YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Wozniak

lines on the record: 46
first: 2022-12-27
most recent: 2022-12-27
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

“Dual purpose here. One is to help the new age of brands rise up and not need to hire this big logistics supply chain team who just pushes paper and just all they care about is the price of freight, but actually is empowered to solve these problems without hiring a big team because you don't need it anymore. You kind of outsource that to the cloud. That's one aspect of what we do, help these small businesses grow really fast without the bureaucracy. The other is how do you help these enterprise brands, these famous companies transform themselves for a world of e-commerce and not die. I think that both of these are really important missions for us.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem and these logistics teams don't even really at the typical brand don't even really know that that's the problem they're solving they're just still used to a world where all they care about is the price of freight and they want to buy the cheapest freight and that's what they think their job is when their job has become how do I ensure a customer experience how do I enable our sales and marketing to have the product in stock so that they can win those customers, be a growth engine and a customer experience engine and then how do they empower their CFO to not sit on too much inventory. And so it's a really different proposition. And frankly, most of the companies that we grew up with, these iconic brands have been going bankrupt left and right. If you Google retail apocalypse and just look like the number of companies that have failed that are iconic brands that we grew up with, it's really sad actually. And I don't think it has to be that way. So one of our, we kind of have.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same number of these batteries or whatever product. And it didn't have to be very agile. The modern world all of a sudden, there's this proliferation of brands and it all has to be stored close to the edges. So brands need to have multiple fulfillment centers. You need about five fulfillment centers to get two-day delivery nationwide. And you need probably to do next day. It's more like 16 fulfillment centers and you want to do same day. Well, you need one in almost every zip code, right? If you want to have two hour delivery. That's a really, really different configuration of supply chain. And now you want to be able to get to that world where you're doing same day or next day delivery. You now need to load balance your inventory. Because if you put too much inventory out there and it doesn't sell, you're going to go bankrupt, right? You're sitting on all this working capital, all this inventory that's not earning a return too little and you lose the customer and they'll never come back, right? They buy your competitor's brand. And so that's the fundamental.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were in charge as well, in that they better have that product now. You're not willing to wait a week. Like in the series catalog era, you could order and you'd get it in three weeks. Well, you're going to go out of business if you can't deliver. It's becoming two hour delivery. Like if you can't deliver two hours. And so that is a very different supply chain. And what's happening is companies that haven't been able to run a supply chain that's that responsive, that can have wider assortment of choices because we're all unique and we want our choices and have it sort of edge cached to use an internet analogy like a CDM. Like you want to have these goods close to the customer so that it can get there really, really fast. The old world, you could have one distribution center in the middle of the United States and distribute out to your store network from there. But it didn't have to be like super responsive to customer demand. Customer demand was pretty predictable, kind of always bought.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you want to start with the customers, with all of us. And the internet has really put us, you and me and everybody else out there in charge in a way that we've never seen before. You know, in the era of mass media, companies only would run a television ad for whatever product they were selling. And then they would just kind of pump that down in your throat. And they only needed to have a limited number of SKUs, whatever was on television basically. Customers didn't have a lot of choice. They could buy this, you know, the energizer or the Durasel, and there were two choices for wet battery, and there happened to be in the stores. And so the brands were in control. Those who could afford mass media were in control. Now with the internet, there's just like a million choices. You have every kind of possible brand of battery that's out there. Battery is probably a weird case. But still, for every product category, there's a million choices. Everybody's unique. You can get the thing that matches your own personal take.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go into a conflict for fine. In reality, we're probably so far away from doing that. But if we have one conflict with China where we spend most of our ballistic infantry, we might not be able to remake it for like five years. And we're basically standing around with our hands tied behind our backs.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone else's impression of you is that you are a 10 out of 10 lethal, so they absolutely not gonna fuck with you, and then maybe you lose one small conflict and someone goes, well, hold on. Like, maybe these guys aren't so scary as we thought they were. And in reality, I think we're about a three out of ten. And the real danger comes when a Greg power competitor finds out before you find out that you're actually three out of ten. So the problem with everyone's thinking advanced manufacturing is in a really good place is that we don't go fix the problem because culturally everyone thinks it's buying the roads are getting paved. Fighter jets get made.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most police officers and most bouncers are probably incompetent, can probably get taken out by someone relatively competent as a civilian. But we have enough social construct around the concept that is a really dumb idea that no one wants to take the risk. And it's what I describe it in defense land is the lethality mirage. In a lethality mirage is basically...”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We gone to a great power total flakes. We have enough logistics and infrastructure to go and win that conflict or release. Be scary enough that that conflict never exists in the first place. And the analogy I like to tell people is, you know, bar fights happen when both people mispredict their ability to win the fight. And bar fights don't happen for two reasons. One is there's two UFC fighters staring down each other and they both know the cost of the conflict and both the other person is scary so that fight never happens or there's a bunch of morons, but there's a bouncer and like he's big and staring enough that the conflict never happens in the first place. But that construct of the bar fight relies on impressions and kind of social trade-offs that like, hey, enough people have seen their friend getting beaten up by a bouncer, so I'm probably not going to even test that assumption that this is a real thing. Now, the reality, of course, is that”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a miracle in the first place that we're here and that society is relatively stable and like the roads get paid. People forget because they grow up in America that it's so successful that like they don't have to worry about having a bulletproof car otherwise if you have more than like a hundred thousand dollar net worth someone in the gang might try and steal your daughter, which for the rest of the world is like a reality, right? And because America is so isolated culturally, most Americans view of geopolitics is Russia bad. You don't learn those lessons. And as a younger person, you don't realize that unless we quote unquote keep the rose paved, like this can all fall over very, very quickly. So if you run the scenario of saying, okay, right now, basically, we are successful because, you know, we are the world's police and whether we should play that role or not is obviously up for debate. But the reality is that we are fine culturally because everyone understands that if you fuck with America, we will put a missile over your head and you're dead.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unless we solve this problem, I think the country and our way of life. Exist I give to people is if you're living in a small town or something like that, we've built up 200 layers of abstractions in society so that you can be an artist or you can be a painter or you can be in finance or in crypto. Video games or whatever happens to be. And the reality of the world is that 200 years ago, you know, we were chilling.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've actually heard you use the term dangerous when you speak to the point that we're at in terms of this pipeline and this particular space of advanced manufacturing. And if someone's listening, they might be like, okay, a bunch of people are retiring. Some people are not very keen on the idea of us continuing to pursue space. But what you say to the average person, like what's at stake here? What are we going to lose if these people retire and we don't have these things documented?”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working around, which is the evolution of space policy and the Space Act and treaties evolving. These things were based in maritime law. And I guess that kind of made sense for the time because we needed a framework for how we interoperate in space. But that is actually creating the challenge because we don't have even the simplest notions of like right of way. You're in space. You're going to come very close to colliding with someone else's object, whether it's dead or alive. Who's got the right of way? Well, I mean, obviously it's dead. You better move. But if you're both active, who's got the right way? These are very simple constructs on the ground. You wouldn't get in your car and not know that. But in space, we're operating in the blind. We don't have these rules fully defined as a community, and yet we keep watching more and more things without solving those.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there's a lot of collisions, and there are some that we actually can see and we can clearly identify that was caused by debris or even in the case of a satellite hitting an active satellite or vice versa or two objects in New York space colliding. It happens a lot more than we would like to think. And there's also reasons why we don't talk about it as a community, why we don't just openly talk about our problems in the space community the way that we would in other academic communities or places where we're more data driven. And some of that actually surrounds liability and risk. As an example, many insurance policies in space on the writers exclude space debris from a covered loss. I'm not saying that people do it. I'm probably implying it, but if your insurance policy said we don't cover things hitting your car windshield that are rocks, then whatever cracked your car windshield is probably not a rock. These are challenges we're also”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to get to how we solve the problem, but I also want to speak a little bit to what is at stake here. So you're talking about thousands of things that we can monitor, but potentially millions that we aren't able to monitor. How often does this stuff actually collide? And then also, how often does that impact us on Earth, whether it be things actually coming down to Earth or impacting the satellites or infrastructure that we use on Earth up there in space?”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you got told when you boarded the plane, there's a million little bullets flying around, and this is going to make your life potentially very miserable. We just don't know. Hope you make it. Like that would be. That's kind of what's going on with spaceflight. The first challenge is you have to be able to see everything so that we can put together a plan on how to solve for that. And astrographs, Wayfinder, these are tools to help enlighten the world and kind of bring attention to the problem first so that we can all align on what the best solutions are for cleaning up space, which is kind of one side of Privateer's mission of making space safe and accessible for humankind.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we're talking about over a million pieces of debris that are smaller than a centimeter, but the only thing we can really see from ground-based radar is that's bigger than the size of a softball. So when Morba says there's these 26,000 things or whatever that number is precisely, those are things the size of a softball doing roughly $18,000 an hour. And, you know, mv squared still mv squared. It's a real problem because the little pieces of debris, the things you can't see can really hurt you. In space Wouldn't get on a passenger jet.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were starting massive propulsion lab working on Mars missions, but when we moved to Mali in 2006, I started working with the Air Force Research Lab with the telescopes on top of Mont Polyakla. And all of a sudden, at that time in 2006, there were only 1,200 working satellites and 26,000 pieces of garbage. And I'm like, what? This doesn't make any sense. Holy cow, like, this is ridiculous. How is it okay for 96% of the stuff that we put in space to turn out to be garbage? Like we don't see that in other domains. We don't have that as acceptable. Okay, we're going to put a bunch of stuff out here on the land, but 96% of the stuff we're going to put out is going to be trash. Like we don't do that.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know you originally created something called Astriograph, and I heard you say on an interview that actually seeing the amount of stuff, some of it being valuable, some of it being junk, actually caused you to cry because it was so, I guess, devastating, or maybe let's hear from your words. Why did that trigger that kind of emotion in seeing that?”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that most people just aren't aware of how many satellites we have launched. The fact that most of the stuff that we launch just doesn't come back or it takes a really, really long time to come back. It's a sufficiently lower four bit. Also, people just haven't had a place to just go online and just kind of see the stuff. And, you know, now that we have privateer of World App Wayfunder, we're just like a click away from people seeing all these dots all around the earth.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whenever I tried to see the future a year ahead, I knew it one year ahead because I was working on it. If I look two years ahead and made some guesses, oh my gosh, other aspects, other technologies, it all came out from outer space and people's desire which way they wanted to go was different. It's very hard to predict even two years ahead successfully the way I work. Nowadays we got huge big companies. So it's kind of like anything that work on is going to be successful. It's not as much of a gamble. Real inventors like to gamble, like to prove the world that they can do more than you ever imagined.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Apple two days. And then all of a sudden, we sold it to everyone in the world, and our sales doubled and our profits doubled. And the board gave Steve Williams and stock options and jet airplanes. That was the turning point. And then the iPhone was even better. And it was based on the iPod, not the reverse, not a phone that will include an iPod. More like it's an iPod, but you get a phone with it. And so it's hard to say that you really see the future more than a year ahead when you're working a year ahead on your projects.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a great product. It was going to be all the revenues of Apple for the first 10 years. We had a great league. We were comfortable. We could do what we wanted. But the amount of memory that would hold us song costs, you know, we were back in the days of tape. It cost about a million dollars, a good fraction of a million dollars. Do you think we saw it today where you have a device in your hand with a thousand songs on it even? No. Steve Jobs is very instrumental in always taking us. Do what we can do today. Fred do something a little more tomorrow, a little more. And you can have a lot of failures too if you'll have one great product bringing in the revenues. But the whole idea was we'll move towards the future and we'll be a part of it and we'll be in with it. And after all, you look back at it, it was kind of invisible, the steps we took, but they all led to today. And then there was some of that invention stuff we got to. Steve Jobs' Apple II was really the iPod music music. And that was the first time, oh my gosh, up till then our company valuation was the same as the old.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I myself, I was really a great engineer in certain fields and I was designing the hottest products in the world for Hewlett Packard without even having a college degree yet. And then you have, you talk about visionary, vision seeing the future. That's difference at invention, though. Inventor really wants to actually go in and create something today that didn't exist and not have a vision that's 50 years out or 10 years out because that's science fiction a lot. And everybody can talk about it and say later on. See, I proposed it, but it wasn't possible to do with money. And the engineer says, feet on the ground? What can I actually do and build and deliver to people when we started Apple?”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes along, thinks, Oh my gosh, is there something I'm interested in that I could do? And would it work? And maybe it hasn't been done before. And can I make a difference in the world and the inventor wants to run into a laboratory, hook up some demos real quick, try to get some sort of prototype to show that the ideas is right. And that's the sort of person I am. It's in your personality. You don't change it. You don't just say tomorrow I'm going to be an inventor today. I'm an engineer. You're usually one or the other. That's another advantage of Alex, you know, putting together privateers. We're looking for the inventor types.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen them look off into space because we almost all come from science backgrounds. And even when we, when Apple went public round, 1980, our president Mike Scott, maybe 81 or 2, started a little company with some people. I funded into that. He's a friend. And actually, we did a launch of a rocket from out at sea from somewhere. So I don't know. There were a bunch of rocket engineers around saying it is possible to do with, let's say, money. Now, governments have all the resources, you know, but they're stale in their approaches because of it. Here's what we can do very successfully, very stably. We know we'll get there if we put enough money in and test enough. And private industry works so differently. I've only been in private. And I just love having ideas and thinking about them.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, like stories that tell what's in their head. And that's when I decided, you know what? Wanting something is even more important. And I go back. I wanted a computer. It was in my heart. And I didn't know if I ever ever did it. I didn't know if designing computers would ever be a job for engineers because we were back in the analog days, you know, smart math stuff. But I kept it in me and eventually I found the path to do it. So I was building a computer for myself. And it turned out that the point in time. Luck is sometimes there's a lot of luck in business success. And the point in time that I was going to build that computer no matter what it was worth turned out to be worth a ton. And, you know, and then a lot of times when people are successful in technology,”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of great things come personally, and I learned even I taught middle school and elementary school for eight years straight full time, full time, like every hour of the day up to seven days a week. No press allowed, so it's not a big story. But I learned that it was less important that you're speaking facts and knowledge from your mouth, knowledge with less importance than the motivation of my students to learn, had to find ways to make it fun, make it understandable, to make it.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ability for these technologies to be exponential, right? What we see today from Pyrrhate Tier might not be what it is in five years or 50 years. And I had the privilege of talking to Alex yesterday, and he told me this story about you from the very, very early days where when you were younger, you basically told your dad, hey, dad, I want to have a computer someday. And he said, because at this time, this is true. He said, you're crazy. Computers cost as much as that house. And you told him, well, dad, I'll live in an apartment. And you seem to really, really just want a computer at that time. To your point earlier, starting Apple was not about building one of the biggest businesses in the world. It was wanting a computer and wanting other people to have that. I'm curious just to know from a personal perspective, what did you see back then? Was it truly just like a personal need for this device? Or I want to dig into that early WAS brain and hear your perspective on what was going on in those early days.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To go learn oil painting, but they actually do have the talent to be able to describe what's in their imagination and continue to refine until they get the result they want.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I think that what this is going to do, what AI art is going to do is it's going to significantly lower the barrier to entry to become an artist. To be an artist right now, you have to have a lot of time, a lot of training. Sometimes the monetary financial means to be able to do that, or the willingness to be like a starving artist to do it, or it's a hobby on the side, there's definitely a barrier to being an artist. And now it's like everyone can do it. I almost liken these image synthesizers like Dolly, your midjourney to like a Peter Pan. But instead of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, it takes the artistic skill of artists and it's like gives it to everyone. Like, here you go, you know? And so I do think that a lot more people are going to be empowered to be artistic or to be artists because they didn't necessarily have the”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a tool, as you said. But the reason I asked if you were fungible is because I just really wonder how this progresses in terms of we know it's going to be somewhat of a democratizing force because now a bunch of people who couldn't paint or couldn't do Photoshop in certain ways can now do it and create all of this art or these outputs. But I do wonder then does that make a lot of people really successful or a lot of people really capable or does it still surface the very, very best to the top, right, where there's a different filter and now the filter is prompt engineering versus painting or drawing or singing or whatever it might have been in the past? So do you think that's still the case where you're still going to see these like outliers who are just so much better than the rest? Or do you think it'll be more of a level playing field than what we're seeing before?”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hired her to do this pro earring, and when she showed me hers. I was just like moved to tears almost, like jaw drawn. I was like, that is what you made. And so I felt like she was irreplaceable in this. I mean, I could have hired 10 different artists to do this pearlering and gotten 10 very different results. And what I like about this example is that everyone is starting with the same source image. And so it almost establishes like a little bit of like a control for it. And so I think this is the perfect case study for like, hey, different humans get very different results with AI.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I made a video a while back where I imagined her in a library and she was holding a book. And I was like, I want her to be like an educated woman. And so I made that. And then I actually am working with a project with OpenAI actually right now. It's one that they commissioned. It's not out yet, but it will probably be out by the time this podcast releases. So if you go on my Instagram, on Caranexchen, you'll be able to go and see this filter. We made this Instagram filter where we expanded these famous paintings. And you can actually go inside through them and see these famous paintings. And I looked at my girl, the preliminary, and I was like, this could be done better. And so I hired August Camp, who is the person who taught me about this method. And she has spent way more time in Dalia than I have. She's so artistic and talented.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a lot of people would have been able to make a really good Cosmo cover. The people who would have done it best are people who have a good artistic eye, have the kind of the patience and the motivation to keep going and keep refining on the prompt and who can describe what they see in their head. And so a lot of these people are not necessarily traditional artists. I think a lot of people could have made a really, really good result. There's actually an example that I have that we can show on screen. I a while ago wanted to expand the girl with the pearl earring. So you may have seen one thing that you can do that was actually just announced is you can expand paintings in Dali. And so you can basically take a famous painting and then imagine it was all around it. So you can take like the Mona Lisa and imagine like where was she? You can take the girl with the pearl earring, imagine everything that was around her.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was in the physical environment and be reactive, it's an incredible thing to work on. Because of that, I think it's kind of different from what most people talk about when they talk about the metaverse.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came there and they didn't think of themselves as American or Brazilian or Mexican or Canadian or something like that. Nowadays, North and South America have, they're all slotted into the same grid as the old world, right? But initially they thought of themselves as English or French. They were colonists, they were settlers, right? They didn't identify with the new land as primary and the old world as secondary, right? They didn't think of themselves as a Polish American or English American, right? They thought themselves just English. And that's similar to folks who spend all of this time in this cloud continent but have not made the flip, right? You're spending the majority of your time in the cloud continent, but you're not thinking of yourself as a cloud person first yet.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their discovery of the Americas was this huge thing. It was this new frontier, right? Which is obviously thousands of years earlier. This internet frontier where we've migrated to will over time give rise to new countries just like the Americas did. The Americas people”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up from nothing in 1990 something. When we think about that, that is actually a different way of visualizing the whole thing. And you realize the internet is actually on par with the discovery of the Americas for the Europeans, right? Yes, of course, there were people in the Americas before the Europeans got there. I talk about this in the book actually, that if you go and look at the Bondu expansion or the Mongols sweeping across the world, there's essentially no ethnic group that has ever had some location since time immemorial. They just killed the previous folks and kind of took over their territory or whatever, right? So leaving that whole part of things aside from the perspective of the Europeans, like quote the discovery of the New World was this, you know, huge thing. Similarly, like the folks who went over the Bering Strait.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, this Atlantis, this cloud continent, right? So just to extend the metaphor, we're taking these commuter planes up to the cloud continent 14 hours a day and coming back and we're only spending two hours of our waking lives in your case on the land and 14 hours in the cloud, right? For other people, it might only be a few, like three or four hours. But like that's amazing. Billions of people have migrated huge chunks of their lives to this cloud continent. When I say billions, I mean like three something billion just on Facebook, right? And you add all the people with smartphones and so on. So let's say it's on their three, four billion people in the world. Half the people of the earth are now spending half their lives in this cloud continent, half their weeking hours.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can think of the internet as basically like giving rise to a new continent. Okay, imagine an Atlantis that just arose out of the middle of the ocean and people were just taking commuter flights there back and forth each day. So you'd spend eight hours in Atlantis and 16 hours at home. That's really what the internet is. You know how I can prove that?”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You and your botanic would take the car apart, and you have to hide the parts of the car so that the horse can't see them. Because the worst might get scared, right? It's stared by the appearance of the car. And then when the horse goes by, you can then reassemble your car. And of course, you look back to me and you're just like, okay, this is like incredibly comical. Like, how could they ever do this? And then, of course, exactly your point, like social networking, you think of exactly the technology. So then you're like, oh, yeah, you know, they're putting in place laws that 100 years from now, you know, the laws that are being put in place now on a lot of modern technology topics are going to look just as silly as red flag laws. Since nobody ever learns anything.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The explanation that he needs to warn people that a car is coming, well, because the car might scare the horses. So if the car comes along, is making noise and scares the horses, you know, the horses that are most of us on the road at that time, they freak out or bystanders freak out, people get hurt. Like, this would be really bad. And so literally, it's like, okay, that was how the car got rolled out. The most advanced form of this law that I've been able to find went a step further said basically if you're driving along and you actually see a horse coming at you, you see somebody on a horse coming at you in the other direction, you have to pull over to the side of the road. You have to disassemble the car to take it apart.”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cars broke down all the time. And so when you would take your car out for a ride, you'd be driving the car, and you'd often kept bringing a mechanic with you, right? Basically fixed the car when it broke. We were still getting everything to work. And so you and your mechanic or whatever, your family, you'd be out, you know, motoring along in your car on whatever dirt. And the law was that you had to employ another guy to walk 50 feet in front of the car carrying big red flags, right? Okay, so picture this. You're driving along. You're out for a nice Sunday drive. You got your kids, whatever, you got your mechanic. You're going along. You know, look, cars in those days didn't go very fast, but they did go faster than you could walk. And so you're driving along at whatever, 10, 20 miles an hour. But according to law, you have to have a guy in front of you on foot, like out in advance. And he's got these like big red flags. And you have to follow this guy because he has to stand in front of you. And so you can only motor along at whatever the three or four miles an hour that this guy can walk. And this guy's like waving the red flags. Why is this guy waving the red flags to warn everybody that a car is coming?”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Threat to like the ordering of everything from how cities were laid out, they were going to upend the ability to have modern transportation, modern shipping. They were going to upend everything from the role of local merchants. They were going to upend, you know, there was an entire industry of blacksmiths. The horse was like central to a lot of economies. A lot of people made their living off of dealing with horses. There were people who were like trained carriage drivers who all of a sudden were out of jobs. And so there was this like, all of a sudden, this huge backflash. And so what happened was a bunch of sort of state municipal level areas, both in the US, like Pennsylvania at the time, and then also in the UK, implemented their legislators implemented at the time what became known as the red flag laws. So the red flag law works as follows. Which is, okay, Mr. Car owner, you've got your fancy new car. Congratulations. You know, you're very proud of yourself. You're probably a pretty well-up person in the community. People probably generally are probably jealous of you to start with. You've got this fancy new automobile. And by the way, in those days,”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Castle cars. This is another great one. So, like cars, it's like, okay, we all live with cars, we all can't live without cars. Like, you know, there's still huge fights about how, you know, cars should be used in our society, but like there's cars everywhere. Like our society doesn't function without cars. We just kind of take them totally for granted. By the way, we take them so for granted that we just repeatedly bail out the big car companies, right? At this point, like the taxpayers have kept them in business for a long time. And so, you know, then you're just like, okay, the car must have been this obvious thing. Like, of course, you want the car. Who could have fought the car, at least for any kind of valid reason? And so again, to your point, like it turns out actually the cars where we're actually a profound threat to the sort of social order of that time of the era. This is like going back 100, 120 years. And it was basically this exact same kind of process played out with the car. And so the thing you mentioned basically, the thing that happened at the peak of kind of the anti-car hysteria at the time, the moral panic around cars was basically what happened was cars were a threat to basically if you were”
2022-12-27 · a16z Podcast · Best Clips of 2022 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source