a16z Podcast - How Marc Andreessen Actually Uses AI

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

Half a billion people can access the world’s best AI on their phone. So why are most using it to write emails while only some are using it to build empires?In this conversation with Mark Halperin from Next Up, Marc Andreessen reveals why small bakeries are beating Fortune 500 companies at AI adoption, how to turn ChatGPT into your personal board of directors, and why Silicon Valley just reversed five years of geographic dispersion overnight. He also shares the questions that unlock AI's real power—including one of his favorite prompts: "What questions should I be asking?" Resources:Follow Mark Halperin on X: https://x.com/MarkHalperinFollow Marc Andreessen on X: https://x.com/pmarca Stay Updated:If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zListen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYXListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711Follow 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 http://a16z.com/disclosures. Stay Updated:Find a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Podcast on SpotifyListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is already probably the most democratic, you know, small D technology of all time in the sense of the very best AI in the world is fully available on the apps that anybody can download. This is just a completely different kind of computer that has these characteristics that are frankly more like a person, which is it's right most of the time. It occasionally gets things wrong. When it gets things wrong, he's able to self-critique. And you have to kind of work with it the way that you work with a person. You want to take advantage of the fact that it's creative and then you want to be tolerant to the fact that it's not always correct. AI basically has snapped everything right back into the 20-month-square radius around where I sit to just an incredible degree.

So I would say like almost 100% of the actually interesting AI companies in the West are happening at sort of ground zero right here in Silicon Valley. There's a bakery owner somewhere using the same AI as Google CEO, and according to Mark Andreessen, the bakery owner is winning. The man who invented the modern web browser and built multi-billion-dollar companies just revealed something remarkable. AI is spreading backwards to society. Individuals first, small businesses second, Fortune 500 companies third, government lasts.

The exact opposite of how computers evolve from mainframes to smartphones. Mark says half a billion people already have the world's most sophisticated AI on their phones, so the question is, why are most using it to write emails while only some are using it to build empires? Today, we're sharing a conversation Mark Andreessen had with Mark Halperin on his show Next Up. They talk about a specific prompts that transform AI into a world-class advisor, why Silicon Valley just snapped back into a 20-mile radius after five years of dispersion and the uncomfortable truth about America's AI race with China.

We hope you enjoy. All right, next up, Mark Andreessen, innovator, creator, and damn successful businessman. Early on, he invented the Mosaic Internet browser, co-founded Netscape. And since then, he has been the animating force and investor behind a lot of very successful companies, including some at the multiple billion dollar level,

co-founded his firm, Andresen Horowitz, a general partner there, and they do a lot of stuff about a lot, a lot, a lot of stuff, and he knows a lot about a lot. Mark, welcome. Thank you, Mark. It's great to be here. Really happy to have you. So much about AI, I want to talk to you about,

so we're going to spend a lot of the time on that. First off, it's like it's tempting to say right now, and when I think about AI, I think about where are we now and where are we going? It's tempting to say it's between like really smart, highly educated people who are adapting to it and then people who just don't have the capacity to do that in their jobs easily. But what I'm finding is at people who do what I do, people are well-educated, very privileged, there's a have-nots there. I'm a baby using it.

I'm not using it very sophisticatedly very often, but I am Einstein compared to some of my counterparts. And I'm wondering, is that how you see it? And what do you think differentiates those who understand how powerful it is even now versus those who seem oblivious to it? Yeah, so I think there's kind of a fake story. And then there's a real story. So the fake story is kind of the classic, you know,

kind of the classic marks this story, which is, you know, only the rich people have it. Only the fancy people have it. You know, the big tech companies have it. Everybody else is kind of going to be left out in the cold. That's not actually what's happening. And there's a lot of data on this now that have been released by these companies to justify what I'm about to say. So the real story is this is already probably the most democratic, you know, small D technology of all time in the sense of the very best air in the world is fully available on the apps that anybody can download.

And, you know, take your pick, Chatsy, P.T, Claude, Gemini, Grock, you know, Mistrol, any of these. by the way deep seat for China you download any of these apps you're getting state of the art like the full most sophisticated powerful AI capability in the world and you know the number of people already

who downloaded these apps is north of a half billion on its way to a billion and individual people are figuring out you know basically how to appropriate this in their lives and what you see in the data is there's you know maybe what you'd expect which is there are a slice of people who just use these new systems all the time

like literally all day for everything and you know in a lot of cases they're reporting that they're getting enormous benefits from that. And then there's a lot of people who are experimenting and trying to figure it out. And then there are people who are just, you know, not, you know, for whatever reason, not interested or not engaged. But I would say it's incredible out of the gate, how distributed this technology already is. And then I could just say, like, I don't have that, you know, with all my resources and with all my connections, I don't have access to better AI than the one that you just download off the app store. And so I think this

is actually like just an incredible story of the most advanced technology in the world being available to everybody right out of the gate. You got to get people to use it to take advantage of it, right? So I've got a friend who's drafted a book and took it to his agent. And the agent said, it's 140,000 words. You've got to cut it down to 70,000. And I said, if you try to do that by hand, even if you hire someone, it's going to take you months. I can do it in an hour.

And I can say to AI, don't change the style, don't change the tone, don't cut anything that, you know, ruins the story. And he said, that's immoral. the publisher will be mad that I did it that way it's not right how should I answer that person yeah so the exact same arguments

emerged years ago with the introduction of computers right I actually just I've been watching a lot of old science fiction movies with my kid and you know there's this famous science fiction movie Tron from 1982

you know that have the first computer graphics movies and it was disqualified for an Oscar for special effects because it used computers right and so there's this kind of long tradition of like whatever the new tool is and it's sort of illegitimate and there must be something wrong with it. In this particular case, I mean,

there's no doubt there are people who feel the way that your friends feels. That issue was actually litigated in the last Hollywood strikes in the sort of, you know, on the movie, on the film and TV side of the creative profession. Yeah. The last round of strikes actually began, it's actually funny. He started streaming strikes and then AI hit, and then it began AI strikes. But the settlement with the studios actually with the unions was that the following, which is, if you're a writer and you use a

AI, that's totally fine. What's not allowed is for the studio to basically use the AI and then claim it was a writer. But basically what the unions and studios in Hollywood decided was, it's another tool. It's like the word processor. It's like the personal computer. It's like, you know, it's like using a printer instead of writing out a manuscript by hand. And so I think there are people who feel like your friend does, but I think the world is already adapting very fast to using it. And frankly, one of those reasons you probably point out to your friend is like, I don't even know that anybody could tell anymore, right? And so, you know, if you're going to have a moral prohibition on something that people can just do and nobody knows about, like is that, you know,

is that really going to work? And so I think those certain self-imposed barriers are probably going to collapse quite quickly. I hope so. Fortune put out a list of the top American companies using AI, Alphabet Visa J.P. Morgan Chase, top three. We talked about just now on an individual level. If you were the CEO of a company or advising a CEO, how important is it to be on that list? In other words, how important is it to get to your company to adapt, whether it's for internal or consumer facing? How important is it right now? Yeah, so this goes back to actually where we started, which is, and in fairness, the old model of adapting actually computers and computers came out. The old model was the largest institutions get technology first and then everybody else

gets it later. And so, you know, the way the computer rolled out was the government actually got mainframe computers first, starting the 1940s, and then big companies got computers in the mainframes in the 1950s, 1960s. Small companies started to get computers, we're called mini computers at the time in the 1970s. And then we as individuals only got, you know, PCs in the 1980s. And so it took 40 years for basically technology to cascade down from the largest organizations in the world to small businesses and to the individual. This technology, AI, is going the opposite, which is like I said, the most sophisticated capabilities are available on the consumer app today. And then what we're finding is consumers are adapting the fastest, just individuals in their lives.

The small businesses are then adopting right after that because, you know, a small business typically is just, you know, a person who's, you know, making decisions for their own business. Very, very easy to do new things. Then companies are then following small companies. And so, you know, the companies on that list, you know, obviously some of them are doing the rest of your things. But in general, big companies right now are pretty tight up in knots internally. kind of in all their processes and in all their legacy systems and all their, you know, organization and training and, but their unions and like all the other issues they have to deal with, you know, they're actually relatively slow to adopt compared to individuals and

small businesses. And then government is the late adopter, right? And so governments, of course, are already trying to figure out, you know, kind of how to adapt this technology, but they're not adopting it very fast because they can't because of all their rules and systems and bureaucracy. And so there's been a real inversion of how to algae moves through society that's really become, you know, AI is becoming a case study for. And so the answer to your question is, I think big company CEOs, and, you know, many of them are, are doing this. But I think they really have to force the issue on this inside their, their companies because, you know, these big companies are just such now giant bureaucracies with so many rules that, like,

by default, they'll smother new ideas. And so it's a real active leadership to, you know, to get in a list like that and be able to, you know, actually say kind of with pride, like we're on the leading edge. So if your friend owned a bakery, and he said, Mark, I want you to come in and help me figure out how to use AI. Well, how could someone owns a single sorefront bakery use it now? Yeah, I mean, so there's, I mean, there's dozens of ways. You know, it obviously depends on what your business goals are. They're baker dozens of ways.

They're going to exactly. And so, yeah, I mean, look, the first thing you can do is just say, look, you know, review, you know, do a performance review for me. Like, just feed in, you know, here's my staffing schedule. You know, what do you think of it? Give me a critique of it. you know, here's the last, you know, 100 emails we've got with the customers. One of the, one of the patterns of that.

You know, here's the copy for the ad that we're going to place to the local newspaper, you know, put up on Facebook or whatever. Like, you know, what do you think of this? You know, let it do a performance assessment. A lot of people find it very effective for personal coaching. And so, you know, the owner might use it that way or might, you know, ask the employees to use it that way. And then I think where the power really kicks in is, okay, you're a, you know,

your small business owner, you've got one bakery. Now you want to have two bakeries, right? And you want to have a brand. and then maybe if that works, you're going to have five, and then 50, and then 500, and then you're going to have, you know, packaged power spending the supermarkets and so forth. And then there you basically turn the AI into a thought partner, right? And you basically say, okay, what, you know, what are the best ways to expand from a single, you know, to multiple and, you know, turn this into a larger business?

And, you know, the AI, you know, it's been, you know, because it's been trained on, you know, some large percentage of the total amount of human knowledge, like it has within and all the information on how, you know, Ray Crock turned McDonald's from, you know, a single restaurant and McDonald's and how all these other, you know, you know, entrepreneurs who actually did this. And so it can, you know, explain with you and help you, you know, figure out how to do this for your own business. And then, you know, the thing that you get into is you use it is basically,

it's just like, wow, it's like having the world's best coach, mentor, therapist, right, advisor, you know, board member. But it's like infinitely patient. And so it's like, it's happy to have the conversation. It's happy to have the conversation 50 times. It's happy if you admit your insecurities and it'll coach you through them. You know, it's happy if you run wild speculations that don't make any sense. It's happy to do all that for in the more.

morning. And so the people who are using it a lot are finding it's, you know, it actually turns to be very supportive in their general real lives. Could you say, here's the recipe for our best selling sim and rules? How could I make it better? Would that? Yeah, 100%. Yeah, you can say, you can say, and by the way, part of the art of AI, right, is not what questions to ask it, right? Because, you know, it turns out, you know, it can answer, you know, many, many different questions. So you have to, you have to actually create it at this. Yeah. And so you can say, like, here's my current recipe, you know, how am I improve it? You can also say, you know, what's the best cinnamon roll recipe in the world, wordbackers from that. And then you could also say,

look, I want to make the best fun of the world, but I need to do it at a tenth of price. You know, what are the ways to cost? I optimize. Right. So the other thing you can ask it is you can ask it, what question should I be asking? Right. And so you can plug in. I run a bakery, dot, dot, dot. What question should I be asking? And you'll find it, it's actually a thought partner in helping you figure out what questions to ask. Right. Brilliant. So the other day I said, I want to know every Republican who voted against any of the articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton. Give me the list of every Republican.

And it came back and it listed some Democrats and mixed in there. And it said they were Democrats. And I said, back, I only want Republicans. And it said, oh, sorry, I inadvertently included Democrats. Now, I could understand a human being, a junior researcher doing that. But how could AI make a mistake, have it pointed out to it and say, oh, yeah. How could that be in the model? Yeah, so, you know, this gets technical, and I'd be delighted to get deeply into the technical details.

I'll try to resist. It's a new kind of computer, and the way to think about it is computers up until now have been, what you might call it, like, hyper-literal, right, where computers up until now, like, they do math really fast, but, like, they do the same thing every single time. they exhibit no creativity whatsoever. And if you expect them to exhibit creativity, like, you know, they just can't do it. And then if they make a mistake, it's because the human programmer made a mistake. And that has made computers, you know, super useful for running, like, you know,

large math exercises or, you know, doing a lot of things that computers do. But, of course, computers have never been creative, right? Computers never been able to write you poetry. Or work with you on your cinnamon bun recipe. Like, it's just never even been a thing that we can think about. So it's never had kind of that human element of creativity to it. This is just a completely different kind of computer

that has these characteristics that are frankly more like a person, which is it's right most of the time. It occasionally gets things wrong. When it gets things wrong, it's able to self-prudique. And you have to kind of work with it the way that you work with a person. And so you have to basically figure out as you use it. Like you want to take advantage of the fact that it's creative and then you want to be tolerant to the fact that it's not always correct,

just like you're working with a person. Now, having said that, when it makes easily avoidable mistakes where it's just like makes boneheaded fact mistakes, you know, we call those hallucinations. the latest systems are much, much, much better at not doing that. They're much more accurate. And in particular, for anybody watching this, if you want to kind of see this in action,

I'll just give an example. If you buy the full version of chat GPT, there's a model called GPT Pro, GPD5 Pro, which is the latest one. And then there's something called Deep Research, which is a switch that you turn on. And if you use GPT5 Pro with deep research, you ask a question like that.

Like at this point, I think it's, I wouldn't say it's bulletproof, but like it's really good as things vastly grounded. literally you can watch it work and it'll literally go out on the internet and it'll like check all the authority sources and it'll you know it'll go on congress dot go whatever and check the voting records and verify that and so i think that problem is being ironed out you know kind of as we speak yeah for people watching listening who haven't used it or not used it much the thing you said about good prompts is so key and that what does differentiate uh that you know the people really getting productive at it from

not and and one of the things that you and i've talked about is it is hilarious It can write, if you give it the right prompts, it can write stuff that is so funny. And where does that come from? How does it have the capacity to understand? Because humor involves metaphors and sophistication and humanity. How can it do that? Yeah, so this gets to this idea of how it's trained.

So basically what these systems are is there basically the accumulation of human knowledge over time. And by the way, most of the training data is just literally the, internet, right? So one of the reasons that this is happening now and not 20 years ago is because the internet finally got big enough, but just the web finally got big enough to have like all this information in it, right? And so if you go out of the internet today, you know, you can find, you know, all kinds of written material online that's, you know, it's, you can find like, you know, classic screenplays from, you know, the gold age of cinema for 100 years ago. You know, you can find, you know, literally, you know, people joking with each other on social

media all day long, you know, you can find, you know, professional comedians doing oral histories of, you know, how they did great comedy. So there's just like there's incredible amounts of information that are online about comedy and about what's funny. And then all of that information is in the training data. So it's all kind of fed into the AI during the training process. And the AI basically processes it through like any other kind of data and comes out the other end and just basically is like,

oh, you know, now that AI is a world class expert in humor, right? And of course, you know, look, you could be an expert in humor and not actually be funny, right? And they're, you know, they're, I don't know, probably professors of comedy or something like that in colleges who are very funny. but like it just it knows so much about what humor is it knows so much about the pattern of jokes it knows so much about what make people laugh it has so many examples you know to be able to learn from and you know the professional comedians will tell you there are patterns to comedy right you know

there are you know I worked in the progressive community once in something and he suddenly you know the key to get you to just like nail the reference you know another comedian I'll say the key is you know timing or pacing or the call back to the previous junk or whatever you know the punchline whatever it is. And so it just, it knows all that. And then it's just, you know, it's now so powerful that it's actually, yeah, I quite honestly, especially at like two of the morning, I find these hysterical. Yeah. All right. Just a minute left before we take a break. What's your advice to an individual who's barely used it or hasn't used it? What's your advice to them to sort of how to get started? Yeah. So, I mean, by far the best way to do it is just

download it and use it. And like I said, you know, there's several good, you know, Elon's got Brock, which is now fantastic. By the way, you know, it's actually interesting how these things are getting built into products now. So, you know, the new versions of X, you know, formerly Twitter, actually, if you go to any post on X, there's a little rock icon that looks like a little black hole icon on the upper corner of the post.

And if you click on it, actually calls up the Brock AI to explain the post to you, right? And so, like, it literally is like, it can explain to you that, you know, if there's some post on politics or something, you don't understand what's happening. You just, you have lost the threat of the topic. you just like balk that button.

And you get in a dialogue with the AI, a little AI window pops up and it explains the post and you can ask it for more details. And so it's like built into that product. Google's actually built AI now into search. And so now when you do searches, it has this thing called AI mode and you balk on it. And in addition to getting the 10 blue links for Google,

you now get into an AI dialogue. And so you just start using those products or you just download one of these apps and start using it. And like I said, a really great question is like, okay, how do I use you? Right. Or you can teach me works really well. You could say, you know, teach me how to use you in the best way, you know, teach, you know, teach, you know, teach me how to use you for my business, you know, for this project.

And it'll, you know, these things love to talk and it'll, it'll happily sit there and chatter away and take you through it. Yeah. Just my sort of analog to the way you just said it is, ask it for what you want as specifically as possible. Don't hold back. Be really specific. And it will do what you ask. All right. More with Mark Andreessen.

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they'll help you make the switch. This could be the most important call you make this year. Dial pound 250 and say chapter Medicare to get peace of mind. Again, that's pound 250 and say chapter Medicare. All right, welcome back. We're here with Mark Andrews and still. Mark, are you of the school that says that we're in an exit the United States is in an existential struggle with China do you subscribe to that point of view I don't say I hope that's not true right you know I hope this is not going to walk all the way to the situation that we ended up in with the Soviet Union you know like most like you know like you know like you I grew up in an era I'm sure you understand see if you remember this like you know I'm growing up thinking

there was a significant chance that like we're all going to die you know from nuclear war and so I hope it doesn't get back to that level of intensity but but I I do think there are a lot of historical parallels to what happened between the U.S. and the U.S.S.S.S.R. in the 20th century, you know, happening right now. And, you know, you have two hegemonic superpowers that both have, you know, visions. You know, they both have visions. You know, they both have visions. You know, they both have visions of how society should be structured and how the sort of global political system should be structured. And, you know, obviously, I think America's is better. you know but they both have visions and you know they're they're both working you know to that end and then they they both have international strength so it's militaryologically economically

culturally and you know there is there is that kind of geopolitical fight happening so so I hope we stay in this kind of I don't know what you call it mode of like co-opposition you know tension without you know without military strife you know I hope we stay

you know in that mode but like it's a sufficiently fraught situation you know, that we certainly need and, you know, and by the way, have a national strategy for how to win that, and we need to make sure that we do. Right. Do they have any one or two advantages over us

in terms of AI? Yeah, they do. So they have all, I'll say they have two advantages. And by the way, I should say, we have many advantages. I'm very bullish on the U.S. And, you know, I think we're a better position.

I would trade places with them, and we could talk about that. But having said that, they do have strengths. And in particular, they have two key strengths. Number one is they do have the advantages of a command economy. And, you know, like, generally speaking, or 100%, like, I'm on the side of, like, you know, free markets and, you know, the decentralization and, you know, having a dynamic

economy and we have advantage, you know, we have much, you know, we have much better entrepreneurial ecosystem and so forth. Having said that, they do have this advantage where, when their government decides that something's a national priority, like, they just do it. And by that, I mean, not only does the government do it, but they just tell the private sector you do the following, right? And so it's sort of, you know, the, you know, this thing the Soviets had where, you know, the entirety of society is able to, you know, go up against single missions.

You know, we're just a lot more fractious than that. And so, you know, we kind of navigate our way through this on our own way, but not, you know, we don't have anywhere new to that level of organization. So that gives them the ability to execute against specific areas of focus in, you know, in arguably a superior way. And then the other, the other advantage that they have is, you know, we, we volunteer, we in the U.S. voluntarily be industrialized, you know, starting, you know, 30 or 40 years ago. And, you know, that industrialization, you know, the,

making of physical things, and particularly the making of machines, you know, has moved substantially to China. And, you know, the way that we think about machines now is that they're basically, you know, they're the hardware version of software, right? They're the embodied version of AI. And so, you know, the car is not just steel and glass anymore. It's a, you know, it's a robot on wheels. You know, the drone isn't just a toy, a toy anymore. It's a, it's a computer, you know, that flies through the air, you know, that navigates itself. You know, robots are coming. You know, we're going to, we're going to live in a world that's just like completely. washed with robots in the decades ahead.

And China's just like, as a consequence in the last 30 years of policy, China is just like way ahead on everything involved in building physical things. And that, and then, you know, then, you know, this administration and others have had visions of how to recapture that, but, you know, we have a long way to go. As the U.S. tries to become more of a

manufacturing country, it would seem to me AI integrated into manufacturing is extremely powerful. Are they ahead of us on that? As you said, our biggest companies here are slow adapters of AI? Are there big manufacturers now using AI more than we are? Yeah, so I think we, so I think unleashed we could do that faster and better.

Like if we could manufacture in the U.S., the way that we used to 30 or 40 years ago, we could definitely do that faster for a variety of reasons, including the, I mean, we have better software engineers. We, you know, we have a more flexible and dynamic economy. You know, we could do that faster. The big issue is just we have chosen to not be a manufacturing economy. Like, we chose to move that, to move that offshore. And, you know, for a very long time, we were very proud that we moved that offshore for a, you know, for a variety of reasons. And so the challenge is not so much that, you know, that we couldn't, in theory, do exactly what you just describe better than they can. It's just like, if you just, if you're not manufacturing things, then you can't do that at all, right?

Which is the situation that we've worked ourselves into. And so, you know, just, you know, their, you know, their car, just to pick one, their car industry is, like, moving, like, incredibly fast at this. You know, we, and look, we have to, you know, we have our superstar companies. you have Tesla, you know, in particular that's world-class of this and, you know, still, you know, better than the Chinese today. But, like, the Chinese are moving really fast. And if you talk to people, we don't have a lot of exposure to Chinese cars in the U.S. because the terrain barriers are so high that they really are not cost-effective to sell here.

But it's like, if you go to the Middle East and talk to just like normal affluent people, you know, they're not driving Chinese cars by choice, you know, not because they can't afford a Mercedes because the Chinese cars are better. And the Chinese cars are, like, full self-driving, electric, autonomous, you know, voice AI, like they're state of the art and exactly what you're talking about. And we have just, we have just, you know, we still have car companies, but ex-Tesla, you know,

mainly what they do is they assemble, you know, third-party, you know, parts that are coming from other places. You know, the Chinese are just doing a much more specific at the best level of unified hardware and AM manufacturing. Yeah, by the way, you see that in drones. Like, virtually the entire global drone industry and virtually the entirety of the drone industry, you know, in terms of people using drones in the U.S.,

like virtually 100% of those drones are made in China. And again, that's not because we couldn't make them, It's because we chose a set of policies that grow that actually off. We better start making it. I want to talk to you about Silicon Valley. As much as it's been covered for the last quarter century, I don't think the coverage is even close to explaining how significant it has been. They're great stories like yours of people who have been so successful.

But the influence over our culture, our government, our economy, and the world is just so massive. If someone like you understands engineering, markets, economics, technology, there was a long period where you had to live in Silicon Valley if you wanted to succeed and have the relationships and the interactions. Is that still the case? Is Silicon Valley still a place you have to physically be if you want to excel, someone with those skills? Yeah, so I should start by saying I'm an import, right? So I'm from out of town. You know, I grew up in the rural Midwest and in Wisconsin, you know, kind of, you know, in the tundra. And so, you know, I, you know, I, I didn't grip here.

I, you know, I didn't get to participate kind of in the heyday of, you know, back when we actually, by the way, it was called Silicon Valley because they originally made chips here, right? Yeah. You know, speaking, manufacturing, they, of course, lock blocks, I stopped doing that. You know, that's down thoroughly illegal in California. And so, you know, I wasn't here for that. I wasn't here for the personal computer. And so I'm an inheritor of, you know, the phenomenon that you're describing that other people built.

What year did you, what year did you show up? Yeah, so I shut up in 1994. And, you know, Silicon Valley is really dated, you know, it sort of based in the early 50s, you know, with Hewlett-Packard in particular, sort of the original company. But the 90s, the 90s is when so much of what we think of now in terms of consumer-facing, social media, internet, right? I mean, that's a pretty big dividing line. So, yeah, you missed the Hewlett-Packard days, but you were there for the phase we're in now, right? Yeah, but I just bring it up because basically the history of Silicon Valley, it's a sequence of waves, right? And so it's part of what makes it special is, you know, this AI is like wave 9 or wave 10 of these like just major, you know,

basic microprocessors and smartphones and, you know, kind of cloud and social and mobile, like all these, you know, kind of, you know, the PC, you know, kinds of all these ways of hit. So, so anyway, my point is like when the Valley are like, we're the inheritor of a tradition and a system of the model that was built by other people. And then to your question on geographic focus, this is very interesting thing playing out right now. So a couple things. So one is like, look, like I said, like the technology that's built in Silicon Valley is diffusing nationally and globally into ordinary people's hands and a far faster rate than in the past. So you don't have to be in Silicon Valley to get access to the best technology. Like you can now get that from everywhere. And that's very important because that didn't used to be the case.

Having said that, if you want to be at the company or start a company that's going to build the leading edge technology itself from scratch, I would say at this point, like maybe you don't need to be in Silicon Valley proper, but like you better strongly consider. If you're not, there's maybe three or four other places in the country, you can give it a shot. But primarily the people that want to do that are coming in Silicon Valley. And the important thing in the last five years that happened, actually, was during COVID, we all thought, actually, that the Silicon Valley geographic concentration was actually unwinding. And we thought that, you know, virtual work and remote work, and, you know, you could be able to start companies everywhere. And you had all these kind of booms happening in places like Miami and also other places with lots of high-type entrepreneurs. And, you know, it felt like the whole thing was, you know, really distributing out. AI basically has snapped everything right back into the 20-mile square radius around where I sit

to just an incredible degree. So I would say like almost 100% of the actually interesting AI companies in the West are happening at sort of ground zero right here in Silicon Valley. And then by the way, and this is good news and bad news, by the way, the other place in the world where these things are happening is basically, you know, the Shanghai, Beijing access of China. Right. You know, these are the two places.

And then you also say a very important thing, which is it's just not happening elsewhere in the world. You know, and there's kind of high-tech clusters in other places. But, you know, if you're a sharp AI person and, you know, I'll just pick on one, London, like, you have already moved to California or you're going to. You know, because they have just, you know, essentially decided to outlaw. The EU has decided to outlaw. And so, you know, people are being driven to the U.S. and to California. I think in a way that's even more concentrated than it was when I first got here. All right. Last question. Name inventions in human history that have more benefited the lives of individuals than the iPhone.

Oh, well, I mean, you know, if you go far enough back, you know, electric lighting was a big deal. You know, steam power was a big deal. You know, obviously, antibiotics are the easy call. I mean, you know, the internet itself, you know, electricity. You know, it's, you know, indoor plumbing, you know, it's hard. to question those and people sometimes say like you know you guys aren't inventing important things like why are you inventing something as important as indoor plumbing and it's like well that was a big one i can see but like you know we did we did solve that problem i would i would if you said if you said give up your iphone or switch to an outhouse i would switch to an outhouse i think you know i think there's a lot too that and i and maybe i serious point underneath that which i was being serious i was being serious no well no but so maybe you say the the the generalization you can make from that is i think people

may be systematically underrated the importance of communication. So being able to be connected with other people and then being able to actually be able to learn things, be able to get access to information. Like those two things, there's something in the culture, I was just say in Silicon Valley culture, there's something where like those are like looked out on as less important.

They actually think to your point, like they're actually incredibly important and they're foundational for everything else that people do. I mean, you know, human connection and human learning is, you know, both of those are at the center of everything that we do. And so, yeah, I would make that same trade. Here's my idea for a reality. you put someone like us in Cleveland for a week

without their smartphone and give them a series of tasks which they would otherwise conduct with their smartphone. Good luck. By the way, I had relatives in the 70s who still had outhouses, right? Yeah, it's fine. Passes 100%.

Well, it's fine. In Iowa in January, you start to reconsider whether that's fun in the middle of the night when it's 40 below. But the past was not that long ago. And, you know, yeah, that's all right. Mark Andrewies and very grateful to you. Scratch the surface, I had a list of about 15,000 questions that AI winnowed down to me to 1500, but we didn't get to them all. Very grateful to you, though, for making time.

And again, so just not many people on the planet who understand this stuff as well as you do. So grateful to you for sharing. And hopefully we inspired a few people to learn how to use the latest technology. Thank you. Good. Fantastic. Thank you, Mark. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast.

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