hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i'm chatting with mark andreessen 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 andreessen at that time what was your favorite book and why that's a really good question i don't i read a lot you know probably like a lot a lot of people like me it was a lot of science fiction um i'm one of the few people i know who thinks that late robert heinlein was better than early
robert heinlein so that that had a really big effect on me um you know uh what else just uh you know i just i was i'm nervous at an early age and why is late robert heinlein better um so he has uh to me at least to young me see if older me would agree with this but it a sense of exploration and
discovery and wonder and open-endedness um it was for me for me it was if he got more open-minded as he as he got older um and so i just i remember those i remember those books in particular being kind of very very inspiring you know that the so 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 it's hard to it's hard to beat knight rider why night rider um so it that writer was so there was a really there was there were a wave of sort of these sort of near science fiction shows in the in the
earth late 70s early 80s that kind of coincided with you know some of it was the aftermath of star wars um 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 um and so you know there's a massive
wave of anxiety but there's also a tremendous sense of possibility um and so there were a set of these shows that basically propelled you i think the uh the the line they would always use this 20 minutes into the future um and so you know it's it's our you know net writers like this airwolf was like this a whole bunch of shows like
this um where it was our world except advanced technology had just arrived um and you know really like what that meant uh how it would fit in um how it would change things um you know it was just these very uh you know compelling fictional portrayals i still get a little fired up whenever i get into a
you know a modern car today you get in and it actually looks like the matte rider car on the inside and i still get a little uh i still get a little you know a little a little a little jolt of excitement that that that actually happened and you know and in fact the car if you wanted 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 it also did the worst at what was the biggest tax of high school classes but which chemistry lab writing no i would i went to a very small i went to a very small high school so uh people i 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 and i read and it's actually really funny i read all these debates about you know lowell high school or whatever what is it and all these places and i don't know what my high school was like the
opposite of of all that so um you know no ap classes no advanced you know kind of work of any kind so so basically just basically just an endurance it was an endurance competition to see who would you know who could outlast you me or them and was there a teacher who understood what you were about or just no one
uh you know there were you know there were a couple there was a computer teacher in particular we actually actually got a computer lab with i think i don't know two or three computers towards the very end and then there was a teacher a young teacher who came in um and uh and so uh and uh yeah yeah we you
know we dialed in a little bit but uh it was it was mostly just a holding period until i got off 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 for where i was i grew up in rural wisconsin and so it's like everybody everybody just assumed if you went to
college it just meant you just went to college in wisconsin you just went to you know you know probably the university of wisconsin they had actually rolled i actually found it later they had rolled up all these little tiny like teacher colleges into what they called the university of wisconsin system
um you know but it was really a bunch of little colleges and then it was it was madison um and so that that was sort of the default path and so from where i grew up at that time crossing state lines to go university of illinois was a gigantic move um a a a a very big uh change you didn't have a passport
very uncommon uh yet people don't um you know people don't you know you when you're it's amazing how fine people can subdivide groups um and there there was a there's a wisconsin illinois rivalry that's like a very big thing um and uh you know i wouldn't go so far as to say east germany west germany but you know
maybe maybe a little bit um 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 in you know tech you don't you know basically you know you you kind of very very kind of different path than than the people i knew um and so i just i just assumed that i was sort of weird and different and then i i read this i i got out here to silicon valley and then i i started
to kind of get oriented and then i read this profile that i recommend everybody which is uh tom wolf the great uh novelist journalist wrote a profile of bob noyce who was the original founder of intel and basically the father of the the chip industry um and i read this profile and basically and i don't mean to compare myself to
bob noyce but basically tom wolf describes an archetype and the archetype is the midwestern tinkerer right who basically comes out of a sort of you know if they're very practical kind of farming oriented mechanical uh 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 uh you know for for for light mechanical work and and then basically ends up in in advanced technology um and so i i went i went in one shot after reading that profile from thinking of myself as a fluke to thinking of myself as a cliche um and i
think the cliche definitely applies and as a moralist are you still rural midwest so i i really struggle with that i would say i've 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 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 uh you know right-wing um and uh very um 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 uh in kind of the real midwest and then
and then i've lived the other part of my life in the sort of extremely um open-minded libertine um liberated progressive uh you know far-left you know sort of milieu of uh i don't live in san francisco proper but i live close enough where i feel that i feel the gravity well of sort of uh you know the
most extreme form of progressivism in the country um and so i've sort of experienced both extremes i think i'm i'm pro i'm probably you know i'm sort of i don't know maybe it's again the the tinker in me or the practical person i sort of inclined more towards the middle on that stuff um so i i i see i
i see the issues with both sides over time i see the advantages of both sides and i think that 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 yeah so i you know i my answer for a long you know i waited a long time we have we have one kid now um the seven-year-old and i you know i waited a long time you know to do that into my 40s and so my my answer for a very long time would have been you you prioritize you you either have you know basically
worker kids you know they cut for the kind of career that i do it's like you you have a choice and it's like really hard uh for people to be able to do both i i will for a long time i would have said you know that that was the case and so the answer the question would have been you know i wouldn't have been able to do
what i did um i will say i was really struck my business partner and friend ben horowitz um uh you know who's had a you know very kind of similar career to mine um he had three kids when he was very young uh in his early twenties um and when he had no money um and was under a lot of stress um and he had kind of the polar opposite
life life trajectory in that dimension that i did um you know his kids are now you know i've got a seven-year-old these kids are like fully grown they're up in college uh they're they're beyond college they're graduated and they're off in their careers um and what he told me was you know
having three kids at that age he said he wouldn't necessarily wish anybody you know in terms of like the the stress that results um but however uh he said that it was a very focusing uh uh motivating thing and it caused him to be like laser focused hyper focused at work you know the cliche and tech right as the workers are
like you know it's foosball and then it's time for the yoga class and it's time for the mustache it's time for volleyball then it's time for the beer bust and and ben and i knew this because i knew i knew when the kids were little i've known it for 25 years now and i worked with them starting in the early
90s um and he was it was just always very clear he was he was hyper focused every minute work really really counted uh and so in retrospect i i don't know whether i could have pulled that off but there is a different way of working um that that uh 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 so um well let's see do i get to be a medici or or not if you want to be but they're just plain bankers right well yeah so yeah sort of yeah yeah you know so if people don't know the medici
rule in florence they were they were they were playing bankers they the line goes to kosumoto managing sort of the line when he sort of had to take over the state um in order to preserve the banking business um and then the family became you know very 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 you know for for decades and then centuries had followed um and so yeah i aspirationally would have been a medici i i i had i not been a medicine i would have tried to get as close to the benefit as
i possibly could um you know i would like to think i had i would have been some form of either kind of proto-scientist proto-engineer you know da vinci 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 um he actually built military machines at one point um and so you know maybe there was like a proto-engineering going on there and then as you said like finance you know that they they they created an entire world of finance and trade and really sort of helped develop
the economy as we know it today from you know from 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 um sculpting i i think i lack the talent so so maybe banking instead
say we put you back in the neolithic period what are you doing hopefully hopefully finding a niche um you know aspirationally you know you'd probably want to be a hunter uh we see we would see very quickly whether i had the aptitude for that um uh probably which doctor would have been a bit of a stretch um although maybe i
could i can play cult leader when i have to um and um you know and then you know at some point they started writing things down like at some point you know they started writing things down they started having poetry um they uh you know they started to have kind of you know not really science per se but they
started to kind of explore nature they started to build you know they started to build cities um you know kind of come together and so um you know you know i don't know maybe maybe i could have i could have done the irrigation system uh that would have been a good way to uh get the rest of the tribe to put up with me
moving ahead to the current view which books have you reread the most um that is like let's see um i am re-reading that's a good question i've read a lot of business history i've l i've read a lot of technology history um i've sort of 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 um around basic basically how do people
organize and then what happens when they do and then how do they behave um and so i keep circling around that um i've been reading lately i've been reading rereading james burnham's books um have had a particular fascination for me for the last few years so i'm actually i'm actually finishing a reread of those
books right now um so books like that how are those different on the reread um 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 in my life trying to figure out how people work
um it turns out people are a lot more complicated um it turns out uh there's a lot more moving parts um and there's a lot more history um 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 you know
i took one history class they left university illinois very good engineering school they let us take one humanities elective i took extra class one class um so i don't have any formal foundation in history or philosophy or economics uh so um or you know political science uh sociology um and so a lot of the times
like i don't under it actually reminds me of learning technology i don't understand a lot of what they're talking about the first time um and then i will read like six other books um 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 you know what for me is sort of a 500 year tradition um you know kind of piecemeal um and so those books tend to get re-read 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 i think i'm i think i'm getting there there's so tell me what you tell me what you think of this or we can maybe we can have a different conversation a different interview i can interview you on this some time which is it's
there was the humanities pre the 1960s and maybe even the humanities sort of pre the 1930s um and what they thought about and talked about and worked on and then they're sort of the humanities as we know and understand it today and i think they're pretty different um and i think they're they might go so
far stay very different and they might go so far as to say they really have no resemblance to each other um and so there's an 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 the sort of you know history of philosophy you know sort of philosophy in 1960s um
as she turns out i've got quite fascinated through burnham i've gotten quite fascinated with like sociology in the 1910s 1920s was was a very different kind of thing um uh um uh i'm sure you yeah it's much closer to economics right it can well this is this is the other thing is economics
economics pre what was it like the 1950s 1960s it wasn't all these formulas right it wasn't all these formulas it wasn't a branch of physics like it seems like it is today um it was it was descriptive it was it was verbal i mean you know can't you know you read keynesian you know it's like this and even the people that
preceded him um i found it i found a book um i was like i'm fascinated by the the second industrial revolution a while ago and i found this book on google books about uh since david wells was 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 it did he just like he just like tells a story he just like goes through like here's what's happening and then that was like an economics book right uh with like no formulas um and so yeah it was like the former humanities that resonates with me is just like that it's like it's
like history economics philosophy politics merged um you know and then they're sort of you know you're trying to at least in my case you're trying to find the people who are sort of analytical and descriptive uh 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 um and not you know being scientific but i think they were being scientific kind of in their way at that time um and then they what they didn't have i mean they had their issues but but they didn't they had
their issues but they didn't have our issues um and so it right it's it's it's it's like everything today is filtered through our politics um and so it's so it's it's it's really hard to understand in my view how people thought especially before the 1960s and again i think even before the 1930s um through our
political events you have to kind of go back and kind of reconstruct like what they actually talked about at that time and it turns out to be more interesting than i would have 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 the great miracle of twitter uh so so everybody kind of says you know everybody looks at twitter as like this mass like basically it's as an engine this is all this whole question is something are these different machines engines or cameras like it's a stock market an
engine or a camera it's like something that that like economists will debate and uh the third thing about twitter is twitter and engineer camera and this prevailing view is that you know say twitter social media broadly but twitter specifically because it's kind of where the elites are the you know sort of the
intellectual elites the social elites um and so the prevailing wisdom on twitter is that it's primarily an engine uh which is you know it's sort of a it's changing behavior you know for for better for worse um i actually tend to think it's it's at least as much a camera it's like it's like a giant x-ray machine um and you've got this
phenomenon which is just fascinating where you have all of these public figures um all of these people in positions of authority like in a lot of cases great authority you know the leading legal theorists of our time you know leading politicians like all these people business people um and all of a sudden
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 um you know oh these are the delusions you're operating under um and so it's our friend martin guri has this uh you know thesis of the sort of collapse of
authority uh in the modern world and i think a lot of it is the authority figure it's just basically showing up and exposing that like you know the emperor the emperor quite literally in a lot of cases has no clothes um and so that that the fact that that phenomenon is so widespread and not more
recognized and then that it continues um i i just think it's absolutely fascinating so all this extensive reading of history of earlier social science how does it affect your your daily practical investing decisions at the conceptual level yeah so what i'm trying to get to what i'm trying to get to is yeah sort of the
the broad patterns of human behavior and and so you get to get very practical on this right so what we actually do what we actually do in both entrepreneurship both starting and running these companies building products designing products building products that don't exist uh bringing
them into being and then also in venture capital and actually funding these efforts um you know it it's actually there there was a guy i wrote a book referring to uh sort of this kind of investing it says the last liberal art which is to say it 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 um 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 um but then you know look 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 uh you know have it really effect effect affect how they live and so i think i think i think what i'm sort of figuring out over time is sort of the so
the psychology sociology uh kind of elements are you know as important or more important as than the business finance elements or the or the technology elements um and you know it's not like i said like it's not something that comes natural like you know 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 never trained in sociology or psychology or any of these things and so we kind of back into this through kind of harsh experience uh over time um but 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 you know is this 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 what actually is this form of behavior is is it is it actually that deep right because if it's you know it's kind of the lindy thing if people have been acting a certain way for thousands of years they are highly likely to
continue acting a certain way for thousands of years and so then you you know you can't predict people per se but at least you can start to predict the patterns of behavior and at least i 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 the 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 yeah the the you know that there's a couple big obvious tempting ones you know athens you know the trial
of socrates would have been exciting to see um um socrates had it coming um uh it would have been fascinating to see that play out um you know what was the the first modern cancellation um i think the the era the medici um you know a month in the court of uh lorenzo um would have been fascinating
um or i think that you know the early yeah the second industrial revolution um edison's lab um yeah maybe right around the point uh so jp morgan john j pierpont morgan the original j.p morgan um you know was a bet was a banker and he operated primarily with that you know he financed large-scale industrial enterprise like
the railroads but he actually was also a venture capitalist um kind of in his spare time and he financed uh he was uh financed uh edison's efforts uh in a significant way and in fact was the first uh customer uh of edison's uh uh lightbulb system for for the house and edison came and installed uh the first
uh in indoor lighting uh in the world in jpmorgan's library and then it caught on fire up for the library down and then jp morgan to his enormous credit uh rebuilt the library and hired edison to do it all over again um and so sort of that moment like that was the you know 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 what it would have been would have been really great what's your favorite tech product that no longer exists ah
that is i love that little i love the little blackberry uh that had the four line led display and the keyboard and ran on double a batteries i love that little guy i still miss him um i could type like crazy on that guy um i took notes on a four line led display for for years um so it was better for typing than the
current products it was better for me for typing um uh so yeah i've missed it ever since um what else no longer exists i mean it's really fun to drive old cars it's it's very very fun to drive old cars it's like the 60s muscle cars are super fun to drive it does very quickly educate you as to why modern cars
are what they are um 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 um i do so i use so i use actually this this is actually an exciting moment on that topic for those of us who love
these things um so i use feedly uh which i like a great deal and it's a it's a guy the guy who does it is a guy who used to used to work for us and a wonderful guy i think it's a great product it's sort of the inheritor of the of the of the now lost google um google reader um the the uh the ruthlessly uh executed
google reader um and then um you know sub stack you know this is talking my book but sub stack one you know one of our companies has a new reader uh and uh and it's it's primarily for reading reading substack uh but it basically is recreating in my view the best of a google reader head um and so that that's
the other one that i'm is getting a lot of use right now so 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 and there's this big i would say this gets into a broader overarching kind of huge debate fight happening in the tech
industry right now which is sort of the sort of internet got built on two models which were kind of diametrically opposed one model was sort of open source open protocols um and networks and and this was originally tcp 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 um 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 those protocols ssl we you know we created an escape another one of these um and so these sort of protocols you know
computer languages if you will and then um you know sort of open like not tied to a company anybody can implement you know kind of against them you know they say anybody can be on the internet anybody can can exchange email anybody can be on the web that 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 the you know the sort of um you know the actual you know google and facebook and all these companies over the years you
know many you know with us today and long gone that you know built all these incredible services that we live in and get get huge amounts of value out of um 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 wall gardens
these you know these kinds of contained environments um you know they exercise a lot of control there's huge debates over that control you know we have a long discussion about that there there are big virtues to that level of control in terms of their you know their ability to kind of maintain a very consistent kind
of user experience um 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 um before basically the the 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 and others at the time um and so i think basically in in essence the the social networks sort of stole their lunch money so stole rss as much money the social networks just
they got so good so fast they just absorbed a lot of the energy that was going into vlogging and going into rss uh by the way podcast is the other area right podcasts never there was never really a podcast they were podcast companies but nobody ever really got to critical mass uh 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 they're still like the podcast search is still like a a big problem um you know maybe that's a good thing though 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 we're 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 um and you know and a lot of people crossed crossbows between those and both youtube and spotify have very highly prioritized you know this kind of you know spoken word content interviews uh podcasts and so forth and so like you know there's the potential that we're sitting here five
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 kind of you know text content or whatever um
and maybe you know to your point like maybe that would be a you know there'd be good direction in some ways maybe they'd be a bad direction otherwise this this this whole thing i want to go through it because this is why we're so excited about this new light you know this new kind of web 3 idea it's going
to be these these elaborations of these technologies you know so-called crypto and blockchain is like that there is this new way of envisioning this kind of thing um which basically is as a network but with money right a network but with trust right so these these sort of open protocols open networks but built on
this new kind of web three infrastructure that gives you a a very different way to kind of realize both a high trust environment and also to realize that you know actual 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 um i'm hoping for example for a
podcast i'm hoping five years from now there will be these thriving you know call it web three podcast environments that will be open and will be you know it will have the sort of anarchic uncontrolled kind of element that i think that i think you and i both like however we'll have a higher level of
trust and will have a higher level of monetary incentive and economic incentive um than the open networks of the past usually did so there's this there's this third way and you know this is still early but like we're 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 an arctic 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 um you just you don't get paid right um and so like youtube youtube has built-in monetization spotify has built-in monetization you know a big way that they're able to sort of entice creators over um is is is by paying them
and i mean you know famously joe rogan you know they're paying him but you know they 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 it put it into a closed ecosystem and you know like and again like i'm you know good for spotify
like i think that's tremendous it seems to be great for their business um you know that's all good and i'm glad that joe rogan is making money but like he it might be like he joe rogan should not have to choose he should not have to choose between being part of an open internet um and basically not having a
way to make money um and then kind of going into a silo and then and then having that be the way that he makes money like that that that's the binary choice that we've had with all of these internet architecture decisions now for 30 years 40 years um and it shouldn't have to be a choice um people you know
people people should be able to get paid they're you should you know make what will strike you as an obvious statement a lot of people are still controversial statement incentives matter uh economics matter uh it is better um you know in general when there is a way for you know there to be monetary value assigned to you know
productive work um you know more interesting things happen i mean sub stack is a great case study of this i mean they're the the quality and the level of writing on substance you know is 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 um and so that's 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
yeah i mean yeah i mean they they pick they can pick their business i mean they can pick their business model they can decide a subscription-based business model you know micro microtransactions they can pick you know they can pick whatever model they want um you know they can also have indirect you know
there's this whole those whole new rise of this kind of the the non-fungible token um you know kind of this idea of unique digital assets there's you know completely different monetization methods that are opening up for media um you know it's entirely possible in the future for example you 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 they get sold and and uh and and trades um and so you you it's you know it's it's yeah it's look it's
injecting it's injecting economics it's injecting at a very fundamental level kind of internet native money internet native economics and incentives uh 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 um but the ability to put it this way the hard decision between free the hard decision between let's say total independence and no money um and then having a traditional contractual relationship with one company like that that shouldn't be the trade-off there
should be lots of room in the middle for experimentation and that's that's the zone we're heading into now but is the key difference easy or micro payments is the key difference sort of being able to sell collectibles more readily say with the nft model rather than signed t-shirts they don't sound very big to me they
both sound like possible advantages but as a percentage of gdp they sound like really tiny advantages well it depends percentage of gdp i mean it's a percentage of gdp like everything is tiny compared to like healthcare um so so i mean the media industry is quite small right like if you just if you look
at slice of precise percentage of gdp like it's actually turns out it's actually really interesting like video games it turns out it's actually quite large but like television prints you know newspapers 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 um you know so i don't yeah i don't really look at it i don't really look at it top down i don't really look at it as like okay this this therefore has to lead to like an expansion of 100x in the media like
that's not the like maybe i i think it grows the media business but it doesn't have to like it because if you explode like that but having it be having to be a better proposition for creators having to 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 five billion directly addressable consumers online at any moment for any new thing um and so one of the things that we're
finding in our in our day job is it's getting really hard to forecast market size um for any of these new things because you know if if they don't take if they don't take if they don't you know it goes back to if they don't kind of have kind of uptake in the in sort of consumer psychology then of course
they're going to be small but when these things run they can really run right i know you just look at like just a you know most recent examples tick tock you know tick tock is just you know who knew that short form videos were going to be that big and it just turns out that five billion people as a significant
percentage of the like short video short form videos all of a sudden it's this huge business and so the i think these things are unpredictable in the scope that they the 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 re-emerging in web 3.0 and making it in some ways a lot like web 2.0 which could be okay but actually re-centralized uh there are gatekeepers again there are censorship issues again and it's not actually that different but with marginal improvements
why is yeah so there will be some of that let me give you an example of how that did happen with in the in the old world so uh email was email was was fully open um in many ways by the way is at least in theory still fully open emails there's an smtp protocol an email that lets basically any uri or anybody could write
an email client email server and we exchange email with all the other email servers on the internet um you know and then basically webmail emerged and then you had yahoo mail now you have gmail and so gmail right gmail is an example of what you're talking about which is gmail's a sort of a call it a
semi-walled garden it's an environment that you can live in it's a 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 with other email clients 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 you know it it's giving examples gmail is not censoring content yet that i know of but like i think it's like basically any day now like they could start at any moment um 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 or gatekeeper that starts uh you know that starts uh censoring content uh actually 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 it's not smtp so that so this gatekeeping function emerges and so the argument basically is gmail 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 um and and we've lost the sort of an arctic and freewheeling aspect of it and i and look there there is some truth to that notwithstanding that you can still build your own email system and in fact google built their you know at one point everybody was on yahoo mail and
everybody's on gmail um and so i would describe it as it's a little bit the sort of loyalty uh voice exit uh you know kind of hershman framework um which is if you're just in a walled garden like you have uh loyalty or voice right you but you really don't have exit and and again it's it's people
blame themselves you know i think people blame this on policies and companies whatever and that has something to do with it but it's also it's an architectural observation um which is it's the difference between something getting built just by a company versus something getting built by a network um
if there is an underlying network then there is exit um and all of the web three you know technologies start you know in a lot of cases the web three things that we're backing they're not even companies they're they're projects they're they're web through projects out of the gate we're not even buying equity
we're buying tokens you know they're decentralized from the very beginning uh and their open protocols from the very beginning and so it's this yeah it's it's this alternate way of of of looking at the world alternate way of designing systems and then it kind of opens up this exit kind of option um and
i think that you know 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 yeah so i'm not convinced i mean look in the long long run um so uh i'll i'll pick on uh science fiction so the the
the movie the kingsman um which is kind of a funny spy movie spoof but they have a the the conference room scenes in there that all the all the british agents are meeting around the conference table and it turns out they're they're all virtual they're all wearing their augmented reality glasses um and so
they're all kind of seeing holograms of each other um you know there are going to be technological approaches virtual reality augmented reality in the future um you know that that give you basically the recreation of a of a physical uh meeting environment i mean they already exist i mean these these things already
exist um uh our friend uh our friend biology is teaching courses right now in vr uh in a virtual classroom so like you know the these technologies do already exist you know that that will happen and you know i think that will be a big deal um having said that i don't think that's necessarily the goal or that i
don't think that's necessary 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 i'm not sure if it's something we need to center in on and the reason i say that is because it's one is a 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 working back working backwards from that that well there's another way to think about that which is well actually maybe we maybe we shouldn't try to have hybrid
meetings maybe in fact hybrid meetings are the exact wrong idea right and maybe they're the wrong idea because maybe instead of combining the best elements of being local being remote maybe they combine the worst elements of being local and being remote and maybe instead 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 and we have some of those and some of those now work really well um and then maybe when we get people together we don't want to have meetings maybe we want to have like very
immersive um you know very social you know very human bonding you know a very much more intense level of of actual like you know actual human interaction uh and relationship building than you have in a meeting um and let's take a step back on this like the office is an artifact of the
technology of a time and place i mentioned the the second industrial revolution like the office is sort of a derivation of the factory right that sort of there was 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 in motion studies
and all these guys who did that and then out of that out of that you you got the you go back look at the history you've got schools um you've got jails um as they're known as you see them today and then and then you get you've got offices and it's it's 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 you know the historical fact like the roman empire was not run out of offices like they didn't they ran the world and yet there was no office there was no office building they the roman aristocrats they worked out of their
homes and then they went to the senate and 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 you know maybe a couple of offices in in london but they didn't
probably have a lot of offices either um like this office construct is a time and place kind of thing that you need you know it's a punch card you need to get people in at eight o'clock they need to leave at five o'clock you know the the calendar is regimented by half-hour hour-long meetings you know in a in a
school or prison the bell goes off you know at 8 a.m in office environments 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 of these new tech we have now all these new technologies they didn't have a hundred years ago we've got video we've got
slack we've got text we've got what's up we've got you know this endless array of of all of these new uh new technologies making it possible to go we're portable the cell phone was obviously a huge breakthrough this is actually craig the cause vision for the cell phone which is that you know it's just crazy
the desk phone like why are you at your desk why are you at your desk well 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 that are either they're they're going to be the best companies that are great at remote or they're going to make they're going to be companies that have the choice take the choice of having people have actually a much deeper level of human
interaction much more frequently um and and 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 health care renovations for say the upper middle class what is likely to be the biggest change in the personal home over the next 20 years
i mean the big one the big you know the big one now it goes built right off what we said and in a lot of ways this is like the biggest topic in the world or at least in the develop 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 copied world this basically this presumption that remote work is now viable um you know which is a new presumption um you know if this sticks um then you know it represents the first decoupling of economic opportunity from geographic locality
right in in in you know thousands of years like you know it's potentially a civilizational level change i'm getting quite excited about this and so you know just to kind of go through the history of this right for for thousands of years if you were a sharp ambitious young person and this you know this is true
the medicis and it's true that greeks are not but like you had to go to the city like you had to go to the city to get actually to get you know to basically get opportunity um if you don't have to do that and in particular if you don't have to go to the same city and if you don't have to go all 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 um much less dependent on the sort of physical requirement of colocation uh with economic opportunity than they have in
the past i think that's just potentially it's like potentially 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 uh for how society developed in that case like the definition of the home changes right it's because you know
well the first thing is like number one you're working on 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 it 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 what it meant to work out
to work out of their houses and so it's a place that you 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 you know should should should the home really be you
know two parents and a couple 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 um and if everybody could still have access to great knowledge work jobs
um you know online like maybe that's like a fundamentally better way to live um or you know maybe young people i just uh met with uh i've talked to a founder today he's got you know he's got eight people in his in his eight young people in his company and they they literally go city to city every six months and
they get a group house together um and they they're just you know they're exploring the world whether while they're building their 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 so this is the uh the skynet um but it could be intermediate right just master criminals who use script out a higher hitman to achieve yeah nefarious master criminal they're master ai criminals to be clear yeah yeah the problem yeah that at least
historically the problem with criminals is they're not that smart um so they they they they don't do um they don't they don't tend to do the big elaborate it's you know there's not a lot of real life moriarty's running around but um so i guess i would say what i what i don't worry what i don't worry at all
about it maybe i'm just short-sighted but i just don't get it i what i'm not worried about is kind of the sort of macro ai like ai comes alive and you know skynet or the paper clip optimizer or the grey goo or whatever the different formulations 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 i like i don't know for for me and this probably i'm too much of an engineer or something it's like well you know what is ai it's math right it's like it's it's basically elaborations on linear algebra and i just i i have a hard time getting worked
up about linear algebra like it's it you know it's math um we'll we'll we'll be able to keep the math under control um so i'm not as worried about that i think it's 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 um a world of everybody you know being connected i mean you know there's there's whatever hive mind global brain kind of concept where everybody's plugged in all the time um a world in which you know people have the ability to marshal you know
enormous economic resources potentially very quickly in a collaborative way um you know yeah these dystopian views this um you know this these old uh this um the old idea i think you're alluding to the idea of a i think the essay was called assassination politics which was sort of yeah crowdfunding uh assassinations and then the about the
concern with uh what is it the concern with futures markets uh the concern with robin hansen's idea that always gets gets uh put at him as if 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 they're gonna be all kinds of issues um you know they sort of emerge um you know from basically connecting the world and wearing everybody up with computers and information systems but it's like okay we've been doing that for a long time now i mean we you know we gave everybody spoken language that
you know maybe 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 of machines um you know we figured it out like you know we we gave people we gave people 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 rash of you know bank robberies you know the dillinger gang went out you know they they took the automatic weapons from world war one and they took the car from the 1920s and they started knocking over
the banks it was a huge crisis and led to the creation of the fbi um and so it's like yeah it's like okay you know these are the new tools these are the new systems for me it goes back to the 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 i just i what i just what i just don't see is i i just again maybe i like vision i i don't see the discontinuous jump uh 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 um 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 could rerun my career i think one of the things i think about is if i reran my career and i used his method instead of my method whatever my method is uh what i've been more
successful and i'm not positive i think maybe um the thing about is that 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 um so my mental model what peter does is i use the metaphor the bat signal peter puts
out the bat signal um 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 he's a staff review he's like okay we're gonna 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 um you know let's put out this clarion
call with founders fund with uh 140 you know we're from the slanted cars tagline um and you know basically see who shows up with flying car startups and he's found fund's been a very successful firm based on attracting you know some very you know some very very unusual and very uh you know compelling founders
um and and then his you know it's interesting peter doesn't really use social media but he gives talks and he writes um and i and again i think that's part of it which is he he he's looking for who reads his stuff or who shows up at his talks um and then he basically you know it's like which he's one of the most public i
don't know what you're like as a public speaker when i give public talks i'm like i have to talk and then i'm out the back door um and then i'll like go online and see what people think but like no you've got to stick around you've got to stay yeah the whole point the talk is irrelevant just show up
for the end of your own talk right here i am so um i think it's the i don't know i think it's like 90 it's one of these things where 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 uh 90 of the talent picking process is over if you're
attracting the right people up front um and then the filtration just becomes a lot easier um 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 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 it will probably always be it's a little bit the nature nurture question or let's say it's
inherent capability of whatever form uh for whatever reason um and then training right and that 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 we you know we can help people with that um i guess i start by saying that
presumption is my presumption is there are not enough great founders in the world and i you know and and and i think i i think that's obvious we could have a big discussion as to whether that's the case or not i think there isn't 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 um and can you 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 or a thousand like what what's the what's the upfront criteria like what what do they have to show up with by the
time they become engaged in the activity and open to the training um and then how much can we train like how many people could we you know how many people you know maybe there's just maybe it's much more um 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 uh you know much more freely available to you know to a lot more people and i think that's i can that remains i would say a surprisingly open question so let's say you speak with five people tomorrow their founders are potential founders what is it you would like data
on that you don't have data on now waving your magic wand i mean it would be great it would be great to it would be great to have like the psychometric tests um but you can do that they don't seem that useful right i don't know yeah they're not exactly in fashion um they you i would like to have um i would
like to have uh i would like to have videotape of what they were like under adversity um of what they were like under pressure um 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 um 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 have 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 um i would like to see that more often uh you know we learn these things once they're up and running we learn all these things uh it would be great to have the i don't know whatever the um you're great to have the scrying device
that let us see all that stuff up front why is 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 yeah so private equity so private equity is able to be private equity and this 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 um and then you know it attempts to optimize them or turn them around or do
you know to consolidate them or whatever it does but these are there's always the businesses already there that that that exists you know what what we do is i like to say we do value investing but it's value that doesn't exist yet it hasn't been created yet um you know it's it's it's blank sheet of paper um stuff
um the history with some exceptions the history as you said the history basically is that um computer science based venture capital has done very well biomedical biotechnology based excuse me uh venture capital has done about you might say half as well or a quarter as well um 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 yeah there were a few vcs but like most people venture capital land didn't think there was like a ripe opportunity to build a new car company i can tell you that um nor did
most vcs think there was an opportunity to build a new rocket company uh i can also tell you that and so you do have these very striking counter examples which let's go back to but the pattern has been as you said it's computer attacker it's biotech i think it's the bill janeway bill
january's thesis that he wrote about in his book um uh i think a book is called doing capitalism and it's his history he's a legendary vc in his own right and a trained economist and he he basically says it was the it was the foundational science um and advanced technology um uh basically uh developed in the computer
world uh for 50 years by darpa and at succeeding technological you know 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 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's like half a successful is because there was like 25 years of biotech you know nih and all these kind of very aggressive uh you know kind of you know biotech biological science investing programs and so his claim and this is why like i think he's always
been leary for example cleantech environmental tech for example he's like look there you know maybe there should have been a derpa of cleantech that 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 gonna 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 my history about the history in the valley is if if we have a sharp young you know whatever entrepreneur with the ability to attract a team 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 at both of those companies but at least i didn't see that uh going in and and i would say the the case studies of tesla and spacex this is something we're spending a lot of time on 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 and i 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
oh so my mistakes so the the prior decade from 20 years ago to 10 years ago my errors were almost all um misevaluations of ideas and in particular negative you know false negatives um so um you know oh this won't work um and then it turns out it worked and and and basically you know in my line of work
after you do that a while you learn that to stop like to stop basically they say subtracting value uh by imposing your own opinion on whether something will work um and and i have a whole different different theory on that i think i've worked i don't have that problem anymore um and you know necessary kind of
disclaimer on that in in my line of work a false negative right saying something doesn't saying that something is not going to work and then it works is a much bigger mistake than the the false positive of saying something's going to work and then it doesn't work and it goes to the the asymmetry returns so the big
mistakes are always missing missing the big winners like almost 100 of the time so anyway i've cured myself of that um the last 10 years my biggest mistakes have all been in the dimension of okay this might 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 five billion people connected being able to click and use something new um the for the things that work they're getting to be much much larger than i would have ever thought possible um just just much bigger by orders and orders of magnitude um and so
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 gonna work at all in this new world of five billion connected people maybe it's maybe just everything it's really big or although all the all the important things are really big um so that's the one we're trying to work out right now whom do you admire the most
um yeah the people i admire the most um and say like and and there you go two-part answer this in the in the abstract it's it's it's basically it's the again this goes to the patterns of sort of human behavior social conform 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 um that the number of people who are willing to go out on a limb and actually take control and position anything it's just a very small number of people and this is an example of like that's just never going
to change like it and if anything that's that's going backwards like that might so this might be an area where social media has caused you know conformity to rise or at least among a lot of populations costs for me to rise you could argue it's probably also leading to more contrarianism as well
but it certainly is is there's a lot of conformity effects that you can see in plain sight and so the people who are willing and it's like everybody wants to be 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 um you know it's great to be those guys once their thing 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 um and so it's the people willing to withstand the scorn um
uh that's 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 in what we do and what i do which is it has to you know working with these kind of very special people um and working with kind of you
know the the the people around them and their families um uh and so i you know the other side is like people who take care of other people people who really take care of other people um and people who really care about other people and really try to help them succeed um and try to support them um in
you know these these crazy efforts um or you know or sign up to be part of these crazy efforts um and so i'm i'm gaining a lot more apprecia 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
i get 100 of my travel and 100 of my adventure needs are satisfied online um and and uh being able to meet being able to meet people and talk to people here on earth so i'm i am not a unless it's after one of your talks right yes exactly um uh i yeah no i do not hella ski um i do not parasail and i
will not be going to mars have you ever wanted to write a book uh yeah i have and some yeah yeah yeah yes 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 can i simply subsidize it for 50 years um and if nobody ever comes
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 well 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 um and so it would have to be a physical gathering place um for people um and i don't know maybe
i need to maybe i need to think more broadly than this maybe it also needs to be in vr or something new virtual gathering place um you know but look it should be a place for the exploration of ideas um and then you know it should be extremely comprehensive you know i would i would i would want it to be you know
very focused on sort of yeah sort of history politics philosophy um economics so kind of the you know the the history of kind of human the evolution of human society how we got here why we're not all still living in mud huts um you know the the the really big questions um you know a lot of it probably organized by era
um and then uh and then of course i would want to just like ruthlessly in in this case i would watch a ruthlessly sensor um and so it would it would take a it would be an arduous uh gauntlet to actually get a book into the bookstore 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 movies are hard because they're so short um it's i don't even know if i have i enjoy you know i 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 um real genius
um have you seen real genius i'm not sure i have what's it about real genius is actually a movie it's actually a good movie for you um so it's a movie it was a it was it was sort of it was a comedy it was a sort of mid-80s comedy but it was actually it's like the mit movie so it's basically this kid you
know um basically he ends up testing off the charts on his aptitude test it ends up essentially at mit um it was phil kilmer's first big starring role um it's a very funny movie um but also very very sweet um and so uh it's about it's no kids actually you know kind of discovering their full
potential um and it takes place at a recreation of of mit at that kind of that time with that with that kind of level you know the sort of level of experimentation um and then you know the you know the 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 lasted um so that's a great movie but um yeah tv show tv show favorite so that one's easy so that that's easy answer so dead wood dead wood by far um by a mile um and so i i i'm uh that dead one's a product of an i'm not sure name by david milch who's a legend um who
i've had the pleasure meeting meeting one time and really enjoyed um he um it's deadwood is the in my opinion is the closest thing that we're gonna get to shakespeare uh out of our era um it's an absolute extraordinary creative accomplishment the language is unbelievable um and um but the content
it really sticks with me in fact i'm due to rewatch it uh i need to rewatch it it's it it is as far as i'm concerned it is the actual telling of the creation of america and and through the through the vantage point of the frontier uh through the development of the frontier and you know for good bad and ugly like it's all
in there um you know it's the entire process it's a story of carving out basically the mining the mining colony of dead wood and then you know ultimately the creation of the state and you know essentially the creation of the modern america that we live in um but it's it's a like it's the best recreation i mean it
wasn't there so i can't attest to how accurate it is and of course it's it's dramatized and so forth but um 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 and really not being able to rely you know it's sort of the emergence of in a lot of ways this
is emergency human civilization not being able to rely on you know law enforcement is not necessarily there the military is not necessarily there um you know if you have a contract dispute like it might get solved in the fist fight or a gunfight like you know like what it what it takes to basically
carve what we would consider civilization out of the wilderness um and by the way 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 in the sort of uh the creation of the frontier um you know i i i i think a lot about
the frontier idea i you know i think i think i work at the frontier i think the you know basically i think i think basically the american frontier went west as far as it could it reached the pacific coast it stopped um people weren't quite sure what to do next and then eventually we figured out
that we should just keep going but at the virtual frontier um and then i think that's why i think that's why california has the tech industry in the north and has the media industry in the south um it's because those are the two kind of parts of the virtual front here um you know the the networks and them
and then the the content the imaginary worlds um and so that would you know i i 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