Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:13:14 · Marc Andreessen, Lenny Rachitsky
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 10 times as good as I used to be." And so I think, at the unit of N=1 of an individual kid, I think the question is, how do you get them into position where they're kind of this super empowered individual such that they're going to be really kind of 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? 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. [00:13:53] S1: So when I heard there is essentially agency, this word that we see on Twitter all the time is building agency, them not waiting for someone to tell them what to do, figuring out what to do.
00:14:01 · Marc Andreessen
[00:14:01] S0: Yeah. Yeah. So this term agency that's become very, very, very popular, certainly in California for the last couple of years, it's really interesting because I had a lot of trouble with this early on, because I'm like, "Agency? Okay, what are they talking about?" And what they're kind of talking about is initiative, you could just do things. What is it? The [inaudible 00:14:25] has the great term, live player, you can be a primary participant in events. And at first, I was like, "Well, yeah, that's kind of obvious, of course." And then I'm like, "Oh, actually, it's not so obvious anymore." Because to your point, I think so much of our society is based on, there are all these rules and everybody gets taught kind of by default, you're supposed to follow all these rules. And then if you break the rules, 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, the thing you want to train kids to do is follow all the rules. And you could argue that, for example, K through 12 school system or whatever has gotten more and more focused on that over time. And again, especially unit N=1 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. In order to issue orders, you must learn how to follow orders and trying to keep him with some level of structure in his life, and not just pure agency. But yeah, and so look, some rules are important and so forth. But yeah, no, look, there's just 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 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.
00:16:04 · Marc Andreessen, Lenny Rachitsky
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, 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, whatever that thing is, I can fully participate in the world. I can really change things." And the combination of that idea combined with this technology feels very healthy to me. [00:16:35] S1: What is that quote about, "Give me a lever and I'll move the world"?
00:16:35 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen
[00:16:35] S1: What is that quote about, "Give me a lever and I'll move the world"? [00:16:38] S0: And I'll move the world. Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, so it's actually funny you mentioned that. So the early scientists, including Isaac Newton, were super obsessed with this concept of alchemy. Like Newton, he 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. 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. It was incredibly frustrating. Nobody ever figured that out. And now, we literally with AI have a technology that transfers sand into thought. Right? [00:17:31] S1: That just blew my mind.
00:17:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen
[00:17:31] S1: That just blew my mind. [00:17:33] S0: 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, it is the philosopher stone. It is that. It actually is that. And it's just this incredibly powerful tool. And that's where I get so excited. And again, this is what we're doing with our 10-year-old, which is like, all right, 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, which is to say AI. And then 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 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 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. [00:18:26] S1: I did not know your kid was homeschooled. That is super interesting. It's almost a statement on education in today's day. Maybe, is there any thoughts there? And just for folks that maybe aren't in your tax bracket that want to help their kids be successful, maybe homeschooled, maybe not, what advice would you have?
00:18:42 · Marc Andreessen
[00:18:42] S0: 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 it's usually thought about and talked about is kind of at the level of a nation. So it's like a national level issue or maybe a state level issue in the US, which is basically, 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, N=1, for an individual kid, what can you do with an individual kid? And so I'll just give you 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=1, by far the ideal way to do it is with one-on-one tutoring. 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. Many of the great kings, queens, royal families, aristocrats and so forth over the course of centuries kind of 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's 2 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 N=1, 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 kind of 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.