Marc Andreessen’s Worldview in 60 Minutes | Live on MTS

People are becoming what we now refer to as AI vampires. They've got these huge bags under their eyes. They're completely exhausted, but they're like euphoric. They're thrilled. We're entering a golden age, which is AI is going to be a superpower that everybody on the planet's going to have access to. It's like the most dramatic increase in programmer productivity in like ever.

I generally don't wish I could go back in time and do things over again, but it would be really really fun right now to be 18 or 20 or 22 and to have this capability and figure out what I could do with it. We are going to see super producers the likes of which we've never seen in the world.

Two things are pretty clear at this point. One is that...

Eric, it is great to be back.

I haven't studied this one in detail. I've been monitoring other situations but however, I mean just what I saw so far I think I just saw Anthropic's thread. I haven't read the underlying material yet, but Anthropic's thread has said they trace some blackmail behavior literally to the AI doomer literature. That it was in the training data. So there are all these scenarios of like, you know, the rogue AI gone wrong that the AI doomer has been writing about for 20 years and literally Anthropic, of course, which is like half doomer, essentially said that their own movement's literature is the thing that's causing the behavior that they say they don't want. So it is a fairly incredible...

I mean like look if you didn't want to build the killer AI, you know, step one would be don't build the AI. It's like hm and then you know step two is like don't train it on all the data that says it's supposed to, you know, the literature that your movement wrote that says it's supposed to be a killer AI. So I, you know, I don't know. Yeah. It's like your golden algorithm coupled with like the snake eating his tail. Coupled with, you know, I don't even know. Like the whole thing is so bananas.

I mean you know I can't resist you know if I can act out memes it's the scream meme right which is you know the calls coming from inside the house.

Yeah, so there's this really brilliant guy, Gad Saad, and you know very brilliant guy and it's obviously lots of YouTube videos and books and so forth and really brilliant guy. He's got this new book coming out on so-called what he calls suicidal empathy and you know look it's a you know there's a sort of political loading to it which you know we don't need to spend a lot of time on but you know it's sort of this idea that there are kind of these social justice, you know, kind of social reform movements, you know, kind of through time that have this characteristic of, you know, they claim to be causing positive change in some direction and then it turns out they have sort of severe negative consequences. The great Thomas Sowell has basically spent 50 years writing books about this and by the way nobody listened. And then in the last decade we've been through wave after wave of this kind of social activism that results in like, I mean it's all the stuff right, it's just all these like crime policy reform, defund the police things and it causes these massive crime waves and then of course low-income and minority people get hit hardest by that and all these other crazy things. And so he says the characteristic of that kind of social reform movement is characterized by what he calls suicidal empathy. And the idea being basically it's sort of driven by a pathological form of empathy on the one hand, which is, you know, it's sort of a deep desire to be nice and empathetic, but coupled with basically a sort of self-destructiveness, you know, either a willingness to really cause damage to the people you claim to be speaking for or by the way to cause damage to yourself kind of in that process. And it's the kind of thing where if you've lived through, you know, everybody in San Francisco's lived through this for the last decade and seen the consequences of these movements. The San Francisco version of this is like the quote harm reduction movement that ended up basically handing out free drug paraphernalia and in some cases actually just free drugs to people who are just literally dying in the street from drug addiction. Right. So you just look at it and you're like well yeah they claim to be activists they claim to be reformers. They claim to care about these people and yet they're killing them and then killing the city and causing innocent people to get harmed. It's like okay they seem so actively like that they're doing it out of some sense of compassion that this must be suicidal empathy. The problem with it is and I think that the problem is the theory is sort of easily falsifiable or maybe lets the reformers off the hook which is they certainly don't show empathy to their enemies, right? And so if they're like all empathetic, you would think that they would be less aggro when it comes to destroying their ideological opponents, you know, who they take great delight in trying to wreck. Number one, on the one hand, and then number two is they use the classic reformer move is to use these movements to gain power and status and money for themselves. And you know, again, San Francisco's a case study of this where you have all these nonprofits that wreak all this damage on the city and yet basically get lavishly funded, including, by the way, by the city government, by the state government. And so it's just like, okay, well, like if you just spend two seconds thinking about it, like they're neither empathetic nor are they suicidal, right? Rather quite the opposite. They're hateful and they're greedy. You know, they're sort of self-aggrandizing and gathering power and resources for themselves. And so I just think it lets the phenomenon off the hook, you know, it's a little bit like, 'Oh, Eric, what's your biggest flaw?' You know, 'Oh, I'm too nice.'

Yeah. I care too much. Right. Exactly. It's like, yeah, don't... By the way, Eric, I don't know. I don't know what your biggest flaw is. Like, it's definitely not that because that's also definitely not my flaw. Like, I guarantee I have other things wrong with me that are like way more wrong than that.

And so I just I hit my limit on that topic. And maybe a crazy example of this and I'm not sure if all the facts are out yet, but it was a situation a week ago, but it hasn't been covered that much. The SPLC incident. Is it accurate that basically what was happening or is it our understanding that basically the groups that they were fighting the most or thought were the biggest threats to what they care about also the same groups that they were secretly funding unbeknownst to those groups or how do we make sense of what was actually happening there and is that indicative of something bigger happening and it's funny because that happened the day after we had a conversation about astroturfing and I was like is it really happening to the degree that people are or sort of conspiracies are things like that really happening and it's just funny that more and more seem to get uncovered.

Yeah. And so I should start by saying the reason why this situation really matters and actually I think matters a lot is the SPLC specifically and other groups like it as well but the SPLC specifically played a dominant role in the debanking and censorship and cancellation programs of the last 15 years. And I cannot tell you how I was in so many meetings in so many contexts with so many companies where the SPLC's word was gospel. Like it was just like, oh, it's the SPLC that it was almost like they're the outsourced US Department of, I don't know, racism detection or something. It's just like if the SPLC says you're bad, you're bad. And you're bad means you get kicked off of all the social media platforms. It means you get debanked. It means you can't get a job. It means like it's just like total absolute like, you know, social economic death. And in my view, you know, I've been very vocal on the debanking and censorship topics. In my view, that includes very deeply un-American and I think in many cases unconstitutional removal of both free speech rights and also literally the ability to bank. And in fact, you know, our partner Ben's father himself was specifically tagged and attacked by the SPLC for being racist. And was himself debanked and really like directly threatened his livelihood in a really egregious way. And then by the way the significance of this is of course it's not literally the US department of racism it's actually arguably worse than that it's not a government agency and so it's not subject to any level of government oversight it's a completely, you know, as I say it's an NGO right and so it lives in this twilight world you know it doesn't have the business responsibilities of a company it doesn't have any of the legal oversight that a government agency has it lives in this kind of twilight world where it gets to do fundamentally whatever it wants and then by the way on top of that it raises money as a nonprofit. So, you know, on top of that, everybody gets a tax break. And so, it's this shadowy thing. Like, if you didn't agree with his politics, you were just like, 'Wow, like this is a weird star chamber shadowy thing. Like, what the hell?' But like it had really really really intense power particularly in the business world, particularly in the financial sector, particularly in Silicon Valley. Like, it could basically it was like a death star to be able to aim it at obliterating people's reputations and rights. And so, you know, this is a really big deal. By the way, many of the big corporations and including big tech companies funded it directly. And so the money trail on this is not just major philanthropists and political activists, but also actual companies. And then, by the way, they also had a long history of actually cooperation with certain government agencies, including, I think for a long time, they quote unquote trained FBI agents, basically catching, you know, racist and therefore sort of presumptive domestic terrorists or something. And so just like a very powerful outfit and then this thing that dropped is that they've been now criminally indicted by the US Justice Department and I should say the indictment reads like a novel that no it's an indictment the SPLC in fairness has not had a chance to present a defense and so you know presumably in court we'll get both sides of this which I'm sure will be an absolutely spellbinding experience. So I of course I want to say all of the things that are in the indictment are allegations and innocent until proven guilty and so forth. However the allegations are eye watering right and the allegations are that the SPLC using donor funds was directly funding among other organizations the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. Let me just repeat that. The Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. As well as an array of other sort of literal hate groups. And you know, and funding them and not just funding them, not just like funneling money in, but like funneling money to very senior members or leaders of these organizations. And then the kicker is in the among the allegations is that they were directly funding one of the leaders of the January 6th whatever you want to call it, riot at the capital. Oh sorry, no I'm going to let me back up. We need to clip that. I'm sorry that I can't remember if that was the one, but for sure what I meant to say was the Charlottesville riot. So the Charlottesville riot in 2017 that played such a central role in our politics, at the time, you know, kind of the famous 'there are good people on both sides' kind of thing, which was like one of the big crises of that era. The SPLC was directly funding, evidently, allegedly, they were directly funding one of the organizers of the Charlottesville riot. And apparently they were also paying for transport for rioters to go to the capital. Right. And so like if this is true, you know, what could you conclude if this is true? Well, number one is like the allegation is they broke the law in doing that. There's additional allegations in the DOJ indictment that they've committed, you know, various kinds of money laundering crimes, other kinds of crimes. And so that's a big deal. And then I've been asking the obvious question, which is if any of these claims are true, what did their donors know? And you know were the donors all totally oblivious to this or did the donors work closely with them the also by the way the companies that worked with them did they know what was happening and so I do wonder whether there's like a I wonder whether over time what we're going to discover is this was a sprawling network of which there's a legal the legal term would be conspiracy that was going on around this and so I think this needs to be fully unressed look the other thing is this raises the obvious question is were they the only one. And so there's a variety of these groups that had degrees of the kind of power that I was talking about. And tremendous amounts of funding along the way and the ability to basically again direct some combination of state and private sector obliteration at American citizens. There have been rumors for years on this. There's been incidents like this in the past like, you know, this isn't the first time this has happened. But if the allegations are true and the SPLC was doing it, I think it raises the very direct question of like, okay, who else is? It's hard to believe they were the only one. And so who else is doing it? And then, yeah, and then we're back to our astroturfing thing, which is, yeah, were they constructing the boogeyman that they claim to be fighting? And by the way, and this is where you get into the sort of self-interest component of it. This is where you get back to the suicidal empathy thing, which is like, okay, how suicidal is it if you're the anti-KKK group to fund the KKK? Like I don't know, maybe it's suicidal if people find out about it. But if they don't find out about it, like that's the opposite of suicidal because like wow wouldn't you like to get to like if your group's entire purpose for existing is to fight an enemy then you need to make sure that that enemy exists to do that of course of course of course you would fund them. And so yeah I don't know what is that. That's like the reverse of the snake eating the tail. It's the you're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so, yeah, I mean, look, we're gonna I mean, this all needs to be ventilated. I'm really fascinated to see like what the reality is underneath this, but, you know, by at the end of the day and what this means about what we've all been told all these years about all these groups.

Yes. Correct. Exactly. Yeah. And one of the things is the lucrative and again it's because they get cloaked in this kind of NGO lens. I mean they've got the amounts of money at play are not small. The SPLC has something like an $800 million endowment. And has an enormous budget. And by the way people get paid a lot of money to do this work. And by the way there's recurring scandals on that front also. Which is you get a lot of these kind of activist foundations and so forth where when you look into it it's like some giant percentage of their spending is going to salaries and expenses for their employees. And so, and again, they cloak it in virtue. And then you kind of look underneath and you're like, 'Wow, like this is amazing and by the way, like I don't know, it's America. Maybe they should be allowed to do all this, but like maybe we should not get lied to in the process.' You know, maybe all this should not get dressed up to make us feel like our whole society is rotten and immoral and that deplatforming and censorship and debanking are good ideas.

Yeah. So we'll come back to the bloat thing. I will say the funny thing on the bloat tweet was the responses have been along the line. The responses for the most part have not been you're wrong. The responses have been oh no the company I used to work at is like eight times bloated.

Right or yeah too generous or by the way the nonprofit or the whatever kind of institution agency I used to work for.

I mean, look, I don't even know. And you know, if I knew I wouldn't say, but like I think Twitter is way down from the 80%. I think there I don't know if the number for sure the number has a nine on it. If not a high nines. So yeah, no, he's really as usual with Elon, he's really demonstrated he's really forecasted the future through his own actions. Yeah, so a couple things. So one is I mean look there's just this endless there's literally been a 300-year argument about mechanization, industrialization, technology, computers, software replacing human labor causing unemployment, lower wages and unemployment. You know, it's been a 300-year argument. I quite frankly, I'm even wondering at this point whether it's even worth having that argument because people really really deeply don't want to hear it. And what I find is I go through it. Many other people, by the way, there's great books on this topic and there have been for hundreds of years. People have talked about this for a long time. You know, people really, this is one of those things where people really don't want to hear good news. And so, you know, it's actually even hard to have a discussion about it because people actually won't they're so dug in on this that they actually won't even engage on the topic. They just keep repeating the same fallacy over and over again. So, you know, we could go through that. I guess the more interesting thing to say though is just like we have data now. And you know, because now we have AI and now we have data. So, we can like look at what's actually happening. And I would just make a couple of observations. So one is there was actually jobs data just came out today. As a situation to monitor and you know it's sort of unexpectedly good. And so you know and by the way the jobs data overall in the last couple years has been interesting because the federal government has actually shed a lot of workers. I think the federal government is down estimates are as much as 400,000 workers in the federal government since Trump took office the second time. So, private sector employment is actually way up and then the net result I think for the last quarter was actually very positive. And so like in other words like the reported jobs numbers are even more impressive than they look because the private sector growth actually has to make up for the public sector decline which means the private sector job growth is actually much better than people were expecting. And again like this is in the face of actual AI staring us in the face and being rapidly adopted and so okay like the data is there you know there's more data. And then the other thing that's sort of macro data and then there's the micro data which is the world we live in. And the micro data is you know that sort of obvious question is you know if you live in Silicon Valley or work in San Francisco you undoubtedly have friends who are computer programmers. Those friends some percentage of those friends are early adopters of AI coding. You can just observe their behavior and of course if you believe in the zero sum argument you would expect that they would be working less and less and then rapidly becoming unemployed and in fact the observed behavior of what's happening is very clear which is the opposite which is those people are becoming what we now refer to as AI vampires by which I mean the individual programmer's productivity an individual programmer who is, you know, using Codex or Claude Code or one of these AI coding systems. Just the thing that you just now see over and over again at the ground level is, they're working harder than ever. They're working just more hours than ever. And then the AI vampire thing is literally this thing where they stop sleeping. And then when you talk to them, it's actually really funny. Because they're like and I have a whole bunch of friends like this. They're blurry. Like they've got these huge bags under their eyes. They're completely exhausted. But they're like euphoric. Like they're thrilled like they're having the absolute time of their life. By the way, a fair number of people who we both know, literally they're former programmers who stopped coding at one point. And then all of a sudden, have picked it back up again. And then, actually we have partners at the firm who actually have never coded who are now like ripping out software like crazy and again they've turned into AI vampires. I won't name names because I'll let him tell his own story, but we have one partner who's built an entire AI system for everything that he does at work and he is absolutely excited about it and it works great and he loves it. And it's like his partner in all of his work now. And I asked him I said have you looked at the code and he's like hell no. I've never done that and I said have you ever looked at any software code and he's like hell no. He doesn't have, you know, he's not a programmer by background. And yet all of a sudden he's hyperproductive. And so you've got this, you got, of course, the phenomenon which is sort of exactly what classic economics would predict, which is if you increase marginal productivity of the worker, you don't have a diminishment of human work, you have an expansion of human work. You make the worker more productive, therefore the worker works more and gets paid more and there are more jobs in the process. And so it's the opposite of what all the doomers say. So we're seeing that at the level of these individuals. And then by the way what you see inside companies inside employers of these individuals is of course these people are now in even more demand than they were before. They are garnering higher salaries than they were before. And then by the way their productivity is just starting to ramp up right like everything that I'm describing and like at our leading edge companies estimates are the leading edge programmers are like 20x more productive than they were a year ago. Like it's like the most dramatic increase in programmer productivity in like ever. And so again logically people get paid according to their marginal productivity and you're also seeing that track in the compensation data or I'm seeing that on the ground in the companies which is that the more hyperproductive a coder becomes all of a sudden the more bargaining power that they have for their compensation and we're seeing comp for those people ramp up quickly. And so I just it's just kind of like it's just kind of staring us in the face and coding of course coding is like the first domain in which this has happened. Now people want to project forward and say this is going to happen in every area of knowledge work. And then I think you can predict a similar outcome. And then that gets us to the bloat topic. Which is of course the other thing that's happening is of course companies are seeing big layoffs. And then you know of course immediately it's like two plus two must equal four. And so if it's AI coding it must therefore translate into layoffs. And you know Mark you're wrong. Therefore all of your ideas are wrong because that's evidence that these companies are wiping out their they're reducing their workforces or are really nuking them because of AI coding. And I guess there again, this is like maybe the inside baseball take on it is but I see it. I see it up close, which is just every major Silicon Valley company is overstaffed. Every major Silicon Valley company's been overstaffed basically forever. They all know it. There's a whole variety of reasons why it's the case. By the way I think this is true basically of just corporate America broadly companies broadly we can talk in detail about why that's the case because it flies in the face of the idea that these companies optimize for profits which they definitely do not. Like the one thing that is the least true claim in the world is the companies are optimized for profitability which is 100% not true. And so you know and then basically if you're going to do a big cut like if you want to do a big cut if you want to take out whether it's 15% or 40% or whatever like obviously you want a scapegoat right you just want to peg it on something and so of course it's going to get pegged on AI and again and say like it's not like it's just like a straight lie like it is simultaneously true that there are these massive for the same amount of coding you can now have fewer people using tools like that is true and so do you need as many aggregate number of programmers if you're generating the same amount of code. No, you don't. And so you can take out people on the other side. So there is truth to that. But what that misses is what happens on the other side of that, which is of course you're not just going to be generating the same amount of code in the future. You're going to be generating a lot more code. You're going to be building a lot more products a lot more quickly. And that's going to fuel enormous amounts of employment growth on the other side. And so I think you're seeing both phenomena play out and you kind of have to read the announcements coming out of these companies in code because of the way those two dynamics are crossing.

What do the hot people do exactly?

Otherwise known as the pharmaceutical sales rep. Yes or the Oracle sales rep. So yeah. So exactly. So yeah I mean look this is going to happen like well not literally that but like the jobs are going to change. I mean this is sort of the obvious thing and this always happens. The jobs are going to change you know by the way so there's like a new concept that is actually playing out I'm seeing in a bunch of the early leading edge companies in the valley which is they're kind of circling around a job title you could loosely call builder or something like it. And basically the idea is that you had these separate jobs in the past of programmer product manager and designer. And I've been describing what's happening in the valley companies as sort of this three-way Mexican standoff. Where the programmers think that they don't need the product managers and the designers anymore because they can have AI do that. And then each of the other two doesn't think that they need the other two either. And what I've been predicting is like they're all correct. The product manager can generate code and design now and so each of them can do the job of all three. And so the idea is the job's changed and so now the job is builder. And you might come into the builder you might get on the builder track by coming out of coding or product management, or design or maybe even something else, customer service, or whatever. And but you then become responsible for building complete products. And again, you have this kind of you're super empowered by the AI that can help fill in all the things that are not directly in your background. And so like I think it's entirely possible that we're sitting here in 10 years, in 20 years or whatever and like the job of coder is gone, but you have this just extraordinary number of builders running around. And again, by the way, this is the historical pattern, right? And so I think our partner David George did a post on this this week, but it's I forget the exact numbers, but it's something, some giant percentage of the jobs that existed in, call it 1940 were like gone by 1970. And they're like ancient history today. Right. And I mean the ultimate example of this is you know United States 200 years ago like 99% of the people in the US were farming. And today it's like 2%. And having grown up in farm country I can tell you all these people who worry about job loss and job change would not like to go back and be farmers. I guarantee that. And particularly they would not like to go back and be farmers the way people were farming in 1800. Like they definitely don't want to do that. And so the new jobs that have been created of course are far better jobs. And that isn't to understate the level of stress in individual people's lives as the economy changes but in aggregate the result is evolution towards higher income and jobs that people are happier to do. By the way, you can also see all of this playing out in the American economy broadly. Which is the American economy is that there again there's this doomer narrative or there has been for a long time that like the American middle class is falling apart and the sort of presumption of that is that all the middle class people are kind of falling off the ledge and becoming lower class. But actually and by the way there is some of that and there are communities in which that's very clearly happening. But having said that there is at least as much or more of the other phenomenon which is people in the middle class climbing the ladder into the upper middle class. and rapidly gaining in wealth and income and quality of life for themselves and for their kids and their grandkids as time passes and that is a consequence of actual economic development, technological change, job transformation actually being allowed to happen is you know 20 years later you look back and you're just like oh thank god like this is just a much better world for me and my family than it was before. And so this is why like I'm so optimistic I think you know, God willing, like we're entering a golden age on this topic, which is AI is going to be a superpower that everybody in the country and everybody in the planet is going to have access to. Everybody's going to become far more capable at whatever it is that they want to do. They're going to become far more productive in whatever line of work that they're in. They're going to get compensated. The economy naturally compensates according to productivity. So they'll get compensated that way. There will be a rapidly rising ladder of both incomes and number of jobs and my prediction again consistent with history is the extent to which that's a positive phenomenon is a function to the degree to which it's actually allowed to happen and then of course Europe is going to run the opposite test which is they're going to try to prevent all this from happening and again I think the data is already in there which is they've been falling very badly behind economically and they're going to continue to fall further and further behind the US and it's a tragedy because it's a 100% a self-inflicted wound.