Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:34:04 · Marc Andreessen
[01:34:04] S0: Yeah. Somebody said, "Silicon Valley is a company town, but they company is Silicon Valley." Right? And again, at the loneliest coast, again, is one of these great n equals one. If the level of n equals one is somebody, and I've run startups before, I've run companies before, if the level of n equals one of, like, running a company, that's just a giant pain in the fucking butt. Because your secrets are walking out the door, and your employees are walking out the door, and the whole thing sucks. But the other side of it is you also benefit from that, right? Because you get to hire people with all these skills and experiences, right, and you're in this ecosystem that adapts and channels talents and skill and knowledge and people into the new fields. So there's kind of the push and pull of that at the level of just being an individual CEO. At the level of just being in the ecosystem to your point, yeah, it's an absolutely magical phenomenon. And by the way, for all of the issues in Silicon Valley, I did the count once, I think AI is the ninth major technology platform in the history of Silicon Valley. Right? Silicon Valley is still called Silicon Valley, we haven't made Silicon here in decades. Right? We used to actually... You know it's called Silicon Valley because they used to make chips, right? They used to have the actual fabs were in Silicon Valley. And then they designed them and they made the chips. And so, and that was wave one starting in the 19... No, that was actually, no, that was more wave three or whatever. But that was when the area was named in the 1950s. But now we're on wave nine. Right? And the company town phenomenon where the company is, the industry, again, the indeterminate optimism, nobody had to sit and plan and say, "Okay, in the 1990s Silicon Valley's going to do the internet, in the 2000s they're going to do the smartphone, in the 2010s they're going to do the cloud, in the 2020s they're going to do AI." It's just, right, the indeterminate optimism of ecosystem flexibility of the ecosystem that they Silicon Valley could morph into all these categories, and again, maybe a testimony to indeterminate optimism.
01:35:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen
[01:35:58] S1: This reminds me of the meme of how we're all just wrappers over sand, everything we're building is just wrapper over wrapper, wrapper, wrapper. [01:36:03] S0: The wrapper thing is hysterical, yeah, yeah. I'm a software company and I'm a chip wrapper, right? [01:36:07] S1: Yeah. [01:36:08] S0: Yeah. I'm a business application, I'm a database wrapper. Yeah, exactly. I'm a sand... I mean, you and I, we're all now sand wrappers. [01:36:15] S1: Sand wrappers. [01:36:17] S0: Perfect. [01:36:17] S1: Okay. One more question along the media diet, I asked your partner Ben Horowitz what to talk to you about. This is a16z if people don't know him. And he said you're really into movies these days. [01:36:27] S0: Yeah. [01:36:28] S1: And so I don't know, any movies? Any movies you're really into these days, any movies you've absolutely loved recently? [01:36:33] S0: Yeah, so the movies that blew my socks off last year, which I think is the best movie of the decade for sure and maybe of the last, like, 15 years, is this movie. Unfortunately it's one of these things, not a lot of people have seen it, but I would encourage it. It's called Eddington. [01:36:48] S1: I've not heard of it.