voluntarily be industrialized starting 30, 40 years ago. And that industrialization, the making of physical things, and particularly the making of machines has moved substantially to China. And the way that we think about machines now is that they're basically, they're the hardware version of software, right? They're the embodied version of AI. And so the car is not just steel and glass anymore. It's a robot on wheels. The drone isn't just a toy anymore. It's a computer that flies through the air that navigates itself. Robots are coming. We're going to live in a world that's just like completely washed with robots in the decades ahead. And China is just like, as a consequence of the last 30 years of policy, China's just like way ahead on everything involved in all the physical things. And then this administration and others have had visions of how to cash us out, but we have a long way to go. As the US tries to become more of a manufacturing country, it would seem to me AI integrated into manufacturing is extremely powerful. Are they ahead of us on that? As you said, our biggest companies here are slow adapters of AI. Are there big manufacturers now using AI more than we are? So I think unleashed, we could do that faster and better. If we could manufacture in the US, the way that we used to 30 or 40 years ago, we could definitely do that faster for a variety of reasons, including the fact that we have better software engineers. We have a more flexible and dynamic economy. We could do that faster. The big issue is just we have chosen to not be a manufacturing economy. We chose to move that offshore. And for a very long time, we were very proud that we moved that offshore for a variety of reasons. And so the challenge is not so much that we couldn't, in theory, do exactly what you just described better than they can. It's just like if you're not manufacturing things, then you can't do that at all, which is the situation that we've worked ourselves into. Just to pick one, their car industry is moving incredibly fast at this. And look, we have our superstar companies. We have Tesla in particular that's world-class at this, and it's better than the Chinese today. But the Chinese are moving really fast. And if you talk to people, we don't have a lot of exposure to Chinese cars in the US because the trade barriers are so high that they really are not cost-effective to sell here. But if you go to the Middle East and talk to just normal, affluent people, they're not driving Chinese cars by choice, not because they can't afford a Mercedes because the Chinese cars are better. And the Chinese cars are full self-driving, electric, autonomous, voice AI. State of the art, and exactly what you're talking about. And we still have car companies, but ex-Tesla, mainly what they do is they assemble third-party parts that are coming from other places. The Chinese are just doing a much more specific advanced level of unified hardware and AI manufacturing. By the way, you see that in drones. Virtually the entire global drone industry, and virtually the entirety of the drone industry, in terms of people using drones in the US, virtually 100% of those drones are made in China. And again, that's not because we couldn't make them. It's because we chose a set of policies that drove that industry off. We better start making them. I want to talk to you about Silicon Valley. As much as it's been covered for the last quarter century, I don't think the coverage is even close to explaining how significant it has been. They're great stories, like yours, of people who have been so successful. But the influence over our culture, our government, our economy, just in the world, it's just so massive. If someone like you understands engineering, markets, economics, technology, there was a long period where you had to live in Silicon Valley. If you wanted to succeed and have the relationships and the interactions, is that still the case? Is Silicon Valley still a place you have to physically be if you want to excel someone with those skills? Yeah. I should start by saying I'm an import. I'm from out of town. I grew up in the room at West, in Wisconsin, kind of in the tundra. I didn't get to participate in the heyday of back when we actually, by the way, it was called Silicon Valley because they originally made chips here. Speaking of manufacturing, of course, lock blocks, I stopped doing that. That's not thoroughly illegal in California. I wasn't here for that. I wasn't here for the personal computer. I'm an inheritor of the phenomenon that you were describing that other people built. What year did you show up? I showed up in 1994. Silicon Valley is really dated. It's sort of based in the early '50s with Hewlett-Packard, in particular, sort of the original company. But the '90s is when so much of what we think of now in terms of consumer-facing, social media, internet. That's a pretty big dividing line. Yeah, you missed the Hewlett-Packard days, but you were there for the phase we're in now, right? Yeah, but I just bring it up because, basically, in the history of Silicon Valley, it's a sequence of waves. It's a part of what makes it special. The AI is like wave nine or wave 10 of these just major basic microprocessors, smartphones, and kind of cloud and social and mobile. All these kind of the PC kind of all these waves have hit. Anyway, my point is, in the valley, we're the inheritor of a tradition and a system of the model that was built by other people. And then to your question on geographic focus, this is a very interesting thing playing out right now. So one is, like I said, the technology that's built in Silicon Valley is diffusing nationally and globally into ordinary people's hands and a far faster rate than in the past. So you don't have to be in Silicon Valley to get access to the best technology. You can now get that from everywhere. And that's very important because that used to be the case. Having said that, if you want to be at the company or start a company that's going to build the leading edge technology itself from scratch, I would say at this point, maybe you don't need to be in Silicon Valley proper, but you better strongly considering it. If you're not, there's maybe three or four other places in the country where you can give it a shot. But primarily, the people that want to do that are coming to Silicon Valley. And the important thing in the last five years that happened actually was during COVID, we all thought actually that the Silicon Valley geographic concentration is actually unwinding. And we thought that virtual work and remote work, and you can be able to start companies everywhere. And you had all these kinds of things happening in places like Miami and also other places with lots of high tech entrepreneurs. And it felt like the whole thing was really distributing out. AI basically has snapped everything right back into the 20 mile square radius around where I sit to just an incredible degree. So I would say almost 100% of the actually interesting AI companies in the West are happening at Brown's Zero right here in Silicon Valley. And then, by the way, and this is goodness and bad news, by the way, the other place in the world where these things are happening is basically the Shanghai Beijing access in China. These are the two places. And then you also say a very important thing, which is it's just not happening elsewhere in the world. And there's kind of high tech clusters in other places. But if you're a sharp AI person, and I'll just pick on one one, and like you have already moved to California or you're going to, because they have just essentially decided to outlaw. The EU has decided to outlaw it. And so people are being driven to the US and to California. I think in a way that's even more concentrated than it was when I first got here. All right, last question. Name inventions in human history that have more benefited the lives of individuals than the iPhone? Oh, well, I mean, if you go far enough back, electric lighting was a big deal. Steam power was a big deal. Obviously, antibiotics are the easy call. I mean, the internet itself, electricity, it's inter plumbing. It's hard to question those. And people sometimes say, you guys aren't inventing important things. Why are you inventing something as important as inter plumbing? And it's like, well, that was a big one I can see. But we did solve that problem. If you said, give up your iPhone or switch to an outhouse, I would switch to an outhouse. I think there's a lot to that. And maybe I think the serious point underneath that. Oh, I was being serious. I was being serious. Well, no, so maybe you're just saying that the generalization you can make for that is, I think people may be systematically underrate the importance of communication. So being able to be connected with other people and then being able to actually, you know, be able to learn things, be able to get access to information. Like those two things, there's something in the culture, I was just saying, in Silicon Valley culture, there's something where like those are like, look down on as less important than that. They actually think to your point, like they're actually incredibly important and they're foundational for everything else that people do. I mean, you know, human connection and human learning is, you know, both of those are at the center of everything that we do. And so yeah, I would make that same trade here. Here's my idea for a reality show. You put someone like us in Cleveland for a week without their smartphone and give them a series of tasks which they would otherwise conduct with their smartphone. Good luck. By the way, I had relatives in the 70s who still had uphouses, right? Yeah, it's fine. Passes 100%. Well, it's fine. In Iowa, in January, you start to reconsider whether that's fine. In the middle of the night, when it's 40 below, but the past was not that long ago. Yeah, no, I know. Yeah. All right, Mark Andriesen, very grateful to you. I scratched the surface. I had a list of about 15,000 questions that AI went down to me to 1,500, but we didn't get to them all. Very grateful to you though for making time. And again, so just not many people on the planet who understand this stuff as well as you do. So grateful to you for sharing and hopefully we inspired a few people to learn how to use the latest technology. Thank you. Good. Fantastic. Thank you, Mark. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com/a16z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management LLC, A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the data publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.