#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Mark Andreessen, his second time on the podcast. Mark is a visionary tech leader and investor who fundamentally shaped the development of the internet and the tech industry in general over the past 30 years. He is the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and is one of the most influential voices in the tech world, including at the intersection of technology and politics. Now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Encord for unifying your ML stack, GitHub for programming, Notion for team projects and collaboration, Shopify for merch, and Element for hydration. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. No ads in the middle. I tried to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Encord, a platform that provides data focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation, and management. And for model evaluation once you train up the model on the data that you curate. In this conversation with Marc Andreessen, we actually discuss what he calls kind of like the trillion-dollar questions. And one of them for AI is how effective will synthetic data be? It really isn't an open question. What piece, what fraction of the intelligence of future models will be based on training on synthetic data? At the top AI labs, I'm hearing a lot of optimism. As far as I can tell that optimism is not currently, at least in the general case, based on any real evidence. So I do think synthetic data will play a part. But how big a part? There's still going to be some curation from humans. There's still gonna need to be a human in the loop. I think the real question is how do you effectively integrate the human in the loop so that the synthetic data, sort of 99 synthetic, 1% human, that combination can be most effective. That's the real question. And companies like Encord are trying to solve that very problem. First of all, I want to provide the tooling for the annotation, for the actual human AI collaboration, but also asking and answering the research question of, like, how do you pull it all off and make the resulting model more intelligent for very specific applications and for the general applications. Yeah, so Encord does a really good job on the tooling side. Go try them out to curate, annotate, and manage your AI data at encord.com/lex. That's encord.com/lex.
This episode is brought to you by GitHub and GitHub Copilot. If you don't know what that is, my friends, you're in for a joyous, beautiful surprise. I think a lot of people that program regularly know and love GitHub and know and love Copilot. It's the OG AI programming assistant and it's the one that's really trying to win this very competitive space. It is not easy. If you're somebody that uses VS Code, obviously, well, maybe not obviously, but you can use GitHub Copilot in VS Code, but you can use it also in other IDEs. I'm going to be honest with you. It's a very competitive space. I'm trying all the different tools in the space. And I really love how much GitHub and GitHub Copilot want to win in this competitive space. So I'm excitedly sitting back and just eating popcorn like that Michael Jackson meme and just enjoying the hell out of it. And like I said, I'm going to be doing a bunch of programming episodes including with PrimeGen. And he, I think, has a love-hate relationship with AI and with AI agents and with the role of AI in the programming experience. And he's really at the forefront of people that are playing with all these languages, with all these different applications, with all the different use cases of code. And he is a new of M user, so he's going to be skeptical in general of new technology. He's a curmudgeon sitting on a porch, on rocking chairs, screaming at the kids, throwing stuff at them. But at the same time, he's able to play with the kids as well. So, I am more on the kid side. With a child like Joy, enjoy the new technology. For me, basically everything I do, programming wise, has the possibility of AI either reviewing it or assisting it. It's constantly in the loop. Even if I'm writing stuff from scratch, I'm always just kind of one second away from asking a question about the code or asking it to generate or rewrite a certain line or to add a few more lines, all that kind of stuff. So I'm constantly, constantly using it. If you're learning to code or if you're an advanced programmer, it is really important that you get better and better at using AI as an assistant programmer. Get started with GitHub Copilot for free today at gh.io/copilot. This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool that Marc Andreessen on this very episode sings a lot of praises to. I believe he sings, was it on mic or off mic? I don't remember, but anyway, he loves it. It's one of the tools, one of the companies, one of the ecosystems that integrate AI really effectively for team applications. When you have, let's see, like docs and wikis and projects and all that kind of stuff, you can have the AI load all of that in and answer questions based on that. You can connect a bunch of apps, like you can connect Slack, you can connect Google Drive. I think in the context we were talking about something like Notion for email, for like Gmail, I don't know if Notion integrates email yet. They're just like this machine that's constantly increasing the productivity of every aspect of your life so I'm sure they're going to start integrating more and more apps. I use it for Slack and Google Drive, but I use it primarily at the individual level for note taking, and even at the individual level, just incredible what Notion AI can do. Try it out for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase, notion.com/lex, to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. There are a few people embody the joy and the power of capitalism than Marc Andreessen. I believe Marc and Toby are friends. I was at a thing where Marc and Toby were both there, and they were chatting and they were very friendly, so I think they're friends, and I got to hang out with Toby, and he's, again, an incredible person. I say it again and again, it's almost becoming funny that eventually we'll do a podcast. I don't know why we haven't done a podcast. There's a few people in my life where, it's like, like Jeffrey Hinton is one of those people. It's like, we've agreed to do a podcast for so long, and we've just been kind of lazy about it. And Toby's the same. Anyway, he's the CEO of Shopify. I don't even know if he knows that Shopify sponsors this podcast. It doesn't matter. It goes without saying, it should be obvious to everybody, that one doesn't affect the other. I am very fortunate to have way more sponsors than we could possibly fit, so I could pick whoever the hell I want. And whatever guest I choose will never have anything to do with the companies that sponsor the podcast. There's not even like a tinge of influence. In fact, if there's anything, it will be the opposite direction, but I also try to avoid that. You know, it's possible I talk to the CEO of GitHub, for example, on this podcast, and GitHub sponsors this podcast. It's possible I talk to the CEO of Shopify, Toby, and Shopify sponsors this podcast. One doesn't affect the other. And obviously, again, it goes without saying, but let me say it, make it explicit that nobody can buy their way onto the podcast, whether through sponsorships or buying me dinner or whatever. I don't know. This just, it's impossible. And most likely, if that's attempted, it's going to backfire. So I think people intuitively know not to attempt because it would really piss me off. Anyway, this is a detour. We're supposed to talk about Shopify. I have a Shopify store, lexfridman.com/store that sells t-shirts, but you can sell more sophisticated stuff, make a lot of money, and participate in this beautiful machinery of capitalism. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all over the case. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar delicious electrolyte mix of which I consume very ridiculously large amounts. You know, salt used to be currency in the ancient world. How silly are humans? We're not silly. How sort of surprising the things we converge on as being the store of value. Just value in general, the kind of things we assign value to together. We just kind of all agree that this item, this material, this idea, this building is extremely valuable. And then we compete over that resource or that idea or that building. And we fight and sometimes there is wars and sometimes there is complete destruction and the rise and fall of empires all over some resource. What a funny, strange little world. Mostly harmless, as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy summarizes humans. For some reason, instead of that book, I was going to say Catcher in the Rye. In my exhausted brain, the books kind of all morph together. Catcher in the Rye is a really damn good book. All of the classics I return to often, the simple books, even like the first book I read in English, trivial book, trivial book called The Giver. It's like I return to it in its simplicity. Maybe it's, maybe it has sentiment of value, maybe that's what it is, but just the simplicity of words. Animal Farm I've read, I don't know how many times, probably over 50 times. I returned to it over and over and over. The simplicity, the poetry of that simplicity. It's something that just resonates with my brain. Maybe it's a peculiar kind of brain. It is a peculiar kind of brain. And I have to thank you for being patient with this peculiar kind of brain. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase of whatever the thing I was talking about, which I think is element. Try it at drinklmnt.com/lex.