The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
16 Jan 2025
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with entrepreneur and software pioneer, Marc Andreessen. They discuss the timeline of the woke institutional takeover, the ruinous effects it has had on Western ideology and business, the ways in which AI will shape society, and the immense responsibility we have to instill the future with an ethos and morality that serves human flourishing. Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marc serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Coinbase, Dialpad, Flow, Golden, Honor, OpenGov, Samsara, Simple Things, and TipTop Labs. He is also on the board of Meta. This episode was filmed on December 18th, 2024. | Links | For Marc Andreessen: On X https://x.com/pmarca?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Substack https://pmarca.substack.com/ “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (Book) https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
This movement, you know, that we now call wokeness, it hijacked what I would, you know, call sort of at the time, you know, bog standard progressivism. But, you know, it turned out what we were dealing with was something that was far more aggressive. You're pouring cultural acid on your company and the entire thing is devolving into complete chaos.
It's also, I think, the case that the new communication technologies have also enabled reputation savages in a way that we haven't seen before.
The single biggest fight is going to be over what are the values of the AIs. That fight, I think, is going to be a million times bigger and more intense and more important than the social media censorship fight. As you know, out of the gate, this is going very poorly.
Stop there for just a sec, because we should delve into that. That's a terrible thing. Hello, everybody. So I had the opportunity to talk to Mark Andreasson today, and Mark has been quite visible on the podcast circuit as of late.
And part of the reason for that is that he's part of a swing within the tech community back towards the center and even more particularly under the current conditions toward the novel and emerging technology players in the Trump administration. Now, Mark is a key tech... visionary. He developed Mosaic and Netscape and they really laid the groundwork for the web as we know it.
And Mark has been a investor in Silicon Valley circles for 20 years and is as plugged into the tech scene as anyone in the world. And the fact that he's decided to speak publicly, for example, about such issues as government, tech,
collusion, and that he's turned his attention away from the Democrats, which is the traditional party, let's say, of the tech visionaries, and they're all characterized by the high openness that tends to make people liberal. The fact that Mark has pivoted is, what would you say, it's an important it may be as important an event as Musk aligning with Trump.
And so I wanted to talk to Mark about his vision of the future. He laid out a manifesto a while back called the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which bears some clear resemblance to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Policy Platform, that's ARC. which is an enterprise that I'm deeply involved in.
And so I wanted to talk to him about the overlap between our visions of the future and about the twist and turns of the tech world in relationship to their political allegiance and the transformations there that have occurred, and also about...
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