Marc Andreessen: AI arrived at exactly the right moment

If we didn't have AI, we'd be in a panic right now about what's going to happen to the economy. We've actually been in a regime for 50 years of very slow technological change in the face of declining population growth. The timing has worked out miraculously well. We're going to have AI and robots precisely when we actually need them. The remaining human workers are going to be at a premium, not at a discount.

This is a very, very historic time. AI is the philosopher stone. Now we have a technology that transfers the most common thing in the world which is sand converted into the most rare thing in the world which is thought.

Everybody wants to talk about job loss but really what you want to look at is task loss. The job persists longer than the individual tasks.

People aren't fully grasping how much this changing. And people who really want to improve themselves and develop their careers should be spending every spare hour in my view at this point talking to AI being like, 'All right, train me up.'

Awesome, Lenny. Thank you. It's great to be here.

This is a very, very historic time. I think 2025 was maybe the most interesting year in my entire career and probably life, and I think I would expect 2026 to exceed that.

Yeah, I've seen some stuff. So, it feels like two things are happening. One is the trust that a lot of people have had in kind of what you describe as legacy institutions around the world is I think in kind of full scale collapse right now. By the way, there's a lot of data to support that. And so I think there's just a lot of structures and orders and institutions that people have just relied on for a long time that have just proven to not be up for the challenge. And then kind of corresponding with that is the national and global conversation have become, let's say, liberated. And so, this sort of incredible revolution that we have in kind of what I've described as freedom of speech, freedom of thought, ability for people to openly discuss things that maybe they couldn't discuss even a few years ago, is just dramatically expanded. And I think that's now on a one-way train for just a much broader range of discourse. And then, there's also just these incredibly massive geopolitical shifts that are happening. And obviously, the US is changing a lot, Europe is changing a lot, China is changing a lot, Latin America, by the way, is changing a lot. Very dramatic events playing out down there right now, kind of all over the world. Like I think a lot of assumptions are being pulled out into the daylight and re-examined. And then it's kind of the fact that all these things are happening at the same time, right? And so you've got all of these countries and industries where things are kind of increasingly in upheaval, but you have AI as this kind of new technology that's going to really affect things. And then you've got citizens being able to fully participate and being able to argue things out. So, it's kind of like those three kind of big mega things are kind of all colliding at the same time. And I think we're probably just at the very beginning of all three of those. And those all feel like kind of historical moment shifts, comparable in magnitude to maybe the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, maybe the end of World War II. It certainly feels like that.

I think at this point it's pretty clear with our technology hats on that this stuff is really working now. And so there was this kind of when there was a ChatGPT moment three years ago, it was only by the way only three years ago, right? It was the ChatGPT moment and the big question was all right this is like incredibly fun and creative and we have machines now that can compose Shakespeare and rap lyrics and this is amazing. But then there was this big question like can you harness this technology for reasoning and for problem solving in domains that really matter, medicine and science and law and so forth. And it turns out the answer to that is yes. And the last 12 months and especially the last three months have really proven that AI can really do, you're seeing it all now, AI is now developing new math theorems. Over the holiday break, it feels like the AI coding thing really hit critical mass and the world's best programmers, including like Lisbald's, for the first time over the holiday break basically said yeah AI is now coding better than we can. And so that's incredibly powerful and I think we all kind of assume that AI now is going to get really good at reasoning in any domain in which there are verifiable answers and so that's going to include many very important domains. So the technology feels like it's moving fast and it's going to be working really well. I think the thing that is not well understood, I think a lot of people in the industry have kind of what I would describe as this one-dimensional thing which is okay as a result of the technology working AI just kind of sweeps the world and changes everything. And I think that's kind of the wrong frame. I think it's based on an incomplete understanding of the world that we live in or the world that we've been living in for the last 80 years and I would call out two things in particular. So one is it has felt to us like in the US and the west for the last whatever 30 years or 50 years it's felt like we've been in a time of great technological change but actually if you look for actually evidence of that, statistical evidence, analytical evidence, you basically can't find it. And in particular economists have a way of measuring the rate of technological change in the economy that is productivity growth which we could talk about what that means but basically it's the mathematical expression of the impact of technology on the economy and productivity growth for the last 50 years has actually been very low not very high. So we all feel like it's been very high, there's been lots of technological change, what's actually happening is it's been very low and in fact the pace of productivity growth in the US is running at about half of what it in my lifetime, in our lifetimes, it's been running at about half the pace that it ran between 1940 and 1970. And it's been running at about a third the pace that it ran between about 1870 to about 1940. And so statistically in the US in the west technology progress in the economy, technology impact in the economy has actually slowed way down. And so the AI thing is going to hit, but it's hitting an environment in which we have actually had almost no technological progress in the actual economy for a very long time. So we could talk about that. And then there's this other incredible thing that's happening, which is the demographic collapse. It's sort of a western phenomenon, an increasingly global phenomenon, which is the rate of reproduction of the human species is in rapid decline. And there are many countries including the US where the rate of reproduction is under two meaning that many countries around the world by the way including China which is a really big deal are actually going to depopulate over the next century. And so you have this kind of precondition that says there's actually been very little technological progress happening in the world and the world is going to depopulate and so AI is going to enter a world in which those two things are true and I think this is incredibly important because we actually need AI to work in order to get productivity growth up, which is what we need to get economic growth up. And we actually need AI to work because we're going to need machines to do all the jobs that we're not going to have people to do because we're literally going to depopulate the planet over the next hundred years. And so I think the interplay of these factors is going to be much more interesting and frankly more complex than a lot of people have been thinking.

The way I think about this and yeah, we have a 10-year-old and we actually homeschool and so we think a lot about this. So I think the way to think about the impact of AI on people, specifically people as individuals, I think it's actually a lot of people just focus on kind of this straightforward and or overly simplistic view of just literally job gains, job losses which we could talk about but there's two specific things at the level of an individual person and individual kid. So I think it's pretty clear that AI is going to take people who are good at doing things and it's going to make them very good at doing things. And so it's going to be a tool that's going to sort of raise the average kind of across the board. And you see that playing out already. Anybody who's in a position where they need to write something or design something or write code or whatever, if they're pretty good at it today, they use AI and all of a sudden they're very good at it. And so there's sort of that aspect to it. And I think the way the education system very large is going to teach AI is going to be based, hopefully a lot on that. But then there's this other thing that's happening which we're also starting to see and we're really seeing it particularly in coding right now. Where the really great people are becoming spectacularly great. And so you just kind of use the term you think about like the super-empowered individual. So the individual who is really good at coding or really good at making movies or really good at making songs or really good at designing art or whatever those things are or podcasting or hopefully venture capital, if you're very good at it and you can really harness AI you can become spectacularly great and super productive. And I'm sure you have a lot of friends in this category as well but the really really good coders are experiencing this. My friends who are really good coders are like, 'Oh my god, all of a sudden I'm not twice as good as I used to be. I'm like 10 times as good as I used to be.' And so I think at the unit of n equals one of an individual kid, I think the question is kind of how do you get them in a position where they're kind of this super-empowered individual such that they're going to be really deep in whatever it is they're going to do, but they're going to be deep in a way that's going to let them fully use the power of AI to be not just great, but to be spectacularly great. And I think that's the real opportunity and at least that's what we're shooting for and that's what I would encourage parents to shoot for.

Yeah. So, this term agency that's become very popular certainly in California for the last couple years. It's really interesting because I had a lot of trouble with this early on because I'm like agency. What are they talking about? And what they're kind of talking about is initiative, willingness to, you could just do things. What is it? The demo bird has the great term live player. You can be like a primary participant in events. And at first I was like, well, yeah, that's kind of obvious, right? Like of course. And then I'm like oh actually it's not so obvious anymore because kind of your point I think so much of our society is based on like there are all these rules and everybody gets taught kind of by default you're supposed to follow all these rules. And then everybody if you break the rules like everybody gets freaked out it's like oh my god he broke the rules. And so we have somehow worked our way kind of psychologically, sociologically into a state in which I guess the natural assumption for a lot of people is the thing that you for example you want to train kids to do is follow all the rules. And you could argue that kind of the school system, the K through 12 school system or whatever has gotten kind of more and more focused on that over time. And it's like yeah, it's like no, you should actually and again, especially at unit n equals one, of your kid. It's like and look, there's something to be had. I just had this conversation with my 10-year-old last night actually. I rolled out the concept of in order to lead, you must first learn to obey, right? In order to issue orders, you must learn how to follow orders. And you kind of try to keep him with some level of structure in his life and not just pure agency but yeah I mean and so look some rules are important and so forth but yeah no look there is a huge premium in life on being somebody who is able to fully take responsibility for things fully take charge run an organization lead a project create something new and maybe yeah that has been maybe a little bit diminished in our culture over the last 30 years it's healthy that there's now a term for that that is coming back into vogue. And again that's how I view AI for kids is like okay AI should be the ultimate lever on the world for a kid with agency to be able to say okay I can actually be a primary contributor right whether that's I can be a primary contributor in everything from developing new areas of physics to writing code to being an artist to writing novels like whatever that thing is I can fully participate in the world I can really change things and that combination of that idea combined with this technology feels very healthy to me.

And I'll move the world. Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, so it's actually funny you mention that. So the early kind of scientists including like Isaac Newton were super obsessed with this concept of alchemy, right? It's like they developed Newtonian physics and he developed calculus and all these things but the thing he was really obsessed with was alchemy which was the thing he could never get to work. And alchemy was the transmutation of lead into gold which meant the transmutation of something that was very common which was lead into something that was very rare and valuable which was gold. And they there was this he spent decades trying to figure out this thing called the philosopher stone which would be basically the machine or the process that would be able to transmute the common thing into the rare thing, lead into gold. And he never figured it out and it's incredibly frustrating nobody ever figured that out. And now we literally with AI have a technology that transfers sand into thought.

Right, the most common thing in the world which is sand converted into the most rare thing in the world which is thought. And so AI is the philosopher stone. It actually is that and it's just this incredibly powerful tool. And that's where I get so excited. I mean and again this is what we're doing with our 10-year-old which is like all right a primary thing that we want to make sure to do is to make sure that he knows fully how to leverage and get benefit out of the philosopher stone, right? Which is to say AI and that's certainly central to everything we're teaching him. There's this meme going around that Silicon Valley people don't let their kids use computers. And I just there may be a handful of people who are like that. I don't know. I think it's more honestly the other way around, which is the more you're kind of plugged into stuff in Silicon Valley, the more important it is to make sure that your kids actually fully understand this and know how to use it. And that's certainly the mode that we're in. And that's certainly the mode that I would encourage parents to think about.

This is the challenge and again this kind of goes to your original question which is education there's two completely different ways to think about education. The way that's usually thought about and talked about is kind of at the level of a nation, right? So it's like a national level issue or maybe a state level issue in the US, which is basically like how do you educate all the kids? And of course, that's incredibly important. And of course, you're going to need some level of large scale system like the national K through 12 school system or something like that in order to do that. But then there's this other question which is like at n equals 1 for an individual kid like what can you do with an individual kid? And so I'll just give you kind of the ultimate answer to that question, which is it's been known for centuries that the ideal way to teach a kid at the unit of n equals 1, by far the ideal way to do it is with one-on-one tutoring. Like if you just have an individual kid and the goal is to maximize an individual kid, by far you get the best results with one-on-one tutoring. And this is something that every royal family knew in history. It's something that every aristocratic class knew in history. There's all these amazing examples. Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle. He took over the world, right? Many of the great kings and queens and royal families and aristocrats and so forth over the course of centuries always had this approach. There's actually also statistical evidence, analytical evidence that this is correct. There's this massive question in the field of education, which is how do you improve educational outcomes? And basically it turns out it's very hard to improve educational outcomes except there's one method that always does it which is called the Bloom two sigma effect which is there's one method of education that routinely raises student outcomes by two standards of deviation and will take a kid from the 50th percentile to the 99th percentile and that's one-on-one tutoring. So again if you go back to like at n equals one you have a kid and a tutor and they're in this very tight loop with each other where the kid is able to constantly be on the leading edge of what they're capable of doing and they can move incredibly fast and they get kind of correction in real time, you get these better outcomes. But, to your question, it's never been economically feasible for anybody other than the richest people in society to be able to provide one-on-one tutoring for kids. AI provides the very real prospect of being able to do that. Because obviously now, if you have a kid that's super interested in something and they can talk to an LLM about it and they can ask an infinite number of questions and they can get instantaneous feedback. And in fact, you can even tell an LLM it's like, teach me how to do the following. And you can say, wow, that's like I don't quite understand what you're saying. Like, dumb it down for me a little bit. Okay, now quiz me, do I actually understand this? People can just do this today. And so I think there's this massive opportunity for parents in many walks of life to be with a little bit of time and focus to be able to say, okay, my kid's probably still going to go through a traditional education system, but I'm going to augment this with AI tutoring. And of course there's going to be tons of startups and there already are that are going to try to build all the products and services for this. Khan Academy on the nonprofit side has a big push to do this. And so I think the broad answer might be a hybrid approach with schools plus one-on-one tutoring through AI. There's also this great, you may have heard there's this great new private school system called Alpha, in which everything I just described is kind of the basis of their philosophy, which is it's a combination of in-person schools and teachers, but it's also heavily based on AI and AI tutoring. And so I think there is a magic formula in here that I think is going to apply much more broadly. And for parents interested in this now would be a great time to really start to think hard about that and to look at the options.

Yeah. So the job substitution job loss thing is just very reductive. It's an overly simplistic model. And again it goes back to what I said at the very beginning which is we've actually been in a regime for 50 years of very slow technological change in the economy. And so again like I said it's at a half the rate of the previous era and then a third the rate of like 100 years ago. And so we're coming out of this kind of phase where we've had like almost no technological progress in the economy. We've had remarkably little job turnover as a result of that relative to any historical period. And so even if AI ticks up, even if AI triples productivity growth in the economy, which would be a massively big deal, it would take us back to the same level of job turnover that was happening between 1870 and 1930. And if you go back and you read accounts of 1870 to 1930, people just thought the world was awash with opportunity. At that rate of technological transformation, kids were able to develop new careers into new areas of the economy, building new kinds of products and services. A huge part of everything in our modern world today was kind of invented and proliferated during that period. And so even if AI triples the pace of economic change in the economy, it's going to just translate to a much higher rate of economic growth, it's going to translate to a much higher rate of job growth. And there will be some level of task level and job level substitution that will take place but that will be swamped by the macro effects of economic growth and innovation that will happen and then corresponding to that there will be hiring blooms quite honestly I think all over the place. And then again go back to the other thing which is this is all happening in the face of declining population growth and increasingly population shrinkage. And so human workers in many many countries over the next 10, 20, 30 years are going to be at more and more of a premium literally because you're going to have shrinking population levels. We don't really want to get into politics particularly but it does feel like the world broadly is going to reverse course on the rates of immigration that we've had for the last 50 years. It seems to be kind of a broad-based thing happening with rise in nationalism, concerns about the rate of immigration and immigration historically in countries like the US it's kind of ebbed and flowed over time based on how the national mood shifts. And so if you combine in a country like the US or any country in Europe if you combine declining population with less immigration the remaining human workers are going to be at a premium not at a discount. And so I think that combination of kind of faster productivity growth, faster economic growth, and then slower population growth and less immigration actually means there's going to be much less of this kind of dystopian no jobs thing. I just think it's probably totally outpaced.

Yeah. Well, look, if we didn't have AI, we'd be in a panic right now about what's going to happen to the economy. Because what we'd be staring at is a future of depopulation and depopulation without new technology would just mean that the economy shrinks. So it would mean that the economy kind of itself shrinks over time. The opportunity diminishes. There are no new jobs. There are no new fields. There's no new source of consumer demand for spending on things. And so you would be very worried about going into a period of severe decline, of stagnation. And essentially you'd be looking at these very dystopian scenarios of an economy kind of self-euthanizing itself over time. And so you'd be very worried about the opposite of what everybody thinks that they're worried about. The only reason we're not worried about that is because we now know that we have the technology that can substitute for the lack of population growth and then also for the lack of immigration that's likely. And so I would say the timing has worked out miraculously well in the sense that we're going to have AI and robots precisely when we actually need them to keep the economy from actually shrinking. And I just think that's just a fundamentally good news story. To get to the mass job loss thing that people are worried about, on the other side of things, you'd have to look at far far higher rates of productivity growth. You'd have to look at rates of productivity growth that are 10, 20, 30, 50% a year, something like that, which are orders of magnitude higher than we've ever had in an economy in the history of the planet. It's possible that we get that. I mean, look, I have my utopian temptation along with everybody else. If AI radically transforms everything overnight, then maybe let's play out the kind of utopian scenario. You get to a much higher level of productivity growth. You get to a much higher level of technological change. Corresponding to that you'll have a massive economic boom. You'll have massive growth in the economy and then corresponding with that you'll have a collapse in prices. And so the price of goods and services that are affected by or commoditized by AI the prices of those goods and services will collapse, there'll be price deflation and then as a consequence of price deflation everything that people are buying today gets a lot cheaper and that's the equivalent of a gigantic increase in wealth across the society. Think of it this way this is actually worth talking about because people I think get kind of sideways on this issue. So if AI is going to transform the economy as much as the utopians or dystopians think that it will. The necessary economic calculation of what happens is massive massive productivity growth. The consequence of massive productivity growth, what that literally means mechanically is more output requiring less input. So you get more economic output for less input. So you're substituting in AI for human workers or whatever. And as a consequence, you get this massive boom in output with much lower input costs. The result of that is you get lots of goods and services in all those affected sectors. The result of those gluts is you get collapsing prices. The collapsing prices mean that the thing today that cost you $100 now cost you $10 and now cost you $1. That's the equivalent of giving everybody a giant raise. Because now they have all this additional spending power. That additional spending power then translates to economic growth. The development of new fields. Everybody's materially much better off very quickly. And then by the way, to the extent that you do have unemployment coming out the other side of that, it's now much cheaper to provide the kind of social safety net to prevent people from being immiserated. Because the prices of all the goods and services that a welfare program has to pay for, they're all collapsing. And so the price of healthcare collapses, the price of housing collapses, the price of education collapses, the price of everything else collapses because of this incredible impact that AI is having. And so in this kind of utopian dystopian scenario that people have, there's no scenario in which everybody's just poor. In fact, it's quite the opposite, which is everybody gets a lot richer because prices collapse and then it's actually much easier to pay for the social safety net for the people who for some reason can't find a job. And so maybe we end up in that scenario. The kind of optimistic part of me says, yeah, maybe AI is that powerful and maybe the rest of the economy can actually change to accommodate that and maybe that'll happen. But the result of that is going to be a much better news story than people think it's going to be. And again, everything I've just described, by the way, is just a very straightforward extrapolation on very basic economics. I'm not making any bold predictions of what I just said. This is just a straightforward mechanical process that plays itself out if you have higher rates of productivity growth, which are necessarily the results of higher rates of technological growth. And so I think we're looking at a world that's not radically transformed the way that maybe the utopians think that it will be or the dystopians think it will be. I think it'll be more incremental for reasons we can discuss. But I think that incremental is overwhelmingly I think that process is going to be a good news process. And then even if it's much faster, it's also going to be a good news process. It'll just be a good news process in the other way that I described.

So, I should start by saying I've been wrong about tons of things, but you know, I buried those out back behind the shed.

Yes, I have them nuked out of the internet archives so they're never seen again. So, I'm wrong plenty of times also. But yeah, I mean, look, I think, yeah some of those I got right. By the way, I will say on the Peter one, I have come much more around to Peter's point of view. I would probably argue that one quite a bit differently today than I did, and I would give his view I think a lot more credit. And it actually goes to the kind of conversation we just had, which is the real form of what Peter was arguing was we have lots of progress in bits. We have lots of progress in bits, but we have very little progress in atoms. And that's the real core of what he was arguing. And I think I was a little bit missing that or kind of glossing that over a little bit because I was so focused on making sure people understood no there actually is still progress happening in bits. But I think a lot of his critiques around the lack of progress in atoms is real and again this goes back to this thing of like in the last 50 years there has just been very little technological innovation in most of the economy. There's been very little technological innovation in particular anything involving atoms, there's been very little real world technological change there just hasn't been like the built world is just not that different today than it was 50 years ago and if you contrast that, if you compare and contrast 1870 to 1930 it was a dramatically different world if you contrast 1930 to 1970 it was a dramatically different world if you contrast 1970 to today it's not that different. And look you just see that you could just walk around and it's just like oh yeah there's a bunch of buildings that were built in like 1960. And there's a bridge that was built in like 1930 and there's a dam that was built in like 1910 and there's a city that was founded in 1880 and like what have we done? Like where are new cities? Where are new dams? Where's the California high-speed rail? Like what's going on here? And so I think he is right about a lot of that. Again, this is also why I think that AI is not going to have as rapid an impact. It's not going to be again this kind of utopian or dystopian view of everything changes overnight. I think it just kind of can't happen because of the reasons that Peter articulates which is there's just so much about how the world works that's basically just wrapped up in red tape, bureaucratic process, rules, restrictions, the politics, by the way, unions, cartels, monopolies, there's all these structures in the world that are kind of economic or political or regulatory structures that basically prevent things from changing. And so let's take a great example like AI's impact on the healthcare system. By rights AI is going to have a dramatic impact on the healthcare system and in very positive ways but large parts of the medical system today are they are cartels. And so there's the doctors are a cartel and nurses are a cartel and hospitals are a cartel and then there's this push to nationalize all the healthcare systems and then you've got a government monopoly. And guess what cartels and monopolies don't like is they don't like rapid change. And so you show up as a kid and you're like, 'Wow, I've got this new technology to do AI medicine.' And they're like, 'Oh, well, does it threaten doctors' jobs?' Well, in that case, we're going to block it. And I think a lot of consumers, by the way, I see this in my life and you'll probably see this in your life also, which is ChatGPT is almost certainly a better doctor than your doctor today, but ChatGPT can't get a license to practice medicine. So, it can't substitute for a doctor. It can't prescribe medications. It can't perform procedures. And so there are these anyway so Peter I think was very articulate and has been for a long time on like no there are actually real structural impediments in the economy and in the political system that we have that actually prevent any the rates of change that are anywhere near the rates of change that people had in the past. And you can maybe say optimistically maybe the presence of the new magic technology of AI maybe it causes us to revisit a lot of these assumptions for the first time in decades to really say okay is this really the world we want to live in? Don't we actually want to get to the future faster? So maybe that would be the optimistic view.

It's time to build. That's my block in the morning of the day. Thank you for that.

This I think is a really funny question. So these three roles in particular obviously are kind of the central roles for building tech companies. So, the way I've been describing it is, you know the concept of the Mexican standoff, right? Which is the movie scene where the two guys have guns pointing at each other's heads. And then there's, if you watch like John Woo movies, he loves to have the three-way Mexican standoff where you've got like a triangle, people like, and of course it's a John Woo movie, they've got guns in both hands. So, they're all each aiming at the other two. And you got this kind of standoff situation. And so the way I've been describing this is there's like a Mexican standoff happening between those three roles between product manager, designer and coder. Specifically the following which is every coder now believes they can also be a product manager and a designer right because they have AI. Every product manager thinks they can be a coder and a designer. And then every designer knows they can be a product manager, and a coder, right? And so people in each of those roles now know or believe that with AI they don't need the other two roles anymore, right? they can do that because they can have AI do that. And then of course there's the real irony which is all three of them are going to realize that AI can also be a better manager, right? So they're going to end up aiming the guns up the org chart. But that's probably that's the next phase. And what I think is so fascinating about this Mexican standoff is they're actually all kind of correct I think right which is AI is actually a pretty good, it's actually now a really good coder. it's actually now a really good designer and it's also a really good product manager, right? It's actually good at doing all three of those things or at least doing a lot of the tasks involved in those three jobs. And so again, this goes back to the superpower, this kind of idea of the superpowered individual. Where if I'm a coder like step one is I need to make sure that I really understand AI coding and what that means and how coding is going to change in the future. specifically how to go from being a coder who writes code entirely by hand to being a coder who orchestrates a dozen instances of coding bots. there's a change in the actual job of coding itself which is happening right now but the other part of it is okay how do I become that superpowered individual how do I become a coder that also then harnesses AI so that I can also be a great product manager and I can also be a great designer right and then the same thing for the product manager which is how do I make sure that I can now use coding tools how do I make sure I can also do AI based design. And the same thing for the designer, which is how do I use AI to also become a coder and also become a product manager. And then what you get is maybe those individual roles change like maybe those are not anymore sort of stovepipe roles the way that they have been for the last 30 years or whatever. But what happens is the talented people in any of those roles become superpowered and they become good at doing all three of those things. And then those people become incredibly valuable because then those are people who can actually build and design new products right from scratch which is the most valuable thing. And so I think that's the opportunity.

Number one if you're amazing at these roles that's great but also part of being amazing at these roles is also being able to fully harness the new technology right. So if you're a master coder today and you don't ever get to the point where you figure out how to use AI to leverage your coding skills, and do more, right? Like at some point you are going to hit an issue, right? Here's another way economists talk about this, which is there's the concept of the job, but the job is not actually the atomic unit of what happens in the workplace. The atomic unit of what happens in the workplace is the task. And so the way the economists think about it is a job is a bundle of tasks. And everybody wants to talk about job loss, but really what you want to look at is task loss, right? Tasks changing. I mean the classic example of task changing was once upon a time executives never used typewriters or personal computers themselves, right? If you were a vice president of a company in 1970 or whatever, you did not have like a typewriter or computer on your desk typing things. You had a secretary who you dictated memos to, right? And then there was this change where like emails started to show up. And what would happen was the job of the secretary then went from sending out letters with stamps on them to like sending or receiving emails with the other admins. And then the secretary would print out the email and bring it into the executive's office. And the executive office would read the email on paper, scribble the reply and give that message back to the secretary who would go back and type it into the computer on his or her desk and send it as an email. Fast forward to today, none of that happens. Now executives just do all their own email. They still have secretaries or admins, but they're now doing different tasks. travel planning and orchestrating events and doing all these other things that the great admins do. And then the task set ironically of the executive has expanded to do actually more of the clerical work themselves actually sit there and type their own memos, which again 50 years ago they never would have done that. And so the executive job still exists. the secretary job still exists but the tasks have changed and I think that's a great example of what's going to happen in coding the tasks are going to change is what's product management the tasks are going to change designer tasks are going to change and so the job persists longer than the individual tasks and then as the tasks change enough then that's when the jobs change and so at the level of individual you kind of want to think of like okay I have this job the job is a bundle of tasks I need to be really good at making sure that I can swap the tasks out, right? I can really adapt, use the new technology, get really good at AI coding, for example. and then you want to kind of add skills. I can also get really good at design. I can also get really good at product management because I've got this new tool. So, you want to kind of pick up more and more scope as you do that. And then, 10 years from now, is your job title coder or coder designer, product manager, or is it just I build products or is it just I tell the AI how to build products? It's like whatever that job is called, who even knows what it's going to be, but it's going to be incredibly important because the people doing that job are going to be orchestrating the AI. And so that's the track that the best people are going to be on. And I think that's the thing to lean hard into.

Yeah. So again here I go back and again pardon maybe the history lesson but I go back like coding. So the first you may know that do you know the original definition of the term calculator. Do you know what that referred to?

It referred to people. Right. So back before there were like electronic calculators or computers or any of these things the way that you would actually do computing the way that you would do calculating like the way an insurance company would calculate actuarial tables or the military would calculate troop logistics or formulas or whatever it was the way that you would do it is you would actually have a room full of people and by the way these like big rooms you could have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people doing this and you would actually figure out you have somebody at the head of the room who was responsible for whatever the mathematical equation was and then they would parcel out the individual mathematical calculations to people sitting at desks who were doing them all by hand, right? And that job title was those people were calculators, right? And so we've gone from a world in which you literally have people doing mathematical equations by hand. Then we got the first computers. The first computers of course didn't have programming languages, right? They only had machine code, right? So the first computers were programmed with ones and zeros. And so the task of the programmer became do the ones and zeros and then that became punch cards and you can still there's still people today whose job as a programmer was to deal with the punch cards and then you got actually this big breakthrough which was called assembly language which was basically the way to do machine code but with some level of English kind of added to it and then the best programmers did assembly language and then when I was coming up it was higher level languages like C that compiled into machine code and that's what programmers did and then I still remember when scripting languages, we developed JavaScript at Netscape and then Python took off and Perl and these other scripting languages but scripting languages took off in the 2000s there was this big fight in the technical community which is is scripting real programming or not right because it's kind of cheating right because real programmers write code that compiles to machine code and real programmers do memory management themselves and they do all this whole craft of writing C code and these JavaScript or Python programmers are doing this kind of lightweight thing and does it even really count as coding and of course the answer is yes it very much counted and now most coding is done with the scripting languages right which have you see my point the scripting languages have abstracted away like five layers of detail underneath that people used to do by hand and they don't anymore and then to your point like AI coding is the next layer on that AI coding actually abstracts away the process of actually writing the scripting code right and so in one sense this is a really big deal for all the obvious reasons but on the other hand it's like okay this is the next layer of the task redefinition under the job of programmer right now what's the job of the programmer it's to your point it's not necessarily to write the code by hand but what it is now is all right now if you talk to the world's best programmers today what they'll tell you is oh my job is I'm sitting there and I'm orchestrating 10 code bots right coding bots that are running in parallel right and literally they sit there and they shift from browser to browser or terminal to terminal and their day job now is kind of arguing with the AI bots trying to get them to write the right code, right? And then debug it and fix the problems and change the spec and do all these things. And so now the job of the programmer is to argue with the coding bots, but like if you don't know how to write the code yourself, you don't know how to evaluate what the coding bots are giving you, right? And so, you asked about the 10-year-old who is super into computers and super into programming. And what I'm telling him is like, look, and by the way, he loves coding. He's on Replit all the time doing vibe coding, doing games, he's sitting there, it's hysterical, right? Because he's sitting there, it's a 10-year-old basically who spends two hours at dinner arguing with an AI for fun, right? But what I'm telling him is, no, look, you need to still fully understand and learn how to write and understand code because the coding bots are giving you code. If it doesn't work or if it's not doing what you expect or it's not fast enough or whatever, like, you need to be able to understand the results of what the AI is giving you, right? in the same way that somebody who's writing scripting language code does need to understand ultimately how the microprocessor works. And so again, it's kind of this upleveling of capability where you actually want the depth to be able to go down and be able to understand what the thing is actually doing even if you're not spending your day actually doing that by hand. And again, I look at that and I'm like, okay, now programmers are going to be 10 times or 100 times or a thousand times more productive than they used to be, right? And that is overwhelmingly a good thing. The tasks are definitely changing. The nature of the job is changing. But are human beings going to be involved in the coding process and overseeing the AI coding and all that? And the answer is of course absolutely 100%. Like no question.

Oh yeah, totally. Well, again, if you want to be one of these super Look, look, if you just want to put yourself on autopilot and like I can't be bothered and I'm just going to have AI write the code and it's going to generate whatever it does and that's fine and I'm going to be, if the goal is to be a mediocre coder, then just let the AI do it. It's fine. The AI is going to be perfectly good at generating infinite amounts of mediocre code. No problem. It's all good. If the goal is I want to be one of the best software people in the world and I want to build new software products and technologies that really matter then yeah you 100% want to still be you want to go all the way down you want your skill set to go all the way down to the assembly and machine code you want to understand every layer of the stack you want to deeply understand what's happening at the level of the chip right and the network and so forth by the way you also really deeply want to understand how the AI itself works right because you want to right because if people understand how the AI works are able to they're clearly able to get more value out of it somebody doesn't understand how it works, right? I mean, you're always more productive if you know how the machine works, right? When you use the machine and so yeah, the superpowered individual on the other end of this that wants to do great things with the new technology, yes, you 100% want to understand this thing all the way down the stack because you want to be able to understand what it's giving you, right? And when something doesn't work or when something isn't right, you want to be able to really quickly understand why that is. By the way, again, this goes back to education. AI is your best friend at helping you learn all that, right? because it's like, oh, I need to understand, I don't know, like this isn't fast enough. I need to figure out as a coder, I need to figure out how to do a different approach to memory management or something. And you can be like, well, I don't quite know how to do that. Okay, AI, let's spend 10 minutes. Teach me how to do this, right? Teach me what this all means, right? So, all of a sudden, you have this incredibly synergistic relationship with the AI where it's also helping you get better at the same time as doing a lot of work for you.

Do you remember I don't know when you were doing it but do you remember at least early on did you ever hit this where coders were like looking down their nose at you being like

And of course, and again, it was sort of this thing where they were sort of correct, which is at the beginning it wasn't fast enough or whatever. By the end, they were definitely wrong, right? Which is it got much better, much faster, and it swept the world. most coding today happens as scripting languages. And then by the way, the people along the way, the people who really understood the scripting languages and the people who understood all the lower level systems, they were the ones who were able to actually make the scripting languages actually work really well, right? And so that was a great example of this kind of adaptation. And then the result of that was a far higher number of people writing code with scripting languages than were ever writing code with lower level languages. And I think this will just kind of be a more dramatic version of that. I love that Perl was designed by a linguist. I don't know if you remember that part and that's what made it so nice to code with.

Yeah.