YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Green

lines on the record: 34
first: 2025-12-01
most recent: 2025-12-01
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

“But actually, why don't we just is there anything that we haven't talked about that you want to get in, like a little soliloquy that you can...”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like there is just like it's magic. Yeah. If you show somebody a magic trick or you get somebody addicted and you'll guess which one I'm referring to for which, but if you ever watch Seinfeld, there's this great episode where Jerry buys his father a sharp wizard, which was like an early palm pilot. It was like this early smart computer like in the 1990s never went on to great things, but it did everything. It was like, you know, you could run these applications. And Jerry's trying to explain it to his dad. And he's like, well, I don't get it. What does it do? It's like, well, like, look here, it has a tip calculator. It's like, oh my God, a tip calculator. And then he explains it to all of his friends. It's like, look at this. My son, he's a comedian. He's doing great. He got me a tip calculator. And Jerry's like, no, it does other things. And it often ends up being frustrating for the company that does the other things because they aspire to have this like more broad horizontal platform. But what we kind of need is more of these tip calculator things. I know we're...”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do that? And that needs, like, this is kind of, I think once you have more of these articulations of what can be done and like the things that have really kind of gone hyper growth, it's like, oh, like I have AI, it does everything. Oh, I will help you code a lot better.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not just like self driving, like, I need somebody who actually is collecting the trash. Like, that's what waste management does for $150,000 a year. I can't find them. So it is kind of interesting how things have flipped. But I guess the other thing that I would say is I would almost argue that a lot of AI's problem right now in terms of diffusing into the workplace, it's almost a product. Right? Where it's like, okay, AI can do anything But I'm not looking for anything. Like I say, like, hey, I could do anything. And you're like, oh, I don't need you. It's like, no, I could do this one thing very, very, oh”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, a lot of this actually predates AI. There's this great article or interview with the CEO of Waste Management. Before ChatGPT came out. And he was saying, I have unlimited, like I get resumes every day from somebody who has an MBA and wants to work in our office for, and they're like negotiating against themselves. The price keeps going down there. So hundred jobs for 100 applications for every opening, or I forgot what he said. I'm going to hire truck drivers.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It might not, like, this does not mean that what happened to Detroit, right? It's like that actually wasn't about automation. That was about the Japanese built better cars. There are a lot of reasons why that happened. But what do you do with somebody who had a very, very high paying job, but actually didn't have that many skills? And now they lost that job, because they don't have any skills. They can't find another job. Whereas, if you are highly skilled, you will find something else to do.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're a human. You have a pulse. You need someone with a pick. Go do this or just see that line over there. Like, yeah, like straighten it out. But what's different is that, yes, it's scary for some people, but like everything right now, and maybe robots will work better in the future, but like everything right now is bit manipulation going after or augmenting. I would argue more augmenting white-collar hypereducated people by virtue of the fact that they're hypereducated.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so he actually had a different framing on it. So, yes, agreed. But almost tautologically, hypereducated people are hypereducated. Sure. So should be able to rejigger themselves and do something else versus in all of these previous revolutions where it's like you have somebody that really has no skills. And just like showed up at work with no skills and got paid And there are a lot of jobs that look like that when there's tremendous labor shortages. So if you were doing anything in 1849, apparently, in California, like boom, right? It's like there's just like, oh.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's interesting. I talked to this economist, Ed Glazier. I think he's at Harvard, and he was saying, I asked him this question. It's like, you know, what's going to happen with jobs and how do you compare this to everything else? He's like, well, what's really interesting is that this is arguably the first time That the job losses might be borne by like white collars super educated. That's why everybody gets scared.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody knows the answer to this, but given that you're in charge of a company that's measuring AI productivity and human productivity and kind of AI and humans working together, I mean, what's your timetable for how fast things change? Are we going to see net new jobs create? And by the way, behind every one of these, there are all sorts of jobs that start becoming around that didn't exist before. So maybe that's kind of part two of the question. Because like the job that we have right now, like, you know, filming a podcast, like that wasn't a job like 200 years. Like there's so many jobs that just like nobody could even think of. So I guess like where do you think things are going and like what types of maybe to put a nuance on it? Like what types of like future jobs do you see in and around this like new stuff?”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So maybe we could talk. I mean, this is a little bit philosophical, but future of work, because to a certain extent, like, all right, you're the measurement, like the measurement inevitably will become a little bit more of a target. And I always like to kind of remind people that I think it was 97, 98% of Americans, when the Constitution was ratified were farmers. And they all lost their jobs due to these pesky things. Like the tractor and fertilizer and all these things. And I think the average life expectancy was like 35. And most children died in childbirth or shortly thereafter. It's like, you know, things have changed, but this is what technology brings you.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, it's really good. And the worst thing that can happen this is like the inverse of everything that we just talked about. The worst thing that can happen is that guy keeps it a secret. Because he might be afraid. It's like, oh, am I allowed to use this? But what you should do, this is how AI will go from underhyped to correctly hyped and correctly diffused is it's like there's somebody at every big company who has figured out this like I could do something in one minute that used to take eight hours, we need to like make this person a hero, like memorialize this and push it out through the entire company. So like how do you do that?”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, not the cheating, right? It's like you're getting, like, I can now, I know that my boss was thinking this would take eight hours. I've figured out a way to do it in five seconds. And it's”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are these productivity on locks where it's probably not going to happen top down. Sure. It's like somebody in the company, and sometimes, again, not to like oversimplify human behavior, but it's like, I want to be lazy and I want to be rich. Right? Like these are the two things that are motivating people. And I found this tool that allows me to be lazier and richer that actually helps the company.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's amazing because you go, it has not diffused. You have the 19-year-old kid, or my 13-year-old son was like, wow, normally homework would take me two hours. Right. Now it takes me one second. Right. It's amazing. And obviously, that's bad, right? Like, I'm not using him as the confiscated his iPhone, right?”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and that kind of last point is super interesting as well, because it's like there's the did it work, how well did it work, you know, what are the measurements, make sure that the measurements don't become targets, like all the stuff that we just talked about. And then to use the metaphor of my son who cheated on his math homework, there are people that are just like, wow, like they're the go-getters in the company. This is actually why I am convinced that AI is under hyped. Yes. We have our little group chat where we have another friend who's like, oh, all this stuff is overhyped and it's going to zero. Totally wrong”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bureaucratic company And that's kind of a good segue into perhaps the state of AI enterprise, right? So you went on this whole like, you talked about 350 people.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sales, it's very easy. I want you to sell more stuff, but there's a lot of latency between you go talk to a customer and then you go collect money. So you might have targets in between. You might have measurements in between. If you're a lawyer, draft more contracts. So I guess how do you try to define the goals? Because some of them are just like, it's kind of, I think of it as like background information that's going through. It's like emails that are being sent or slacks that were sent or Google Docs that were edited. There are these key, like there are these very, very clear measurements But those aren't necessarily outputs.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And obviously the companies themselves, like if you ask any company that is trying to sell you anything and you ask, does your product work? They will probably 99 times out of 99 say, Of course it does. It's the best, it's the best. You need to have an independent arbiter And that's where you guys come in. But kind of like double clicking on this point before, it's almost like reinforcement learning at a company-wide level, right? What is the outcome that I'm looking for? And sometimes it's clear, right? And this is where the measurement and target thing is also relevant because it's like, I want you to write more lines of code. Whoa, if that's there's a measurement of how many lines of code were written, but if it becomes the target, then you're just writing gobbly good code and like you're”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Goodhart's law. I love this one. It's like when a target becomes a measure, sorry, when a measure becomes a target. It is no longer accurate as a measure Right, so if I say, okay, I'm going to judge you based on, I'm going to like how many emails are sent every day. Well, that's a measure. But once it becomes a target, it's like I want you to send more emails. Well, you're no longer, like the measurement gets corrupted. Because now people decide to do more things to hit this target, and it's no longer an objective measure. Part of it is if I'm trying to figure out like, okay, there's a product called Harvey. A lot of people love Harvey, and it seems to make people a lot more productive. But compared to what?”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there is no baseline. Like, it's like, did this work? Well, first, you have to know how you have to define the outputs. You have the inputs, which are largely just like time and money. And then you have the outputs. And part of it is actually, it is kind of complicated to come up with an output. For sure. Do you know a Good Hart's law?”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There, the principle is the agent. Right. This is why it's like, but this is why it's so important. And this is why, I mean, candidly, I love what you do. Sure. Obviously, I love what you do. That's why you're here.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But how does the company? Company's like, oh wow, you're still operating at your baseline. But actually, you should be able to do twice as much with this tool. So I guess like, how do you define the baseline? How do you address that problem? How do you think am I framing it the right way?”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's probably the hardest problem to sell. But, like, I mean, maybe kind of taking this example and riffing on it, now I can do an eight hour, like in four hours, I can do what used to take me eight. Sure.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Set of rules. But take that example. So you can imagine the individual agent, you know, the human being, the lawyer in this example is benefiting, but then does the company benefit? Because to a certain extent, I'm paying you the same amount of money. I want you to work for eight hours a day. So, actually, my expectation should be that if you're whatever, I don't know what the lawyer does, but like drafting legal drafts, like if you can now do it in four hours versus eight, you know, and spend four hours, you know, playing golf, like you're thrilled you got a productivity gain. The company didn't actually benefit. So what you kind of want is you want both parties to benefit, which is always tough because sometimes it's very, very hard to sell products to people that eliminate their jobs. Sure.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's richer. Yeah, that's true. That's true. So, like, if you get the promotion by doing less work, I'm sure people would opt for that. But I guess how, like, think about it. Right, with ChatGPT. Like, clearly, productivity gained for him. Right. Right, because it allowed him to be lazier and richer with his video game time until we confiscated his phone.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody wants to be lazier. Sure. Right. They want to be lazier and richer. I feel like these are like the universal kind of human conditions.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But to kind of like put a finer point on this, so I'm a lawyer. I work at some big company, productivity to a certain extent. Like if I only have to work four hours a day versus eight hours a day, that's great for me. I kind of feel like it's a win because I often think about the principal agent problem, right? So everybody is an agent, and then there's the ethereal being of the corporation, which is the principal. And it's like, you know, yeah, I guess if I own stock in my corporation, I want it to be more profitable. But really, I want to work as little as possible and get paid as much as possible. Like that's kind of every individual agent's job. And then you have these tools. So like theoretically, it's like everybody's going to adopt these things if they get to be lazier”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I've stolen your framing of it. It's like if Chase spends $18 billion on software or whatever, I never think they doubled out.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because right now, if you have like a $10 billion labor budget and a $1 software budget, you're not going to try to cut, optimize your $1 software budget, but you're really going to say, okay, do I need to hire more people? Can I make people more productive? All these things that are going through people's minds right now. And this is yielding a lot of the mega growth curves of the AI software companies. But now this chart is going to be a little bit more balanced. Sure. Of like the $10 billion of labor, maybe that goes to eight. And now you spend $1 billion on software. So like the net spending for the company is actually lower. The company is more profitable. Productivity gains galore. But then is this productive? Like I always want to know if the humans are productive. But then is the software yielding me more productivity? And how do I measure that? So everybody's excited about this gold rush.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you have companies where their software budget is very, very small, but their labor budget is enormous. And step one of the mega opportunity that excites us as a firm is that people say, oh, I'm going to start hiring software. But now that means that your software budget is enormous.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe we can get into how you're doing this, but just to kind of level set a little bit, and I love this framing that you gave me, I've stolen it. When I steal a phrase, it's the most sincere form of flattery, of course, but I just released a little video about how software is eating labor. So software eats the world. This was a thesis that our firm has founded on, but it's eating labor. But it doesn't actually mean that jobs are going to go away. For sure. Largely, what it means is that people are going to be 10 times more productive where I can't hire anybody to do this job, but I can hire AI to do it.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of ad tech is here's an advertisement, and there's this attribution problem The sale happened, who is responsible for that sale? Was it the banner ad on Yahoo? Was it the last click that happened on Google? Was it the coupon site that stuffed a cookie on your machine? So part of ad tech is like on buying ads, that's part of it, but part of it is also did it work. And AI, there's all sorts of stuff around making AI work, which is like technically very, very challenging. But then there's the question of did it actually yield a benefit? Which is probably the biggest question for, I mean, there's a lot of myths on this on both sides, but would love to kind of hear about the origins of Laraden and how you think about even some similarities between the two.”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've known you for a long time. That's right. And I think when I first met you, I still actually remember meeting you the first time. It was from, I think, Josh McFarland And Josh was at Google, and he was like, Yeah, there's this guy, Russ Fred, and he started this company Adify, and he sold a Tacox for all this money back in $300 million. I know. It is amazing. Now it's like a B route. But like back then, like, that was a huge acquisition. And there was like, oh, like Russ, like I had, like, amazing person that pulled this off. And I think we met in Florida. That's right on a Silicon Valley bank trip. And kind of everything comes full circle in the end. But AI is probably the hottest thing in the history of the world. But you also worked in what was the hottest thing in the history of the world in Web 1.0. But now there's this big question. Actually, it reminds me of ad tech. I think it's a nice little segue. It was like ad tech, you're trying to figure out, does the advertising work?”
2025-12-01 · a16z Podcast · The $700 Billion AI Productivity Problem No One's Talking About · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source