Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: As you look out today in the world, I'm curious what things are captivating you most and maybe even most inspiring you. You have such an interesting perch. You get to see so much.
· Ben Horowitz
[00:00:00] S1: What's going on in coding now is quite phenomenal. We kind of went through this period where, "Okay, AI can write code. Cool. Okay, you can vibe code stuff. A lot of security holes. Fine." But I think over the winter break, it turned a corner where really good programmers were going, "Whoa, this helps me. I just became 100 times more productive." And I can't remember any technology where, like, just all of a sudden you wake up and everything, the whole world just changed like that. That's happening on a pretty regular basis, I would say. We spent a bunch of time with people in Hollywood who are using AI. I think AI will help you make movies both better and at much lower cost, because you can shoot a scene and then have the AI do a variation of that scene that's very, very good. So you don't have to do – if you're an actress, you have to shoot a scene like 15 or 20 times or something. Wouldn't it be nice to shoot it three times and then you just take the pieces you like and make it what you want. It's a little underestimated as a tool for creatives, I think. That's true in music, too. I was a young person when hip-hop started and the huge criticism of, like, "This is not music. They're just taking music and they're remixing it and they're rapping over it and it's a bunch of bullshit. It's a novelty." It was postmodern art. And I think we're going to get into post-postmodern art with what people will be able to do with AI and music. And that was one of the most exciting times in music. The invention of the new art form is when it gets really exciting.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: What specific people have had the largest impact on you personally and how?
· Ben Horowitz
[00:00:00] S1: Nas is a very good friend of mine. He's definitely had a big impact. Just the lens at which he sees the world is so different and interesting for me. We're both very big fans of Rakim, who is kind of like the John Coltrane of rap. So Rakim, when his first big song was a song called My Melody. Nas and I are listening to My Melody. The first line is, "Turn up the bass, pull up a chair, hand out a cigar. I'm letting knowledge be born. My name's R." And so he puts it on, "Hands out a cigar," and he pauses it. And he goes, "Ben, why is he handing out a cigar?" And I go, "I don't know." Then he plays the next line, "I'm letting knowledge be born." He's like, "It's a birth, Ben. He's passing out cigars at the birth of knowledge." And I was like, "Oh, shit, I've listened to that song a thousand times. I never heard that." But I can't tell you how many times he sees or hears something that's there that I don't see. So having somebody that I can talk to who has just a completely different perspective of all things in life. And it was interesting. We did the Coinbase deal together. And he had called me like two weeks prior to us really seeing that because he wanted to learn about Bitcoin. So, you know, I explained to him how it worked. He was very interested. When I was talking to Chris Dixon, who was working on the deal, I was like, "Tell me about the guys." And he's like, "Well, you know, one of them, Fred, is really into hip-hop." I was like, "Okay." I brought Nas over to mine, I was like, "Have him come over to my house. There's a boxing match on Saturday." You know, I had Nas come over, and that's how we got that deal. But he's a big influence on me personally. I think he's one of the great storytellers of all time. Just a super genius on that.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Ben Horowitz
[00:00:00] S0: Is there a CEO comparable to Nas, where there was this class of guys in the 90s where, Jay-Z, you know, "I'm not just a businessman, I'm a business, man." There were these just massive franchises that got born. These guys all became incredibly successful in the business world. It felt more industrialized almost, like the whole process. Even just his album that just came out. It feels like it could have come out then or now. It's like this weird timeless quality. He still has that somehow. And, like, Premier, same thing. Do you know anyone else like that in another domain? He seems like such a unique person relative to his peers. [00:00:00] S1: Maybe Jensen. Jensen has this very defined view of who he is, what the company is, and so forth that's kind of gone across eras. But it's still the same thing. It played in gaming. It played in Bitcoin. It plays in AI, but it's still Nvidia. He never thought he had to change the name of the company. He's gotten better over the years. In a weird sense, it never felt like he's trying to be current. Nas never feels like he's trying to write a hit. [00:00:00] S0: The best. Can you tell the story of the work you're doing with the Vegas Police Department? And I'm asking about this one because it's super interesting, but also because it feels like an interesting, different kind of example of what the application of this constellation of new technologies might allow for in terms of improvement efficiencies. It's just such an interesting case study.
· Ben Horowitz
[00:00:00] S1: A couple of things about the Las Vegas police force were intriguing to me. The biggest one was, they were different than other police forces in the country because they're a big metropolitan area that's not run by the chief of police, but run by the sheriff. And the reason that's important is the sheriff is an elected official and does not report to the mayor. So they never got caught in the big political movement and "defund the police." One of the only cities that didn't reduce the police budget or anything like that. So they stayed intact. And they're also, interestingly, the one that I knew that never militarized, and they do community policing, and you can see it in the numbers. So the murder clearance rate in Las Vegas is the highest murder clearance rate, meaning they solve the murder 94%. San Francisco is like 75%, and then Chicago's like in the 30s, and the national average is below 60. And I asked, "Why is your murder clearance rate so high?" And the sheriff, Kevin McMahill, said, "Ben, when somebody is murdered, there's always somebody who knows who did it. They just don't talk to the police. But they talk to us because we're part of the community. They know us." So I was like, "Wow, that's a great environment to see if this new technology worked." And I knew about all the public safety technology because we invested in through American Dynamism. So I was like, "Look, we're going to become the highest tech police force in America, hopefully the world. I'm just going to fund it." We've got a drone program, and we've got Prepared 911, and we've got Flock Safety, you know, AI cameras. If a 911 call comes in, or if a gunshot goes off, there will be a drone deployed there within 90 seconds. And then that drone video feed will be in every police officer's phone in the vicinity instantly. Since we started the program, I think crime is down over 50%. And then shooting of suspects by police is down close to 75%. But everybody's safer, and I think this is the thing that was the most surprising to me on the technology deployment is that when you talk to the police, they go, "Look, the problem is the descriptions cause half the violent confrontations." I'm like, "Well, what do you mean?" So somebody jacks a car. There's a baby in the backseat. We get a description of the car. It's a 2004 Hyundai that's blue.