Marc Andreessen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…There’s a positive vision where you could turn that into the Bloom two-sigma, single student for single administrator but I don’t think that’s what's happening. Yes, yes. That’s correct. You could and they’re not. That’s exactly right. And then you see the federal student loan kind of crazy thing. By the way, the universities are voluntarily shutting down use of admissions testing. They’re shutting down SAT, ACT, GRE. They’re very deliberately eliminating the intelligence signal which is a big part of the signal employers piggyback on top of. They become intensely politicized. We now know through the replication crisis that most of the research that happens in these universities is fake. Most of it is not generating real research results. We know that because it won’t replicate. You’ve just got these increasingly disconnected mentalities and there’s some set of people who are obviously going to keep going to these schools. And then you just look at cost. A degree from a mainstream university that costs, in ten years, a half-million or a million dollars that has no intelligence signal attached to it anymore. Where most of the classes are fake, where most of the degrees are fake, most of the research is fake, where they are wrapped up in these political obsessions. That’s probably not the future of how employers are going to staff. That’s probably not where people are actually going to learn valuable marketable skills. The last thing they want is to actually teach somebody a marketable skill. Teaching somebody a marketable skill is just so far down in the list of priorities of a university now it’s not even in the top 20. Lot of it is just they’re a cartel. They operate as a cartel, they run as a cartel, it is a literal cartel. And the cartel is administered through the agencies, the quasi-governmental bodies that determine who gets access to federal student loan funding. And those bodies are staffed by the current university administrators. So it’s a self-governing cartel. It does exactly what cartels do, it’s stagnating and going crazy in spectacular ways. There’s clearly going to be an educational revolution. Does that happen today or five years or ten years, I don’t know. Does it happen in the form of new in-person tuitions versus internet-based? I don’t know. Is it driven by us or is it driven by employers who just get fed-up and they’re like — “Screw it. We’re not gonna live like this anymore and we’re gonna hire people in a totally different way.” That, I don’t know. There’s lots and lots of questions about what’s gonna happen from here. But the system is breaking in fundamental and obvious ways. Healthcare, same thing. It’s extraordinarily difficult to find positive outcomes in healthcare. In other words, there’s lots of activity in healthcare. It’s very hard to find anything that causes people to live longer. Or to be healthier longer. Every once in a while there’s a successful new cancer treatment or something but there are all these analyses that show that massive investment and public support for health insurance and all these things. And the health outcomes basically don’t move. er treatment or something but there are all these analyses that show that massive investment and public support for health insurance and all these things. And the health outcomes basically don’t move. To the extent that people care at all about the reality of their health, there are going to have to be new ways of doing things and tech is going to be the way through the market for people who have those ideas.…

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