In this episode, my guest is Marc Andreessen, the legendary software innovator who co-created the internet browser Mosaic, co-founded Netscape, and is now at Andreessen Horowitz — a venture capital firm that finds and brings to life technologies that transform humanity. We discuss what it takes to be a true innovator, including the personality traits required, the role of environment and the support systems needed to bring revolutionary ideas to fruition. We discuss risk-taking as a necessary but potentially hazardous trait, as well as the role of intrinsic motivation and one’s ability to navigate uncertainty. We also discuss artificial intelligence (AI) and Marc’s stance that soon everyone will use AI as their personalized coach and guide for making decisions about their health, relationships, finances and more — all of which he believes will greatly enhance our quality of life. We also delve into nuclear power, gene editing, public trust, universities, politics, and AI regulation. This episode is for those interested in the innovative mind, psychology, human behavior, technology, culture and politics.
For the full show notes, including articles, books, and other resources, visit hubermanlab.com.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) Marc Andreessen
(00:03:02) Sponsors: LMNT & Eight Sleep
(00:06:05) Personality Traits of an Innovator
(00:12:49) Disagreeableness, Social Resistance; Loneliness & Group Think 
(00:18:48) Testing for Innovators, Silicon Valley
(00:23:18) Unpredictability, Pre-Planning, Pivot
(00:28:53) Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation, Social Comparison
(00:32:52) Sponsor: AG1
(00:33:49) Innovators & Personal Relationships
(00:39:24) Risk Taking, Innovators, “Martyrs to Civilizational Progress”
(00:46:16) Cancel Culture, Public vs. Elite
(00:53:08) Elites & Institutions, Trust
(00:57:38) Sponsor: InsideTracker
(00:58:44) Social Media, Shifts in Public vs. Elite 
(01:05:45) Reform & Institutions, Universities vs. Business
(00:14:14) Traditional Systems, Lysenkoism, Gen X
(01:20:56) Alternative University; Great Awakenings; Survivorship Bias 
(01:27:25) History of Computers, Neural Network, Artificial Intelligence (AI)
(01:35:50) Apple vs. Google, Input Data Set, ChatGPT
(01:42:08) Deep Fakes, Registries, Public-Key Cryptography; Quantum Internet
(01:46:46) AI Positive Benefits, Medicine, Man & Machine Partnership
(01:52:18) AI as Best-Self Coach; AI Modalities
(01:59:19) Gene Editing, Precautionary Principle, Nuclear Power
(02:05:38) Project Independence, Nuclear Power, Environmentalism
(02:12:40) Concerns about AI
(02:18:00) Future of AI, Government Policy, Europe, US & China
(02:23:47) China Businesses, Politics; Gene Editing 
(02:28:38) Marketing, Moral Panic & New Technology; Politics, Podcasts & AI
(02:39:03) Innovator Development, Courage, Support 
(02:46:36) Small Groups vs. Large Organization, Agility; “Wild Ducks”
(02:54:50) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube Feedback, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, Momentous, Neural Network Newsletter, Social Media 
Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac
Disclaimer

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Mark Andreessen is a software engineer and an investor in technology companies.

He co-founded and developed Mosaic, which was 1 of the first widely used web browsers.

He also co-founded and developed Netscape, which was 1 of the earliest widespread used web browsers.

And he co-founded and is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, 1 of the most successful Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

All of that is to say that Mark Andreessen is 1 of the most successful innovators and investors ever.

I was extremely excited to record this episode with Mark for several reasons.

First of all, he himself is an incredible innovator.

Second of all, he has an uncanny ability to spot the innovators of the future.

And third, Mark has shown over and over again, the ability to understand how technologies not yet even developed are going to impact the way that humans interact at large.

Our conversation starts off by discussing what makes for an exceptional innovator, as well as what sorts of environmental conditions make for exceptional innovation and creativity more generally.

In that context, we talk about risk-taking, not just in terms of risk-taking in one's profession, but about how some people, not all, but how some people who are risk-takers and innovators in the context of their work, also seem to take a lot of risks in their personal life and some of the consequences that can bring.

Then we discuss some of the most transformative technologies that are now emerging, such as novel approaches to developing clean energy, as well as AI or artificial intelligence.

With respect to AI, Mark shares his views as to why AI is likely to greatly improve human experience.

And we discussed the multiple roles that AI is very likely to have in all of our lives in the near future.

Mark explains how not too long from now, all of us are very likely to have AI assistants, for instance, assistants that give us highly informed health advice, highly informed psychological advice.

Indeed, it is very likely that all of us will soon have AI assistants that govern most, if not all of our daily decisions.

And Mark explains how if done correctly, this can be a tremendously positive addition to our life.

In doing so, Mark provides a stark counter argument for those that argue that AI is going to diminish human experience.

So if you're hearing about and or concerned about the ways that AI is likely to destroy us, today you are going to hear about the many different ways that AI technologies now in development are likely to enhance our human experience at every level.

What you'll soon find is that while today's discussion does center around technology and technology development, it is really a discussion about human beings and human psychology.

So whether you have an interest in technology development and or AI, I'm certain that you'll find today's discussion to be an important and highly lucid view into what will soon be the future that we all live in.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring 0 cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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And now for my discussion with Mark Andreessen.

Delighted to have you here and have so many questions for you about innovation, AI, your view of the landscape of tech and humanity in general.

I want to start off by talking about innovation from 3 different perspectives.

There's the inner game, so to speak, or the psychology of the innovator or innovators.

Things like their propensity for engaging in conflict or not, their propensity for having a dream or a vision, and in particular, their innovation as it relates to some psychological trait or expression.

The second component that I'm curious about is the outer landscape around innovators, who they place themselves with, the sorts of choices that they make, and also the sorts of personal relationships that they might have or not have.

And then the last component is this notion of the larger landscape that they happen to find themselves in.

So to start off, is there a common trait of innovators that you think is absolutely essential as a seed to creating things that are really impactful?

So, I'm not a psychologist, but I've picked up some of the concepts and some of the terms.

And so, it was a great moment of delight in my life when I learned about the big 5 personality traits.

Because I was like, aha, there's a way to actually describe the answer to this question in at least reasonably scientific terms.

And so I think what you're looking for when you're talking about real innovators, like people who actually do really creative breakthrough work.

I think you're talking about a couple of things.

So 1 is very high in what's called trait openness, which is 1 of the big 5, which is basically just like flat out open to new ideas.

And of course, the nature of trait openness is trait openness means you're not just open to new ideas in 1 category, you're open to many different kinds of new ideas.

And so we might talk about the fact that a lot of innovators also are very creative people in other aspects of their lives, even outside of their specific creative domain.

But of course, just being open is not sufficient.

Because if you're just open, you could just be curious and explore, right, and spend your entire life reading and doing, you know, talking to people and never actually create something.

You need a high level of conscientiousness, which is another 1 of the big 5.

You need somebody who's really willing to apply themselves, in our world, typically over a period of many years to be able to accomplish something great.

That often gets obscured because the stories that are getting told about these people are it's just like there's this kid and he just had this idea and it was like a stroke of genius and it was like a moment in time and it was just like, oh, he was so lucky.

For most of these people, it's years and years and years of applied effort.

And so you need somebody with an extreme, basically, willingness to defer gratification and really apply themselves to a specific thing for a long time.

And of course, This is why there aren't very many of these people, is there aren't many people who are high in openness and high in conscientiousness.

Because to a certain extent, they're opposed traits.

And so you need somebody who has both of those.

Third is you need somebody high in disagreeableness, which is the third of the big 5.

So you need somebody who's just like basically ornery, right?

Because if they're not ornery, then they'll be talked out of their ideas by people who will be like, oh, well, that, you know, because the reaction most people have to new ideas is, oh, that's dumb.

And so somebody who's too agreeable will be easily dissuaded to not pursue, you know, not pull on the thread anymore.

So you need somebody highly disagreeable.

Again, the nature of disagreeableness is they tend to be disagreeable about everything.

So they tend to be these very sort of iconoclastic, kind of renegade characters.

And then there's just a table stakes component, which is they just also need to be high IQ.

Because it's just hard to innovate in any category if you can't synthesize large amounts of information quickly.

And so those are 4 basically high spikes, very rare traits that basically have to come together.

You could probably also say they probably at some point need to be relatively low in neuroticism, which is another of the big 5, because if they're too neurotic, they probably can't handle the stress.

And then, of course, if you're into the science of the big 5, basically, These are all people who are on the far outlying point on the normal distribution across all these traits.

And then that just gets you to, I think, the hardest topic of all around this whole concept, which is just there are very few of these people.

Do you think they're born with these traits?

Yeah, well, so they're born with the traits.

And then, of course, the traits are not, you know, genetics are not destiny.

And so the traits are not deterministic in the sense of that just because they have those personality traits doesn't mean they're going to deliver great creativity.

But they need to have those properties, because otherwise they're just not either going to be able to do the work or they're not going to enjoy it.

I mean, look, a lot of these people are highly capable, competent people.

It's very easy for them to get high-paying jobs in traditional institutions and get lots of traditional awards and end up with big paychecks.

And there's a lot of people at big institutions that you and I know well.

And I deal with many of these, where people get paid a lot of money, and they get a lot of respect, and they go for 20 years, and it's great, and they never create anything new.

A lot of them end up in administrative jobs.

The innovators can't run everything, because the rate of change would be too high.

Society, I think, probably wouldn't be able to handle it.

So you need some people who are on the other side who are going to keep the lights on and keep things running.

But there is this decision that people have to make, which is, OK, if I have the latent capability to do this, is this actually what I want to spend my life doing?

And do I want to go through the stress, and the pain, and the trauma, and the anxiety, and the risk of failure?

Once in a while, you run into somebody who's just like can't do it any other way.

I mean, Elon's the paramount example of our time.

And I bring him up in part because he's such an obvious example, but in part because he's talked about this in interviews where he basically says like he's like I can't turn it off like the ideas come I have to pursue them right it's why he's like running 5 companies at the same time and like working on a sixth right it's just like he can't he can't turn it off you know look there's a lot of other people who probably have the capability to do it who ended up talking themselves into or whatever events conspired to put them in a position where they did something else.

You know, obviously, there are people who try to be creative who just don't have the capability.

And so there's some Venn diagram there of determinism through traits, but also choices in life.

And then also of course, the situation in which they're born the context within which they grow up, the culture, right?

What their parents expect of them and so forth.

And so you have to, you know, you kind of get all the way through this, you have to thread all these needles kind of at the same time.

Do you think there are folks out there that meet these criteria who are disagreeable, but that can feign agreeableness?

For those just listening, Marc just raised his right hand.

In other words, they can sort of, phrase that comes to mind, maybe because I can relate to a little bit, they sneak up through the system.

Meaning they behave ethically as it relates to the requirements of the system.

They're not breaking laws or breaking rules.

They're paying attention to the rules and following the rules until they get to a place where being disagreeable feels less threatening to their overall sense of security.

Yeah, I mean, look, the really highly competent people don't have to break laws.

There was this myth that sort of happened around the movie The Godfather.

And then there was this character Meyer Lansky, who ran basically the mafia 50, 60, 70 years ago.

And there was this great line of, well, if Meyer Lansky had only applied himself to running General Motors, he would have been the best CEO of all time.

Like the people who are like great at running the big companies, they don't have to be mob bosses.

They're smart and sophisticated enough to be able to work inside the system.

So I don't think there's any implication that they have to break laws.

And specifically, this is probably the thing that gets missed the most.

Because the process of innovating, the process of creating something new, once it works, the stories get retconned, as they say, in comic books.

So the stories get adapted to where it's like, it was inevitable all along.

Everybody always knew that this was a good idea.

And invariably, if you were with them when they were actually doing the work, or if you actually get a couple of drinks into them and talk about it, they'd be like, no, that's not how it happened at all.

They faced a wall of skepticism, just like a wall of basically social, essentially, denial.

No, I'm not going to come work for your company.

And so they get just like tremendous social resistance.

They're not getting positive feedback from their social network the way that more agreeable people need to have.

And this is why agreeableness is a problem for innovation.

If you're agreeable, you're going to listen to the people around you.

They're going to tell you that new ideas are stupid.

And so I would put it more on like they need to be able to deal with they need to be able to deal with social discomfort to the level of ostracism or at some point they're going to get shaken out and they're just going to quit.

Do you think that people that meet these criteria do best by banding with others that meet these criteria early?

Or is it important that they form this deep sense of self, like the ability to cry oneself to sleep at night or, you know, lie in the fetal position, worrying that things aren't going to work out and then still get up the next morning and get right back out there.

So Sean Parker has the best line, by the way, on this.

He says, you know, being an entrepreneur, being a creator is like, you know, getting punched in the face like over and over again.

He said, eventually, you start to like the taste of your own blood.

And I love that line, because it makes everybody like massively uncomfortable.

But it gives you a sense of how basically painful the process is.

If you talk to Any entrepreneur who's been through it about that, they're like, oh yeah, that's exactly what it's like.

So there is a big individual component to it.

And especially very hard, I think, to do this if nobody around you is trying to do anything even remotely similar, right?

And if you're getting just universally negative responses, like I, you know, very few people I think have, very few people have the ego strength to be able to survive that for years.

So I do think there's a huge advantage, and this is why you do see clusters.

There's a huge advantage to clustering, right?

And so you have, and you know, throughout history you've had this clustering effect, right?

You had clustering of the great artists and sculptors in Renaissance Florence.

You had the clustering of the philosophers of Greece.

You had the clustering of tech people in Silicon Valley.

You have the clustering of creative arts, movie, TV people in Los Angeles, and so forth and so on.

There's always a nexus and a place where people come together, you know, for these kinds of things.

So generally speaking, like if somebody wants to work in tech, innovate in tech, they're going to be much better off being around a lot of people who are trying to do that kind of thing than they are in a place where nobody else is doing it.

Having said that, the clustering has, it can have downsides, it can have side effects, and you put any group of people together and you do start to get groupthink, even among people who are individually very disagreeable.

And so these same clusters where you get these very idiosyncratic people, they do have fads and trends just like every place else.

And so they get wrapped up in their own social dynamics.

And the good news is the social dynamic in those places is usually very forward looking.

And so it's usually like, It's like a herd of iconoclasts looking for the next big thing.

So iconoclasts looking for the next big thing, that's good.

The herd part, that's what you got to be careful of.

So even when you're in 1 of these environments, you have to be careful that you're not getting sucked into the groupthink too much.

When you say groupthink, do you mean excessive friction due to pressure testing each other's ideas to the point where things just don't move forward?

Or are you talking about groupthink where people start to form a consensus or the self-belief that, gosh, we are so strong because we are so different?

It's actually less either 1 of those things both happen.

The part of groupthink I'm talking about is just like we all basically 0 in.

We just end up zeroing in on the same ideas, right?

In Hollywood, there's this classic thing.

It's like there are years where there's all this and there's like a lot of volcano movies.

It's like, why are there all these volcano movies?

There was just something in the gestalt, right?

There are moments in time where you'll have these.

But it's like the old thing, like, what's the difference between a fad and a trend, right?

The fad is the trend that doesn't last, right?

And so Silicon Valley is subject to both fads and trends just like any place else.

In other words, you take smart, disagreeable people, you cluster them together, they will act like a herd.

They will end up thinking the same things unless they try very hard not to.

You've talked about these personality traits of great innovators before, and we're talking about them now.

You invest in innovators, you try and identify them, and you are 1, so you can recognize these traits.

Here I'm making the presumption that you have these traits, indeed you do, we'll just get that out of the way.

Have you observed people trying to feign these traits?

And are there any specific questions or behaviors that are a giveaway that they're pretending to be the young Steve Jobs

to be the young Steve Jobs or that they're pretending to be the young Henry Ford.

Pick your list of other names that qualify as authentic, legitimate innovators.

We won't name names of people who have tried to disguise themselves as true innovators, but what are some of the litmus tests?

And I realize here that we don't want you to give these away to the point where they lose their potency, But if you could share a few of those,

We're actually a pretty open book on this.

So yeah, so first of all, yes, so there are people who definitely try to come in and basically present as being something that they're not.

They will have listened to this interview.

And they come in and present as something they're not.

I would say the amount of that varies exactly correlated to the Nasdaq.

And so when stock prices are super low, you actually get the opposite.

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Marc Andreessen: How Risk Taking, Innovation & Artificial Intelligence Transform Human Experience