YouSaid · the spoken record

Eddie

lines on the record: 42
first: 2025-09-27
most recent: 2025-09-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Go back to something you said about the group chat I've slightly mourned the death of the group chat As a person who looks back fondly on those years and the friends we made, I mean, The group chat era, it is definitely a good thing that the group chats are no longer siloed, are no longer necessary. I do think a lot of the real interesting conversations have moved to X, and that is a good thing. But there's also something about, I don't know, there was something special about that moment that I think all of us will always miss.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I think most people don't talk about when they talk about sort of these media properties and sort of the growth of them.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you have a business that's actually forced to rethink its views based on competitive dynamics and where the market wants it to go, if one of the richest people in the world buys it and infuses it with cash and doesn't have a strong opinion of where it's going, you could make the argument that part of the reason why the Washington Post, you know, why it took so long for it to sort of, I would argue now normalizing, right? Like normalizing to where its readership was when I was there, which is still left of center, but not nearly what it was. Democracy dies in darkness. There's an argument that the actual infusion of cash was actually the thing that radicalized.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like it changed in the opposite direction of where people would have thought, right? But it's like if you have a struggling, like part of the reason I left the Washington Post was because it was about to go into bankruptcy.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can also make the argument as a former posty that Jeff Bezos taking over the Washington Post and infusing it with limitless capital actually did change the Washington Post.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is my argument too why more people should post because it becomes a personal thing if it's like your idea and then a nuns are engaging with you, right? Like it's like it becomes resonates more where you're like, oh, I hadn't really thought about how that would be insulting to this group or I hadn't really thought about how half the country would perceive this thing that I thought was innocuous. So like there is something there too where it's like you learn a ton, you get the feedback loop if you're posting. Whereas if you're just looking at other people's, which is also fun, you're lurking, but it doesn't resonate the same way with your kind of core and kind of allow it to.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the other thing that I often tell people because they're like, people will say horrible things back to you after you post. Does it bother you? And I'm like, no, it's actually great because it gives you a theory of mind for people you otherwise would not have a theory of mind for. And I think there's something about sort of the pseudo-anonymous accounts on X. But actually do a really good job of giving you a full picture.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From this cohort that remembers, but like also is very fluent. Like I'd say, like, we have the first poster in chief and the vice president, right? So it's like there's something about X that maybe captures a generation that's like really good at amalgamating across different platforms, right? Like you spend a lot of time on Discord. Like, you know, there are a lot of people who also spend time on Facebook and Insta who are on X, right? So they're able to like, so there's something about it being like a truly not like just the Global Town Square, but like it's a translation layer.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is something about, I think it also could be generational, and I haven't really thought through this fully, but I said something on X like a couple weeks ago that resonated with people, which was that I feel like there's this elder millennial cohort that is really, really good at translating across the entire living existence of humanity right now, right? Like we remember what the world was like before the internet, you know, and that's like 1980s and 1986. Like we have deep memories of landlines, of like car phones, right? Like we remember the 80s, but we also remember the 90s, right? Like there's something about like we remember the shifts, but we're also like, we're not digital natives, but we grew up with the internet. And so we understand the pace of change. And there's something about, like, I look at like, you know, AOC is kind of part of, maybe she's a little on the cusp with this cohort, but like JD Vance is on this cohort. You know, a lot of sort of our political leadership, I think, is going to come.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The worlds they live in, that the information gets to them late. There's an information lapse, you really want to know what's going on on anything, whether it's a tragic event or even the election, right? Like I think, you know, I talked to a lot of people about the election 2024. And I said, like, you know, the meme X is not real life. Like, no, no, X was the only place. If you were spending time on X. Yeah. Exactly what was going to happen”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally different world. Like what she was saying from her takes on things on Instagram last week was. Wildly different than what I had seen on X, right? And I think there's something about, I actually think X is sort of a unifying platform from all of the different pockets that you talked about because if you're a power user of X, a lot of the early data that was coming out on anything, I mean, not just Charlie Kirk's assassination, but on anything, things get to X early. People really do the investigative work early. Last week I was saying, you know, it probably, like, I don't know if the FBI or if intelligence agencies actually have people. I mean, there's that whole meme of like the, you know, the show that was just taken off the air because maybe for a variety of reasons, but that whole meme of like people looking at the internet and saying like is what's going on here? What are these kids talking about, right? But like there is probably some truth to the fact that it's so siloed from what like just real world law enforcement or real world government officials like”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that you brought this up, Eddie, because I had a conversation with my best friend, Normie, throwing that out. I am a creature of the internet, clearly, but I was having a conversation with her at one point last week. And I explicitly remember saying to her, your insta is not my ex.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think there is, I would hope there's large scale agreement that people need help. That if you see someone in your life who is having a baby help them, they need help, no matter who it comes from or what form. It is definitely not something to be done alone in a vacuum, whether it's friends, whether it's family or kind of any form.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Yeah. And especially if you don't have it, you're like, how do two people do this? It's like, well, it used to be a tribe. And then like only until the nuclear family post-war did we really move to suburbs and separate sort of multi-generational family units from each other where then you have one mother doing this all alone, which of course was the big complaint was loneliness in the 50s and 60s of these housewives, right? Like even though they didn't work, it was just extreme loneliness that had never really existed because you were constantly surrounded by siblings, family multi-generations and that sort of thing. So there is something about that aspect too where if you're in a city it's almost impossible to have that experience of having a multi-generational family.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You might get to go to brunch. And like that might be an enjoyable thing you do every Saturday. So that is definitely, I think, a huge part of it. The other thing that I'll point out, like my experience of, I'm fortunate enough to have my mother live with us, but she has been a godsend in holding these babies as they cry for those of us who are working. And that sort of thing. And it's like there used to be sort of a familiar unit that took care. I mean, like it's very, it's only been like the last, you know, like the nuclear.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's one of the I always point to the rise of cheap airfare and sort of international travel also becoming sort of like a widespread middle class phenomena, right? Like it's not like you have to be, you know, like when we were growing up, if you knew someone who went to Europe, you were like, seriously, like how did you do that, right? Know if you're fortunate enough to go to university, like you can travel abroad anywhere, right? Like universities like, you know, make that a possibility where it's like life has become so much more interesting, as you said, opportunity costs across a wide degree of sets, where you are having to think through, okay, like you might have the most interesting life. You might get to go to brunch, right? I don't get to go to brunch anymore.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eddie, I want to hear how fatherhood has been. I always feel like the first few months of becoming a new mom or dad, you have like all these like weird insights that are partially driven by sleep deprivation and then partially driven by this new important experience that have in your life. So I'd love to hear the high-level takeaways as they're fresh.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm so that there's choice, right? Like it's good that there's a lot of choice now so the parents can know their kid can be like, oh, like clearly my kid's going to thrive in a individualized, personalized environment. Or actually, I have this kid who like is, you know, the ham of the group and like loves being in school and like put them in school. It'll be great.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, it is important to learn how to work in big systems. Like, it is important to kind of realize that, like, not everyone's going to entertain your weird rabbit hole. And so there is something about getting that lesson early and having that sort of, I'm bored, I hate school, I'm going to figure out how to make it interesting for me that could be very valuable for kids as well. So I'm always like on the fence. Like I feel like you can kind of dabble in different things and like, you know, on the weekends, teach one thing during the week, teach another. And the outcomes are probably going to be the same no matter what.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the other thing that's really interesting is I'm very sympathetic to the homeschooling movement. I'm not a homeschooler for obvious reasons. But you can like do a lot of the homeschool stuff on the weekend. And one of the things that I've become much more sympathetic to now that I have, you know, kids who are exhibiting their own passions and sort of own personalities, like there is probably something good about being a slightly weird kid in a school. You know, like I remember that experience of being like kind of bored or slightly weird and being in a normal school around normal people. And that was like a very good thing. Like I look back on it, I'm like, that was probably very good for me. And it's probably very good for like, you know, there's one school of thought, which is you have a bright kid or a weird kid or someone who's really interested in something and you put them in alpha school and like let them go down the rabbit hole, which again, I think that's awesome. But then there's the other thing like boredom's actually good. Like a lot of our life is pretty boring.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You help them learn about that in a way that parents before, like unless you knew a lot about subject tanks or had a friend in that business, how are you going to educate your kid on how that works?”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what's interesting about our children versus how we grew up is that arbitrary depth couldn't be nurtured when we were kids around random things, right? Like you would have to go to the public library and see if there's a book on septic tank installation, which my son was into about six months ago, like deeply into septic tanks. Now he's into garbage disposals. There is no book in the public library on garbage disposals and how they work. Absolutely not. Of course not. But there are hundreds of YouTube videos, right? Like on how to install your own garbage disposal, how does it work? Like like diagrams, like all the things that he's interested in as a kid who's obsessed with garbage disposals. So in some ways, it's like our kids play comes before they go to school and their play is so hyper specialized and their entertainment is so hyper specialized. And if you're like a very hands-on parent and your kid's like, I want to learn about septic tanks.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About, you know, if you look at Purdue Pharma, if you look at ADHD and you look at sort of our generation's experience with the medical community, You know, it's like it is this consistent experience of all the incentives of large systems that go beyond individuals are pushing you to one thing. And years later, you might find out, as Eric has found out, you didn't need riddle in.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what that means is that those parents and teachers are incentivized for a number of different reasons, especially if you're like, wow, like my kid's about to take the ACT and I want them to have an extra hour so that they can perform higher than the other 25% of children who have this diagnosis. So there's the systematic reasons why people are actually asking for the diagnosis. And what I've joked with both of you all is it takes like a very disagreeable, sadly principled mother to be like, no, like I'm not getting my hyper energetic boy a diagnosis for life and I'm definitely like not going to put him on drugs because I realized the incentive system that's set up and it's funny like again like a couple years ago if you talked about this you were an absolute quack and then this piece comes out in the New York Times you know in April and it's like oh yeah actually the medical community kind of agrees that like this ADHD like adderall pill mill thing might be a huge problem and so I think there's some”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reason parents want them is because it gives you extra time, it gives you extra resources. You can then opt your kid out of certain things in school, it makes school more manageable for high energy boys. The reasons the school wants it is because they get more dollars from the state if they have special needs students across a variety of different special needs. Everyone knows this, that the schools will tell you this, right? So it's like it is.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's one in four boys in America. There's something wrong with them, right? And you can say, okay, there's clearly something wrong with all these boys. Or you can say, okay, we're medicating boyhood. But what is it about why? Like, why is it incentivized that doctors give them this diagnosis? And why is it, why is it something that I think teachers in some ways, I don't want to say encourage, but it is sort of this strange thing where if you have a child who is very energetic in a pre-K, they sort of say, well, you know, next time at their four-year-old checkup, maybe talk to them about some of these behavioral things, right? And like now my son is like an angel. He's like grown up like a little bit. And they're like, oh, he's doing grade school, right? But for like a year, we were like, oh, clearly, clearly it's just a high energy boy. And the incentive systems around a lot of these things are like if you go to the doctor, parents, one want these ADHD, you know, want these diagnosed.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if I don't get the energy out, like a dog before they go to school, like something will happen in school and it will be, oh, and I can already kind of see, and I don't blame, again, I don't blame teachers for this. I don't blame doctors. These are more like systematic issues. Like if you have an energetic boy, it's mostly boys, right? Like I think that the New York Times expose that came out a couple months ago basically said that 17% or no 23% of all 17 year old boys have been given an ADHD diagnosis.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I want to get to the ADHD. I actually think let's move to ADHD because I think that one, one I'm more familiar with it. I'm not going to say personally, but like more familiar with the data, right? I have sons, so I'm preparing myself for the inevitable ADHD diagnosis. And that's like even a weird thing to say, right? I have, you know, a four and a half year old and a two and a half year old. And just looking at their energy levels, I always joke like I have to run them before they go to school.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and it's so funny. I was having this exact conversation with my phlebotomist at Lab Core. I'm like, how often do you see people come in and talk to you about what they've uploaded to ChatGPT? He's like all the time. He's like, this is like one of the number one use cases, right? He's like a normal. He was like, yeah, like no one just goes to the doctor. No one just comes here and then gives their results to the doctor and has them read them out. Like everyone is putting them into chat GPT. Everyone is having some sort of additional analysis and it's been like it's been eye-opening for people. In some ways, I feel like we should feel really good that like America is adopting, you know, like adopting, like questioning, wanting more information. Like this is a good thing. In some ways, I feel like, you know, when people were always occupied by MD, it was like, yeah, maybe that was like 1.0, but like here we are now and people really want more information.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where they were preparing class action lawsuits against Purdue Pharma before 2013 when FDA. It's so part of our DNA now that you can't call it quackery. You kind of have to call it like wisdom of crowds. And I have a lot of doctor friends. I have a lot of people I, you know, grew up with who are in the medical community. And the way that these doctors practice medicine now is they realize that you're not just practicing it in the doctor's office. Like you're competing with all of these different information sources, all of these different backgrounds. People are a lot more open with their questions. I'm having my third child. I joke. It's my chat GPT baby because I upload every single medical diagnostic, every blood report, everything to chat GPT. And it gives me a ton of data that the doctors don't have time to give me. I share it with my doctors. They think it's cool. It's like, we're just in this totally different generation where people are a lot more open-minded and they expect things to swing faster than the Purdue Pharma case, which was a 20-year.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that I've been reflecting on a lot, and again, I know we're going to talk about Eddie has a new arrival to his family. I'm going to have my third child. Just here in a few months. But there's something about the way that this generation understands medicine that I actually think comes from like the internet is your doctor now, right? Like, and maybe 10 years ago, there was a lot of fear around that. There was a lot of, oh, you can't trust the internet. You can't trust information sources that are not reviewed by government and aren't passed down by experts. And I think we're just living in this completely different reality where the people who are having children now who are sort of entering their 30s, their 40s, and really vocal around a lot of these topics grew up in an age of just completely distributed information, particularly around things like medicine. And they follow the wisdom of crowds. They've been pitched. I just posted about sort of the history of OxyContin, right? Where it's like there was a whole decade.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As is the startup, the startup is an American concept. Founder is an American concept, right? Like, why do we call them founders? Like, you know, we don't use the French term. We don't use entrepreneur. It is a very American thing what we do. We're not what I do, but what the people we support do.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But like I believe in federalism, that's why I live in Florida, like, I believe in the federalist experiment, right? I think that's something that's like under discussed about what makes America extraordinary and unique. And sort of where is decentralization most prominent in the tech community? It is in the crypto world, right? Like that's where you actually use words and it's very much aligned to, I would say, a strain of political philosophy that really focuses on sort of the federalist experiment as the unique part of America, not necessarily the other parts that people always point to. It's like makes America great. So in some ways, I think like there's a ton of alignment between how the people view why it's so necessary to build for America in a startup versus why it's anyone could go into government. They could go into other means to serve their country. But I think there's a lot of philosophical alignment from like why you need American dynamism companies and why.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's probably where there's the most alignment, right? Like you could come to different results. Like, I always say, Balaji and I have a ton in common. We come to completely different ends on where we end up in many cases. We have a ton in common on what we agree is the problem, right? And so I think in some ways there's like a unifying sort of philosophical connection between the people who operate in these ecosystems. And then the other thing that I always point out that's an anecdote too is like the first time that the sovereign individual and sort of like the canonical books that like, you know, led to people really investigating is this a category, all of those people that introduced those books to me like 10 years ago when I first moved to the valley, those people are like all American dynamism hardware, early SpaceX investors, early Palantir, right? Like they, these, these people have a lot in common philosophically. And, you know, when you look at sort of the even just the way I describe myself, like as an American dynamist, like.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The things that I've anecdotally seen the connection on, and again, I'm not a crypto person, I consider myself kind of a normie, the things that I've picked up on over 10 years of investing is really like philosophical alignment between the types of founders who start crypto companies and the types of founders who start American dynamism companies. So much so that some founders that we have backed, I will not out them without their permission, but some founders that we have backed that are now leading unicorn companies and American dynamism were toying with the idea, do I want to start something in crypto or do I want to start something in American dynamism? And people would say like that's crazy, right? Like one's like hardware, one's, you know, like these are completely different things, but from a philosophical level, the conversations we were having about what does America need, like what are the biggest problems for our generation? Like these people are very aligned at what the problems are.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In various categories, and you can bring some of those learnings from consumer land into defense land, and it will be incredibly impactful. And clearly that's what the Ukrainians do.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I have a great story, a very timely story about this. We were just in Washington, D.C. with Mark and a center who I won't name was in the meeting and was talking about what could be very valuable for the defense world. And he was talking about basically in Ukraine just how this just-in-time manufacturing then feeds into building things in the trenches very quickly and basically doing this iteration live with people who are then using the products, changing the products every few days. And his sort of question was, why can't we do this inside the defense industrial base? And Mark actually responded to him and he said, well, we do this with toys. This is how we build hardware toys. Of course we can do this with hardware in America because this is how any type of toy is built, any type of hardware is built. Like you iterate very rapidly and you can iterate in a field. It's only in defense where we don't do this, right? Because there's infrastructure that makes it impossible for us to do this. But it is very possible and we do it in consumer land. And so I thought that was like a very interesting thing. You could kind of see the light bulbs going off like, oh, American dynamism actually does exist.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't even think Palmer would have said that about himself, right? So there's something about the hero's journey and the building journey that is very universal, that brings all of these categories together where tech should be aligned on these things and shouldn't necessarily have infighting or think of these categories as very different. And I know Eddie, we're going to get into like where are the sort of unique kind of, I don't know, philosophical overlaps between American dynamism and crypto, which I actually, there are many kind of similar personality profiles of the founders that are attracted to these categories. But I think if people question how can you do it all or what is the unifying force between all of these categories, go back and read Mark's techno-optimist manifesto, right? Because that to be exemplifies how all of these things are really on the same hero's journey.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eric, I've been begging you and telling you we have to have the techno-optimus manifesto on the front page of our website, right? Because to me, that is the coherent thesis of what all building is. It's the thesis of every founder's journey, right? Like the founder's journey is pretty universal across every sector. It's sort of a universal story arc in terms of what they experience, even if they're building in different realms. I think the sort of Adams and bits sort of playful battles between our founders is actually more of, it's sort of like a humorous thing versus one that's really grounded in philosophy because at the same time everyone's going through the same thing of building and no one can predict like you could have you can be directionally correct on where you believe the future is headed but no one can make predictions that no one would have ever looked at Palmer in his motor home living outside his parents house when he was trying to build Oculus and say he's going to remake American defense”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because Andrew would not have happened if not for Oculus. Oculus would not have happened if not for Palmer's obsession with gaming, right? Like there's so much continuity in the world of tech that I sometimes think people silo things almost because we silo things, right? Like we're in very different worlds. We have very different types of expertise in terms of what we're looking for as investors. But sort of the continuity of what is building and what is technology, it spans all sorts of realms and frankly it spans every industry. It spans every realm of human life that to say, oh, well, games have nothing in common or crypto has nothing in common or these people have nothing in common.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I always get the question, or someone put on the internet maybe a week ago with American dynamism. And I always answer that question with one word, which is Palmer.”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the New York Times Expos ⁇ that came out a couple months ago basically said 23% of all 70-year-old boys have been given an ADHD diagnosis. You can say, okay, we're medicating boyhood, but why is it incentivized that doctors give them this diagnosis?”
2025-09-27 · a16z Podcast · The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source