This is already probably the most democratic, you know, small d technology of all time, in the sense of the very best AI in the world, is fully available on the apps that anybody can download.
This is just a completely different kind of computer that has these characteristics that are frankly, more like a person, which is it's right, most of the time.
It occasionally gets things wrong.
When it gets things wrong, it's able to self-critique.
And you have to kind of work with it the way that you work with a person.
You want to take advantage of the fact that it's creative, and then you want to be tolerant of the fact that it's not always correct.
AI basically, has snapped everything right back into the 20 mile square radius around where I sit, to just an incredible degree.
So I would say like almost 100 of the actually interesting AI companies in the West are happening at sort of ground zero right here in Silicon Valley.
There's a bakery owner somewhere using the same AI as Google CEO.
And according to Marc Andreessen, the bakery owner is winning.
The man who invented the modern web browser and built multi-billion dollar companies just revealed something remarkable.
AI is spreading backwards through society.
Individuals first, small businesses second, Fortune 500 companies third, government last.
The exact opposite of how computers evolve from mainframes to smartphones.
Mark says half a billion people already have the world's most sophisticated AI on their phones.
So the question is why are most using it to write emails, while only some are using it to build empires?
Today we're sharing a conversation Mark Andreessen had with Mark Halperin on his show NextUp.
They talk about the specific prompts that transform AI into a world-class advisor, why Silicon Valley just snapped back into a 20-mile radius after five years of dispersion, and the uncomfortable truth about America's AI race with China.
We hope you enjoy.
All right.
Next up, Marc Andreessen innovator, creator and damn successful businessman, and Early on he invented the Mosaic Internet Browser, co-founded Netscape and since then he has been the animating force and investor behind a lot of very successful companies, including some at the multiple billion dollar level.
Co-founded his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, a general partner there, and they do a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff and he knows a lot about a lot.
Mark, welcome.
Thank you, Mark.
It's great to be here.
Really happy to have you.
So much about AI I want to talk to you about, so we're going to spend a lot of the time on that.
First off, I think it's tempting to say right now, and when I think about AI, I think about where are we now and where are we going?
It's tempting to say it's between really smart, highly educated people who are adapting to it and then people who just don't have the capacity to do that in their jobs easily.
But what I'm finding is And people who do what I do, people who are well-educated, very privileged.
There's a have-nots there.
I'm a baby using it.
I'm not using it very sophisticatedly very often, but I am Einstein compared to some of my counterparts.
And I'm wondering, is that how you see it?
And what do you think differentiates those who understand how powerful it is even now, versus those who seem oblivious to it?
Yeah, so I think there's kind of a fake story, and then there's a real story.
So the fake story is kind of the classic Marxist story which is you know oh, only the rich people have it.
Only the fancy people have it.
You know, the big tech companies have it.
Everybody else is kind of going to be left out in the cold.
And that's not actually what's happening.
And there's a lot of data on this now that has been released by these companies to justify what I'm about to say.
So the real story is this is already probably the most democratic, you know, small d company technology of all time, in the sense of the very best AI in the world, is fully available on the apps that anybody can download.
And, you know, take your pick, ChatGPT, Cloud, Gemini, Grok, you know, Mistral, any of these.
By the way, DeepSeek from China.
You download any of these apps, you're getting state-of-the-art, like the full, most sophisticated, powerful AI capability in the world.
And you know the number of people already who downloaded these apps is parts of a half billion, on its way to a billion.
And you know individual people are figuring out.
You know basically how to appropriate this in their lives.
And what you see in the data is there's.
You know maybe, what you'd expect, which is there are a slice of people who just use these new systems all the time, like literally all day, for everything.
And you know, in a lot of cases they're reporting that they're getting enormous benefits from that.
And then there's a lot of people who are experimenting and trying to figure it out.
And then there are people who are just, you know not, you know for whatever reason not interested or not engaged.
But I would say it's incredible out of the gate how distributed technology this technology already is.
And then I could just say, like I don't have that you know, with all my resources and with all my connections, I don't have access to a better AI than the one that you just download off the app store.
And so I think this is actually like just an incredible story of the most advanced technology in the world being available to everybody right out of the gate.
You got to get people to use it to take advantage of it, right?
So I've got a friend who's drafted a book and took it to his agent and the agent said it's 140000 words.
You got to cut it down to 70,000.
And I said, if you try to do that by hand, even if you hire someone, it's going to take you months.
I can do it in an hour.
And I can say to AI, don't change the style.
Don't change the tone.
Don't cut anything that, you know, ruins the story.
And he said, that's immoral.
The publisher will be mad that I did it that way.
It's not right.
How should I answer that person?
Yeah, so the exact same arguments emerged years ago with the introduction of computers.
I actually just – I've been watching a lot of old science fiction movies with my kid.
And there's this famous science fiction movie Tron from 1982 that had the first real computer graphics movies.
And it was disqualified for an Oscar for special effects because it used computers.
And so there's this kind of long tradition of, whatever the new tool is, it's sort of illegitimate and there must be something wrong with it.
In this particular case, I mean, there's no doubt there are people who feel the way that your friend feels.
That issue was actually litigated in the last Hollywood strikes in the movie and the film and TV side of the creative profession.
The last round of strikes actually, it's actually funny.
They started streaming strikes and then AI hit and then it became AI strikes.
But the sentiment with the studios actually with the unions was that the following, which is if you're a writer and you use AI, that's totally fine.
What's not allowed is for the studio to basically use the AI and then claim it was a writer.
But basically what the unions and studios in Hollywood decided was it's another tool.
It's like the word processor.
It's like the personal computer.
It's like using a printer instead of writing out a manuscript by hand.
And so I think there are people who feel like your friend does, but I think the world is already adapting very fast to using it.
And frankly, one of those reasons you probably pointed out to your friend is, like I don't even know that anybody could tell anybody.
Right.
And so you know, if you're going to have a moral prohibition on something that people can just do and nobody knows about, like you know, is that really going to work?
And so I think those, those sort of self-imposed barriers are probably going to collapse quite quickly.
I hope so.
Fortune put out a list of the top American companies using AI.
Alphabet, Visa, JPMorgan Chase, the top three.
We talked about just now on an individual level.
If you were the CEO of a company or advising a CEO, how important is it to be on that list?
In other words, how important is it to get to your company to adapt, whether it's for internal or consumer facing.
How important is it right now?
Yeah, so this goes back to actually where we started, which is, and in fairness, the old model of adapting actually computers.
When computers came out, the old model was the largest institutions get technology first and then everybody else gets it later.
And so you know the way the computer rolled out was.
The government actually got mainframe computers, first starting in the 1940s, and then big companies got computers mainframes in the 1950s, 1960s.
Small companies started to get computers, what were called minicomputers at the time, in the 1970s.
And then we as individuals only got PCs in the 1980s.
And so it took 40 years for basically technology to cascade down from the largest organizations in the world to small businesses and to the individual.
This technology AI, is going the opposite, which is, like I said, the most sophisticated capabilities are available on the consumer app today.
And then what we're finding is consumers are adapting the fastest, just individuals in their lives.
The small businesses are then adopting right after that, because a small business typically is just a person who's making decisions for their own business.
Very easy to do new things.
Then companies are then following small companies And so you know the companies on that list some of you know.
Obviously some of them are doing interesting things, but in general, big companies right now are pretty tied up in knots internally kind of, in all their processes and in all their legacy systems and all their you know organization and training and but their unions and like all the other issues they have to deal with you know they're actually relatively slow to adopt compared to individuals and small businesses.
And then government is the late adopter, right?
And so governments, of course, are already trying to figure out, you know kind of how to adapt to this technology, but They're not adopting it very fast because they can't because of all their rules and systems and bureaucracy.
And so there's been a real inversion of how technology moves through our society.
That's really become, you know, AI is becoming a case study for.
And so the answer to your question is I think big company CEOs and you know many of them are doing this, but I think they really have to force the issue on this inside their companies because you know, these big companies are just such now giant bureaucracies with so many rules that, like by default, they'll smother new ideas.
And so it's a real act of leadership to get on a list like that and be able to actually say with pride that we're on the leading edge.
So if your friend owned a bakery and he said Mark, I want you to come in and help me figure out how to use AI, how could someone who owns a single storefront bakery use it now?
Yeah, I mean, there's dozens of ways.
It obviously depends on what your business goals are.
There are baker dozens of ways.
And so yeah, I mean look, the first thing you can do is just say look, you know, do a performance review for me.
Like, just feed in, you know, here's my staffing schedule.
You know, what do you think of it?
Give me a critique of it.
You know, here's the last, you know, 100 emails we've gotten from customers.
What are the patterns of that?
You know, here's the copy for the ad that we're going to place in the local newspaper or, you know, put up on Facebook or whatever.
Like, you know, what do you think of this?
You know, let it do a performance assessment.
A lot of people find it very effective for personal coaching.
And so you know the owner might use it that way, or might you know, ask the employees to use it that way?
And then I think where the power really kicks in is, say, you're a small business owner.
You've got one bakery.
Now you want to have two bakeries, right?
And you want to have a brand.
And then maybe if that works, you're going to have five and then 50 and then 500.
And then you're going to have, you know, packaged products going to supermarkets and so forth.
And then there you basically turn the AI into a thought partner, right?
And you basically say okay, you know what are the best ways to expand from a single business.
You know outlet to.
You know to multiple and you know turn this into a larger business.
And you know the AI.
You know it's been, you know because it's been trained on, you know some large percentage of the total amount of human knowledge like it has within it all the information on how you know Ray Kroc turned McDonald's from you know a single restaurant into McDonald's, and how all these other you know entrepreneurs before actually did this.
And so it can, you know, explain with you and help you, you know, figure out how to do this for your own business.
Um, And then you know, the thing that you get into as you use it is basically it's just like wow, it's like having the world's best coach mentor therapist, right advisor, you know.
Board member.
But it's like infinitely patient.
And so it's like, it's happy to have the conversation.
It's happy to have the conversation 50 times.
It's happy if you admit your insecurities, it'll coach you through them.
You know, it's happy if you run wild speculations that don't make any sense.
It's happy to do all that at four in the morning.
And so the people who are using it a lot are finding it's, you know it actually turns out to be very supportive in their general real life.
Could you say, here's the recipe for our best-selling cinnamon rolls.
How can I make it better?
Yes.
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah, you can say, and by the way, part of the art of AI, right, is what questions to ask it, right?
Because, you know, it turns out, you know, it can answer, you know, many, many different questions.
So you have to actually create it at best.
Yeah, and so you can say, like, here's my current recipe.
You know, how might I improve it?
You can also say, you know, what's the best cinnamon roll recipe in the world?
We're backwards from that.
And then you could also say look, I want to make the best fun of the world, but I need to do it at a set price.
You know, what are the ways to cost optimize?
By the way, the other thing you can ask it is you can ask it, what question should I be asking?
Right.
And so you could plug in.
I run a bakery, dot, dot, dot.
What question should I be asking?
And you'll find it's actually a thought partner in helping you figure out what questions to ask.
Right.
Brilliant.
So the other day I said I want to know every Republican who voted against any of the articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton.
Give me the list of every Republican.
And it came back and it listed some Democrats and mixed in there.
And it said they were Democrats.
And I said, back, I only want Republicans.
And it said, oh, sorry, I inadvertently included Democrats.
Now, I could understand a human being, a junior researcher doing that.
But how could AI make a mistake, have it pointed out to it and say, oh yeah, how could that be in the model?
Yeah, so this gets technical, and I'd be delighted to get deeply into the technical details.
I'll try to resist.
It's a new kind of computer.
And the way to think about it is, computers up until now have been what you might call hyper-literal right.
Where computers?
Up until now they do math really fast, but they do the same thing every single time.
They exhibit no creativity whatsoever.
And if you expect them to exhibit creativity, they just can't do it.
And then if they make a mistake, it's because the human programmer made a mistake.
And that has made computers super useful for running large math exercises and doing a lot of things that computers do.
But, of course, computers have never been creative.
Computers have never been able to write you poetry or work with you on your cinnamon bun recipe.
It's just never even been a thing that we can think about.
So it's never had kind of that human element of creativity to it.
This is just a completely different kind of computer that has these characteristics that are frankly, more like a person, which is it's right, most of the time.
It occasionally gets things wrong.
When it gets things wrong, it's able to self-critique.
And you have to kind of work with it the way that you work with a person.
And so you have to basically figure out as you use it, like you want to take advantage of the fact that it's creative and then you want to be tolerant of the fact that it's not always correct, just like you're working with a person.
Now, having said that, when it makes easily avoidable mistakes, where it's just like makes boneheaded fact mistakes, you know we call those hallucinations.
The latest systems are much, much, much better at not doing that.
They're much more accurate.
And in particular for anybody watching this, if you want to kind of see this in action.
I'll just give an example.
If you buy the full version of ChatGPT, there's a model called GPT-5 Pro, which is the latest one.
And then there's something called Deep Research, which is a switch that you turn on.
And if you use GPT-5 Pro with Deep Research, you ask a question like that.
At this point I wouldn't say it's bulletproof, but it's really good um, as things, vastly grounded and literally you can watch it work and it'll literally go out and even that it'll like check all the authority, authoritative sources and it'll, you know, it'll go on commercegov or whatever and check the voting records and and verify that, and so i think that problem is being ironed out, you know, kind of as we speak.
Yeah, for people watching, listening who, who haven't used it or not used it much.
The thing you said about good prompts is so key and and that what does differentiate uh, that you know, the people really getting productive at it from not, and and One of the things that you and I have talked about is it is hilarious.
It can write, if you give it the right prompts, it can write stuff that is so funny.
And where does that come from?
How does it have the capacity to understand?
Because humor involves metaphors and sophistication and humanity.
How can it do that?
Yeah, so this gets to this idea of how it's trained.
So Basically, what these systems are is they're basically the accumulation of human knowledge over time.
And by the way, most of the training data is just literally the internet, right?
So one of the reasons that this is happening now and not 20 years ago is because the internet finally got big enough not just the web finally got big enough to have all this information in it, right?
And so if you go out on the internet today, you can find all kinds of material online.
You can find classic screenplays from the golden age of cinema 400 years ago.
You can find literally people joking with each other on social media all day long.
You can find professional comedians doing oral histories of how they did great comedy.
So there's just like there's incredible amounts of information that are online about comedy and about what's funny.
And then all of that information is in the training data.
So it's all kind of fed into the AI during the training process.
And the AI basically processes it through like any other kind of data and comes out the other end and just basically is like oh, you know now that AI is a world-class expert in humor, right?
And, of course, you know, look, you could be an expert in humor and not actually be funny, right?
And there are, I don't know, probably professors of comedy or something like that in colleges who aren't very funny.
But, like, it just knows so much about what humor is.
It knows so much about the pattern of jokes.
It knows so much about what makes people laugh.
It has so many examples, you know, to be able to learn from.
And, you know, the professional comedians will tell you there are patterns to comedy, right?
You know there are.
You know, I worked with a professional comedian once on something and he said you know, the key to it is specificity.
Like you need to get, you need to just like nail the reference.
You know, another comedian will say the key is, you know, timing or pacing or the callback to the previous jump or whatever, you know, the punchline, whatever it is.
And so it just, it knows all that.
And then it's just, you know, it's now so powerful that it's actually, yeah.
Yeah, quite honestly, I find, especially at like two in the morning, I find these things hysterical.
Yeah.
All right.
Just a minute left before we take a break.
What's your advice to an individual who's barely used it or hasn't used it?
What's your advice to them to sort of how to get started?
Yeah.
So, I mean, by far the best way to do it is just download it and use it.
And, like I said, you know there's several.
You know Elon's got Brock, you know which is now fantastic.
By the way you know, it's actually interesting how these things are getting built into products now.
So you know the new versions of X, you know formerly Twitter.
Actually, if you go to any post on X there's a little rock icon that looks like a little, a little black hole icon in the upper right corner of the post.
And if you click on it, it actually calls up the rock AI to explain the post to you.
Right.
And so, like it literally is, like it can explain to you that you know, if there's some post on politics or something you don't understand what's happening.
You just lost the thread of the topic.
You just like bonk that button and you get in a dialogue with the AI.
A little AI window pops up and explains the post and you can ask for more details.
And so it's like built into that product.
Google's actually built AI now into search.
And so now when you do searches, it has this thing called AI mode and you bonk on it.
And in addition to getting the 10 blue links from Google, you now get into an AI dialogue.
And so you just start using those products, or you just download one of these apps and start using it.
And like I said, a really great question is like, okay, how do I use you?
Right.
Like, or you can teach, teach me works really well.
You can say, you know, teach me how to use you in the best way.
You know, teach you know teach, teach you know, teach me how to use you for my business.
You know, for this project.
And it'll, you know, these things love to talk, and it'll it'll happily sit there and chatter away and take you through it.
Yeah.
Just my, my sort of analog to the way you just said.
It is ask it for what you want as specifically as possible.
Don't hold back, be really specific and it will do what you ask.
All right.
More with Marc Andreessen.
That's next up.
Stay tuned.
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All right, welcome back.
We're here with Mark Andreessen still.
Mark, are you of the school that says that the United States is in an existential struggle with China?
Do you subscribe to that point of view?
I was going to say, I hope that's not true, right?
You know, I hope this is not going to walk all the way to the situation that we ended up in with the Soviet Union.
You know, like you, I grew up in an era, I'm sure you know, growing up thinking there was a significant chance that, like we're all going to die, you know, from nuclear war.
And so I hope it doesn't get back to that level of intensity.
But I do think there are a lot of historical parallels to what happened between the US and the USSR in the 20th century, you know, happening right now.
And you know you have, you know, two hegemonic superpowers that both have, you know, visions.
You know they both have visions of how society should be structured and how the sort of global political systems should be structured.
And, you know, obviously I think America's is better, you know, but they both have visions.
And, you know, they're both working, you know, to that end.
And then they both have international strengths and weaknesses militarily technologically economically, culturally.
And, you know, there is that kind of geopolitical fight happening.
So I hope we stay in this kind of I don't know what you call it mode of like coopetition, you know, tension without you know, without military strife.
You know, I hope we stay, you know, in that mode.
But like it's a sufficiently fraught situation, you know, that we certainly need.
And, you know, and by the way, have a national strategy for how to win that.
And we need to make sure that we do.
Right.
Do they have any one or two advantages over us in terms of A.I.?
?
Yeah, they do.
So they have two advantages.
And by the way, I should say, we have many advantages.
I'm very bullish on the US, and I think we're in a better position.
I wouldn't trade places with them, and we could talk about that.
But having said that, they do have strengths, and in particular, they have two key strengths.
Number one is they do have the advantages of a command economy.
And you know like, generally speaking 100, like I'm on the side of, like you know free markets and you know decentralization and you know having a dynamic economy and we have advantage.
You know we have much.
You know we have much better entrepreneurial ecosystem and so forth.
Having said that, they do have this advantage where, when their government decides that something's a national priority like they just do it.
And by that I mean not only does the government do it, but they just tell the private sector.
You do the following
And so they had this thing the Soviets had, where the entirety of society is able to go up against single missions.
We're just a lot more fractious than that.
And so we kind of navigate our way through this on our own way, but we don't have anywhere near that level of organization.
So that gives them the ability to execute against specific areas of focus in arguably a superior way.
And then the other advantage that they have is we in the US voluntarily deindustrialized, starting 30 or 40 years ago.
And that industrialization, the making of physical things, and particularly the making of machines, has moved substantially to China.
And the way that we think about machines now is that they're basically the hardware version of software.
They're the embodied version of AI.
Um, and so, you know, the car is not just steel and glass anymore.
It's a, you know, it's a, it's a robot on wheels.
Um, you know, the drone isn't just a toy, a toy anymore.
It's a, it's a computer, you know, that flies through the air.
Um, you know the navigates itself.
Um, you know robots are coming.
You know they're, you know we're, we're gonna, we're gonna live in a world that's just like completely wash with, with with robots in the decades ahead.
Um, and, and China is just like, there's a consequence in the last 30 years of policy.
China is just like way ahead on everything involved in building physical things.
And then this administration and others have had visions of how to recapture that, but we have a long way to go.
As the US tries to become more of a manufacturing country, it would seem to me AI integrated into manufacturing is extremely powerful.
Are they ahead of us on that?
As you said, our biggest companies here are slow adapters of AI.
Are there big manufacturers now using AI more than we are?
Yeah.
So I think unleashed, we could do that faster and better.
If we could manufacture in the US the way that we used to 30 or 40 years ago, we could definitely do that faster for a variety of reasons.
We have better software engineers.
We have a more flexible and dynamic economy.
We could do that faster.
The big issue is just we have chosen to not be a manufacturing economy.
We chose to move that offshore.
And for a very long time, we were very proud that we moved that offshore for a variety of reasons.
Um and so the the, the challenge is not so much that you know that we couldn't, in theory, do exactly what you just described better than they can.
It's just like if, if you just take, if you're not manufacturing things, then you can't do that at all.
Right.
Which, which is the situation that we've worked ourselves into.
And so uh, you know, just there, you know their their, you know their car, just to pick one, their car.
Industry is like moving like incredibly fast with this.
Um, you know we, and look, we have to.
You know, we have our superstar companies.
We have Tesla.
You know, in particular, that that's world-class at this and you know still.
You know better than better than the Chinese today.
But like, The Chinese are moving really fast.
And if you talk to people, we don't have a lot of exposure to Chinese cars in the US because the trade barriers are so high that they really are not cost effective to sell here.
But it's like if you go to the Middle East and talk to just like normal affluent people, you know they're not driving Chinese cars by choice.
You know, not because they can't afford a Mercedes, because the Chinese cars are better.
And the Chinese cars are like full self-driving electric autonomous, you know voice AI, like very state of the art and exactly what you're talking about.
And we still have car companies, but ex-Tesla.
Mainly what they do is they assemble third-party parts that are coming from other places.
The Chinese are just doing a much more specific, advanced level of unified hardware and AI manufacturing.
By the way, you see that in drones.
Virtually the entire global drone industry and virtually the entirety of the drone industry in terms of people using drones in the US.
Virtually 100 of those drones are made in China.
And again...
That's not because we couldn't make them.
It's because we chose a set of policies that drove that.
We better start making them.
I want to talk to you about Silicon Valley.
As much as it's been covered for the last quarter century.
I don't think the coverage is even close to explaining how significant it has been.
There are great stories like yours of people who have been so successful.
But the influence over our culture, our government, our economy and the world is just so massive today.
If someone like you understands engineering markets economics technology, there was a long period where you had to live in Silicon Valley if you wanted to succeed and have the relationships and the interactions
Is that still the case?
Is Silicon Valley still a place you have to physically be if you want to excel.
Someone with those skills?
Yeah.
So I should start by saying I'm an import, right?
So I'm, I'm, I'm from out of town.
Um, you know I I grew up in the rural Midwest Wisconsin.
You know kind of you know in the tundra.
Um, and so, you know, I, I, you know, I, I, I didn't grow up here.
I, you know, I I didn't get to participate kind of in the heyday of you know back when we actually by the way, it was called Silicon Valley because they originally made chips here
Right.
Uh, you know, speaking of manufacturing, of course, lock blocks.
I stopped doing that, but you know that's not thoroughly illegal in California.
Um, and so, You know, I wasn't here for that.
I wasn't here for the Periscope computer.
So I'm an inheritor of, you know, the phenomenon that you're describing that other people built.
What year did you show up?
Yeah, so I showed up in 1994.
And, you know, Silicon Valley is really dated.
You know it sort of dates to the early 50s, you know, with Hewlett Packard in particular, sort of the original company.
But the 90s is when so much of what we think of now in terms of consumer-facing, social media internet, right
I mean, that's a pretty big dividing line.
So yeah, you missed the Hewlett-Packard days, but you were there for the phase we're in now, right?
Yeah, but I just bring it up because basically the history of Silicon Valley it's a sequence of waves, right?
And so it's, and it's part of what makes it special is, you know, this AI is like wave nine or wave 10, of these like just major.
You know basic microprocessors and smartphones and you know kind of cloud and social and mobile like all these.
You, you know kinds of all all all, all these ways of hits.
So, so anyway, my point is like when the value, like we're the inheritor of a tradition and a system, of the model that was built by other people.
And then to your question on geographic focus, this is very interesting thing playing out right now.
So a couple of things.
So one is like look, like I said, like the technology that's built in Silicon Valley is diffusing nationally and globally into ordinary people's hands, like at a far faster rate than in the past.
So So you don't have to be in Silicon Valley to get access to the best technology.
Like you can now get that from everywhere.
And that's very important because that didn't used to be the case.
Having said that, if you want to be at the company or start a company that's going to build the leading edge technology itself from scratch, I would say at this point, like maybe you don't need to be in Silicon Valley proper but, like you, better strongly considering.
If you're not, there's maybe three or four other places in the country where you can give it a shot.
But primarily the people that want to do that are coming to Silicon Valley.
And the important thing in the last five years that happened actually was during COVID.
We all thought actually that the Silicon Valley geographic concentration was actually unwinding.
And we thought that you know virtual work and remote work and you know you could be able to start companies everywhere.
And you had all these kind of booms happening in places like Miami and Austin and other places with lots of high-tech entrepreneurs.
And, you know, it felt like the whole thing was, you know, really distributing out.
AI basically, has snapped everything right back into the 20-mile-square radius around where I sit, to just an incredible degree.
So I would say almost 100 of the actually interesting AI companies in the West are happening at sort of ground zero right here in Silicon Valley.
And then, by the way and this is good news and bad news, by the way the other place in the world where these things are happening is basically the Shanghai-Beijing axis of China.
These are the two places.
And then you also say a very important thing, which is it's just not happening elsewhere in the world.
And there's kind of high-tech clusters in other places.
But if you're a sharp AI person and I'll just pick out one London you have already moved to California or you're going to, because they have just essentially decided to outlaw it.
The EU has decided to outlaw it.
And so people are being driven to the US and to California, I think in a way that's even more concentrated than it was when I first got here.
All right, last question.
Name inventions in human history that have more benefited the lives of individuals than the iPhone.
Oh, well, I mean, you know, if you go far enough back, you know, electric lighting was a big deal.
You know, steam power was a big deal.
You know, obviously antibiotics are the easy call.
I mean you know the internet itself, you know electricity, you know it's, you know indoor plumbing, you know it's hard to question those.
And people sometimes say like, you know, you guys aren't inventing important things.
Like, why are you inventing something as important as indoor plumbing?
And it's like, well, that was a big one.
I can see it.
But like, you know, we did, we did solve that problem.
I would if you said.
If you said, give up your iPhone or switch to an outhouse, I would switch to an outhouse.
I think that, you know, I think there's a lot to that.
And maybe a serious point underneath that, which I was being serious.
I was being serious.
No Well, no.
So maybe to say the generalization you can make, for that is, I think people may be systematically underweight.
The importance of communication.
So being able to be connected with other people and then being able to actually, you know, be able to learn things, be able to get access to information.
Like those two things.
There's something in the culture I was just saying, in Silicon Valley culture.
There's something where like those are like looked out on as less important.
And I actually think to your point like they're actually incredibly important and they're foundational for everything else that people do.
I mean, you know, human connection and human learning is, you know, both of those are at the center of everything that we do.
And so, yeah, I would make that same trade.
Here's my idea for a reality show.
You put someone like us in Cleveland for a week without their smartphone and give them a series of tasks which they would otherwise conduct with their smartphone.
Good luck.
By the way, I had relatives in the 70s who still had outhouses, right?
Yeah, it's fine.
Passes, 100%.
Oh, well. it's fine.
And in Iowa in January, you start to reconsider whether that's fine.
Um, in the middle of the night when it's 40 below, but.
But like the past, the past was not that long ago.
Um, and you know, yeah.
All right.
Mark Andreessen, very grateful to you.
I scratched the surface.
I had a list of about 15000 questions that AI winnowed down to me to 1500, but we didn't get to them all.
Uh, very grateful to you though for making time.
And again, uh so uh, just not many people on the planet who understand this stuff as well as you do.
So grateful to you for sharing.
And hopefully we inspired a few people to learn how to use the latest technology.
Thank you.
Good.
Fantastic.
Thank you, Mark.
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