Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:28:10 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:28:10] S1: 200 IQ, I... Just like that frame of reference is such a mind-expanding way to think about just how fast and how smart these things are going to get, and quickly.
01:28:20 · Marc Andreessen
[01:28:20] S0: Well, I don't know if you have this experience, I have this experience all the time. Well, two experiences I have all the time. One is just like, I know I ought to be able to do this, but I just can't... It's going to take too long, I want to write this thing, or I want to... Whatever, I want to have this theory on this thing, or to have a plan or whatever. And it's just like, "Fuck," I don't have the eight hours, or by the way, the eight weeks or the eight years, right? And I just don't know enough yet, and I'm just, like, I can't do the math in my head, and my memory isn't perfect, and I can't remember, and I read... I don't know if you have this, you get interested in something, you read 10 books. And then you're like, "Shit, I forgot almost everything I just read." I wish I could retain it all but I can't. It's just like you just have this... I sort of live in this state of endless frustration. And so it's like, if I could just be smarter than I was, I'd be much better at what I do, but I'm not. So there's that. And I don't know how often you have this, but I have this on a regular basis. It's just like, "I," because of what we do, I know a bunch of people who I know for fucking sure are smarter than I am. And I know it because when I talk to them, I just find myself at a certain point. It's like for the first half of the conversation, I'm just taking notes the entire time. And for the second half of the conversation, I'm just like, "Fuck," like, "Fuck me." Like, this person is just smarter than I am, and they're just out-thinking me, and they're going to keep out-thinking me, and I just can't, and I'm just like, "All right, goddammit. I've got to go home and I've got to have a drink." Because I'm just not... Whatever that is, I'm not that. And so, we're just so used to having those limitations, that the idea of having machines that work for us that don't have those limitations, I just... I think that's much more exciting than people are giving it credit for.
01:30:00 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:30:00] S1: Oh man. I could talk to you for hours, Mark. I'm thinking to close out the conversation, I want to ask about your media diet and your product diet. You just talked about books, 10 books, I think you famously read constantly. I saw an interview with you where you're just like, "Airpods changed my life, I'm just listening to audiobooks now all the time." So in terms of a media diet, what are you reading, what are you paying attention to these days in terms, I don't know, podcasts, newsletters, blogs, things like that, and then any books in particular?
01:30:25 · Marc Andreessen
[01:30:25] S0: Yeah, yeah. So what I read is basically, I mean I read... So I read basically three categories of things. So in terms of general media, it's basically I sort of... I always describe it as I have an almost perfect barbell strategy, which is I read X, and I read old books. Right? So it's basically either, like, up-to-the minute what's happening right now, or it's like a book that was written 50 years ago that has stood the test of time, and then where presumably there's something timeless in it. And then it's sort of everything in the middle, I'm always much more skeptical about. And in particular, it's kind of what I already said, which is I think if you go back and you read old... Nobody ever does this, it's actually really funny, there's no market for it. But if you go back and you read old newspapers... And by the way, you can do this, just read the last week's newspaper, right? Yeah, today, so we're taping on Friday. So read last Friday's newspaper, right? And just go back and read it, and be like, "Oh my God. None of this happened. None of what they predicted played out the way that they said that it would. None of this turned out to actually be that relevant or correct." They didn't understand, by the way, they had no view of what was going to happen this week. Then they couldn't know, and so they were making predictions and forecasts and so forth based on not having information. But it's like, "Wow, none of this happened, I wish I had never read this, oh my God." And then it's kind of the same thing with magazines, I go back and read old magazines, and just the level of just the endless numbers of predictions that they make. And kind of, you know, the problem with... Newspapers at least they're going day-to-day, the thing with magazines is it's like a week or month kind of a long cycle. And so by the time an article even hits publication, it's often out of date. So I just have a big problem with kind of everything in the middle. And so it's either of the moment or timeless. But then yeah, you mentioned newsletters. I mean, so the other thing, and this is maybe obvious, but I think it's probably still underrated, which is actual practitioners in the field who are actually creating content, I think probably is still dramatically underrated.
01:32:15 · Marc Andreessen
And I think this is a huge part of the Substack phenomenon, and the newsletter phenomenon, and the podcast phenomenon, is, like, direct exposure to the people who are actually principals in the field who actually know what they're talking about is probably still dramatically underrated. And I think again, the reason for that is like we're used to being in this mass media kind of culture in which basically everything is mediated. Right? Everything got filtered through like TV interviews or, like, newspaper interviews, or magazine interviews. And obviously now more and more it's just, no, you actually want smart people who are actually working on something explaining themselves. And then you have tons of intermediation, like podcasts, that kind of open that up for people and make that possible. And so yeah, domain practitioners are really great. I mean, yeah, just to state the obvious in AI, it's obviously your stuff, but also, like, the fact that Lex Fridman can have the world's leading... And any of you guys, there's a small handful of you guys who have access to these people, you could have the world's leading experts in the domain actually show up. And by the way, and look, the critique always is, people talk their book, like if I'm running a startup or whatever I'm just selling. But it's like... And there's always a little bit of that... But it's also, my experience is people love to talk about what they do. And they fundamentally want to express what they do, and they want to explain it, and they want people to understand it. And everybody kind of enjoys that, and they get to contribute to human knowledge by doing that, and they get ego gratification by doing that. And so I think there's actually just tremendous amounts of alpha in listening to the world's leading experts in the space who actually just show up and talk about what they're doing. And of course the world is awash in that today in a way that it wasn't as recently as 10 years ago. So yeah, I do as much of that as I can too.
01:33:54 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:33:54] S1: And there's also just this culture in tech, Silicon Valley, in particular, of sharing, or not trying to keep these secrets. Everyone on LinkedIn is always like, "How is this free?" Like, it's just the way it works.