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Marc Andreessen

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2023-06-22
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2023-06-22
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  1. “Yeah, so the main thesis on the essay is that what we're dealing with here is intelligence. And it's really important to kind of talk about the sort of very nature of what intelligence is. And fortunately, we have a predecessor to machine intelligence, which is human intelligence. And we've got observations and theories over thousands of years for what intelligence is in the hands of humans and what intelligence is, right? I mean, what it literally is, is the way to capture, process, analyze, synthesize information, solve problems. But the observation of intelligence in human hands is that intelligence quite literally makes everything better. And what I mean by that is every kind of outcome of human quality of life, whether it's education outcomes or success of your children or a career success or health or lifetime satisfaction. By the way, propensity to peacefulness as opposed to violence, propensity for open mind.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, yeah. This was all brand new, right? Yeah, back then, this was all brand new. These were all brand new. Had you rolled out that theory in even 1999, people would have thought you were smoking crack. So that's emerged over time.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Right now with GPT. And so now, and this is why there is always sort of a constant investment frenzy around software is because, you know, look, when you start one of these things, it doesn't always succeed. But when it does, now you might be building an asset that builds value for four or five, six decades to come. If you have a team of people who have the level of devotion required to keep making it better. And then the fact that, of course, everybody's online, you know, there's 5 billion people that are a click away from any new piece of software. So the potential market size for any of these things is nearly infinite.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Right. But like a software engineer is somebody who basically transmutes his own labor into an actual capital asset, creates permanent value. In fact, it's actually very inspiring. That's actually more true today than before. So when I was doing software, the assumption was all new software basically has a sort of a parabolic sort of life cycle, right? So you ship the thing, people buy it. At some point, everybody who wants it has bought it, and then it becomes obsolete. And it's like bananas. Nobody buys old software. These days, Minecraft, Mathematica, Facebook, Google, you have the software assets that are, you know, have been around for 30 years that are gaining in value every year. And they're just there being a World of Warcraft, right? Salesforce.com. Like they're being every single year. They're being polished and polished and polished and polished. They're getting better and better, more powerful, more powerful, more valuable, more valuable. So we've entered this era where you can actually have these things that actually build out over decades, which by the way is what's happening.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Oh, he would have completely broke his brain because, of course, the whole thing was that kind of technology is inconceivable when he was alive. It was all industrial era stuff. And so any kind of machinery necessarily involves huge amounts of capital. And then labor was on the receiving end of the abuse.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Sits down at a keyboard and types a bunch of stuff in. And a capital asset comes out the other side and then somebody buys that capital asset for a billion dollars. Like that's amazing. It's literally creating value right out of thin air, right? Out of purely human thought, right? And so there are many things that make software magical and special, but that's the economic stuff.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yes, let me get it. So here's the thing I don't know if I figured out them, but figured out later, which is software is a technology that it's like the concept of the philosopher's stone, the philosopher stone in alchemy transmutes lead into gold and Newton spent 20 years trying to find the philosopher's stone, never got there, nobody's ever figured it out. Software is our modern philosopher's stone. And in economic terms, it transmutes labor into capital. Which is like a super interesting thing. And by the way, like Karl Marx is rolling over in his grave right now because, of course, that's a complete refutation of his entire theory. Transpose labor into capital, which is as follows, is somebody.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Deal making and money and just the fur flying and like craziness. And so yeah, it was just one of those, it was just like, I mean, there's the entire Netscape thing from start to finish was four years, which was like for one of these companies. It's just like incredibly fast. We went public 18 months after we got moved where we were founded, which virtually never happens. So it was just this incredibly fast kind of meteor streaking across the sky. And then, of course, it was this. And then there was just this explosion, right, that happened because then it was almost immediately followed by the dot-com crash. It was then followed by AOL buying Time Warner, which again is the succession guys kind of play with that, which turned out to be a disastrous deal. One of the famous kind of disastrous in business history. And then, you know, what became an internet depression on the other side of that. But then in that depression in the 2000s was the beginning of broadband and smartphones and Web 2.0, right? And then social media and search and every SaaS and everything that came out of that.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That was the height of the dot-com boom bubble bust. I mean, that was the frenzy. If you watch Succession, that was like what they did in the fourth season with Gojo and the merger with their. So it was like the height of one of those kind of dynamics.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Look, this stuff AI ought to make the individual coder obviously far more productive, right? By a thousand x or something. And so open source, like not just the future of open source they have, but the future of open source, everything we ought to have a world now of supercoders, right, who are building things as open source with one or two people that were inconceivable five years ago, you know, the level of kind of hyper productivity we're going to get out of our best and brightest, I think is going to go way up.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Very inspiring. I'll give you another one, SSL. So SSL was the security protocol. That was us. And that was a crazy idea at the time, which was let's take all the native protocols and let's wrap them in a security wrapper. That was a guy named Kip Hickman who wrote that over a summer, one guy. And then look, today, sitting here today, like the transformer at Google was a small handful of people. And then the number of people who did the core work on GPT, it's not that many people. a pretty small handful of people. And so, yeah, the pattern in software repeatedly over a very long time has been. Jeff Bezos always said that two pizza rule for teams at Amazon, which is any team needs to be able to be fed with two pieces if you need the third pizza, you have too many people. And I think that's, I think it's actually the one pizza rule.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So he wrote JavaScript over a summer. And I mean, I think it is fair to say now that it's the most widely used language in the world. And it seems to only be gaining in its range of adoption.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It seems like it is the, and by the way, let me give a shout out to Brendan Ike, who was the basically the one-man inventor of JavaScript.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The big one probably JavaScript CSS was after me, so I didn't know it wasn't me, but JavaScript was the big JavaScript maybe was the biggest of the whole thing. That was us. And that was basically a bet. It was a bet on two things. One is that the world wanted a new front end scripting language. And then the other was, I thought at the time the world wanted a new back-end scripting language. So JavaScript was designed from the beginning to be both front-end and back end. And then it failed as a back-end scripting language. And Java won for a long time. And then Python, Perl, and other things, PHP and Ruby. But now JavaScript is back. And so.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Back to just text. Right, and there is this pattern in human creativity and media where you end up back at text. And I think there's, you know, there's something powerful in there.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “To this day, if you create a web page that has no CSS style sheet, the browser will render it however it wants to. So this was one of the things there was this idea of the time and how these systems were built, which is separation of content from appearance And that's still people don't really use that anymore because everybody wants to determine how things look, and so they use CSS, but it's still in there that you can just let the browser do all the work.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah. Now, like I said, the good news for me is the internet kind of had that tradition already. But having said that, we pushed it. Pushed it way out. But the other thing we did going back to the performance thing was we gave up a lot of performance. That initial experience for the first few years was pretty painful. But the bet there was actually an economic bet, which was basically the demand for the web would basically mean that there would be a surge in supply of broadband. The question was, okay, how do you get the phone companies, which are not famous in those days for doing new things at huge cost for speculative reasons? How do you get them to build up broadband, you know, spend billions of dollars doing that? And you could go meet with them and try to talk them into it, or you could just have a thing where it's just very clear that it's going to be that people love that's going to be better if it's faster. And so there was a period there. And this was fraught with some peril, but there was a period there where it's like, we knew the experience was suboptimized because we were trying to force the emergence of demand for broadband.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, yeah, they wanted to be a cop, right? They wanted to, yeah, that was a very, and any properly trained and credential engineer would be like, that's not how you build these systems.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “That's just bad. And by the way, what happens with that, of course, just what happened with coding at that point, which is you get a high priesthood. You know, there's a small number of people who are really good at doing exactly that. Most people can't and most people are excluded from it. And so actually that was where that, this is where I picked up that idea was like, no, no, you want these things to be resilient to error in all kinds. And this would drive the purists absolutely crazy. Like, I got attacked on this a lot. Because, yeah, I mean, like every time all the purists who were like into all this, like markup language stuff and formats and codes and all this stuff, they would be like, you know, you can't, you're encouraging bad behavior because.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And I'm in the core dump trying to analyze it and trying to reconstruct. And I'm just like, this is ridiculous. The computer ought to be smart enough to be able to know that if it's off by one, okay, fine, and it keeps running. And I would go ask all the experts, like, why can't it just keep running? And they'd explain to me, well, because all the downstream repercussions and blah, blah. And I'm like, this is still like, you know, we're forcing the human creator to live, to your point, in this hyper literal world of perfection. And I was just like, that's just”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Used to offend me, so I grew up on Unix. I worked on Unix. I was a Unix native for all the way through this period. And so, and it used to drive me bananas when it would do the segmentation fault in the core dump file. It's like literally there's like an error in the code. The math is off by one and it core dumps.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And so the browser rendering engines to this day have all of this spaghetti go crazy stuff where they can't, they're resilient to all kinds of crazy HTML mistakes. And so, and literally what I always had in my head is like there's an eight-year-old or an 11-year-old somewhere and they're doing a view source. They're doing a cut and paste and they're trying to make a web page for their turtle or whatever. And like they leave out a slash and they leave out an angle bracket and they do this and they do that and it still works.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, and then there was this internet principle that we inherited, which was emit, what was it, emit cautiously, interpret liberally. So it basically meant if the design principle was if you're creating like a web editor that's going to emit HTML, like do it as cleanly as you can. But you actually want the browser to interpret liberally, which is you actually want users to be able to make all kinds of mistakes and for it to still work.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So, the fact that you could look at a web page, you could hit view source and you could see the HTML was how people learned how to make web pages.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “So there was a really key bet that we made at the time, which is very controversial, which was core to how it was engineered, which was are we optimizing for performance or for ease of creation? And in those days, the pressure was very intense to optimize for performance because the network connections were so slow and also the computers were so slow. And so if you had, I mentioned the progressive JPEGs, like if there's an alternate world in which we optimize for performance and it just, you had just a much more pleasant experience right up front. But what we got by not doing that was we got ease of creation. And the way that we got ease of creation was all of the protocols and formats were in text, not in binary. And so HTTP is in text. By the way, and this was an internet tradition, by the way, that we picked up, but we continued it. HTTP is text and HTML is text and then everything else that followed is text. As a result, and by the way, you can imagine purist engineers saying this is insane. You have very limited bandwidth. Why are you wasting any time sending text? You should be encoding this stuff into binary and it'll be much faster. And of course, the answer is that's correct. But what you get when you make it text is all of a sudden, well, the big breakthrough was the view source function, right?”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Logo that says don't trust it. And then we had to spend five years fighting the US government to get them to basically stop trying to do this because the fear was terrorists are going to use encryption plots. And then, you know, we responded with, well, actually, we need encryption to be able to secure systems so that the terrorists and the criminals can't get into them. So anyway, that was the 1990s fight.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, so those days it was all around crime and terrorism. So those arguments happened. But there was no sense yet of the internet having like an effect on politics because that was way too far off. But there was an enormous panic at the time around cybercrime. There was like enormous panic that your credit card number would get stolen and you'd life savings to be drained. And then, you know, criminals were going to, there was, oh, when we started, one of the things we did, one of the Netscape browser was the first widely used piece of consumer software that had strong encryption built in. It made it available to ordinary people. And at that time, strong encryption was actually illegal to export out of the US. So we could field that product in the US. We could not export it because it was classified as ammunition. So the Netscape browser was on a restricted list along with the Tomahawk missile as being something that could not be exported. So we had to make a second version with deliberately weak encryption to sell overseas with a big logo on the box saying do not trust this, which it turns out makes it hard to sell software when it's got a big.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “No, not explicitly. That did come up, but it wasn't even that. It was more just like all the serious. The argument went the purists basically said all the serious information in the world is text. If you introduce images, you're basically going to bring in all the trivial stuff. You're going to bring in magazines and all this crazy stuff that people, it's going to distract from that. It's going to take the way from being serious to being frivolous.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “For kids in the audience, right? For kids in the audience, you used to have to wash an image load like a line at a time, but it turns out there was this thing with JPEGs where you could load basically every fourth, you could load like every fourth line, and then you could sweep back through again. And so you could render a fuzzy version of the image up front, and then it would resolve into the detailed one. And that was like a big UI breakthrough because it gave you something to watch.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I have a comedy routine I do. So it's like 20 minutes long describing all the steps required to actually get on the internet at this point. And so you had to look through these practical, well, and then speed, performance, 144 modems. Right? Like it was like watching, you know, glue dry. And so you had to, there were basically a sequence of bets that we made where you basically needed to look through that current state of affairs and say, actually, there's going to be so much demand for that. Once people figure this out, there's going to be so much demand for it that all of these practical problems are going to get fixed.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “By the way, there was a wall of skepticism from the media. Everybody was just like, yeah, this is the crazy, this is just like dumb. This is not, you know, this is not for regular people at that time. And so you had to think through that. And then look, it was still hard to get on the internet at that point, right? So you could get kind of this weird bastardized version if you were on AOL, which wasn't really real. Or you had to go learn what an ISP was. You know, in those days, PCs actually didn't have TCP IP drivers come pre-installed, so you had to learn what a TCP IP driver was. You had to buy a modem. You had to install driver software.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, you know, look, it's still a stretch, right? It's still a stretch because it's just like, okay, you're still in this zone, which is like, okay, is this a nerd thing? Is this a real person thing? Yeah.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Right, and it was like that the first streaming video thing was another England, some Oxford or something, some guy put his coffee pot up as the first streaming video thing. And he put it on the web because he literally, it was the coffee pot down the hall, and he wanted to see when he needed to go refill it. But there were, you know, there was a point when there were thousands of people watching that coffee pot because it was the first thing you could watch.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Because, like, that's the first restaurant menu on the web. And I don't have to be in Bristol. And I don't know if I'm ever going to go to Bristol, and I don't even like Indian food. And wow.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “So, the homepage was just basically trying to explain even what this thing is that you're looking at, right? Basically, basic instructions. But then there was a button that said what's new. And what most people did was they went to, for obvious reasons, went to what's new. But it was so mind-blowing at that point, just the basic idea. And this was like, you know, this is the basic idea of the internet, but people could see it for the first time. The basic idea was, look, it's like literally, it's like an Indian restaurant in like Bristol, England has put their menu on the web. And people were like,”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “And I would list it on the West New page. And that was how people discovered the new websites as they were coming out. And I remember because it was like one, it literally went from it. It was like one every couple days to like one every day to like two every day.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Looking for my about, about oh, Mark is looking for a job. So the West New page, I would literally get up every morning and I would or every afternoon and I would basically, if you wanted to launch a website, you would email me.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “So, the thing I had early on was I was keeping at the time what there's disputes over what was the first blog, but I had one of them that at least is a possible, at least a runner-up in the competition. And it was what was called the What's New page. And it was hardwired distribution and fair advantage. I wired it right in the browser. I put it in the browser and then I put my resume in the browser, which also was hilarious.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Windows 3.1 or 3.0, Windows 3.0, the iPhone was only 15 years. Right, like that ramp was in retrospect at the time, it felt like it took forever, but in historical terms, like that was a very fast ramp from even a graphical computer at all on your desk to the iPhone. That was 15 years.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Was a big leap, too That was like bang, bang. And then, of course, Steve. And then, you know, in the fullness of time, Steve came back. Then the Mac started to take off again. That was the third bang. And then the iPhone was a fourth bang.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “This is the classic okay, Microsoft was operating on the other. So Steve, Apple was running on the polish it until it's perfect. Microsoft famously ran on the other model, which is ship and iterate. And so the old line in those days was Microsoft, right? It's version three of every Microsoft product. That's the good one, right? And so there are, you can find online Windows 1, Windows 2. Nobody used them. Actually, the original Windows Windows, the windows were non overlapping. And so you had these very small, very low resolution screens, and then you had literally.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Limitations, yeah, $6,000 PC, they did not sell very many. But then there was also FTP, and there was Usenet, right? And there was a dozen other, basically, there's WASE, which was an early search thing. There was Gopher, which was an early menu-based information retrieval system. There were like a dozen different sort of scattered ways that people would get to information on the internet. And so the mosaic idea was basically bring those all together, make the whole thing graphical, make it easy to use, make it basically bulletproof so that anybody can do it. And then again, just on the lux side, it so happened that this was right at the moment when graphics, when the GUI sort of actually took off. And we're now also used to the GUI that we think it's been around forever, but it didn't really, you know, the Macintosh brought it out in 85, but they actually didn't sell very many Macs in the 80s. It was not that successful of a product. It really was, you needed Windows 3.0 on PCs, and that hit in about 92. And so, and we did most ACA 92, 93. So that sort of, it was like right at the moment when you could imagine actually having a graphical user interface to.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “There was the web, which was text based, but there were no, I mean, there were like three websites. There was like no content. There were no users. It wasn't like a catalytic. By the way, because it was all text, there were no documents. There were no images. There were no videos. There were no. So it was, and then in the beginning, if you had to be on a next cube, you need to have a next cube both to publish and to consume. So there were.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Specifically in tech, it's actually, I find it very interesting. There's the Apple way, which is polished, polish, polish, and don't ship until it's as perfect because you can make it. And then there's the sort of other approach, which is the sort of incremental hacker mentality, which basically says ship early and often and iterate. And one of the things I find really interesting is I'm now 30 years into this, like there are very successful companies on both sides of that approach, right? Like that is a fundamental difference in how to operate and how to build and how to create that you have world-class companies operating in both ways. And I don't think the question of which is the superior model is anywhere close to being answered. And my suspicion is the answer is do both? The answer is you actually want both. They lead to different outcomes. Software tends to do better with the iterative approach. Hardware tends to do better with the sort of wait and make it perfect approach. But again, you can.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “So look, Exactly. So the Silicon Valley, I mean, look, he's not, you know, George Patton in the, you know, in the army. Like, you know, there are many examples in other fields, you know, that are like this.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “And then this goes to the way that people describe working with him, which is there was a terrifying aspect of working with him, which is, you know, he was, you know, he was very tough. But there was this thing that everybody I've ever talked to worked for him says. They all say the following, which is we did the best work of our lives when we worked for him because he set the bar incredibly high. And then he supported us with everything that he could to let us actually do work of that quality. So a lot of people who were at Apple spend the rest of their lives trying to find another experience where they feel like they're able to hit that quality bar again.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “He had an integrated worldview. So the properly designed device that had the correct functionality, that had the deepest understanding of the user that was the most beautiful had to be all of those things, right? He basically would drive to as close to perfect as you could possibly get, right? And I suspect that he never quite thought he ever got there because most great creators are generally dissatisfied. You read accounts later on and all they can see are the flaws in their creation. But like he got as close to perfect each step of the way as he could possibly get with the constraints of the technology of his time. And then, you know, look, he was sort of famous in the Apple model. It's like, look, they will, you know, this headset that they just came out with, like, it's like a decade-long project, right? It's like, and they're just going to sit there and tune and tune and polish and polish and tune and polish and tune and polish until it is as perfect as anybody could possibly make anything.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Well, I mean, who makes the fun out of aluminum, right? Nobody else would have done that. And now, of course, if your phone was made out of aluminum, how crude, what a kind of caveman would you have to be to have a phone that's made out of plastic? So it's just this very, right. And, you know, look, there's a thousand different ways to look at this, but one of the things is just like, look, these things are central to your lives. Like you're with your phone more than you're with anything else. Like it's in your, it's going to be in your hand. I mean, he, you know, you know this. He thought very deeply about what it meant for something to be in your hand all day long. But for example, here's an interesting design thing. Like he never wanted, my understanding is he never wanted an iPhone to have a screen larger than you could reach with your thumb one-handed. And so he was actually opposed to the idea of making the phones larger. And I don't know if you have this experience today, but let's say there are certain moments in your day when you might be like only have one hand available and you might want to be on your phone and you're trying to like text your thumb can't reach the send button.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Yes, I guess they say, like, look, he was a deep believer, I think, in a very deep way I interpret it. I don't know if you ever really described it like this, by the way I'd interpret it is like this thing and it's actually a thing in philosophy. It's like aesthetics are not just appearances. Aesthetics go all the way to like deep underlying meaning, right? It's like, I'm not a physicist. One of the things I've heard physicists say is one of the things you start to get a sense of when a theory might be correct is when it's beautiful, right? Like, you know, right. And so there's something, and you feel the same thing, by the way, in like human psychology, right? You know, when you're experiencing awe, right? You know, there's like, there's a simplicity to it when you're having an interaction with somebody, there's an aesthetic, I would say calm that comes over you because you're actually being fully honest and trying to hide yourself, right? So it's like this very deep sense of aesthetics.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “He was like, no, it has to be. So they were like $6,000 basically academic workstations. They had the first CDROM drives, which were slow. I mean, the computers were all but unusable. They were so slow, but they were beautiful.”

    2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source