Chris Dixon – The Future of Tech

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:56)
My guest this week is Chris Dixon, who has written some of my favorite essays on technology and venture investing. Chris is a prolific investor and thinker, having been an entrepreneur, angel investor, and now partner at the well-known venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz.
Our conversation focuses on major trends in technology, including cryptocurrencies and the future of autonomous vehicles and drones. Chris has a rule of thumb for technology trends. Find out what smart people are working on during the weekends, and you'll know what others will be doing years down the road. After surveying his old essays, it's clear you could use Chris' writings as a similar litmus test. Like the Hash Power documentary, this episode and other Hash Power singles are brought to you by Fidelity Investments, a company that is constantly researching and experimenting with emerging technologies like crypto assets and blockchain to improve the lives of their customers. Fidelity provides a comprehensive set of products and services to individual investors, employers, and financial advisory firms. For more information, please visit fidelity.com. Please enjoy this wide-ranging and great conversation with Chris Dixon on the future of tech.
For. So, Chris, it's not often that I come across a fellow philosophy major on this podcast, so I have to start there. We'll go all the way back to college and ask why that was what you decided to study.

**Chris Dixon** (2:16)
Great question. So, I had been interested in computers my whole life, like as a kid growing up, and program computers, and then I read a series of books, Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, these kind of, I don't know, people that know will know, and people that don't know may not know, but sort of AI, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, logic.
And I just thought it was like, kind of to me, it was this really interesting intersection of like all of these technical things I was interested in, but then kind of these almost science fictiony futures of like artificial intelligence. And then you kind of naturally, as you follow that path, you're like, well, what is artificial intelligence? You know, what does it mean to have consciousness? What does it mean? So that's kind of the rabbit hole I started down. And then I ended up kind of focusing on sort of philosophy of mind, logic, philosophy of language, kind of very analytic philosophy. So, you know, philosophy is kind of divided between continental, as you know, probably, but continental and analytic philosophy. And so I was very much on that side.
And I had a wonderful experience. It was a great thing to study. It turned out that the job market in technology was probably a more attractive job market than the philosophy job market. So I ended up switching at some point. But I still go back and read it. I actually recently wrote a piece, an article for the Atlantic, which was on sort of the history of logic and computers.
And so I still read a lot of the stuff. I'm interested in it. But I'm like, I realize at some point I'm never going to be anything more than a mediocre philosopher. So I'll try my hand at something else.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:37)
How much has your, or maybe where has your view changed the most since kind of that early reading to now, having done a lot in the real world in business and investing?

**Chris Dixon** (3:45)
In terms of philosophy interest?
That's an interesting question.
It's interesting, because I go back and I try to catch up on what's going on in philosophy. And it turns out it doesn't change that much. It's a relatively slow moving field. But that's a great question. I mean, I think the stuff I did was, I don't know, in case you get older or something, you get more interested in other questions. So analytic philosophy is very, the stuff I did, at least, was very narrowly focused on things like logic and philosophy of language. And it's kind of technical. And I think just as I've kind of gone on, I've gotten more interested in questions of really going back to the Greeks. If you go back and read Plato and Socrates, like the questions they asked, what does it mean to lead a good life? What does it mean to be a good person? What is the nature of reality? I don't know, these kinds of more almost like religious metaphysical questions.