Thoughts on Lex Fridman's interview with Marc Andreessen

Lex Fridman somewhat redeems himself with an interesting interview

I’ve written a number of times about Lex Fridman’s interviews. I used to enjoy him as he would delve into technical topics and it was obvious he did his homework. But in the last few years they devolved into cheesy soft ball interviews and were often derailed by talking about “love”. But I still listen if the guest is interesting.

I’ve listened to a number of Marc Andreessen interviews, especially recently and they’re all very similar. But this one had a few interesting points that I haven’t heard expressed elsewhere. This isn’t due to Lex Fridman being a good interviewer. In fact, he hardly says anything during the interview and just let’s Marc cook. But this is good! You can’t do that with every guest, but here it brought out some interesting points.

Transcript can be found here

Immigration and H1B Debate

This is the first time I heard Marc comment on the H1B immigration debate. There has been a bit of a riff inside the Republican party on this issue. There are two wings: the newly formed Silicon Valley wing that is very pro legal immigration as their companies depend on foreign born talent. And the nationalist wing that sees as the all immigration as a way to depress American wages.

Marc falls squarely on the Silicon Valley wing in that he is generally pro-immigration and sees foreign talent and brain drain as ultimately benefiting America. But he agree that the debate is nuanced (edited lightly)

When we have somebody from anywhere in the world, and they’ve invented a breakthrough new technology, and they want to come to the US to start a company, they come in through an O1 Visa. And it’s a fairly high bar… Mostly what’s happened with the H-1B Visa program is that it has gone to basically two categories of employers.

(02:55:47) One is basically a small set of big tech companies that hire in volume, which is exactly the companies that you would think, and then the other goes to these, what they call the consulting mills. There’s these set of companies with names like Cognizant, whose business model is bringing in primarily Indians in large numbers, and they often have offices next to company-owned housing, and they’ll have organizations that are literally thousands of Indians living and working in the US, and they do basically call it mid-tier IT consulting. So, these folks, they’re making good wages, but they’re making 60 or 80 a or 100,000 a year, not the 300,000 that you’d make in the Valley.

(02:56:34) Startups mainly don’t use H-1Bs, and mainly can’t, because the system is rigged in a way that we can’t. And then, again, you get to the underlying morality here, which is, well, Amazon. I love Amazon, but they’re a big powerful company, they’ve got more money than God, they’ve got resources, they’ve got long-term planning horizon, they do big profound things over decades at a time, they could launch massively effective programs to go recruit the best and brightest from all throughout the country. And you’ll notice they don’t do that, they bring in 10,000, 20,000 H1Bs a year.

Here Marc points out the nuance. Unfortunately much of the debate is lacking nuance on social media. But obviously we want to attract the best and brightest and obviously the H1B system is being abused. I’ve seen it myself. Not necessarily the internal workings and decision making, but the phony interviews where management creates a fake job, conducts fake interviews and goes through the steps required to get someone on H1B. Everyone knows its fake and being abused but no one really talks about it.

So how does Marc suggest you source American talent?

He describes why we aren’t getting American talent. He points out that the standard college exam, the SAT, was used as essentially an IQ test and intelligent students were identified through this test when we thought we needed smart people to win the Cold War. But now it was dumbed down to make it more equitable and game-able (again slightly edited):

(02:58:40) There’s a system that was created during the Cold War called the National Merit Scholars, and it was created in the 50s or 60s when… It was people in government actually wanted to identify the best and the brightest, as heretical an idea as that sounds today. It’s basically a national talent search for, basically, IQ. Its goal is to identify basically the top 0.5% of the IQ in the country. By the way, completely regardless of other characteristics. So, there’s no race, gender, or any other aspect to it, it’s just going for straight intelligence… They use the SAT as a proxy for IQ, which it is. They run this every year, they identify, they get down to 1% of the population of the kids, of 18 year olds in an given year, who score highest on the PSAT, and then they further qualify down to the 0.5% that also replicate on the SAT. And then it’s like, the scholarship amount is like $2,500. So, it was a lot of money 50 years ago, not as much today... How many of our great and powerful universities use this as a scouting system?

…

(03:00:30) So, the SAT used to be a highly accurate proxy for IQ that caused a bunch of problems, people really don’t like the whole idea of IQ. And so, the SAT has been actively managed over the last 50 years by the college board. It’s been dumbed down, in two ways. Number one, it’s been dumbed down where an 800 from 40 years ago does not mean what an 800 means today. And 40 years ago, it was almost impossible to get an 800. Today, there’s so many 800s that you could stock the entire Ivy League with 800s, and so it’s been deliberately dumbed down. And then, two is, they have tried to pull out a lot of what’s called the g-loading.

(03:01:21) And they’ve tried to detach it from being an IQ proxy because IQ is such an inflammatory concept. And the consequence of that is, and this is sort of perverse, they’ve made it more coachable, right? So, the SAT 40 years ago, coaching didn’t really work, and more recently it has really started to work. And one of the things you see is that the Asian spike, you see this giant leap upward in Asian performance over the last decade, and I think, looking at the data, I think a lot of that is because it’s more coachable now, and the Asians do the most coaching.

Lex mentions that he scored 800 on the math portion and he’s obviously no super-genius.

Marc goes on to talk about how affirmative action in school decisions have stifled the American talent resulting in the need to for foreign labor. But he also brings up that it might not have helped the purported beneficiaries:

(02:41:44) So I just assumed that this was great news for American Blacks, because obviously if Whites, Asians, and Jews are being excluded, then the whole point of this in the beginning was to get the Black population up, and so this must be great for American Blacks. So then I discovered this New York Times article from 2004 called Blacks are Being Admitted into Top Schools at Greater Numbers, but which ones? And the two authorities that were quoted in the story are Henry Louis Gates, who’s the dean of the African-American Studies community in the United States, super brilliant guy. And then Lani Guinier, she was a potential Supreme Court appointee.

(02:42:32) And they are quoted as the authorities in this story, and the story that they tell, it’s actually amazing. And by the way, it’s happening today in education institutions and it’s happening in companies, and you can see it all over the place, and the government. Which is at least at that time, the number was half of the Black admits into a place like Harvard were not American-born Blacks, they were foreign-born Blacks, specifically Northern African, generally Nigerian or West Indian.

(02:43:18) And by the way, many Nigerians and Northern Africans have come to the US and have been very successful. Nigerian-Americans as a group way outperform, they’re just a super smart cohort of people. And then West Indian Blacks in the US are incredibly successful. Most recently, by the way, Kamala Harris, as well as Colin Powell, just two examples of that. And so basically what Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier said in the story is Harvard is basically struggling to either, whatever it was, identify, recruit, make successful, whatever it was, American-born native Blacks, and so therefore they were using high-skill immigration as an escape hatch to go get Blacks from other countries. And then this was 2004 when you could discuss such things, obviously that is a topic that nobody has discussed since, it has sailed on. All of the DEI programs of the last 20 years have had this exact characteristic.

And it checks out! From the mentioned article:

While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.

The Ancient City

Marc mentions a book The Ancient City from the 1860s by French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges. In it, the author tried to reconstruct the lives of people who preceded the Greeks and Romans, the Indo-Europeans.

The key characteristics of these societies were:

• No concept of individual rights or individualism

• Complete hierarchical control (heads of families/tribes/cities had life and death power over members)

• Combined "maximum fascism" (absolute top-down control) with "maximum communism" (shared resources, no market economy)

• Religion centered on two aspects: ancestor worship and nature worship

• Their morality was what Nietzsche called "master morality" - strength was good because it meant survival, weakness was bad because it meant death.

Then Christianity flipped it on its head by celebrating meekness, forgiveness and care for the downtrodden.

But in the new secular age, we’ve fallen back to similar pre-Christian religious structures. Specifically identity politics as a form of ancestor worship and environmentalism as a form of nature worship.

(00:17:23) Identity politics is worshiping ancestors. It’s tagging newborn infants with either benefits or responsibilities or levels of condemnation based on who their ancestors were. The Indo-Europeans would’ve recognized it on sight. We somehow think it’s super socially progressive.

Much later in the interview he mentions the other major difference the new secular religion with other modern traditional religions:

(03:43:20) Wokeness has, I think, has had every single aspect of an actual religion other than redemption, which is maybe the most dangerous religion you could ever come up with, is the one where there's no forgiveness

Preference Falsification

This is a theme I heard brought up by Marc and others numerous times, but he does a good job explaining it and its origins here so it’s worth mentioning.

(00:41:49) So this is one of the all time great books. Incredible. About 20, 30-year-old book, but it’s completely modern and current in what it talks about as well as very deeply historically informed. So it’s called Private Truths, Public Lies, and it’s written by a social science professor named Timur Kuran, at I think Duke, and his definitive work on this. And so he has this concept, he calls Preference Falsification. And so preference falsification is two things, and you get it from the title of the book, Private Truths, Public Lies. So preference falsification is when you believe something and you can’t say it, or, and this is very important, you don’t believe something and you must say it. And the commonality there is in both cases, you’re lying. You believe something internally, and then you’re lying about it in public.

The great example of this is the slogan “Workers of the World Unite”.

(00:42:36) And so he describes what he calls the Parable of the Greengrocer, which is you’re a greengrocer in Prague in 1985, and for the last 50 years, it’s been absolutely mandatory to have a sign in the window of your store that says Workers of the World Unite.

(00:43:22) And it’s 1985, it is crystal clear that the workers of the world are not going to unite… But he says, the thing is, the greengrocer knows the slogan is fake. He knows it’s a lie. Every single person walking past the slogan knows that it’s a lie. Every single person walking past the store knows that the greengrocer is only putting it up there because he has to lie in public. And the greengrocer has to go through the humiliation of knowing that everybody knows that he’s caving into the system and lying in public.

(00:44:07) And so it turns into the moralization campaign. In fact, it’s not ideological enforcement anymore because everybody knows it’s fake. The authorities know it’s fake, everybody knows it’s fake.

He lets the listener decide for themselves what the “Workers of the World Unite” equivalent is in modern Western society.

Final Thoughts

There are other memorable parts and the whole thing is worth a listen. In general he’s amped up about America’s prospects specifically around the new administration and AI. He goes over the same topics a lot, so if you’re interested in what he has to say, this is a good interview since he touches on a lot of what he had discussed elsewhere as well as goes into some new topics.