Joe Rogan Experience #1840 — Marc Andreessen Transcript

Transcript

0:00 The Joe Rogan Experience. Nothing with this reach, though. Yeah, you too. You're't think about that. You can't think about the reach part. First of all, very nice to meet you. Yeah, you too. What was it like before there were web browsers? You missed the original use of the personal computer. It was a system called Play-Doh at the University of Illinois where I went.

1:40 They had all these ideas kind of way back when. It was expensive. So what year was Asteroids? You could move the dial and the thing on the television would move. that basically created the video game industry, your thing is broke, like, come get it. And, you know, Nolan's like all depressed. And he goes in thinking about. What was it called? Something like that.

4:02 I think it was the same one. It was a big deal because it was the first game that had video clips. Yeah, that's probably it. But if you screwed up, they would play a video of you dying. So, look, all this stuff is super obvious in retrospect. Wasn't the people at IBM, who was it that mocked the idea of a personal home computer? That's all anything needs.

6:15 This is ridiculous. Well, it's probably very valuable now, right? Just as a, you know, novelty piece. So I taught myself. What did they run on? Yeah, well, that was a big debate. So there was that. So my first computer had four kilobytes of storage, 4,000 bytes, 4,000 bytes of storage. In the beginning, they used cassette players. And the high-quality cassette tapes were quite expensive.

9:35 Yeah. So that's an old, this is an old, that's a computer from a company called Wang, which is a big deal. So the thing that they did, the thing that they got right on their personal computer was you loaded the personal computer. Because it basically, it was inviting, right? you into this amazing new world. And then that's what caused a lot of us kind of of that generation

11:34 Most people had PCs. But the story is not complete. The way the story gets told is that Apple somehow like stole these ideas from Xerox. That's not quite what demos yeah so this is a legendary this is a guy yes this is a guy Doug And that's the first mouse there on the right. He was one of the first four nodes on the internet back around that time.

13:24 So like sort of an intranet email? And where was that? And so early internet email actually was built. it didn't assume you had a permanent connection, You know, they had a combination. I mean, this is very original. These were very simple systems as compared to what we have today. Yeah, it was the first. We have the GUI. We've lived with the GUI now for 30 years.

16:07 And so when you created this, when you and whoever you did it with created Mosaic, So we got it to the point where it was, like, fully usable. and all the things that we have today. So it was impossible to predict what, you know, it's played out at a much higher level of scale Like all of the experts, right? It was just like, there's just no way. The robos worked.

18:34 You know, every new thing. like firsthand and been a part of the actual mechanisms Well, yeah, it's complicated, but so many, many parts to it. If they have the capability to contribute, if they can code, if they can write, if they can create, they will do it. at the beginning of that. Most people in the world are still not creating things. And so quite literally, like every additional person you add to the network doubles the

21:52 Right. And so it's just going to get, because the internet's going to get wired in everything, And we still have these like older things. What do you anticipate to be one of the big factors? If you're thinking about real breakthrough technologies and things that are going to change the game, So I'll give you what I kind of think is the case. So the two that are rolling right now that I think are going to be really big deals are AI on the one hand, and then cryptocurrency, blockchain, Web3,

24:02 into these environments. That stuff's further out, but there are very serious people working on it. First of all, if it is sentient, does it get rights? Well, I'll make it even a step harder. out there doing speeches. Like what would stop that? And then basically what they do is they've got complex math running on big computers, Well, so Google's core business is to do that,

26:26 And basically just choose through and processes it. the computer could get trained on, okay, if I say this thing, it's likely to make humans happy. It's not nobody, where basically he said you know I want you to prove that you're alive and then If it's not life, it's in this weird fog of like what makes a person a person? And so let's talk about, there's something called the Turing test, right, which is a little bit more famous now because the movie they made about Alan Turing.

29:11 And you can ask the entity then it will have achieved artificial intelligence, right? Specifically to men. And so just think of this as a slightly more – you could think about this as a somewhat more advanced version of that, which is, look, if this thing – if it's an algorithm that's been optimized to trick people, basically, to convince, it has no regret, it has no fear,

30:47 And then there's just the other side of it, which is we have no idea. Nobody has any idea. So this is very valuable work. It will create these programs that will be able to trick people internet in which most of the interesting content is actually getting created by machines. There's You know, on any topic, it'll give you thousands of thousand images of you whatever and then basically they pull in all the images

33:10 So the first one, go back to that, please. So they say that, and then they enter all this stuff in, It doesn't really look like that, right? Now, but see what it's doing, right? Right, so it's not sitting there like a real artist dreaming up new artistic concepts. I mean, it is data. all we are. Because the only difference is emotion and maybe biological needs, like the

35:41 And, of course, that's a hot topic of debate because there are a lot of people who think animals should have more rights. But fundamentally, we do have this idea. We have And that's why I'm confident that these things are not conscious. At what point in time does the program figure out how to manifest a physical object that can take all of its knowledge and all the information that's acquired through the use of the internet?

37:05 There's another topic. Nobody makes the movie with like the happy AI, right? You know, GPT-3 has no body. And so basically, like, I think the most evolved version of this, the most sort of advanced version of this is, like, whatever it means to be human, it's some combination of mind and body. We don't even understand how we work. we don't even understand how it works.

40:30 Right. What's making better stuff? All it does is make better stuff. It never goes, ah, we're good. with wanting the latest, greatest things, Well, so then we get to a deeper different views on this my view is the universe is uncaring yeah right like exactly yeah i think of being the ones who have to define the standards. It's not a replacement. It's a hammer, right?

43:00 People killed by a Clovis point are probably not that excited about the technology. It's like, were nuclear weapons a good thing to invent or a bad thing to invent, right? What? Did they really? well. not nuclear powered set off nuclear explosions We shouldn't invent nukes. would argue, basically prevented World War Three. So the pros and cons on these technologies are tricky, but they usually do turn out to have more

45:37 We could really screw it up. It was pretty bad. And this is like the heyday of the Greeks, Athens and Socrates and all this stuff. Right? it's just, it's a real debate. You could look at it and you could say, well, nuclear weapons are Probably not. Well, there's an argument in sort of defense circles that actually nuclear weapons are Because if he set off a nuke, it'd be an act of suicide.

48:18 Exactly. out aircraft carriers? And if so, that changes the balance of power. So anyway, there's all We got on this tangent talking about whether or not artificial life is life and how do you decide whether it's life? what he literally says, he said two interesting things. making his, his evaluation is made in his role as a priest. Right? What kind of a priest is he?

50:29 questions that you're talking about. And traditionally, culturally, traditionally, very important. vanguard of the West 100 years ago, whatever, decided to shed religion as a sort of primary inventing new religions as we go. Well, it makes sense because people behave like a religious it has something to do with basically And it seems universal? And then they transmit, right? that it's able to basically all agree on and prove to, you know, members of the group, prove to each other that they're full members of the group.

52:49 And then, you know, a thousand years later, people in theory, right, or at least are benefiting from all of this hard-won wisdom over the generations. And of course, the big religions were all developed pre-science, right? And so they were basically an attempt to sort of Like if you go far enough back in human history, if you go back before the Greeks, there's

53:55 a fascist communist cult. And so that was the original form of human civilization. worldview or whatever it is, and now we've watered it all the way down to CrossFit. So in an important way, it's been a process of diminishment as much as it's been a process By the way, what's a hallmark of any religion? That's woke Twitter. They have sin, they have redemption or lack thereof, right?

56:03 That's what they've actually done. Nietzsche actually than creating values from scratch. It took thousands of years to get Judaism to the point scratch using logic and reason instead of all this encoded superstition. However, and we got a century of chaos and slaughter, right? What seems to – that kind of religious thinking applies to so many critical issues of our time.

58:38 This is something we should act, we should be very proactive. But it's clear it's real. better for climate. Like it's complicated. Like it's very complicated. Have you read Unsettled? What we do is we cross-check everything they say. science and people start saying stuff like that. And so that's the tip off at that point that you're no longer dealing with science.

1:00:36 of a religion. accurately guess what side of the fence you're on. Yeah. on the details is not really important to whether the religion works. Have you thought back on the origins of this kind of... the function of the mind to create beings and the belief in things beyond your control and the belief in omnipresent gods that So, yeah. If my group is stronger, I have better individual odds of success of surviving and reproducing than

1:04:10 They're much weaker today than they used to be. Or what is a hobby, right? these are basically sort of increasingly diluted, diluted we are mentally driven to form groups. experiences. So this thing that we have, this operating system, religion seems to be a core component of it, right? What other core components would AI have to get down before it would be

1:06:31 Like at a fundamental level, I think therefore I am. Well, again, historically, that's the... But if it's a computer and it's not a biological and they will protest to the, you can interrogate these systems in a way where they will absolutely Who, me? But why do we need that from – but that, that's not a sociopath, right? And the sex bot, exactly. You know, men will fall for things.

1:08:39 I don't know. Just be aware of the leaps that are happening, which is like, here's what we know. I have no idea how to produce human consciousness. And so the leap here is like, and this is kind of, it's like the Ray Kurzweil leap. We're just like, you know, what just happened? But nothing else in human history has ever been like a computer. And they understand it all the way down to the level of the individual atoms and all

1:11:01 And so in a sense, it's almost giving engineers, I think, too much, I don't know, trust or faith. Like we've recreated the apocalypse, right? And so Nietzsche would say, look, all you've done is you've reincarnated the sort of Christian myths into this sort of neo-technological kind of thing that you've made up on the fly. Do we have to have it display all these human characteristics

1:13:05 That's why we're here and that's why we still have these monkey instincts. You don't have to wake up. It doesn't have goals that it's striving towards. right? Like people in different Greek cities did not consider each other human. Like they That all of our fellow humans are even human. I had a feral cat at one point in time, and he didn't trust anybody but me.

1:15:46 And that's why it was so convenient to think of them as other so you could kill them because So the good news is these machines are really good at generating the art, You cannot buy a robot today that will fold your clothes. You've got all these- Like the difference between the weight of this coffee mug Will it become conscious when it's able to fold clothes?

1:17:29 I don't know this. It's doing it better than me. Right, of course. you're not giving it any air and you're really, you're thoroughly chasing down this idea of what would make it alive. Maybe people are going to actually get a lot out of that. And I'm looking at this guy, I'm like, this is amazing technology. and it was awesome? But again, that's a lot simpler than building a brain.

1:20:03 I would. If you have a human brain that's trapped in this artificially created body that looks exactly like a 20-year-old version of you. these things, right, that if you took the brain away from the rest of the nervous system You know, I would be willing to, me personally, I'd be willing to go so far as to say if it's Everything's great, and you just have this brain there.

1:21:31 For now. At some point, somebody's got to sit down and actually build these things. day we can do this or is there any real technological basis for any of his like his proposals about like downloading consciousness is there any real Yeah. I mean at some point it would want to be asked for example not to get turned off I know, but if it's not even an animal.

1:23:50 like is it anything consciousness is, Can I rule out that that never happens? And then there's a point where you start to wonder if you're dealing with a religion. And I've always said that I think that human beings are the electronic caterpillar that's creating the cocoon and doesn't even know it and it's going to become a butterfly. And what our system of ethics and morals should be in a post-Christian, post-religious world.

1:25:21 look, if we could answer all these questions about the machines, to be a human being. And that's probably what people are at least attempting to do with a lot of these new religions. And they're using that to be really shitty to other human beings that don't do it. Right. Yes. Human beings have, for whatever reason, a very strong instinct to force other people

1:27:54 I need to demand that you convert Yeah. We're basically going to ever weaker forms of cults. The other side of it though would be like all of the social bonds that we expect to dysfunction that are flowing out of that. And so, you know, if everything's going so well, then why is everybody so fat? Well, for who? Yeah, there's a certain number of people who these things go great for.

1:30:05 focus on just basically the few at the top. defending religion per se, but once upon a time And if you're not, you're probably like if you just look at the stats, like obesity is like rising like crazy. No, no, no. Right, right, right. But I think the message gets transported on social media long before so-called elites get a hold of it. Yeah, the 1970s.

1:32:23 But, like, there's a big difference between living in a culture It's the same place all these other ideas are coming from. Anyway, point being, like, it is a weird dichotomy like it's very the outcomes are very strange right it's like okay what why are the people most enthusiastic about sending There's a lot of writers, right? Really? a culture that has expectations or not?

1:34:14 They're not religious, we don't believe in God. Do we value protecting people from shame? Not yet. It's a long time. They might also be banned. Like why? I mean, generally, a lot of people- My tinfoil hat also read that this had something to do with a big building Nancy Pelosi has a number. Right. But think about the underlying thing that's happened, which is negative on nicotine, positive on marijuana.

1:37:48 Wait a minute. disease and death. And then specifically basically raising the price of cigarettes on black people. marijuana with black people. In fact, they're doing quite the opposite because we're legalizing same reason prohibition has been a bad idea, which is when you make it illegal, then you What about 50%? Yeah. I've heard about it. and then a high dose of THC snaps something in them.

1:41:15 We don't really know what's causing schizophrenia, right? cetera, et cetera? Or new opiates. This is the big dilemma about fentanyl, right? And then the You keep saying stoned. We have a lot of laughs. there's another thing that happens Yes. only work in a virtuous population, right? In our time, it is kind of unusual historically You might be belligerent, right?

1:45:06 But don't you think that you should be a standard? Again, we're back to you. ultimately turn out to be hot topics around like all the questions around freedom of speech yeah But how does one do that without forming a restrictive religion? that we agree is better for everyone, for all parties involved, right? And he would make the argument that religion and a belief in some nonsensical idea that there's a guy in the sky that's watching over everything is not benefiting anybody.

1:47:27 And generally those things pay respect to the physical body, whether it's through meditation But shouldn't that be what we aspire to? speaking those traits would be rewarded and you would try to emulate the people around But you don't have a lot of faith in that. That's a giant problem, right? That's an imminent threat. Okay, like if this isn't going well, like what's the system?

1:49:52 ever sit down and come up with just some sort of hypothetical structure that people could operate And you clearly have thoughts on things like marijuana that maybe perhaps people are using What is achievement? Okay, but what are those things? Right. But to be able to get your personality and your body and your life experiences in line Right. Sometimes.

1:51:32 I mean, look, do we value heterodox thinking, right? And then we make this sort of value judgment on whether or not those things are beneficial to the greater human race as a whole or at least to their community as a whole. Have you seen Idiocracy? Devolves is fucking amazing. It's so funny. Yep. That's kind of what we're worried about, right? A hundred years ago, all the smartest people were very into eugenics.

1:53:25 Eugenics though? Really? Yes. Well, it's descended from eugenics. Right. Eugenics itself. Eugenics was discredited by World War II. had been worried about with eugenics. In particular, a lot of the same people who were worried about Nuclear energy. better, the environment would be better. And then this person questioned him, gets to, If that was nuclear, then that would be eliminated.

1:55:27 I don't hate him. You probably would. He also proposed a project in 1972 called—I'm blanking on the name of the project. on nuclear reactors. And then Europe kind of has a similar kind of mixed kind of thing. They're still doing it So somehow we've done, you know, after 50 years of the environmental movement, we've done a complete round trip and we've ended up back at coal.

1:57:42 We know that they can develop nuclear power plants that are far superior to the ones that we're terrified of. What scares us is the occasional nuclear disaster. what were they for Three Mile Island? Oh, it was one guy? There's actually litigation. And then again, you get into the question of, like, they were old people. We know how bad coal is. Smoke in the house.

2:00:47 self-contained plant and you would encase the entire thing, right, in concrete. And then the But if you use modern technology, you could upgrade almost everything about it. Either people have a dispute about the facts or there's a religious component There's a way to build these things where they're like completely contained. You could just bury it.

2:02:59 the, we have, have the answer. Like we don't need to invent the new thing. We actually have the the ones that failed, were very old. There's a debate in the environmental community about this. So it's a way to demarcate friend and enemy, good person, bad person. day. Yeah, ick factor. as an argument amongst intelligent people, is very recent. Right.

2:06:15 Which is Charles Koch. It'll be awesome. But why would that be good if the people on the left freak out? And the last thing they would want is the Koch brothers to profit. That would certainly help. you know, they don't have the amount of access Yeah. This is a, you know, people talk about politics are bad now. Yeah. So they propose degrowth. They propose degrowth.

2:09:27 Do you think it's also there's a financial aspect to that as well? I'd even say like most of this is not – I would not even say most of this is bad intent. of the environmental movement, So Stuart Brand is on sort of the one side, that sort of brought a lot of modern environmentalism into being in the 60s. It would defer to... B-R-E-T, K-U-G-E-L? Yeah, he has a podcast called Titans of Nuclear.

2:11:32 He's in the nuclear industry. And he's like, boy, I don't know if they'll talk to me because I'm just a kid and I don't know whether they'll. Okay, Titans and Nuclear. And virtually no deaths. And, you know, the Russia crisis is one opening. We're going to run out of raw material to make batteries. We've never run out of natural resource in human history, right?

2:14:34 devices have in common, your phone, your Tesla, your iPhone, they all have in common, they all for example, mining in the US. phone, that we don't have a cell phone that's put together by people that get paid a fair get paid here in America. Why is that? Like, is that because we want Apple to make the highest Carbon emissions in the U.S. are actually declining.

2:16:38 And so all of the factories with the smokestacks and all the mining operations and all the things the dirty economic activity and we moved it over there Yeah, we created... It's a little bit like the debate about sort of the drug trade in countries and unacceptably difficult and dangerous manufacturing jobs And I find when I peel these things back, it's like, well, it's not quite that simple.

2:18:44 conversation. If you built new manufacturing plants from scratch in the U.S. And then the other is, look, we have robotics, the AI conversation. Like, you know, if you built new manufacturing plants And so, yeah, you know, you could do those things. Yeah. Right. We're not making enough to be self-sustainable. california get to silicon valley and if you couldn't you probably it was hard for you to be

2:21:12 And taxes are through the roof and everything is fantastic. Like maybe those gains should be able to be spread out across more of the country and more of the country should be able to participate. And it seems like with these technologies like Zoom and FaceTime and all these different things that people are using to try to simulate being there. The actual physical need to be there, if you don't have a job where you actually have to pick things up and move them around,

2:22:47 But a lot of the new startups, There's some benefit to that. yeah, we'll fly everybody into a hotel or resort, you know, for three days, maybe some of them with A lot. Yeah. So it's the company religion, right? individually and do you have like little struggle sessions where you let people air their gripes and But a lot of it is just the bonding. Like Ben and I run our firm.

2:26:10 And if you're the kind of person who wants to be a technology critic, of other places. There's lots of, you know, there's lots of other things. Counterproductive. It's a meritocracy. mission. And then you basically broadcast that right up front. And you basically say, look, And every formation of any group, it's always positive selection or adverse selection.

2:28:25 You're trying to actually attract the right people. and go, hey, we've got a fucking problem here. involved with for a long time. It's a cryptocurrency company. It's a level of sort of internal activation on issues just say non-core issues. It's a level first of all, this is not how we're going to operate going forward. And then he said, on that order, to make it really easy for people

2:30:31 Do you think going forward that's going to be what more companies utilize or that they implement a strategy like that? Like it's in other startups. You're trying to build a sense of camaraderie, a sense of cohesion, just like you would be trying For example, right? Then you can have whatever culture you want. Right. Right. But all that stuff didn't with the search monopoly, the best business model of all time, $100 billion in free cash flow, then you can have whatever culture you want. Right. Right. But all that

2:32:56 So, to give you an example, Brian, CEO of Coinbase, got deluged with emails from other CEOs in the weeks that followed. So they're going to realize that. I have a friend who's an executive at Netflix. And she's like, I'm your fucking boss. You could never imagine it. Oh yeah, for sure. Well, it's all social media, but it's also, it's also the mainstream media,

2:34:39 they do that? They need to choose to. They need to have a crisis. They need to decide that the status quo is so bad that they're going to deal with the flack involved in getting to the other side of the bridge. He's a very brave guy. Yes. We never recommend people buy anything. What are your feelings about the prevalence of, I mean, even these sort of novel coins or novelty coins

2:36:36 Well, so this has happened before. So there was sort of private, so-called script kind of currency issued by companies in that form. When you compare fiat currency with these emerging digital currencies, do you think their fiat, their paper. The thing that really gives them value, in my view, is basically that it's the form of taxation, right? And so if the government

2:38:37 when it's worth almost nothing? No comment. Depends. short-term gains. Jason Kuznicki Yeah but that's also... I mean it's good news, bad news. And that technology is blockchain? and then they had money in the bank are going to come to town It's basically... It's like anything. Oh, I have no idea. You have no idea? No clue. It's just happening? And so some people start to get upset and then a lot more people get upset or some people start to get euphoric.

2:42:18 Ben Graham was Warren Buffett's mentor and kind of the guy who defined modern stock investing. And he has, like, all kinds of crazy impulses, a crazy person. It's probably not a good use of time. Instead, you should just assume that he's What's real? it's a good idea, bad idea, that's not what we do. What we do is we're looking for technological And then we basically lock the money up.

2:45:20 Yeah. So that's the core emotion. So the venture for the firm I'm a part of now, And then a lot of our partners have been very involved in these projects over time. We communicate a lot in public. the, we have a lot of engineers, you know, working for us. A lot of us have engineering you. And then we spend a lot of time in the details, like working through the, we have a lot of engineers working for us. A lot of us have engineering degrees. And so we spend a

2:46:58 To do some dick pics.