#2501 - Marc Andreessen

**Joe Rogan** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:06)
Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:14)
Good to see you, sir.

**Marc Andreessen** (0:15)
Great to be back, thank you.

**Joe Rogan** (0:16)
So we were just talking about this wild crime spree that happened this weekend in Austin. So it seems like it was, was it teenagers that were doing this?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:25)
Yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (0:25)
Yeah?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:26)
15 and 17

**Joe Rogan** (0:27)
You're not on the microphone there, fella.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:29)
15 and 17 years old.

**Joe Rogan** (0:30)
15 and 17 years old. What was the purpose? Just going crazy?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:34)
I think so. Yeah, they stole cars and stole guns and switched cars and...

**Marc Andreessen** (0:38)
And they shot, they shot at like 10 different locations.

**Joe Rogan** (0:40)
One person's, at least one person's in critical condition. They shot multiple people.
So you were saying that the reason why they had a hard time catching them is because of they had flock cameras in Austin, but then they shut those cameras off for political reasons.

**Marc Andreessen** (0:56)
Correct. Yes. Yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (0:57)
So please explain that.

**Marc Andreessen** (0:59)
Yeah. So these guys are driving around in cars and yeah, they're switching cars, whatever. Yeah. And they went to like a dozen locations and like fight, you know, and tried shooting at buildings and people and houses and all kinds of stuff. And so, okay, so you guys are running around. So there's this system called Flock, which is one of our companies. And what they do is kind of like in the movies, you take all the municipal cameras and traffic cameras and everything and you feed them into an AI and the AI is able to first find a license plate in real time. So you can find that, but second, you can actually find a car even if you don't have the license plate, because you can find like distinct markings on the car, it will track the car. And so this thing is deployed, it's sold to city governments. It's used all over the country. It solves crimes every day. We get reports on car jackings with kids in the backseat and their lives get saved because they track them down.
So a lot of towns and cities have this and they love it. In cities like Austin, with the intense politics, they run into backlash on privacy and surveillance concerns. So Austin had Flock and then turned it off. And as a consequence, they were not able to find these guys for, I don't know, whatever, several days.
And then what happened, the late breaking news today is these guys drove into some adjacent town up against Austin and Flock was live in that town. And so Flock tagged them the minute they drove into that town and then they caught the guys. Subsequent to that, your mayor in Austin of your mayor and your chief of police at your press conference and said, we really need to rethink this. Because it's crazy to have the ability to solve crimes and stop crimes and not be able to use it.

**Joe Rogan** (2:26)
Yeah, so the concern is mass surveillance, right? The concern is that someone's going to abuse this and use AI for nefarious purposes, right? Like what nefarious purposes would that be?

**Marc Andreessen** (2:39)
Yeah, so this is a system, this is a system that could be used in bad ways, right? So bad people could use it in bad ways. So if you had a corrupt chief of police and he had some personal entanglement thing and he wanted to track a ex whatever, or if the mayor wanted to do this to terrorize your political opponents or whatever. Like if you had corrupt city officials, then they could use it for bad things.

**Joe Rogan** (2:59)
Wouldn't that be traceable though? Wouldn't that, isn't there like a blockchain, put that sucker so it's not on your chin, push it forward a little bit.
Is there a blockchain for flocks so you could know who's doing what and how it's happening? So someone couldn't abuse it? Is it possible to have to circumvent that?

**Marc Andreessen** (3:17)
Yeah, it could. But this is like the standard, yes. They log everything and I'm sure there's records of everything. But look, it's like anything else. It's why cops have to get a warrant before they search somebody's house, right? There's always the question of what is the legal authority and what are the safeguards that protect this kind of thing.
So I think there's a completely legitimate question, which is how should that all be designed? What should be the controls? What should be the penalties if somebody abuses it?