a16z Podcast - Chris Dixon & Tyler Cowen on Crypto, AI, and Philosophy

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

In this episode, general partner Chris Dixon joins economist and author Tyler Cowen to explore the themes behind Chris’s book, Read, Write, Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet.They trace the internet’s evolution from open, decentralized beginnings to today’s consolidated platforms—and ask: how can we build something better? From stablecoins, tokenized payments, and open blockchains to AI's impact on coding, media, and politics, this wide-ranging conversation dives deep into how technologies like crypto and AI could help redistribute power online and reshape the future of ownership and innovation.The two also debate:Whether banks and legacy institutions will adopt stablecoinsThe long-term role of NFTs and digital property rightsHow AI might rewrite venture capital, education, and economic planningWhether we're heading toward a creative renaissance—or a world of AI-generated monocultureListen to similar conversations, listen to web3 with a16z: https://web3-with-a16z.simplecast.com/ Resources: Listen to Conversations with Tyler: https://conversationswithtyler.com/Find Chris on X: https://x.com/cdixonFind Tyler on X: https://x.com/tylercowenJoin a16z’s Crypto Substack:https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/ Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

I think Visa will enter MasterCard will enter PayPal will enter. Fidelity has already said they're going to enter. Bank for America said there's going to enter. I think you're going to have every bank probably issuing, I hope, a stable coin the way you have them issuing credit cards. These all have users and customers. The banks will have a button that says send a stable coin. So what I'm hoping is that there's enough legitimate actors around this who create a network effect.

Today on the A16Z podcast, Chris Dixon, general partner at A16Z, joins economist Tyler Cowen to discuss the ideas behind his book. Read, write, own, building the next era of the internet. They explore the evolution of web infrastructure, the economic consolidation of today's internet platforms, and how technologies like blockchain, open-source systems, and AI could reshape the future. The conversation spans everything from creator economics and stable coins to the decline of Stack Overflow, and whether AI will centralize power or help redistribute it. Let's get into it.

As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I am chatting with Chris Dixon, who is a general partner at Andresen Harwitz. He has a long-standing history in the tech field. He started off in a way as a blogger, and we now have out the paperback edition of Chris's recent book, a very stimulating and provocative read.

It is called Read, Write, Own, building the next error of the Internet. Chris, welcome. Thanks for having me. Let me ask you a very fundamental question so people can see where you're coming from. So if I listen to music today, not on my stereo, I'll go to YouTube and Spotify. What's wrong with that arrangement?

How is it you think we can make it better? Yeah, I mean, so the kind of core thesis of my book and the core thesis of my career now is that the internet began as a decentralized network, which what that meant was that if you created website, or let's say you were a musician and you created a website and you sold your music, you would sell directly to the consumers. And there would be no intermediary in between taking money from that transaction. The challenge with things like Spotify and YouTube and just generally

the structure of the modern internet is that you've had these services pop up, which are very dominant. It's very consolidated. Sort of 90% of the internet traffic runs through less than 10 services and companies. And they have very high what we call take rates on the internet business. So take rate is the percentage of money flowing through the system taken by the network intermediary, right? So YouTube actually is the most generous of the social networks. They give, like, roughly 50% to the creators and take 50% for themselves. Now, that's actually a low take rate on the Internet in any other area of the economy, as I'm sure you'd know, 50% for an intermediary is generally a very high rate. Spotify is 30%.

But then, of course, musicians, there are, you know, many other layers of fees on top, including the music. labels. Spotify's own statistics. It's on their website. I guess they're glad about this or they think it's a good stat, is that it's something like, I don't remember exact number. It's like 8,000 of the eight million artists make more than $50,000 a year. So a very, very small percentage make something like the average American living. And so the question is, is that because people aren't paying for music? People are paying for music. You know, advertisers are spending a ton of money on YouTube. I mean, meta and Google and these companies are making a ton of money. The problem is, in my mind, primarily economic. And I go through this, by the way, in detail in the first part of my book,

I go through the history of the internet and how this happened. But we basically, in my mind, and why I got into the internet was it was meant to be, it was a very exciting vision. I mean, of course, it came out of academia and government and things. But this vision that you'd have an internet that sort of owned and operated by the people that use it, whereas if you visualize a network, the money is flowing to the edges of the network, there were all these great ideas, like there's a famous blog post by Kevin Kelly called A Thousand True Fans. And the idea was, because you're removing intermediaries, musicians and creative people can now make a living with only a thousand customers. If you do the math, someone's paying $10 a month, and you have a

thousand of them, that's $10,000 a month. That's 120 grand a year. That's a pretty good living for somebody doing something they love. That was always the vision. That's what I got excited. I got started in the Internet, the 90s. And the Internet was like that in the 90s, and it was like that in much of the 2000s. And then I go through this, and I think because of the incentives of the way these services were set up, because of venture capital, because of a bunch of things. You essentially had a bunch of incentives to consolidate and network effects, of course, that these services get more valuable, the more people they're on it, which has a winner-take-all effect. And we ended up in a place, you know, you look around about 10 years ago, and we got to a place where there's roughly 5 to 10 services that are dominating the Internet, taking all the money, taking all the economics, and also have control. That's a whole separate topic.

This is going to this topics of deplatforming and rules. And if you go on YouTube, there's all these debates around demonetization. So in the book, I go through this, it's a history of the Internet, how this happened, and then what are the effects? There's economic effects. There's governance or control effects. And I think more broadly, what it does is, for example, as you mentioned YouTube and Spotify, it creates real challenges for creative people. Now throw in artificial intelligence, which I think is obviously an amazing technology and incredibly powerful. And I generally very excited about what it will do.

But I think left unchecked, you know, on its current trajectory, will likely. lead to even further consolidation. It rewards companies with large amounts of data and capital and things like this. And so the reason that I'm involved with blockchains and crypto is I see blockchains as a potential counterbalancing force to those consolidation trends. But there is a reason why the older internet dwindled, right? For me, as a listener, Google Alphabet, they've upgraded YouTube in some very significant ways. The search function is amazing. The algorithm to me is useful. It used to be you had to download a YouTube video and then you'd watch it much later.

And now it's all seamless and great. Why aren't I just better off in this new world and I left the decentralized internet behind and my music listening today is much better than it was 20 years ago? Yeah, so my argument just structurally is kind of a thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and that's read right on.

The first year of the internet were what you're referring to are protocol networks. So that was the worldwide web and email. These were decentralized networks, but no company behind them, not owned by anyone. They're really just standards,

sort of like a language is a standard. And actually the case study I use in the book is RSS and sort of the fall of RSS. Like RSS is still around but in a very niche way. But at one point it was, let's call it 2008. I was there. I was blogging about this at the time. It was a legitimate kind of contender. Like you could have imagined a world where you were getting your YouTube and Twitter

and all these other services through a decentralized protocol. Not RSS as you imagine it like just a bad visual interface, but as the underlying structure and then you build graphics and streaming and all these other things in it. So why didn't that happen? And then I think to your point, it didn't happen because it wasn't good enough. It didn't offer the same user experience, right? And so you're absolutely right about that. Like these services won because they were better.

And like, one of the big reasons they were better was, and I have, again, a case study of this in the book, is subsidization. So YouTube for a very long time and to this day in some areas is subsidizing video hosting costs, which is very expensive. I mean, so I've seen this from the other side. I work in venture capital. I've now worked in it for, I don't know, I've been investing for almost 20 years. And these companies like YouTube and Twitter, they raise a lot of money. What do they spend that money on? A lot of it is for subsidizing the hosting costs.

Because the basic idea, right, is these are winner-take-all markets. They have network effects. And so what you do is you subsidize along the way. And so let's imagine YouTube came out in 2005. You're sitting there in 2007. You're a video blogger, and you have two choices. You can set up RSS and pay hosting costs, or you can go to YouTube and do it for free. Right?

And that was one of the big value propositions of YouTube early on. And if you used it back then, I'd do it. And that subsidization is something that those protocol networks, there's no company behind it. They can't offer subsidies. RSS couldn't offer subsidies. But isn't there some a priori reason to expect the centralized service to spend more innovating and innovate more rapidly than the decentralized service precisely because there is some monopoly profit there? I think there's a couple of things.

I think if I could get to maybe just briefly to blockchain, so I think what I think of blockchains are as a new architecture for building Internet services where there is no intermediary. Decentralized is another way for saying no intermediary, where you have very low take rates, and you have sort of the way I think of blockchains is the benefits of protocol networks, of the old networks, the societal benefits, in that the money flows to the edges, the controls by the community, but blockchains are able to do some of the things you're describing. So a blockchain can offer incentives. A blockchain can have a treasury, right? This is the architecture of a blockchain. They have a thing called smart contracts. And the smart contract, this is something that's sort of hard

people to get their heads around, but it's not a company or a person. It's literally a piece of code that owns tokens and money and can use that money to do things like the YouTube subsidization. So my kind of core argument is that protocol networks are better for society. Corporate networks, as I call them like YouTube, have a lot of advantages, as you're describing, like competitive advantages. And blockchain networks done right can ideally be the best of both worlds. They can have the societal benefits of protocol networks, but the competitive advantages of these corporate networks. Now, to your point, anything that's decentralized there are some coordination costs.

And I think like a good case study there would be Linux versus Windows, right? So Linux is now, I don't know what the percentages are, but I think it's well about 90% of the operating systems are Linux. If you rewind to the 90s when it was starting out, it was kind of a mess. It was like on a list serve and a bunch of uncoordinated people. Now you did have a very important kind of leader, bully pulpit leader in Linus. But it was sort of an uncoordinated mess. And you're right, there is overhead and coordination costs.

You don't have a hierarchical management structure that can be. very efficient. The flip side and why I think Linux 1 is that open source benefits from what's known as composability. And that's the idea that anyone in the world can write a piece of software once, put it on GitHub as a public resource, and then anyone else can use that as a Lego brick to build another thing, right? And so you get this, I say in the book that composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance. It's this thing where like you basically just keep one person build something and you never have to build it again and you reuse it and you build the Lego bricks up. And I think that's one of the main reasons that open source has,

you know, taken 90% plus market share, AWS, every embedded device you have, every data center, Android devices, and so forth. So you're right, there's a different set of tradeoffs. Like it's tougher to coordinate building a decentralized protocol or a blockchain protocol. On the flip side, you have other benefits. You have lower take rates. You can offer incentives through tokens. You can benefit from composability, sort of everything is open source and reusable. But there is legal free entry in the sector, and people can go to Andresen Harwitz. They can go to you personally and ask for VC money to do something. I recall a bunch of people told me I should try Mastodon, which was decentralized. I did. I didn't like it. Most people didn't like it. That's now a bunch of

years ago. No one has come to me in at least five years and said, oh, Tyler, you need to try this new decentralized service. Why isn't that happening? What's the benefit? The service might be offering me that's like concrete. Yeah, I have a section on Macedon. I mean, I think there's architectural flaws in the whole thing. So, for example, if you've used it, there's this whole concept of servers and you have this very challenging problem of coordinating across servers and it's very fragmented. So that might be a separate topic. Look, I think a broader thing is when I think about where blockchains are getting adopted, if you look at where they're successful right now, it's mostly in financial applications. So stable coins, for example, I think that the numbers are

shockingly high. If you Google, Visa, stablecoin dashboard, visas is, I think, a pretty neutral party. They have a dashboard that tracks it. It's three and a half trillion dollars in stable coin transactions last month, right? And that's been steadily going up. So stable coin, just for your audience, is a something like it could be a dollar or euro, but it's backed by an asset in a bank. So there's Tether, USDC. There's a bill that just made it past the Senate Finance Committee and is going to be voted on the House hopefully in the next six weeks and hopefully passed. That is congressional legislation to put full rules around stable coins. And I think all of this growth has been happening before there was that kind of clarity, and I think that could really accelerate it.

But the reason I'm saying this is that I think there's really interesting things you can do with blockchains and social networks, but the reality is in 2025, it could just be that we have social networks. The network effects are strong. And the areas to focus on when you have new architectures like blockchains may be other areas. You know, in software, there's a phrase, Greenfield, Brownfield, right? Greenfield is you have some breakthrough, AI or crypto or whatever. Do you go after existing use cases and make them better, or do you go after new use cases? And so what you're describing is more brownfield. Like, it may just be that some of the wars are fought and they're over.

There's 3 billion people using Facebook apps. And, like, at some point, the network effects are so strong that even if you come up with something that's much better, it may just be a challenge. I'm sure some of your challenge on something like Macedon is just that your friends aren't there. Network effects. So I guess to your question, I mean, I'm very excited, obviously, about blockchains in this new architecture. And we make investments in a lot of different areas because we like to experiment and try a bunch of things. But I think right now, the most likely areas where we're going to see increased adoption are in these areas where things are more broken. And I would say that's in sort of payments, financial services.

And then I think there's a lot of interesting stuff happening also at the intersection of crypto-blockchains and AI. Well, with stable coins, once the Trump people are no longer in office, it's four years from now, but what do you think the regulatory counterreaction will be like? The stable coin issuers, they are subject to runs, right? There's nominally 100% reserves, but there's no guarantee. There are 100% reserves in the legislation, and in the U.S.DC. has 100% reserves. Tether is debated because they're not audited in the U.S. And people don't know. They say they do.

But the bill would actually require 100% reserves. But why isn't the equilibrium that I have my stable coins overseas where they're not regulated and de facto the sector is not 100% reserves and there's a lot of runs? Why isn't that what ends up happening? Well, what we're hoping to do, and in the bill, there'll be all sorts of things. So, for example, if you go to Coinbase, there'll be restrictions on offering unregistered stable coins. But that's a U.S.-based firm, right? The law is be foreign firms, Estonia, Argentina, wherever, that will offer me a better deal precisely because they're not 100% backed.

It'll be a higher return. I won't care about the social risk I generate by putting my funds into a more run-prone firm. Why don't we have to worry about that? Well, so what my hope is and what often happens, right, is so first of all, I mean, I'm not an expert on every aspect of the proposed stable coin bill, but there are reciprocation kind of requirements. So if other countries want to access them and participate in our financial services and K.YC and AML, they're expected to have similar rules that historically our financial services regulations tend to propagate to a lot of other countries. So my hope would be that the U.S. does something here and a lot of other countries follow that lead and that becomes the norm. And there'll be rules. Like you can't call something a stable coin.

You can't get it on a registered exchange if it's not. And so that would be my hope. But look, I'm sure in crypto, there's no question there are scams and there are bad things. And I'm sure there will be in the future. I think that the best solution to it is to have smart regulation that incentivizes or requires things to be built in the proper way in a way that avoids things like bank runs. By the way, the bank run thing, just to be clear, like there were a bunch of stable coins in the past like Tara Luna, which had a bank run and collapsed. that was not asset backed by dollars. That was a sort of circular thing

that was backed by its own token and had a bank run thing. So that has happened, as you say, the hope would be that these existing ones and the new ones and the regulations around them would require full one-to-one asset backed and therefore make bankruns impossible.

But circa 2025, we've seen a lot of international cooperation break down. So the WTO basically doesn't work. The UN, I would say, has not worked in some while. intellectual property law, that still works, agreements on trying to end various wars, those are not working. So it seems unlikely to me that the U.S. could convince the world, in essence, to copy our stable coin regulation. Even if we tried to use Swift, we've pushed

the swift incentive on countries very hard. It's shown its limits. Again, why don't we just end up with these significant corners where the most profitable stable coins are outside of what the U.S. wants to do with them? Well, I think it's partly also, what do you want to do with the stable coin? Like, who's using the stable coin? So I'll just give you an example. Like the Stripe founders, I think of Stripe is a very smart financial services firm. And who, by the way, they had done crypto like 10 years ago and then I really soured on it. I think you know Patrick and John pretty well.

They had actually really soured on it. And when I saw them would say, oh, crypto's not. I just watched them on the All In podcast a few weeks ago. They acquired this company called Bridge, the Stable Coin Company. And they actually, in their annual letter, they just put out, they called Stable Coins the room temperature superconductor. right, which of course is like a holy grail kind of thing. I don't know. I don't have their financial statements.

But as they describe it, they're using it for things like treasury management. So I believe this example they gave was SpaceX moving money from one jurisdiction to another. A very popular use case is international invoicing. So you're a importer and you have to send out 50 invoices to various countries. You can now do it in a fully digital way with very low fees and very quickly. The strike founders, one of the interesting things they said, is it's not just the lower fees. So just to give you a sense on the fees,

this is as of a year and a half ago, basically, because the infrastructure and crypto has gotten better, you're now basically on things like Base, which is an L2 and Solana have hit what we thought of as long as a target, which is one second, one penny to transfer things, right? That's where we are now, technically. Your viewers, if they want to check me,

they can go download the Coinbase wallet and try it, and you can see it. And so one of the big benefits of Stripe Founders talks about is that because it's fully digital end-to-end, sort of like email, you can fully automate the whole thing. So like a big problem, for example, with invoicing is invoice fraud. People send you an invoice and it's like a fake place to wire or two. Now it's fully digital. Stripe has effectively what's like a reputation

network. One computer sends a request to the other one checks it. It checks it against Stripe's database. Is this a white listed address? And does the whole thing end-to-end, low fees internationally. So to your question, sure, will there be people at the fringes who want to maximize yield? Sure, there's always that kind of behavior, probably. It's the internet. The internet has edges. The question is, can we marginalize it? And will these legitimate companies like Stripe? And look, what I'm hoping, Stablecoin bill passes, I think Visa will enter, MasterCard will enter, PayPal will enter. Fidelity has already said they're going to enter. Bank for America said they're going to enter. I think you're going to have every bank probably issuing, I hope, a stablecoin, the way you

have them issuing credit cards. These all have users and customers. The banks will have a button that says send a stable coin. So what I'm hoping is that there's enough legitimate actors around this who create a network effect that, to your point, yes, there will be that stuff. But it it will be marginalized. In that world, should we infer that the Federal Reserve loses control of the money supply? Create a stable coin. It's backed by a T-bill. In a funny way, it's like a private open market operation, right? And I'm fine with that. I'm not sure the Fed controls the money supply today. But does that become a macro issue? I feel like I'm talking to a famous economist. I'm on your territory now. It's dangerous because I'm not an economist. But I haven't figured this out

myself either, to be clear. I'm genuinely asking various people. I asked Austin Gulsby the same question because I don't know. Yeah, I believe the last stat I saw, stable coins are 4% of they hold 4% of treasuries, right? So if this grows a lot, it will be, you know, it will be meaning. It already is kind of meaningful, but it will be

meaningful. Look, I, like, I guess one is I think of it more in terms of payments and all the things, you know, payments and then all the adjacent things you can do around payments versus a bank account, right? And sort of replacing, you know, folks like banks in the Federal Reserve that control the money supply. So, you know, that's kind of at least how I, where I think kind of the focus should be and not. The, like I believe in the current draft of the bill, it's you can't offer yield to the consumers.

And I think that's something the banks are fighting for. So this, anyway, this is still a political thing going on. But they don't want that because they think if you can offer, you know, essentially a treasury bill, like a yield. and the consumer gets the yield, that that will become more attractive than bank accounts. And so I think this will also, you know, be a question is sort of, is this optimized more around payments or more around kind of savings use cases? Sorry, what was the, and I want to make sure, like, I don't, I'll have to defer to, I would also say just on a, I would also argue the other kind of national security interests here, and you've had others write about this in various editorials, is it's another way to popularize a dollar, right? It's a way, you know, it's already we've seen the demand for it, and if we legitimate it, it presumably will make hopefully the dollar more popular

and increase its status or maintain its status as a reserve currency. Fractional banking stuff, I probably have to defer to you off that as I can speculate a little bit, but it's from an amateur perspective. When the AIs trade with each other, do you think they'll prefer Bitcoin or stable coins? That's a good question. We actually just made an investment in a project that's doing – it's an agent sort of stable coin infrastructure for AI agents. We haven't officially announced yet, but I guess I can talk a little bit. And the idea is sort of – a lot of things with AI, right, is there's the technical side, but there's also the legal side.

Like, how do you deal with KIC AML and liability and all those kind – you know, there's a lot of questions that come up if you have an AI going out and doing stuff and spending money. And so that actually turns out to be a really interesting area of innovation. and the person we just invested in is sort of a, you know, a veteran of that world of sort of the regulatory money world. Yeah, to your point, I mean, if you're trans, you know, one of the knocks on Bitcoin is a payment system, right, is the volatility.

You don't want to, you know, have something that changes value a lot when you're paying for something. But if it's a machine and a machine, presumably they can do that in milliseconds or microseconds and volatility becomes a mood issue. there's a there's a guy David Marcus who was the he ran the Lieber project at Facebook and spun out and we funded his startup it's called Light Spark it's doing exactly what you're describing which is sort of a payment system built on top of Bitcoin and his argument is Bitcoin's

preferable because it's because it's not the dollar that a lot of countries will want some it's sort of the only crypto asset that is credibly globally neutral that that no country sort of a U.S. thing or some other country thing and therefore should be kind of the currency of the internet, right? And I guess an interesting argument. I wonder sometimes if the AIs won't create their own crypto tokens and say, well, basically the senior age from Bitcoin has gone to early humans. You know, we can design one better because they're already smart, but they're going to be really smart. And we'll have to learn how to trade their stuff.

People have done experiments like that. But yeah, like once they have sort of emergent capabilities, I guess it all depends on, on, you know, what we allow them to do and what systems we plug them into. But if there's anything where there's a clear cookbook, right? And you can do it digitally online. No one built crypto for the AIs, but if you had wanted to build a money for the AIs,

I'm not sure you could have done much better than crypto. I think that's right. How will AI change how the web is organized? Will it just be totally different in five years? That's a great question. I, you know, a couple of things I'll say on that. And all of this, obviously, in the context of, you know, like our firm does a lot of AI investment. I'm very, I think it's generally a great thing.

The technology is amazing and impressive. And every day you see new amazing things. And, you know, there's these debates around whether it's going to slow down. My guess is it's not going to slow down. Just there's so many smart people and so much money and so many different ways in which it can improve, you know, it was pre-training. And now it looks like it's reasoning. And so, you know, it's like, they'll probably come up with some other method in a year that that does that.

And, you know, we haven't even begun to scratch a surface around, like, you know, humanoid robots and haven't gone deep on video and other forms of media and modalities. I think one thing I think a lot about, though, is the sort of economics of the Internet. And specifically, I have a chapter in the book on this. I think of the Internet as having kind of an implicit covenant right now between. So you have these five to. 10 companies, Facebook, Google, you know, Amazon, et cetera, who control most, it's like 90% plus of the traffic and the money. And just to take Google as an example, there's sort of

then there's the rest of the internet, the sort of long tail of the internet. There's, you know, my blog, your blog, a cooking site, a travel site, whatever it might be. For 25 years or so, there's been this implicit covenant between the kind of distribution centers like Google and the kind content providers like us, right? And that covenant is, hey, you let us sort of fair use, you let us take a snippet of your content, you know, index it, put it in our search results and, you know, and we'll sort of, or let us let people share it on my social network or whatever it might be. But the, you know, and the trade is we'll put a link there and you'll get some traffic back. And then you can have ads or subscriptions or make it free or whatever you choose

to do, right? So that's been kind of the equilibrium state that evolved, you know, it wasn't like if people sat down and decided that, but it evolved into that. And it's worked reasonably well. I think, you know, it's worked more to the favor of the distribution side to the Google's the world. And you see that in like, you know, Rupert Murdoch box sued Google over at a bunch of, I think Facebook just removed news in Canada because they're upset about it. So it's not that happy, but it's not that happy, but it's not that happened. What happens in a world where you just get the answer and there's no need for a link, right? Which is kind of the world we're in now. I don't know. But I'm using, I'm probably using, you know, Claude and chat GPT and all these things more than I'm using Google. And I read fewer books also. It's not just media sites. Why read a book when you can ask for a 10-page printed report on the history of Edward III? Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, books are a whole other thing, but just the rest of the Internet. Like, if I'm not going to click through, like, why am I going to click through?

I mean, look at Stack Overflow. I actually used to be on the board of Stack Overfell that got acquired, and I love the service. So Stack Overflow is a programmer Q&A site, right? And the traffic is down, I think, I don't know, 80% now. Because of these new, what it basically happened is the AIs went out trained on Stack Overflow on GitHub and then created these amazing services like Copilot and Cursor, right, which are, by the way, amazing. I actually, I use these on the weekends and stuff. I use Cursor. It's an unbelievable product. You can type a English sentence and get code out of it. But it obviates the need to go to these websites, right? And the traffic is down. And my concern is Stack Overflow is the canary in the coal mine, right? This is the first thing to go. Of course. But what if, you know, what are we, in five years, are we ending up with just sort of the rest of the internet atrophying? And we have five to ten services. And, you know, look, and this is all, it will all, like, I love the AI stuff.

It's better. I use it. But I worry that we're going to sort of look around in five years and realize we just recreated, you know, a, you know, sort of a structure that looks like, you know, broadcast TV in the 1970s. you have four channels, right? And sort of the beauty of the web, the serendipity, the diversity, you know, the ability for somebody to just spin up a blog and, you know, this is like how a lot of my career got started. I think you did, you know, you've been blogging for, what, 20 years or something every day. Like, is that, you know, is that kind of the ability to do that going to be lost because

there's now no way to sort of get discovered anymore because links aren't really needed, right? So, I mean, on the one hand, look, it's great for people. I'm not, you know, I'm by no means anti-AI or technology, but I do think we need to think about, and I'm a little bit surprised more people aren't thinking about, you know, what kind of internet do we want? And are we creating the right incentive systems to maintain that? And like what, and by the way, more broadly, like, look at these, just today, the new chat GPT, was a 4-0 image thing came out, which looks amazing. It's gorgeous, yes. And there's going to be, I'm sure, more great stuff like that. Like, what are we, you know, I mean, look, it's all again, it's great,

But, like, what's our plan for graphic designers? Maybe it'll be emergent and new jobs will pop up. And what's our plan? You know, in two years, we're going to have the ability to make a Hollywood movie, one person. You know, what's our plan for all of these other, you know, jobs, parts of the Internet, parts of the – you mentioned books. Like, look, I agree with you, too. It's easier to get that thing on Henry III.

In the other hand, do you want to, you know, do we want a shrinking book industry? I think it's already kind of shrinking too much, in my opinion, the book industry. and do we want that to go further? I don't know. Let's say a media company calls you in, somewhere like Atlantic, the economist, New Yorker. I'm sure you know these products, of course. And they say, well, this is happening.

We'd like some commercial advice from someone who knows the sector. I mean, what would you tell them to do? Yeah, I mean, it's hard because I think it's a systems problem. It's a tech problem and a systems problem. I'm not sure that a single node in the system like the Atlantic has a lot to do. I think that, you know, so I mean, it's, I mean, so it's really a structure.

Yeah, it's a, I mean, look, I think there's a, I mean, look, I think there's a lot of. But does personality-driven content survive? Like, is that the innovation rather than so-called facts? Well, okay, look, one very common pattern with technology is death of the middle barbelling, right? And so just to give you, give you, maybe you probably know this, but to give your listeners context, what that means is, you know, you have, so the internet pops up. And before the internet, you had a lot of middle. mid-sized retailers like J.C. Penny and Sears and other sort of, you know, those kinds of things. Internet pops up and what happens is you get this barbelling effect where you either want to be really, really big like Amazon and Walmart and take advantage of scale, or you want to be

a boutique, high touch, high brand value, Gucci, you know, Hermes, and so forth. And in fact, the two, right, the two sort of biggest winners of this era from a stock perspective, were Amazon and LVMH, which is a private equity style roll-up of those high-end brands, right? And who lost? It was the people in the middle, right? It was Kmart, Sears, all those sort of companies that went bankrupt. Why does that happen? Because technology tends to unbundle, like, because basically they were, Kmart and Sears were

kind of this artificial bundle in a sense of distribution merchandising. You know, you could bring this stuff to them, but not all the way to them, the way Amazon does, and you had a little bit of service, and you had sort of all this stuff in the middle, right? And once you had this new tech, you could kind of unbundle this and you can go all scale or all high touch, right? I think the same thing has happened in media. We've had a barbelling effect. And the winners have been either like 30 second dopamine hits of TikTok and Instagram reels or three-hour, you know, podcasts, right? Or high-end, you know, severance and high-end long-form content, right?

And what suffered generally has been the 30-minute sitcom, the middle, right? the 30-minute, you know, game show, right? So it's either, and that matches human needs, right? Like you're in line for to buy something and you want a couple dopamine hits and you watch TikTok, and then you want to lean back and get something and you want a three-hour. I think that's a lot of people how popular three-hour podcasts are like Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman, right? And it's because that sort of that's the other kind of need. And this turned out these 30-minute things were just there kind of artificially because of the constraints of the medium of TV and things. So I think to your question, like I haven't, I don't have like deep thoughts on this,

But I think that my default answer for media would be you're going to have a barbelling effect. You're going to have highly automated, scaled out, AI-driven content. And so somebody comes up with a new Star Wars thing and you have a whole Reddit community and they're all like building these AI-created, you know, serial movies and things, right? And then my expectation is you'll have, on the flip side, you'll have rising demand for very kind of bespoke human things. That could be, you know, live, like we've seen this, like live concerts have become more popular in an age of machine creative music, you know, fine art, like...

The sphere, right? ...thefted books, you know, like, I don't know, like, right? I mean, you know, people say this all the time, that chess is now more popular than ever, even though AI is, you know, better than humans in chess. Like, there is, in the end, we're monkeys who like other monkeys and, like, you know, like, there is this sort of fundamental human nature that doesn't change. machines can do very powerful things and can be useful. But I think, you know, that would be my naive default assumption is that, is that,

I think, look, I think the other really interesting thing with media that I think about. So when film came along, like the first cameras in photography, you know, there was this, these famous essays like, what was it, art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin. And, like, there was all this kind of discussion of like, what is the future of art now that we can take a picture, like, What's the role of the artist, the representational artists? And, of course, you know, the rise of photography coincided with art becoming abstract and, you know, all those sort of modern art movements. And so in some sense, the camera did replace the representational art. But another thing happened, right, which is a new medium was formed, which is a, you take a photo and you take a series of photos and you make a film, right?

And so you had two things happen when the camera developed, right? You had the old medium get sort of replaced and, of course, high art and then sort of pivoted into abstract art. But then you had a brand new medium that simply couldn't exist before, right? And that was film and a whole industry created around it. So, like, one thing I like to think about is when I think about media is, you know, so maybe AI will be like the camera and it will replace it. It'll replace illustration, the role of the illustrator. will go away and AI will replace it. But on the flip side, maybe we'll enable a new sort of AI-native form of media

that couldn't have existed before. What will AI competition for A16Z look like? You have an AI competitor. What are they like? Well, it's funny. It's a good point. I mean, look, I think, well, what is venture capital, right? Venture capital, I mean, that goes to your question.

Like, there's different sort of a venture capital today is a bundle of services. It's obviously the sort of choose. Well, we raise money, and then we go sort of there's some picking aspect of like choosing what to invest in. And I think in that picking aspect, I think AI could do a very, very good job and probably beat humans in a lot of ways in the near future. There's another aspect, and this is, I think, one of the smart things about what, you know, the founders of the firm Ben and Mark did is there's a very human aspect to what we do, right? There's a high touch human aspect. So a lot of what we do is, and a lot of how we think we succeed is we create a, we create a, culture in a group of people where

entrepreneurs decide they want to work with us. Again, we provide all these Serbia and we spend a lot of our fees that we make instead of on our own salaries on a set of people that help them, right? But can't AIs do that? They're great therapists, right? Yeah, they can, but at some point you always need, like, you're always going to need

somebody to design or at least for some foreseeable future, you're presumably going to need someone to help you build and design the robots and think of us as playing the role of advisors to the people that are building the robots. and hopefully there will be some rule for that, at least for some period of time. If an AI applied for funding, let's say it was legal in terms of the bank transfers.

I mean, would you consider the proposal? I think right now they're limited and they just can't do stuff. Like they can't open a bank account. They can't send money. But yeah, I think it's super interesting. Well, they'll do it with crypto, right? And maybe this isn't two years from now. You'll get a proposal from an AI and you'll get the AI, quote unquote, on the phone,

the Zoom call. I don't even know how you would do it. Maybe you just refer it to your AI. Yeah, we've been actually talking about it semi-seriously. Like, I mean, we haven't done anything yet. I also had this, like Mark and Dries and I were talking about, you know, should there be like a nonprofit that, you know, that's built on a blockchain that, you know, sort of like what, were you involved with the Fast Grants thing? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So like I thought that was really interesting and inspired by that. But imagine Fast Grants, but it's a blockchain version that you use. his AI to give out the grants as an example. Like, that's actually something that we were just, I mean, it was just like a brainstorm. I'm not like a serious idea, but, but that type of thing, right? Like, you could call it faster grants, right?

Yeah. No, I thought what you did was really inspiring. And like, you know, I had this, I had this whole, I actually wrote out a business plan. I haven't done it. But, and it was like you, you have a Dow. So this is like an entity on a blockchain, sort of an autonomous entity on a blockchain. And it's sort of like, think of it like, I'm an endowment does. So if you go to like Yale or Ford Foundation,

Endowments. Like, first time I learned this was when I raised venture capital. I walk in there on Ford Foundation, aren't they this organization that gives away money? Well, they have this other side, right, which invest money. So endowments are sort of two things, right? There's invest the money and give away the money. And they're very different. And like invests the money, they wear suits and give away the money they don't. And it's just like two different organizations. And so the idea was, could we create a blockchain autonomous AI entity that is like an endowment? And so half of it is like investing. And you're investing in tokens and this and that. And the other half is giving the money away a lot of fast grants, right?

So that's actually an idea. I think it's pretty cool, and if someone did it, I'd be excited to help out. I haven't gotten around to it. But I do think that might be like a future thing. And so, and the idea, right, what's cool about an endowment is if it invests well,

it can kind of just snowball and just get, have more and more money, and then you use the kind of some portion of the returns every year to give that out. And hopefully it just becomes this kind of self-sustaining thing the way that the, like, university endowments have. If I ask you, how will AI change politics? What's the most confident prediction you have?

Well, that's a good question. Well, you know, generally, I'd love to ask your question on this. Like, I'd say, well, a couple of things. Like, one, I think there's going to be a lot of political drama around AI in the next couple of years, first of all. And this is not AI changing politics. This is politics potentially changing AI. Maybe it's a little bit of a different question. Like, I think that you're going to be issues around copyright, safety.

I believe these are not going to be settled in the court. They will be settled in Congress. Like they are too important. I just sort of went through this with crypto. Like we just had four years of kind of regulatory struggles in the courts. And now it's going to probably be decided in Congress. And I think ultimately the same thing will happen in AI because it's just too important. So I just think that that's one topic.

I guess I would say another thing is I would say is I wonder. One thing I think about is how many problems in the world are intelligence problems versus political or coordination or regulatory problems? All right. So, like, you know, building housing is a hot topic right now. Is, does more intelligence help us build better housing? Probably the opposite, because the smarter people lobby harder to stop it. So I would argue, right, housing is more of a regulatory or you could argue a collective action problem. Probably a collect, I would say collective action? Sure, yeah.

I think it's a collective action problem, right? And, you know, does AI help with that? Maybe, you know, I don't know. I think AI can do a lot of really, really interesting things. I do think a lot of the most challenging things we have in the world right now and a lot of the kind of gating factors to productivity, growth, economic growth, are actually in just human well-being, I believe, are kind of collective action problems, coordination problems,

getting people to agree on something. Anyway, I could look at the Internet, how did the Internet change politics? The Internet changed politics by changing the way information flows. right? And I think we're only beginning to see the effects of that. You know, I think, I think one way to think about the internet is social, you know, like there's always, technologies always has sort of first order and second order effects, right? So like the first order effect of the automobile was you can get from point A to point B faster. The second order effect was suburbs, trucking, highway system, you know, sort of all the next 50 years, right? The first order was like go somewhere faster.

That's 1900 to 1930 or something. And then I don't know when it was. And then like the next era was like all of the sort of second order things, right? So I think about the internet, the first order thing with social media, I can tell people I had a burrito for lunch or something like this. The second order is you suddenly have a whole different political dynamic, right? You can have an insurgent political movement like Trump or Bernie Sanders or something that comes, you know, that sort of bucks the system and counters the establishment.

you can have a whole narrative universe that counters, you know, you have COVID and you have the establishment's world and then you have the podcasting version of it. And it, you know, it restructured how information flows and people obviously will debate whether that's a good or bad thing. But it's clearly had that. And I think we're in the very beginning of that of how my view is like we're probably, you know, really the social media didn't become a mainstream thing until smartphones probably. I mean, mainstream is in a sense of like three billion people, probably until 2012 or something. So we're still, you know, relatively. early in that development. Now, AI, I think a big question, like, for example, maybe, you know,

it's very possible in five years that people get all their news and political information from an AI. You know, who created that AI? Was it created by, you know, someone with a political agenda? Is it open source? Like, I think, I think AI, open source AI, if I, you know, if I can pick one issue that will make the AI future better, my own, my own belief is that we have very strong open source AI so that we can have it can be you know people can have a choice it can be audited it can be open um our kids will be top AI the news will be formed by AI so to your question on politics I mean politics is downstream of culture and information flows and AI will reshape that and and who controls that reshaping to me seems like the key question as you know

not many countries have serious AI companies, and even those in Europe may or may not last, right? They're not obviously mega-profitable. So let's say you're the government of Peru, and you can turn over your education system to some foreign, maybe American AIs. You can turn over how your treasury is managed to the AIs. You can turn over your national defense to the AIs,

and none of these are Peruvian companies, most likely. In the final analysis, are we even left with the government? of Peru, or is it in some sense been pseudo-privatized to the companies that are running the structures and, indeed, to the AI itself? Well, this goes to open source, right? I think it's, I think you're the answer your question. But even open source is managed by someone, right?

Like, a version of Deep Seek is embedded in perplexity. That's worked great. It's still someone's company. Yeah. I mean, I guess I do think it's, I think you have a great question. I do think it's different if they can get the open weights of Deep Seek and the Peruvian people and government can, you know, fine-tune or change those weights and decide on, I do think that matters. So just, you know, I'm not trying to dodge your question, but I do think that architecture

that really matters, right? Are you getting, do you have, maybe they, maybe not every country has the ability to do that. But maybe without open source, we only have two countries left in the world, U.S. and China. It's possible. Look, I think, if you want an argument for open source. Economic planning seems like an obvious thing that you would, that you would involve AI in. And, you know, right? I mean, that just seems like a first, one of the first things you'd want to do in government eventually is have AI do,

you know, set your interest rates and your, to the extent your central planned economy, decide on your, you know, production schedules and pricing and such. And that, you know, if you bought an AI, an economic planning AI module off the shelf, presumably it would be pretty opinionated on how to do that. And the person who creates those opinions would have immense influence. So, yeah, again, though, I think those countries will insist. I think that one of the reasons that open source will eventually be a dominant, one of the two dominant model, it will be competitive with proprietary AI is partly because of the questions like this.

I think these governments and a lot of companies will demand open source. But even then, it seems there's room for intermediaries. So if you just passed Deep Seek or Lama over to a relatively poor government, And, you know, again, take the case of Peru, they need a McKinsey-like entity, which is maybe the AI company itself to come in, tell them how to use it, how to integrate it with their systems. Does this mean American soft power has just won? Like, it's either America or China? These are hard questions. Look, I think there's a – I think there's –

It might be a good thing, too. You know, if everything in Peru is run by American AI company. the quality of life will be much higher, I think. They may not like it. I do think, you know, I think Peter Thiel said crypto is, what do you say? Crypto is libertarian and AI is, you know, socialist or common. I mean, I think what he meant was. I don't think either of those is right.

No, I think the twist I would put on it is tends to be centralizing. It tends to be consolidating power, I do think. And I think you're making that point, which is the people that produce these things, if they're very powerful things that manage much of the world, being one of the countries and companies that produces them seems to give you immense power. And I think that's what makes the China move into deep-seek and thing very interesting. Right.

I mean, well, I mean, there's a number of interesting things about that. Like, one is the fact that they are so competitive so quickly and with a relatively small team and all the other things. I mean, I guess we shouldn't be surprised. There's a lot of brilliant people there. But the second. one is a strategy. It seems like, you know, sort of taking this, this kind of counter strategy of doing open source and we'll see if that lasts. But, you know, and like when we haven't seen

yet, I would expect India is going to have some interesting stuff, you know, Russia. I mean, there's a lot of smart people in the world. And the fact that DeepSeek was, what is it, like 150 people. I mean, it may be, look, it may also be, there's another, I think there's another thing which we may be trending towards, which is, AI is incredibly important, but it's also, just kind of a commodity foundation models you know it doesn't mean there won't be businesses there'll be businesses at the I think that I think

actually the emerging consensus sort of in the least the people I talk to is that the value you know you're going to have cloud providers like AWS and such and you're going to have you know of course like end user applications like

you know cursor and whatever some lawyer will have their law firm thing and you know every sort of vertical will have their have their product. But it may just be the foundation models end up being like, you know, pie torch or whatever, like, you know, math libraries. It's essentially it's large-scale statistics. It requires heavy engineering, of course, to do the training.

But the sort of tricks and secrets end up propagating and a bunch of people know them. And, you know, it sort of becomes kind of very large-scale statistical analysis of data source sets, right? And just a lot of people have it. it may be. What do you, if that comes about, what do you think is then the dimension that determines which companies dominate?

So one argument could be, well, META and Elon, they just have a lot of resources. They can be in this for a long time. Another argument is, well, Open AI has the most powerful brand name with chat GPT and so on. But what's your commercial intuition

on what other factor steps into play? One framing I would say is, so if you compare the Internet to mobile, Right, both were smartphones, right? So the rise of the Internet in the 90s, the rise of smartphones in late 2010s, early 2000s, both were massively important tech movements. A big difference was with the Internet, I would say, you know, something like 90% of the net new value, sort of market cap value, went to startups, went to new organizations that didn't exist before the Internet, Amazon, Google, and such, right? With mobile, on the flip side, 90%, something like 90%, I haven't done the exact study, went to incumbents, right? The biggest sort of pure mobile startup was, it's probably Uber, I think it's like 100, whatever it is, $150 billion.

There was Snapchat, you know, Instagram got bought for a billion, but the vast majority of market cap kind of value actually went to incumbents. If you look over what it did for, you know, Apple, Google, Facebook, and all the other Amazon, they all did fine in that era. They created mobile apps. They leaned into it. And their user base went from whatever desktop was at the time, you know, home desktop, let's call it 400 million to 4 billion. So 10x, and if you look at the stock, by the way, the best, it's very hard, almost no venture firms over the 2010s beat the strategy of buying Apple stock.

Or the Boston Celtics. So, like, that turned out to be the winner of the mobile era with the incumbents. And so I think one way to frame your question is, will AI be, like mobile or like the internet? Will it be a technology? And so and like the concern would be the concern quote unquote, I work in venture capital. I'm biased. The concern, we've invested in small companies. The concern would be it's more like mobile and that it just ends up reinforcing the strengths of the big companies. Google and Microsoft and Facebook, they have more data. They have more money for the training. They have the infrastructure. They have the distribution. Right.

They, you know, how is somebody going to create a competitor to Facebook? They'll just make, you know, Lama's already great and they'll pump it through all their channels. And so we'll Google and they have more data and so forth. So that would be the sort of the, I don't know, the degenerate outcome from the venture capitalist perspective is like, look, it could be great for the world, though. You know, it could be, I think it's, I think it's the consumer, a lot of this will be consumer benefit, consumer surplus, I think, and that's good. And I'm happy about that. And if, you know, and we'll always find things to, you know, there'll always be some vertical thing or some other thing for VCs to invest in.

So I think that might actually be a really good societal outcome. Do NFTs have a future? I think of the, so let me say with an NFT, so one of the things a blockchain allows you to do is to create digital assets, right? This is sort of one of the unique things that you can create a, you know,

Bitcoin is a digital asset that exists on a blockchain. And those digital assets can be either fungible or non-fundurable. Fungible means, you know, interchangeable, it's like a currency, any Bitcoin can be exchanged for another. Non-fungible means it's a distinct asset. And so do, you know, do blockchains have a future? Of course, I believe yes.

And then on those blockchains, will you have some assets that are fungible and some that are not? I think definitely. When people think NFTs, they think, you know, people buying JPEGs. That may or may not come back. The idea that people will have, you know, digital assets that, for example, could represent a movie ticket an NFT. It can represent a physical

people are doing a lot of people doing this now where they represent like a pair of tennis shoes or a piece of fine art or some other housing deed or some other if we have a future which I hope for and I'm pushing for of you know people transacting with digital assets on

blockchains I think very much that some of those will be non-fungible and I think some of them will be also purely digital like we're seeing a bunch of these people doing like make video games and you have a sword or a gun you can buy and it's an nfti and you can resell it and do other things and so as the digital world becomes more and more important you have you know you'll have virtual worlds you'll have metaverses you'll have

these kind of worlds like roblox and and many more variations of things like that you will have i think digital assets in those worlds and some of those and i think a better you can have those either locked inside of the game owned by the game maker or you can have them on a blockchain where the user can move them around and control them, I think that's a better architecture. So the answer is yes, but in the true sense of NFT, not in the kind of caricatured sense that people think about associating with the kind of 2021 bull market. Won't NFTs become the property rights system for the AIs? I think that's, I think that's a very good outcome. I think it's the right way to do. It's basically what the reason my book's called read right own is

It's a read, sort of read and write is a common phrase referring to the first two errors of the Internet. And my argument is that if this era, if blockchains are successful, this era will be about ownership, digital ownership. And so blockchains enable digital ownership. And that ownership can be something digital, something that's digital to represent something non-digital, like a, I mean, non-digital, like I was going to say, stable coin, whatever, like something in a bank, something off blockchains like in a bank, maybe something in the purely digital world. I think it's the right way to represent digital ownership. One way to think about the Internet today is it's sort of this world in which, you know, it's sort of like imagine the offline world where you could never own something. And every time you go to a new venue, you have to change clothes and use all their stuff and you can't take it anywhere else. It's this weird structure on the Internet now.

You go to Twitter and you gain followers and yet they own your followers and you can't take them with you and you go to play a game and everything's stuck inside that game. And the idea is sort of one of the ideas in the blockchain world is we can we can shift that power back and the user can actually. sort of have this persistent inventory of things that they own and control. That's what a crypto wallet is. And you can take that to different services. And you unbundle the ownership of the data from the providing, from the provision of the service. What's your favorite book in philosophy? I've actually been getting back into philosophy lately.

I did it philosophy years ago in grad school. Favorite book, man. Do you read, do you into philosophy? Of course. Yeah. Plato's dialogues, quine word and object, perfect reasons in persons. Nosick. Those are what come to my mind right away. Yeah, so I did analytic. I did analytic philosophy. I actually was in a grad school program

and dropped out. I did analytic philosophy. So actually, Aquine was one of my favorites, and word and object and, like, two dogmas of empiricism and all those kinds of things. I like Donald Davidson. Nozik, I loved, Anarchy State and Utopia. Reading that with Rawls is a great pairing. You know, I used to love Wittgenstein, so, you know, both early and later. Yeah, yeah. I was into logic, so like Frege. Russell. But now, this is a grad school. Now I'm actually, I'm trying to finally understand continental philosophy. I never understood it. And I've actually spent the last three months,

sort of in a philosophy phase. I've been watching a lot of videos. I highly recommend. You know, Brian McGee? I made. Sure, yes. I watched all of his videos. This guy, Michael Segru, was a Princeton professor, great videos in continental philosophy. I've been reading, that's tant pretentious. Like, I'm not saying I understand this, or I'm an expert on it, but I'm struggling and reading it. I'm trying to read Being in Time right now of Heidegger. Um, and so I, I, I, um, I'd say when I did analytic, I mean, probably like Wittgenstein, I would like Kripke, Paul Kripke, um, I liked his books a lot. Nelson Goodman was one of my favorites. Um, uh, it's like fact fiction and forecast. Funny enough, I just bought

it again, fact fiction and forecast. Um, um, Kripke, there's a, uh, naming necessities is kind of legendary book on reference and language. I've never been persuaded by that one. It always felt like slight a fan to me. He's very, very smart. smart. He might be the sharpest philosopher, but I like the book on Wittgenstein better. He basically invented Modic. I don't know if you know that story. He was like in high school. He was 15 years old, I've heard, yes. So he's like a true prodigy. But, well, naming a necessity, I mean, like a lot of philosophy, you have to take it in the context. Like naming a necessity, I think of it as a response. Gosh, I'm forgetting all the whole history of it. But it was kind of a,

as I recall it was a response to the descriptive theory of reference like Russell you know so you would have um anyways and so it's kind of like you have to read I think you have to take these things in a pairing um I was just actually last night I was with a group of people and I got a lecture on philosophy and and it was great because he went through it was hume Kant um hegel Nietz and like I don't want to go too much into law but I but like I've always struggled with Kant And then he went into Hegel and explained the sort of the Hegel kind of struggled with Kant in the same way that I did and then improved on it. And so for me, these are always, and I'm not trying to go into the details of this is too much. But the point is, for me, a lot of it has to be taken in like as a dialogue between thinkers over multiple periods.

And so are you getting anything out of Heidegger? Because I sometimes say I've looked at every page of that book, but I'm not sure I've read it. Um, it's a good question. And I have a friend who's really into it and we spent, we've spent time together and he's trying to teach me. Yeah, I guess, um, how would, I would also, if you want, I'll send you some videos. That'd be great. I think are really good. So that they've helped me a lot.

I get it. Like, I've always got it from like an intellectual history point of view. Like if you want to follow kind of the history of postmodernism, so like there's like Heidegger and then Derrida and just sort of, you know, What's going on in the academy today with, you know, relativism and, you know, discourse and hermeneutics and just like, you know, I think it's modern political implications to, that were really probably kicked off by Nietzsche and then Heidegger, right? And so I've always sort of understood in that sense. I think what I struggle with, and I understand him as a theory of psychology, I think, of like, describing the experience of the design and being in the world. and, like, to me, it's an interesting theory of psychology. Sort of how do I experience, like, you're thrown into the world.

You don't know that this whole idea is very appealing to me. And then just that whole kind of story he tells. You're thrown into the world, ready at hand versus present at hand. I think this idea of like knowing how versus knowing that sort of different kinds of knowledge is a very interesting idea. Do you watch John Vervakey? No. I highly recommend he's got his 50-part video, 55-0. You'd like him.

He's a philosopher cognitive science, a really smart guy, and he's got a 50-part video on the, it's called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I've watched like 30 of them or something. And the idea is sort of, you know, that in the modern world, we sort of lost religion and lost philosophy, and now people are seeking meaning in their lives, and they're finding it through drugs and I don't know what video games and whatever, and that we should go back and look at all the great thinkers and see how do we find. meaning and sort of is this mission of it. But he's very sophisticated on the philosophy stuff. And he goes through the 50 parts as like Aristotle, Plato, you know, Buddha, Jesus. Like it's just like literally every great thinker. And how do they think about how you find meaning in life?

Very, very interesting. And why was I saying this? I lost my, oh. And so a big part of his thinking is sort of there's many different ways of knowing. And one of the things that we've done in the modern world is we've forgotten that there's more than just propositional knowledge more than just knowing that there's knowing how right there's no and like religious traditions are very good at knowing at at embracing multiple kinds of knowledge that's why you don't just have right like this is the mistake that the reddeter makes about analyzing

christianity look at it as a set of propositions when in fact it's a way of lots a form of life it's about a community a community co-development and meaning rituals and like you know so i i think the heidegger stuff very interesting on those topics of like different kinds of knowledge and I guess I just am very interested in like in you know we we all you and I am sure have this sort of default naturalistic physicalist scientific worldview and I'm interested in sophisticated thinkers who have a different worldview and trying to understand it and I think I think about John von Neumann had this great phrase he's like you don't someone asked him about set theory he said you never understand set theory you just get used to it and I think that's true of a lot of these other alternative philosophies. is like, it's not like there's going to be, like, one argument you're going to read it, Pidegger, and you're going to be like, oh, my God, my worldview changed. Like, you just kind of have to submerge yourself in it, and that's what I'm trying to do of like a year. You just kind of keep seeing it from different angles, and then hopefully you eventually get kind of a gestalt switch,

and you start to see the world maybe through a different lens. And if you had to say, not what you like in philosophy as philosophy, but what in philosophy has stuck with you when you make venture capital decisions, what would you cite? Well, I think the, like, I do think the mode of, I think it just, one thing I like about philosophy is like the move, just like literally the moves they make. It's almost like a chess game, right? Like, like, they're just very, like, nuanced argument style.

You know, like, I, like, I only reason hesitated. I don't know how much you want me to go down this path. No, B, B's nerdy as you are. Okay, well, like, um, okay, so like, uh, Kant's, you're familiar with the cons the synthetic a priori? Sure, yeah. Right, okay, so like,

like this is just a really interesting, so like, so like, so Hume comes along, so actually it's really locked, but then Hume comes along and says, okay, like, let's analyze how we get knowledge. And he says, there's really just two ways you get knowledge. You get knowledge through what he called relations of ideas or matters of facts.

So sort of, you know, math, right? It's just like you can kind of, you could sit in a room and think about the numbers and decode, or all bachelors are unmarried is the famous example. like it's embedded inside of the words that to be a bachelor is to be unmarried. That's relations of ideas. And then there's empirical matters of fact, right? And that's things we go out and and see in the world. And so Hume asked this, you know, the famous skeptical question. Okay, well, if that's the case, where does something like induction fit in, right? Where does causality fit in? Where does time and space fit in? Because they're neither, you know, purely true based on the relations of ideas. And it would be circular if we learned induction. through induction, right? Like, how do we know that, you know, the sun will rise tomorrow? Well, it's always risen in the past. Well, how do we know that futures will be like future paths and

kind of goes through the whole skeptical argument, right? And then Kant comes along and says, okay, that's right. But what that means is there are other preconditions for knowledge, which is a really interesting move because what he's saying is, I mean, this is what a transcendental argument is, right? Is you're not kind of going from premises to conclusion. You're going from premises to preconditions of those premises, right? So I'm just giving you an example, like that move, that kind of plasticity of thought, like that is just a very, like, I almost, when I first saw that, I was like, can you do that? Like, you can go and like, so he says, look, you can't fit, I'm not sure you can do it, to be clear.

Oh, no, I don't either. But he's like, you can't fit causality, this cons favorite, I think, but then induction, a whole bunch of things that we just, that are our modes of intuition, you can't fit them into Hume's two buckets. And so then he argues, of course, you know, 300 pages and very nuanced, that therefore there must be another bucket, right? There must be this other precondition of thought, the modes of intuition. And then he derives this whole kind of beautiful system outside of, out from that. And then, you know, Hegel comes along and changes that changes some of the precondition. So I think just the, I just feel like I learned when I did at least in grad school, just like this kind of, just this, just freedom and I guess, I use

plasticity. I don't know, just like the kind of the, like you kind of learned how to do these moves and meta moves like intellectually that I find really interesting and it just forces you to really think like you can just sit there I just spent like an hour just sitting there and trying to understand these ideas and I sometimes I feel like I don't and it and it just really forces kind of intellectual honesty on you um I don't know I so it's almost like meta like I honestly I've read philosophy for years and I don't know if I've ever actually gotten any conclusions out of it because I think there's just like you can sort of see both so both sides and you can I feel like I can argue both sides.

I feel like that about a lot of things in, like, politics, too, and things. I feel like I can argue, I can give a pretty good argument for a bunch of different things. And, you know, I don't know. I think you get better at analyzing and understanding all the things. And that philosophy helps you with that. I don't know if you actually get answers. Before we say goodbye, I'd like to recommend Chris's book again. Read, write, own, building the next era of the Internet.

Chris Dixon, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. That was a lot of fun. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoy the episode, let us know by leaving a review at rate thispodcast.com slash A16Z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time.