Chris Dixon believes we’re at a pivotal inflection point in the internet’s evolution. As a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of Read Write Own, Chris believes the current internet, dominated by large platforms like YouTube and Spotify, has strayed far from its decentralized roots. He argues that the next era—powered by blockchain technology—can restore autonomy to creators, lower barriers for innovation, and shift economic power back to the network’s edges.
Tyler and Chris discuss the economics of platform dominance, how blockchains merge protocol-based social benefits with corporate-style competitive advantages, the rise of stablecoins as a viable blockchain-based application, whether Bitcoin or AI-created currencies will dominate machine-to-machine payments, why Stack Overflow could be the first of many casualties in an AI-driven web, venture capital’s vulnerability to AI disruption, whether open-source AI could preserve national sovereignty, NFTs as digital property rights system for AIs, how Kant’s synthetic a priori, Kripke’s modal logic, and Heidegger’s Dasein sneak into Dixon’s term‑sheet thinking, and much more.
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Recorded March 26th, 2025.
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Thanks to a listener for sponsoring this transcript in dedication to their grandpa, Girsha Raikhelson.
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I am chatting with Chris Dixon, who is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He has a longstanding history in the tech field. He started off, in a way, as a blogger, and we now have out the paperback edition of Chris’s recent book, a very stimulating and provocative read. It is called Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet. Chris, welcome.
CHRIS DIXON: Thanks for having me.
COWEN: Let me ask you a very fundamental question so people can see where you’re coming from. If I listen to music today — not on my stereo — I’ll go to YouTube and Spotify. What’s wrong with that arrangement? How is it you think we can make it better?
DIXON: Yes, so the core thesis of my book and the core thesis of my career now is that the internet began as a decentralized network, which meant that if you created a website, or let’s say you were a musician and you created a website and you sold your music, you would sell directly to the consumers, and there would be no intermediary in between taking money from that transaction.
The challenge with things like Spotify and YouTube and just generally the structure of the modern internet is that you’ve had these services pop up, which are very dominant. It’s very consolidated. Ninety percent of the internet traffic runs through less than 10 services and companies. They have very high, what we call take rates on the internet business. The take rate is the percentage of money flowing through the system taken by the network intermediary.
YouTube actually is the most generous of the social networks. They give roughly 50 percent to the creators and take 50 percent for themselves. Now, that’s actually a low take rate in the internet in any other area of the economy, as I’m sure you’d know. Fifty percent for an intermediary is generally a very high rate. Spotify is 30 percent, but then, of course, for musicians, there are many other layers of fees on top, including the music labels.
Spotify’s own statistics — it’s on their website. I guess they’re glad about this. They think it’s a good stat. It’s something like — I don’t remember the exact number — it’s like 8,000 of the 8 million artists make more than $50,000 a year, so a very, very small percentage make something like the average American living.
The question is, is that because people aren’t paying for music? People are paying for music. Advertisers are spending a ton of money on YouTube. Meta, and Google, and these companies are making a ton of money. The problem is, in my mind, primarily economic. I go through this, by the way, in detail in the first part of my book. I go through the history of the internet and how this happened.
Basically, why I got into the internet was, it was a very exciting vision. Of course, it came out of academia and government and things, but this vision that you’d have an internet that’s owned and operated by the people that use it, where, if you visualize a network, the money’s flowing to the edges of the network.
There were all these great ideas, like there’s a famous blog post by Kevin Kelly called “1,000 True Fans.” The idea was — because you’re removing intermediaries — musicians and creative people can now make a living with only a thousand customers. If you do the math, someone’s paying $10 a month, and you have a thousand of them, that’s 10 grand a month. That’s 120 grand a year. That’s a pretty good living for somebody doing something they love.
That was always the vision. That’s what I got excited about. I got started in the internet in the ’90s, and the internet was like that in the ’90s, and it was like that in much of the 2000s, and then I go through this.
I think because of the incentives, of the way these services were set up, because of venture capital, because of a bunch of things, you essentially had a bunch of incentives to consolidate. And network effects, of course — that these services get more valuable, the more people that are on it, which has a winner-take-all effect. You look around about 10 years ago, and we got to a place where there’re roughly 5 to 10 services that are dominating the internet, taking all the money, taking all the economics. And also have control — that’s a whole separate topic. This is going to this topic of de-platforming and rules. If you go on YouTube, there’re all these debates around demonetization.
In the book, I go through this. It’s the history of the internet, how this happened, and then what are the effects. There’re economic effects, there’re governance or control effects, and I think, more broadly, what it does is — for example, as you mentioned, YouTube and Spotify — it creates real challenges for creative people.
Now, throw in artificial intelligence, which I think is, obviously, an amazing technology and incredibly powerful, and I’m generally very excited about what it will do. I think, left unchecked on its current trajectory, it will likely lead to even further consolidation and reward companies with large amounts of data and capital and things like this. The reason that I’m involved with blockchains and crypto is, I see blockchains as a potential counterbalancing force to those consolidation trends.
COWEN: But there is a reason why the older internet dwindled, right? For me, as a listener, Google, Alphabet — they’ve upgraded YouTube in some very significant ways. The search function is amazing. The algorithm, to me, is useful. It used to be you had to download a YouTube video, and then you’d watch it much later. And now it’s all seamless and great. Why aren’t I just better off in this new world? I left the decentralized internet behind, and my music listening today is much better than it was 20 years ago.
DIXON: Yes. My argument, structurally, is a thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and that’s Read Write Own. The first era of the internet — what you’re referring to — are protocol networks. That was the worldwide web and email. These were decentralized networks with no company behind them, not owned by anyone. They’re really just standards, like a language is a standard.
Actually, the case study I used in the book is RSS and the fall of RSS. RSS is still around but in a very niche way. At one point — it was, let’s call it 2008. I was there; I was blogging about this at the time. It was a legitimate contender. You could’ve imagined a world where you were getting your YouTube and Twitter, and all these other services through a decentralized protocol. Not RSS as you imagine it, just like a bad visual interface, but as the underlying structure, and then you build graphics and streaming and all these other things in it. So, why didn’t that happen?
I think, to your point, it didn’t happen because it wasn’t good enough. It didn’t offer the same user experience. You’re absolutely right about that. These services won because they were better. One of the big reasons they were better — and I have, again, a case study of this in the book — is subsidization. YouTube, for a very long time, and to this day in some areas, is subsidizing video hosting costs, which is very expensive.
Look, I’ve seen this from the other side. I work in venture capital. I’ve now worked in it for, I don’t know, I’ve been investing for almost 20 years. These companies like YouTube and Twitter — they raise a lot of money. What do they spend that money on? A lot of it is for subsidizing the hosting costs because the basic idea is, these are winner-take-all markets. They have network effects, and so, what you do is you subsidize along the way.
Let’s imagine the 2000s. YouTube came out in 2005. You’re sitting there in 2007. You’re a video blogger, and you have two choices. You can set up RSS and pay hosting costs, or you can go to YouTube and do it for free. That was one of the big value propositions of YouTube early on if you used it back then. I did. That subsidization is something that those protocol networks — there’s no company behind it. RSS couldn’t offer subsidies. It’s like there’s no —
COWEN: Isn’t there some a priori reason to expect the centralized service to spend more innovating and to innovate more rapidly than the decentralized service, precisely because there is some monopoly profit there?
DIXON: Well, I think there’re a couple of things. If I could just briefly get to blockchains, I think of blockchains as a new architecture for building internet services, where there is no intermediary — decentralized is another way for saying no intermediary — where you have very low take rates and you have . . . The way I think of blockchains is the benefits of protocol networks, of the old networks, the societal benefits in that the money flows to the edges. The control is by the community.
But blockchains are able to do some of the things you’re describing. A blockchain can offer incentives. A blockchain can have a treasury, right? This is the architecture of blockchain. They have a thing called smart contracts, and the smart contract is something that’s hard for people to get their heads around, but it’s not a company or a person. It’s literally a piece of code that owns tokens and money and can use that money to do things like the YouTube subsidization.
My core argument is that protocol networks are better for society. Corporate networks — as I call them — like YouTube, have a lot of advantages, as you’re describing, like competitive advantages. Blockchain networks done right can ideally be the best of both worlds. They can have the societal benefits of protocol networks but the competitive advantages of these corporate networks.
Now, to your point, anything that’s decentralized — there are some coordination costs. I think a good case study there would be Linux versus Windows, right? Linux is now — I don’t know what the percentages are, but I think it’s well above 90 percent of the operating systems are Linux.
If you rewind to the ’90s when it was starting out, it was a mess. It was on a listserv and a bunch of uncoordinated people. Now, you did have a very important bully pulpit leader in Linux, but it was an uncoordinated mess. And you’re right, there is overhead and coordination costs. You don’t have a hierarchical management structure that can be very efficient.
The flip side, and why I think Linux won, is that open-source benefits from what’s known as composability. That’s the idea that anyone in the world can write a piece of software once, put it on GitHub as a public resource, and then anyone else can use that as a Lego brick to build another thing. I say in the book that composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance. It’s this thing where, basically, one person builds something, and you never have to build it again, and you reuse it, and you build the Lego bricks up.
I think that’s one of the main reasons that open source has taken 90 percent plus market share. AWS, every embedded device you have, every data center, Android devices, and so forth. So, you’re right, there’s a different set of trade-offs. It’s tougher to coordinate building a decentralized protocol or a blockchain protocol, but on the flip side, you have other benefits. You have lower take rates. You can offer incentives through tokens. You can benefit from composability. Everything is open source and reusable.
COWEN: There is legal free entry in the sector. People can go to Andreessen Horowitz. They can go to you personally and ask for VC money to do something. I recall a bunch of people told me I should try Mastodon, which was decentralized. I did. I didn’t like it. Most people didn’t like it. That’s now a bunch of years ago. No one has come to me in at least five years and said, “Oh, Tyler, you need to try this new decentralized service.” Why isn’t that happening? What’s the benefit the service might be offering me that’s concrete?
DIXON: I have a section on Mastodon. I think there’re architectural flaws in the whole thing. For example, if you’ve used it, there’s this whole concept of servers, and you have this very challenging problem of coordinating across servers, and it’s very fragmented. That might be a separate topic. Look, I think a broader thing is, when I think about where blockchains are getting adopted, if you look at where they’re successful right now, it’s mostly in financial applications.
Stablecoins, for example — I think that the numbers are shockingly high. If you Google Visa stablecoin dashboard, Visa is, I think, a pretty neutral party. They have a dashboard that tracks it. It’s $3.5 trillion in stablecoin transactions last month, and that’s been steadily going up. It’s been going up. Stablecoin, just for your audience, is something like, it could be a dollar or euro, but it’s backed by an asset in the bank, so there’s Tether, USDC.
There’s a bill that just passed the Senate Finance Committee and is going to be voted on in the House, hopefully in the next six weeks and hopefully passed. That is congressional legislation to put full rules around stablecoins. All of this growth has been happening before there was that kind of clarity. I think that could really accelerate it.
The reason I’m saying this is that, look, it may just be me. I think there’re really interesting things you can do with blockchains and social networks, but the reality is, in 2025, it could just be that we have social networks. The network effects are strong, and the areas to focus on when you have new architectures, like blockchains, may be other areas.
In software, there’s a phrase, greenfield, brownfield. Greenfield is, you have some breakthrough — AI or crypto or whatever — do you go after existing use cases and make them better or do you go after new use cases? What you’re describing is more brownfield. It may just be that some of the wars are fought, and they’re over. There’re 3 billion people using Facebook apps. At some point, the network effects are so strong that even if you come up with something that’s much better, it may just be a challenge. I’m sure some of your challenge on something like Mastodon is just that your friends aren’t there. Network effects.
To your question, I’m very excited, obviously, about blockchains in this new architecture. We make investments in a lot of different areas because we like to experiment and try a bunch of things, but I think right now, the most likely areas where we’re going to see increased adoption are in these areas where things are more broken. I would say that’s in payments, financial services. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening also at the intersection of crypto, blockchains, and AI.
COWEN: With stablecoins, once the Trump people are no longer in office — it’s four years from now, but what do you think their regulatory counter-reaction will be like? The stablecoin issuers — they are subject to runs, right? There’s nominally 100 percent reserves. There’s no guarantee.
DIXON: No, there are 100 percent reserves in the legislation. USDC has 100 percent reserves. Tether is debated because they’re not audited in the US, and people don’t know. They say they do. The bill would actually require 100 percent reserves.
COWEN: Why isn’t the equilibrium that I have my stablecoins overseas where they’re not regulated, and de facto, the sector is not 100 percent reserves, and there’re a lot of runs? Why isn’t that what ends up happening?
DIXON: In the bill, there’ll be all sorts of things. For example, if you go to Coinbase, there’ll be restrictions on offering unregistered stablecoins that aren’t —
COWEN: That’s a US-based firm, right?
DIXON: Yes. Sure.
COWEN: There will always be foreign firms. Estonia, Argentina, wherever, that will offer me a better deal precisely because they’re not 100 percent backed. It’ll be a higher return. I won’t care about the social risk I generate by putting my funds into a more run-prone firm. Why don’t we have to worry about that?
DIXON: What my hope is and what often happens is . . . First of all, I’m not expert on every aspect of the proposed stablecoin bill, but there are reciprocation requirements. If other countries want to access them and participate in our financial services and KYC and AML, they’re expected to have similar rules that, historically, our financial services regulations tend to propagate to a lot of other countries.
My hope would be that the US does something here, and a lot of other countries follow that lead, and that becomes the norm, and that people want, and there’ll be rules. You can’t call something a stablecoin and get it on a registered exchange if it’s not. That would be my hope. Look, in crypto, there’s no question there are scams, and there are bad things, and I’m sure there will be in the future. I think that the best solution to it is to have smart regulation that incentivizes or requires things to be built in the proper way, in a way that avoids things like bank runs.
By the way, the bank run thing — just to be clear, there were a bunch of stablecoins in the past, like Terra Luna, which had a bank run and collapsed. That was not asset-backed by dollars. That was this circular thing that was backed by its own token, and it had a bank-run thing. That has happened, as you say. The hope would be that these existing ones and the new ones and the regulations around them would require full one-to-one asset backed, and therefore make bank runs impossible.
COWEN: Circa 2025, we’ve seen a lot of international cooperation break down. The WTO basically doesn’t work. The UN, I would say, has not worked in some while. Intellectual property law — that still works. Agreements on trying to end various wars — those are not working. So, it seems unlikely to me that the US could convince the world, in essence, to copy our stablecoin regulation, even if we tried to use SWIFT. We’ve pushed the SWIFT incentive on countries very hard. It’s shown its limits.
Again, why don’t we just end up with these significant corners where the most profitable stablecoins are outside of what the US wants to do with them?
DIXON: I think it’s partly also, what do you want to do with the stablecoin? Who’s using the stablecoin? I’ll just give you an example. The Stripe founders — I think of Stripe as a very smart financial services firm and who, by the way, were not particularly . . . they had done crypto 10 years ago, and then had really soured on it. I think you know Patrick and John pretty well.
COWEN: Sure.
DIXON: They had actually really soured on it. When I saw them, I would say, “Oh, crypto is . . .” Go watch them. I just watched them on the All-In podcast a few weeks ago. They acquired this company called Bridge. It’s a stablecoin company, and actually, in their annual letter they just put out, they called stablecoins the room temperature superconductor, which, of course, is like a holy grail kind of thing.
They’re using it for — I don’t know — I don’t have their financial statements on the thing, but as they describe it, they’re using it for things like treasury management. I believe the example they gave was SpaceX moving money from one jurisdiction to another. A very popular use case is international invoicing. You’re an importer, and you have to send out 50 invoices to various countries. You can now do it in a fully digital way with very low fees and very quickly.
The Stripe founders — one of the interesting things they said is, it’s not just the lower fees. Just to give you a sense on the fees — this is as of a year and a half ago, basically, because the infrastructure in crypto has gotten better. You now, basically, on things like Base, which is an L2, and Solana — have hit what we’ve thought of for a long time as a target, which is one second-one penny to transfer things. That’s where we are now technically. Your viewers — if they want to check me, they can go download the Coinbase Wallet and try it, and you can see it.
One of the big benefits the Stripe founders talked about is the fact that you can now — because it’s fully digital end-to-end, like email — you can fully automate the whole thing. A big problem, for example, with invoicing is invoice fraud. People send you an invoice, and it’s a fake place to wire it to. Now, it’s fully digital. Stripe has, effectively, what’s like a reputation network. One computer sends a request to the other, and the other one checks it. It checks it against Stripe’s database. Is this a white-listed address? And it does the whole thing end-to-end, low fees, internationally.
To your question, will there be people at the fringes who want to maximize yield? Sure, there’s always that kind of behavior. Probably, it’s the internet. The internet has edges. The question is, can we marginalize it? And will these legitimate companies like Stripe . . . What I’m hoping — Stablecoin bill passes. I think Visa will enter, MasterCard will enter, PayPal will enter. Fidelity has already said they’re going to enter. Bank of America said they’re going to enter.
I think you’re going to have every bank probably issuing, I hope, a stablecoin the way you have them issuing credit cards. These all have users and customers. The banks will have a button that says, “Send a stablecoin.” What I’m hoping is that there’re enough legitimate actors around this who create a network effect that, to your point, yes, there will be that stuff, but it will be marginalized.
COWEN: In that world, should we infer that the Federal Reserve loses control of the money supply? Create a stablecoin. It’s backed by a T-bill. In a funny way, it’s like a private open-market operation. I’m fine with that. I’m not sure the Fed controls the money supply today. Does that become a macro issue?
DIXON: I feel like I’m talking to a famous economist. [laughs] I’m on your territory now. It’s dangerous because I’m not an economist.
COWEN: Well, I haven’t figured this out myself either, to be clear. I’m genuinely asking various people. I asked Austan Goolsbee the same question because I don’t know.
DIXON: Yes, I believe that the last stat I saw, stablecoins hold 4 percent of treasury. If this grows a lot — it already is meaningful, but it will be meaningful. I think of it more in terms of payments and all the things . . . you can have payments and then all the adjacent things you can do around payments versus a bank account, and replacing folks like banks in the Federal Reserve that control the money supply. That’s at least where I think the focus should be.
I believe in the current draft of the bill, you can’t offer yield to the consumers. I think that’s something the banks are fighting for. Anyways, this is still a political thing going on, but they don’t want that because they think if you can offer essentially a treasury bill, like a yield, and the consumer gets the yield, that that will become more attractive than bank accounts.
I think this will also be a question: Is this optimized more around payments or more around savings use cases? I’ll have to defer to you. I would also argue the other national security interest here — and you’ve had others write about this in various editorials — it’s another way to popularize a dollar, right? We’ve seen the demand for it, and if we legitimate it, it presumably will make, hopefully, the dollar more popular and increase its status or maintain its status as a reserve currency.
Fractional banking stuff, I probably have to defer to you on that, as I could speculate a little bit, but it’s from an amateur perspective.
COWEN: When the AIs trade with each other, do you think they’ll prefer Bitcoin or stablecoins?
DIXON: [laughs] That’s a good question. We actually just made an investment in a project that’s doing . . . It’s sort of stablecoin infrastructure for AI agents. We haven’t officially announced it yet, but I guess I can talk a little bit about it.
A lot of things with AI — there’s the technical side, but there’s also the legal side. How do you deal with KYC, AML, and liability, and all those kinds of things? There’re a lot of questions that come up if you have an AI going out and doing stuff and spending money. That actually turns out to be a really interesting area of innovation. The person we just invested in is a veteran of that regulatory money world.
One of the knocks on Bitcoin as a payment system is the volatility. You don’t want to have something that changes value a lot when you’re paying for something, but if it’s a machine and a machine, presumably they can do that in milliseconds or microseconds, and volatility becomes a moot issue. There’s a guy, David Marcus — he ran the Libra Project at Facebook and spun out, and we funded his start-up. It’s called Lightspark. It’s doing exactly what you’re describing, which is a payment system built on top of Bitcoin.
His argument is Bitcoin is preferable because it’s not the dollar, that a lot of countries will want some. It’s the only crypto asset that is credibly globally neutral, that no country sees as a US thing or some other country thing, and therefore should be the currency of the internet. I think that’s an interesting argument.
COWEN: I wonder sometimes if the AIs won’t create their own crypto tokens and say, “Well, basically the seigniorage from Bitcoin has gone to early humans. We can design one better.” Because they’re already smart, but they’re going to be really smart. We’ll have to learn how to trade their stuff.
DIXON: People have done experiments like that, but, yes, once they have emergent capabilities, I guess it all depends on what we allow them to do and what systems we plug them into. I think it’s quite possible.
COWEN: If there’s anything where there’s a clear cookbook, and you can do it digitally online. No one built crypto for the AIs, but if you had wanted to build a money for the AIs, I’m not sure you could have done much better than crypto.
DIXON: I think that’s right.
COWEN: How will AI change how the web is organized? Will it just be totally different in five years?
DIXON: That’s a great question. A couple of things I’ll say on that, and all of this, obviously, in the context of our firm does a lot of AI investing. I think it’s generally a great thing. The technology is amazing and impressive, and every day you see new amazing things. There’re debates around whether it’s going to slow down. My guess is it’s not going to slow down. There’re so many smart people and so much money and so many different ways in which it can improve.
It was pre-training, and now it looks like it’s reasoning. They’ll probably come up with some other method in a year that does that. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface around humanoid robots and haven’t gone deep on video and other forms of media modalities.
One thing I think a lot about, though, is the economics of the internet. Specifically, I have a chapter in the book on this. I think of the internet as having an implicit covenant right now. So you have these five to ten companies — Facebook, Google, Amazon, et cetera — who control 90 percent plus of the traffic and the money. Just to take Google as an example . . .
Then there’s the rest of the internet, the long tail of the internet. There’s my blog, your blog, a cooking site, a travel site, whatever it might be. For 25 years or so, there’s been this implicit covenant between the distribution centers like Google and the content providers like us. That covenant is, “Hey, you let us fair use, you let us take a snippet of your content, index it, put it in our search results or let people share it on my social network or whatever it might be. The trade is, we’ll put a link there, and you’ll get some traffic back, and then you can have ads or subscriptions or make it free or whatever you choose to do.”
That’s been the equilibrium state that evolved. It wasn’t as if people sat down and decided that, but it evolved into that, and it’s worked reasonably well. I think it’s worked more to the favor of the distribution side, to the Googles of the world. We see that in Rupert Murdoch and Fox sued Google over it a bunch. I think Facebook just removed news in Canada because they’re upset about it. It’s not that happy, but it sort of worked.
What happens in a world where you just get the answer and there’s no need for a link? Which is the world we’re in now. I don’t know about you, but I’m probably using Claude and ChatGPT and all these things more than I’m using Google.
COWEN: I read fewer books also. It’s not just media sites. Why read a book when you can ask for a 10-page printed report on the history of Edward III?
DIXON: Yes, exactly, books are a whole other thing, but just the rest of the internet. Why am I going to click through? Look at Stack Overflow. I actually used to be on the board of Stack Overflow. They got acquired, and I love the service. Stack Overflow is a programmer Q&A site. The traffic is down — I don’t know — 80 percent now because of these new . . . What basically happened is the AIs went out, trained on Stack Overflow, on GitHub, and then created these amazing services like Copilot and Cursor, which are, by the way, amazing.
I use these on the weekends and stuff. I use Cursor. It’s an unbelievable product. You can type an English sentence and get code out of it, but it obviates the need to go to these websites. The traffic is down. My concern is Stack Overflow is the canary in the coal mine. This is the first thing to go.
COWEN: Of course.
DIXON: In five years, are we ending up with just the rest of the internet atrophying, and we have five to ten services? I love the AI stuff. It’s better. I use it, but I worry that we’re going to look around in five years and realize we just recreated a structure that looks like — I don’t know — broadcast TV in the 1970s. You have four channels. [laughs]
The beauty of the web, the serendipity, the diversity, the ability for somebody to just spin up a blog. This is how a lot of my career got started. I think you’ve been blogging for, what, 20 years or something, every day? Is the ability to do that going to be lost because there’s now no way to get discovered anymore because links aren’t really needed?
On one hand, it’s great for people. I’m by no means anti-AI or technology, but I do think we need to think about — and I’m a little bit surprised more people aren’t thinking about — what kind of internet do we want, and are we creating the right incentive systems to maintain that? By the way, more broadly, look at these. Just today, the new ChatGPT, was it 4o Image thing came out, which looks amazing.
COWEN: It’s gorgeous, yes.
DIXON: There’s going to be, I’m sure, more great stuff like that. Again, it’s great, but what’s our plan for graphic designers? Maybe it’ll be emergent and new jobs will pop up. In two years, we’re going to have the ability to make a Hollywood movie — one person. What’s our plan for all of these other jobs, parts of the internet, parts of — you just mentioned — books?
Look, I agree with you, too. It’s easier to get that thing on Edward III. On the other hand, do we want a shrinking book industry? It’s already shrinking too much — in my opinion — the book industry. Do we want that to go further? I don’t know.
COWEN: Let’s say a media company calls you in, somewhere like Atlantic, The Economist, New Yorker, I’m sure you know these products, of course. They say, “This is happening. We’d like some commercial advice from someone who knows the sector.” What would you tell them to do?
DIXON: Yes, it’s hard because I think it’s a systems problem. It’s a tech problem in the systems. I’m not sure that a single node in the system, like The Atlantic, has a lot to do. I think that it’s really structural.
COWEN: Does personality-driven content survive? Is that the innovation rather than circled fact?
DIXON: I think, yes. One very common pattern with technology is death of the middle or barbelling. You probably know this, but to give your listeners context, what that means is the internet pops up, and before the internet, you had a lot of mid-sized retailers like JC Penney and Sears and those kinds of things. Internet pops up, and what happens is, you get this barbelling effect where you either want to be really, really big like Amazon and Walmart and take advantage of scale, or you want to be a boutique — high-touch, high-brand-value — Gucci, Hermes, and so forth.
In fact, the two biggest winners of this era from a stock perspective were Amazon and LVMH, which is a private equity–style roll-up of those high-end brands. Who lost? It was the people in the middle. It was Kmart, Sears, all those companies that went bankrupt.
Why does that happen? Basically, Kmart and Sears were this artificial bundle, in a sense, of distribution merchandising. You could bring this stuff to them, but not all the way to them the way Amazon does, and you had a little bit of service, and you had all this stuff in the middle. Once you had this new tech, you could unbundle this, and you can go all scale or all high touch.
I think the same thing has happened in media. We’ve had a barbelling effect, and the winners have been either 30-second dopamine hits of TikTok and Instagram reels or three-hour podcasts or Severance and high-end long-form content. What suffered generally has been the 30-minute sitcom, the middle, the 30-minute game show. That matches human needs.
You’re in line to buy something, and you want a couple of dopamine hits. You watch TikTok, and then you want to lean back and get something, and I think that surprised a lot of people, how popular three-hour podcasts are, like Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman. It’s because that’s the other need. It’s turned out these 30-minute things were just there artificially because of the constraints of the medium of TV and things. To your question, I don’t have deep thoughts on this, but I think that my default answer for media would be you’re going to have a barbelling effect.
You’re going to have highly-automated, scaled-out, AI-driven content. Somebody comes up with a new Star Wars thing. You have a whole Reddit community, and they’re all building these AI-created serial movies and things. My expectation is, on the flip side, you’ll have rising demand for very bespoke human things. We’ve seen this. Live concerts have become more popular in an age of machine-created music. fine art like —
COWEN: The Sphere, right?
DIXON: — handcrafted books. I don’t know. People say this all the time, that chess is now more popular than ever even though AI is better than humans in chess. In the end, we’re monkeys. Like other monkeys, there is this fundamental human nature that doesn’t change. Machines can do very powerful things and can be useful. That would be my naive default assumption.
The other really interesting thing with media that I think about is, when film came along, the first cameras and photography. These famous essays, like The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, by Benjamin — it was all this discussion of what is the future of art now that we can take a picture. What’s the role of the representational artist? Of course, the rise of photography coincided with art becoming abstract and all those modern art movements. So, in some sense, the camera did replace the representational art.
But another thing happened, which is a new medium was formed, which is, you take a photo and you take a series of photos and you make a film. So, you had two things happen when the camera developed. You had the old medium get replaced. Of course, high art then pivoted into abstract art, but then you had a brand-new medium that simply couldn’t exist before. That was film, and a whole industry was created around it.
One thing I like to think about when I think about media is, maybe AI will be the camera and it will replace illustration. The role of the illustrator will go away, and AI will replace it. But on the flip side, maybe it will enable a new AI native form of media that couldn’t have existed before.
COWEN: What will AI competition for a16z look like? You have an AI competitor. What are they like?
DIXON: Yes, it’s funny. It’s a good point. Look, what is venture capital? That goes to your question. Venture capital today is a bundle of services. There’s, obviously, this choosing where we raise money, and then there’s some picking aspect of choosing what to invest in. In that picking aspect, I think AI could do a very, very good job and probably beat humans in a lot of ways in the near future.
There’s another aspect, and this is one of the smart things the founders of the firm, Ben [Horowitz] and Marc [Andreessen], did is, there’s a very human aspect to what we do. There’s a high-touch human aspect. A lot of what we do and a lot of how we think we succeed is, we create a culture in a group of people where entrepreneurs decide they want to work with us. Again, we spend a lot of our fees that we make — instead of on our own salaries — on a set of people that help them.
COWEN: But can’t AIs do that? They’re great therapists, right?
DIXON: Yes, they can, but at some point, you’re always going to need somebody to design, or at least for some foreseeable future, you’re presumably going to need someone to help you build and design the robots. Think of us as playing the role of advisors to the people that are building the robots. Hopefully, there will be some role for that, at least for some period of time.
COWEN: If an AI applied for funding–let’s say it was legal in terms of the bank transfers — would you consider the proposal?
DIXON: Right now, they’re limited, and they just can’t do stuff. They can’t open a bank account. They can’t send money. But yes, it’s super interesting.
COWEN: They’ll do it with crypto, and maybe this is two years from now. You’ll get a proposal from an AI, and you’ll get the AI quote-unquote on the phone, the Zoom call. I don’t even know how you would do it. Maybe you just refer it to your AI.
DIXON: Now, we’ve been actually talking about it semi-seriously. We haven’t done anything yet. Marc Andreessen and I were talking about, should there be a nonprofit that’s built on a blockchain? Were you involved with the Fast Grants thing?
COWEN: Yes.
DIXON: Yes. I thought that was really interesting and was inspired by that. Imagine Fast Grants but it’s a blockchain version that uses AI to give out the grants, as an example. That’s actually something that we were just brainstorming. It’s not a serious idea, but that type of thing, right?
COWEN: You could call it Faster Grant, right?
DIXON: [laughs] Faster Grants, yes. I thought what you did was really inspiring. I actually wrote out a business plan. I haven’t done it. It was like you have a DAO. This is an entity on a blockchain, an autonomous entity on a blockchain. Think of what an endowment does. If you go to Yale or Ford Foundation endowments — first time I learned this is when I raised venture capital. I walk in there, and I’m like, “Ford Foundation — aren’t they this organization that gives away money?” They have this other side which invests money.
Endowments are two things: invest the money and give away the money, and they’re very different. Invest the money — they wear suits, and give away the money — they don’t. It’s just like two different organizations. The idea was, could we create a blockchain, an autonomous AI entity that is like an endowment? Half of it is investing, and you’re investing in tokens and this and that, and the other half is giving the money away, ala Fast Grants.
That’s actually an idea. I think it’s pretty cool. If someone did it, I’d be excited to help out. I haven’t gotten around to it, but I do think that might be a future thing. What’s cool about an endowment is, if it invests well, it just snowballs and has more and more money, and then you use some portion of the returns every year to give that out. Hopefully, it just becomes this self-sustaining thing the way that the university endowments have.
COWEN: If I ask you how will AI change politics, what’s the most confident prediction you have?
DIXON: [laughs] Well, that’s a good question. I’d love to ask you a question on this. Well, a couple things. One, I think there’s going to be a lot of political drama around AI in the next couple of years, first of all. This is not AI changing politics; it’s politics potentially changing AI. Maybe it’s a little bit of a different question. I think there’re going to be issues around copyright, safety. I believe these are not going to be settled in the court. They will be settled in Congress. They’re too important.
I just went through this with crypto. We just had four years of regulatory struggles in the courts, and now it’s going to probably be decided in Congress. I think ultimately the same thing will happen in AI because it’s just too important. That’s one topic.
Another thing I think about is how many problems in the world are intelligence problems versus political or coordination or regulatory problems? Building housing is a hot topic right now. Does more intelligence help us build better housing?
COWEN: Probably the opposite because the smarter people lobby harder to stop it.
DIXON: I would argue housing is more of a regulatory problem, or you could argue a collective-action problem. Do you say collective action in economics?
COWEN: Sure. Yes.
DIXON: I think it’s a collective action problem. Does AI help with that? Maybe. I don’t know. I think AI can do a lot of really, really interesting things. I do think a lot of the most challenging things we have in the world right now, and a lot of the gating factors to productivity, economic growth, and just human well-being, I believe, are collective action problems, coordination problems, getting people to agree on something.
Look at the internet. How did the internet change politics? The internet changed politics by changing the way information flows, and I think we’re only beginning to see the effects of that. I think one way to think about the internet is social. Technology always has first-order and second-order effects. The first-order effect of the automobile was, you can get from point A to point B faster. The second-order effect was suburbs, trucking, highway systems, all the next 50 years. The first order was go somewhere faster. That’s 1900 to 1930 or something. Then the next era was all of the second-order things.
I think with the internet, the first-order thing with social media — I can tell people I had a burrito for lunch or something like this. The second order is you suddenly have a whole different political dynamic. You can have an insurgent political movement like Trump or Bernie Sanders, or something that bucks the system and counters the establishment.
You can have a whole narrative universe that counters. You have COVID, and you have the establishments world, and then you have the podcasting version of it. It restructured how information flows, and people obviously will debate whether that’s a good or bad thing, but it’s clearly had that, and I think we’re in the very beginning of that. Really, the social media didn’t become a mainstream thing until smartphones, probably — mainstream in a sense of like three billion people — probably until 2012 or something. We’re still relatively early in that development.
Now, with AI, I think a big question — it’s very possible in five years that people get all their news and political information from an AI. Who created that AI? Was it created by someone with a political agenda? Is it open source? If I can pick one issue that will make the AI future better, my own belief is that we have very strong open-source AI so that people can have a choice. It can be audited. It can be open. Our kids will be top AI. The news will be formed by AI. To your question on politics, politics is downstream of culture and information flows, and AI will reshape that. Who controls that reshaping, to me, seems like the key question.
COWEN: As you know, not many countries have serious AI companies, and even those in Europe may or may not last. They’re not obviously mega profitable. Let’s say you’re the government of Peru, and you can turn over your education system to some foreign, maybe American, AIs. You can turn over how your treasury is managed to the AIs. You can turn over your national defense to the AIs. None of these are Peruvian companies most likely. In the final analysis, are we even left with the government of Peru? Or has it, in some sense, been pseudo privatized to the companies that are running the structures, and indeed to the AI itself?
DIXON: Well, this goes to open source. I think the answer to your question —
COWEN: But even open source is managed by someone. A version of DeepSeek is embedded in Perplexity. That’s worked great, but it’s still someone’s company.
DIXON: I think you have a great question. I do think it’s different if they can get the open weights of DeepSeek, and the Peruvian people and government can fine-tune or change those weights and decide on . . . I do think that matters. I’m not trying to dodge your question, but I do think the architecture there really matters. Maybe not every country has the ability to do that.
COWEN: Maybe without open source we only have two countries left in the world, the US and China, if you want an argument for open source.
DIXON: Economic planning seems like an obvious thing that you would involve AI in. That just seems like one of the first things you’d want to do in government eventually, is have AI set your interest rates to the extent you’re a central planned economy, decide on your production schedules and pricing and such. If you bought an economic planning AI module off the shelf, presumably it would be pretty opinionated on how to do that, and the person who creates those opinions would have immense influence.
I think those countries will insist. I think that one of the reasons that open source will eventually be one of the two dominant models, competitive with proprietary AI, partly because of questions like this. I think these governments and a lot of companies will demand open source.
COWEN: Even then, it seems there’s room for intermediaries. If you just passed DeepSeek or Llama over to a relatively poor government — again, take the case of Peru — they need a McKinsey-like entity — which is maybe the AI company itself — to come in and tell them how to use it, how to integrate it with their systems. Does this mean American soft power has just won? It’s either America or China?
DIXON: These are hard questions. Wow.
COWEN: It might be a good thing, too. If everything in Peru is run by American AI companies, the quality of life will be much higher, I think. They may not like it.
DIXON: I think Peter Thiel said crypto is — what’d he say — crypto is libertarian and AI is socialist or communist. I think what he meant was —
COWEN: I don’t think either of those is right.
DIXON: No, I think the twist I would put on it is, AI tends to be centralizing. It tends to be consolidating power. I think you’re making that point, which is, the people that produce these things, if they’re very powerful things that manage much of the world, being one of the countries and companies that produce them seems to give you immense power.
I think that’s what makes the China move into DeepSeek thing very interesting. There’re a number of interesting things about that. One is the fact that they are so competitive so quickly and with a relatively small team and all the other things. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. There’re a lot of brilliant people there. The second one is the strategy, taking this counter strategy of doing open source, and we’ll see if that lasts. Look, we haven’t seen yet. I would expect India is going to have some interesting stuff, Russia, too. There’re a lot of smart people in the world, and the fact that DeepSeek was — what is it — like 150 people.
I think there’s another thing which we may be trending towards, which is, AI is incredibly important, but it’s also just a commodity. The foundation models — it doesn’t mean there won’t be businesses. There’ll be businesses at the . . . I think, actually, the emerging consensus — at least the people I talk to — is that you’re going to have cloud providers like AWS and such, and you’re going to have, of course, end-user applications like Cursor and whatever.
Some lawyer will have their law firm thing, and every vertical will have their product. It may just be the foundation models end up being like PyTorch or whatever, like math libraries. Essentially, it’s large-scale statistics. It requires heavy engineering, of course, to do the training, but the tricks and secrets end up propagating, and a bunch of people know them. It becomes very large-scale statistical analysis of data source sets, and just a lot of people have it. It may be.
COWEN: If that comes about, what do you think is the dimension that determines which companies dominate? One argument could be Meta and Elon. They just have a lot of resources. They can be in this for a long time. Another argument is OpenAI has the most powerful brand name with ChatGPT and so on. What’s your commercial intuition on what other factor steps into play?
DIXON: One framing I would say is, if you compare the internet to mobile smartphones. The rise of the internet in the ’90s, the rise of smartphones in late 2000s, early 2010s — both were massively important tech movements. A big difference was with the internet. I would say something like 90 percent of the net new market-cap value went to start-ups, went to new organizations that didn’t exist before the internet: Amazon, Google, and such.
With mobile, on the flip side, something like 90 percent — I haven’t done an exact study — went to incumbents. The biggest pure mobile start-up was probably Uber. I think it’s — whatever it is — $150 billion? There was Snapchat. Instagram got bought for a billion, but the vast majority of market-cap value actually went to incumbents. If you look over that, what it did for Apple, Google, Facebook, and all the others, Amazon — they all did fine in that era. They created mobile apps They leaned into it, and their user base went from whatever desktop was at the time — home desktop — let’s call it, 400 million to 4 billion, so 10x.
By the way, it’s very hard. Almost no venture firms over the 2010s beat the strategy of buying Apple stock in 2010.
COWEN: Or the Boston Celtics.
[laughter]
DIXON: Yes. That turned out to be the winner of the mobile era with incumbents. I think one way to frame your question is, will AI be like mobile or like the internet? The concern would be — the concern, quote-unquote — I work in venture capital; I’m biased. We invest in small companies. The concern would be, it’s more like mobile and it just ends up reinforcing the strengths of the big companies: Google and Microsoft and Facebook. They have more data, they have more money for the training, they have the infrastructure, they have the distribution.
How is somebody going to create a competitor to Facebook? Llama’s already great, and they’ll pump it through all their channels, and so will Google, and they have more data and so forth. That would be the — I don’t know — the degenerate outcome from the venture capitalist perspective. It could be great for the world though. I think a lot of this will be consumer benefit, consumer surplus. That’s good, and I’m happy about that. There’ll always be some vertical thing or some other thing for VCs to invest in. I think that might actually be a really good societal outcome.
COWEN: Do NFTs have a future?
DIXON: One of the things a blockchain allows you to do is to create digital assets. Bitcoin is a digital asset that exists on a blockchain. Those digital assets can be either fungible or nonfungible. Fungible means interchangeable; it’s like a currency. Any Bitcoin can be exchanged for another. Nonfungible means it’s a distinct asset.
Do blockchains have a future? Of course, I believe, yes. Then, on those blockchains, will you have some assets that are fungible and some that are not? I think, definitely. When people think NFTs, they think of people buying JPEGs. That may or may not come back.
The idea that people will have digital assets that, for example, could represent a movie ticket . . . An NFT can represent a physical object. A lot of people are doing this now, where they represent a pair of tennis shoes or a piece of fine art or a housing deed or some other . . . If we have a future — which I hope for, and I’m pushing for — of people transacting with digital assets on blockchains, I think very much that some of those will be nonfungible. I think some of them will also be purely digital. We’re seeing a bunch of these people make video games, and you have a sword or a gun you can buy, and it’s an NFT, and you can resell it and do other things.
As the digital world becomes more and more important, you’ll have virtual worlds, you’ll have metaverses, you’ll have these worlds like Roblox and many more variations of things like that. You will have, I think, digital assets in those worlds, and you can have those either locked inside of the game owned by the game maker, or you can have them on a blockchain, where the user can move them around and control them. I think that’s a better architecture.
So, the answer is, yes, but in the true sense of NFT, not in the caricature sense that people think about associating with the 2021 bull market.
COWEN: Won’t NFTs become the property right system for the AIs?
DIXON: I think that would be a good outcome. I think it’s the right way to do it. The reason my book’s called Read Write Own is that “read and write” is a common phrase referring to the first two eras of the internet. My argument is that, if blockchains are successful, this era will be about ownership — digital ownership — and blockchains enable digital ownership. That ownership can be something digital, something that’s digital that represents something non-digital, something off blockchains, like in a bank. It can be something in the purely digital world. I think it’s the right way to represent digital ownership.
One way to think about the internet today is, imagine the offline world where you could never own something, and every time you go to a new venue, you have to change clothes and use all their stuff, and you can’t take it anywhere else. It’s this weird structure on the internet.
Now, you go to Twitter, and you gain followers, and yet, they own your followers, and you can’t take them with you. You go to play a game, and everything’s stuck inside that game. One of the ideas in the blockchain world is we can shift that power back, and the user can actually have this persistent inventory of things that they own and control. That’s what a crypto wallet is, and you can take that to different services, and you unbundle the ownership of the data from the provision of the service.
COWEN: What’s your favorite book in philosophy?
DIXON: I’ve actually been getting back into philosophy lately. I did philosophy years ago in grad school. Favorite book, man. Are you into philosophy?
COWEN: Of course, yes. Plato’s Dialogues; Quine, Word and Object; Parfit, Reasons and Persons; Nozick. Those are what come to my mind right away.
DIXON: Yes. I did analytic philosophy. I actually was in a graduate school program and dropped out. I did analytic philosophy. Actually, Quine was one of my favorites — Word and Object and Two Dogmas of Empiricism, all those kinds of things. I like Donald Davidson. Nozick — I loved Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Reading that with Rawls is a great pairing. I used to love Wittgenstein, both early and later. I was into logic, so Frege and Russell. This was a grad school.
Now I’m trying to finally understand continental philosophy. I never understood it. I’ve actually spent the last three months in a philosophy phase. I’ve been watching a lot of videos. Highly recommend this. Do you know Bryan Magee?
COWEN: Sure, yes.
DIXON: Amazing. I watched all of his videos. This guy, Michael Sugrue, was a Princeton professor — great videos on continental philosophy. I’ve been reading — it sounds pretentious; I’m not saying I understand this or I’m an expert on it, but I’m struggling in reading it. I’m trying to read Being and Time right now — Heidegger. I really like Kripke. I follow Kripke. I liked his books a lot. Nelson Goodman was one of my favorites. Funny enough, I just bought it again — Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. Kripke — Naming and Necessity is his legendary book on reference and language.
COWEN: I’ve never been persuaded by that one. It always felt like sleight of hand to me. He’s very, very smart. He might be the sharpest philosopher, but I like the book on Wittgenstein better.
DIXON: He basically invented modal logic. I don’t know if you know that story. He was in high school, something.
COWEN: He was 15 years old, I heard. Yes.
DIXON: [laughs] He’s like a true prodigy. Like a lot of philosophy, you have to take it in the context, like Naming and Necessity I think of as a response — gosh, I’m forgetting the whole history of it, but as I recall, it was a response to the descriptive theory of reference, like Russell. Anyways, I think you have to take these things in a pairing.
Actually, last night I was with a group of people. I got a lecture on philosophy, and it was great because he went through Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche. I don’t want to go too much into that, but I’ve always struggled with Kant. Then he went into Hegel and explained that Hegel struggled with Kant in the same way that I did, and then improved on it. I’m not trying to go into details of this; it’s too much. The point is, for me, a lot of it has to be taken in as a dialogue between thinkers over multiple periods.
COWEN: Are you getting anything out of Heidegger? Because I sometimes say I’ve looked at every page of that book, but I’m not sure I’ve read it.
DIXON: It’s a good question. I have a friend who’s really into it, and we’ve been spending time together, and he’s trying to teach me. If you want, I’ll send you some videos that I think are really good.
COWEN: That’d be great.
DIXON: They’ve helped me a lot. I’ve always got it from an intellectual history point of view. If you want to follow the history of postmodernism, there’s Heidegger and then Derrida, and just what’s going on in the academy today with relativism and discourse and hermeneutics. I think it’s modern political implications that were really probably kicked off by Nietzsche and then Heidegger. I’ve always understood in that sense.
What I struggle with, and I understand him as a theory of psychology, I think of describing the experience of the Dasein and being-in-the-world. To me, it’s an interesting theory of psychology. You’re thrown into the world. This whole idea is very appealing to me. Just that whole story he tells — you’re thrown into the world, ready at hand versus present at hand. I think this idea of knowing how versus knowing that, different kinds of knowledge is a very interesting idea. Do you watch John Vervaeke?
COWEN: No.
DIXON: I highly recommend him. He’s got a 50-part video, [laughs] 50, 5–0. You’d like him. He’s a philosopher of cognitive science, really smart guy, and he’s got a 50-part video called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I’ve watched 30 of them or something. The idea is that in the modern world, we lost religion and lost philosophy, and now people are seeking meaning in their lives, and they’re finding it through drugs and I don’t know what, video games and whatever, and we should go back and look at all the great thinkers and see, how do we find meaning. It’s his mission of it.
He’s very sophisticated in the philosophy stuff. He goes through the 50 parts. It’s like Aristotle, Plato, Buddha, Jesus. It’s literally every great thinker, and how they think about how you find meaning in life. Very interesting. A big part of his thinking is, there’re many different ways of knowing. One of the things that we’ve done in the modern world is we’ve forgotten that there’s more than just propositional knowledge, more than just knowing that. There’s knowing how.
Religious traditions are very good at embracing multiple kinds of knowledge. It’s the mistake that the redditor makes about analyzing Christianity. They look at it as a set of propositions when, in fact, it’s a form of life. It’s about a community, a community co-development and meaning, rituals. I think the Heidegger stuff is very interesting on those topics of different kinds of knowledge.
We all, you and I, I’m sure, have this default naturalistic, physicalist, scientific worldview. I’m interested in sophisticated thinkers who have a different worldview and trying to understand it. John von Neumann had this great phrase. Someone asked him about set theory. He said, “You never understand set theory. You just get used to it.”
I think that’s true of a lot of these other alternative philosophies. It’s not like it’s going to be one argument you’re going to read in Heidegger, and you’re going to be like, “Oh, my God, my worldview changed.” You just have to submerge yourself in it. That’s what I’m trying to do. You just keep seeing it from different angles, and then hopefully, you eventually get a Gestalt switch, and you start to see the world maybe through a different lens.
COWEN: If you had to say not what you like in philosophy as philosophy, but what in philosophy has stuck with you when you make venture capital decisions, what would you cite?
DIXON: One thing I like about philosophy is just literally the moves they make. It’s almost like a chess game. They’re a very nuanced argument style. The only reason I hesitated is I don’t know how much you want me to go down this path.
COWEN: No, be as nerdy as you are.
DIXON: Okay. You’re familiar with Kant’s synthetic a priori concept?
COWEN: Sure, yes.
DIXON: Actually, it was really in Locke, but then Hume comes along and says, “Okay, let’s analyze how we get knowledge.” He says, “There’re really just two ways you get knowledge.” You get knowledge through what he called relations of ideas or matters of fact, so sort of math, right? You could sit in a room and think about the numbers and decode. Or “all bachelors are unmarried” is a famous example. It’s embedded inside of the words that to be a bachelor is to be unmarried. That’s relations of ideas.
Then there’re empirical matters of fact. That’s things we go out and see in the world. Hume asked the famous skeptical question: Okay, if that’s the case, where does something like induction fit in? Where does causality fit in? Where does time and space fit in? Because they’re neither purely true based on the relations of ideas, and it would be circular if we learned induction through induction. How do we know that the sun will rise tomorrow? Well, it’s always risen in the past. How do we know that futures will be like future past? It goes through the whole skeptical argument.
Then Kant comes along and says, okay, that’s right, but what that means is, there are other preconditions for knowledge, which is a really interesting move, because what he’s saying is — this is what a transcendental argument is — is you’re not going from premises to conclusion. You’re going from premises to preconditions to those premises. I’m just giving you an example. That move, that plasticity of thought — when I first saw that, I was like, “Can you do that? You can go and — ?” He says, “Look, you can’t fit — ”
COWEN: I’m not sure you can do it, to be clear. [laughs]
DIXON: Oh, , I’m not either. He’s like, “You can’t fit . . .” Causality is Kant’s favorite, I think, but then induction, a whole bunch of things that are our modes of intuition. You can’t fit them into Hume’s two buckets. Then he argues — of course, 300 pages and very nuanced — that therefore there must be another bucket. There must be this other precondition of thought, the modes of intuition. Then he derives this whole beautiful system out from that. Then Hegel comes along and changes some of the preconditions.
I feel like I learned when I did, at least in grad school, just this freedom. I use plasticity. You learn how to do these moves and meta-moves intellectually that I find really interesting, and it just forces you to really think. You can just sit there. I’ve spent an hour just sitting there and trying to understand these ideas, and sometimes I feel like I don’t. It really forces intellectual honesty on you. I don’t know. It’s almost like meta. Honestly, I’ve read philosophy for years, and I don’t know if I’ve ever actually gotten any conclusions [laughs] out of it.
You can see both sides, and I feel like I could argue both sides. I feel like that about a lot of things in politics, too, and things I feel like I can argue, I can give a pretty good argument for a bunch of different things. I think you get better at analyzing and understanding all these things, and philosophy helps you with that. I don’t know if you actually get answers.
COWEN: Before we say goodbye, I’d like to recommend Chris’s book again, Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet. Chris Dixon, it’s been a pleasure.
DIXON: Thank you. That was a lot of fun.