This picture is probably one of the most misleading pictures I’ve ever posted. Because you see a guy who’s in shape. You see $10 million collected. You see an 8-figure business. And you probably think, “Fuck, this guy has it figured out.” You have no idea. You can’t see the business I built and then lost. You can’t see the money I lost. You can’t see the years where I was fighting to get my life back together. You can’t see the decisions that cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can’t see the people I trusted that I shouldn’t have. You can’t see the people I lost. You can’t see the nights I genuinely wondered if I had fucked my entire life up. You can’t see rebuilding from a place where I had already proven I could build something, only to have to prove it all over again. You can’t see the days where I was dealing with my own shit internally, then getting on a call and having to be the guy everyone else believed in. You can’t see how many times I got it wrong. How many times I had to admit I was wrong. How many times I had to change the plan. How many times I had to start over. And eventually, I fucking figured it out. Not because I was smarter than everyone. Not because I never failed. Because I refused to let failure become my identity. That’s what the $10 million doesn’t tell you. The money is the scoreboard. The body is the evidence. But neither one tells you what it cost to become the person capable of creating them. That’s the part I’m actually proud of. Because the result is easy to photograph. The fucking process isn’t.

The GREAT MARC ANDREESSEN @pmarca SPENT THREE AND A HALF HOURS WITH @joerogan . I'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT IT EVER SINCE. I'm a cardiologist. I've spent twenty-five years at UCLA and in my own practice in Tarzana. So when one of the most influential technologists alive starts talking about medicine, I listen carefully — and I push back where I think he's wrong. Here's my honest verdict: he's right about far more than my profession is ready to admit. 1. He says AGI already arrived — and nobody noticed. Marc's claim is that the line was crossed roughly three months before the interview, with the current frontier models, and the field is now moving so fast that nobody stops to register milestones anymore. Think about that. The thing humanity has argued about for seventy years may have quietly happened on a Tuesday, and we were all busy checking email. 2. The models now beat the experts he could call on the phone. This is a man who can call almost anyone on earth. He says the AI gives him better answers. My first instinct was to bristle — twenty-five years of training, and a machine does it better? Then I sat with it honestly. He isn't wrong. Though I'll add what he didn't: independent studies of AI health tools have found real misses on true emergencies. Take the claim seriously and verify it yourself. 3. The hardest thing he said, and he said it about doctors. He points out that physicians are already typing your symptoms into ChatGPT the moment you stop talking, and then asks out loud: what do I need you for? That question stung. It also deserves an answer instead of a defense. He's right that the machine will out-read me on the EKG, the echo, the labs, the scan. It doesn't get tired at 2am. It doesn't forget the rare diagnosis it saw once in residency. Any physician whose ego prevents him from using a better tool is a physician putting pride ahead of patients. 4. His method for hard subjects: escalating simplicity. Explain it like I'm 10. Then like I'm 5. Then like I'm 2. Keep going until it truly clicks. I've started doing this and it has changed how I read papers outside my specialty. 5. He doesn't ask for the right answer. He asks the AI to steelman both sides of a hard question — the strongest possible case for each — and then he decides himself. That's not outsourcing your thinking. That's the opposite. 6. He convenes a panel. For the big questions, he has the AI role-play a room full of experts arguing with each other, and he listens to the argument. Imagine having that available for the biggest decision of your life. 7. His most important line has nothing to do with computers. The moment you think "I don't know how to figure this out" is exactly when most people quit — and exactly when you should lean in instead. Read that again. That's not a technology lesson. That's a life lesson, and it applies whether you're facing a diagnosis, a divorce, or a business that's failing. 8. The only skill left is knowing what to ask. The bottleneck is no longer the machine. It's in your own head. The quality of your life is now, more than ever, downstream of the quality of your questions. 9. He sends it photographs. Rashes, blood tests, images — the current models read pictures directly and give a fast second opinion. As a physician I'll say clearly: a second opinion, not a substitute for one. But the day a worried parent at midnight has something intelligent to consult is a good day for humanity. 10. Free therapy, for everyone, forever. This is the one that moved me most. He points to cognitive behavioral therapy as the clinically proven modality an AI can plausibly deliver on its own — meaning real therapeutic support becomes freely available at scale. Think about what that means. The man lying awake at 3am with nobody to call. The single mother who can't afford a therapist. The teenager who can't yet say the words out loud to a human face. For all of human history, healing was rationed by geography, wealth, and luck. That is ending in our lifetime. 11. It's solving problems we couldn't. He cites AI cracking previously unsolved math problems, with early signals of the same beginning in physics, chemistry, and biology. Cardiology is downstream of biology. Every drug I prescribe came out of that pipeline. 12. The top AI engineers are earning up to $50 million a year. He offers this less as gossip than as a signal — that's what a civilizational shift looks like from the inside. 13. A friend built his own health dashboard. Sequenced his DNA, handed it to an AI along with his blood work and wearable data, and got back a working picture of his own body. That is precision medicine arriving through the side door, years ahead of schedule. 14. Another friend put cameras in his jiu-jitsu gym. So the AI could review his sparring and coach his technique. Elite coaching, for anything, for anyone. 15. The warning he gave — "the AI vampire." This is the term he coined, and as a physician it's the one I want you to hear. Because AI keeps making more output possible, people are working more and sleeping less, addicted to their own productivity. Let me be blunt with you as a heart doctor. Chronic sleep deprivation raises blood pressure, drives inflammation, disrupts your rhythm, and shortens your life. Marc named the disease before most physicians did. Do not let a machine that never sleeps convince you that you don't have to either. 16. One person, many agents. His extrapolation: a single human eventually directing a fleet of AI agents that check each other's work. He describes this as close. Not years away. 17. And his own caveat, which I'll repeat. Watch the whole interview. Several of these are Marc's stated views and personal anecdotes, not independently verified facts. He'd be the first to tell you to think for yourself — that's the entire point of #5#. So here's where I land, as a doctor who has sat with thousands of frightened people. Marc is right that the diagnosis is no longer the hard part. What remains — what will always remain — is the chair pulled close, the hand held, the human being who says I'm not going anywhere, we'll walk through this together. But that was never in competition with the machine. The machine frees me to do more of it. Marc calls himself a techno-optimist. From inside an exam room, watching patients whose lives are about to get measurably longer and better because of this — I'd just call him right. 🙏

The World is Changing: AI For Creativity By Jeffrey Katzenberg A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe. Later that day, I received a text from an artist I've known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: "Is this the end of us?" My answer was, "Certainly not.” I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both. In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious. There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I've spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn't quite right. I've sat in screening rooms where four years of people's labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there's really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love. People do not fight this hard for things they don't care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft. Is History Repeating Itself? The history here is more complicated than either side may realize. In 1906, the most famous composer in America, John Philip Sousa, published an essay titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music." He warned that the phonograph would become "a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul." Sousa's fight was not really about the machine, it was about money. The machines were playing his compositions, and the men who built them weren't paying him a cent. His campaign helped create the Copyright Act of 1909. He did not stop the technology. He changed the terms under which it could use his work. A hundred years ago, sound came to the movies. We remember it now as a miracle, and it was. What we forget is who paid for it. Before sound, tens of thousands of musicians made their living in the orchestra pits of movie houses, scoring every film live, every night, in towns all over the world. When the soundtrack arrived, the work of one composer and one orchestra was recorded for a film that went into thousands of theaters. The union fought back with everything it had, taking out newspaper ads across the country warning against the menace of "canned music," one of them showing a mechanical man tearing the strings out of a harp while an angel wept. They were not fools, and they were not Luddites. They were right. Those pit jobs did not come back. And yet (this is the part we have to be brave enough to admit), sound gave us the movie musical, the modern score, sfx, sound design, audio engineering, and an art form vastly larger than the one it disrupted. And it helped keep Hollywood in the forefront of world entertainment for the rest of the century and into the next. The loss was real. And yet the art form expanded. This is a story that has been told over and over again. To resist technology is to risk irrelevance. Just look at Kodak or Blockbuster. To embrace technology is to open doors of new possibility. Just consider Apple and Netflix. What I Learned From Walt Disney In the mid-1980s, I was tapped to lead Disney's animation division at a moment when the studio was at an inflection point. Animation wasn't just another business unit. It was the soul of the company, a medium revered because of Walt's genius and his passion. But the production system was cumbersome and unforgiving. A single movie was 125,000 individual hand-drawn and painted cels, photographed one frame at a time. Every revision carried a cost measured in months. These degrees of difficulty shaped the kinds of stories we could tell. We found our way forward in an unexpected place: Walt himself. The Disney archives held astonishing recordings of Walt explaining his creative process. His own writings. His notes and storyboards. Work product captured at every stage of his process. This was truly a gift. Listening, reading, sitting with the work itself, we heard him talk about character, about emotion, about how an audience feels when a character truly comes alive. He talked about making bold choices and refining a scene until it genuinely moved people. We didn't hear a word about pencils or paintbrushes. In fact, Walt was famous for being a technologist, forever hunting for state-of-the-art tools, often inventing them himself to achieve the images he saw in his head. But he never defined animation by the tools. He defined it by whether the audience believed the character. His principles were timeless. The tools were not. That realization changed everything. We co-developed the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) with a young Northern California company called Pixar, replacing hand-painted cels with CGI. In The Little Mermaid, the final scene shimmered with a dimensionality and light that the old process simply couldn't achieve. In Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom sequence moved with a cinematic sweep that placed the audience inside the emotion of the moment. In Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders felt vast and alive, and the Magic Carpet became an intricate, compelling character all its own. In The Lion King, the stampede carried a scale and intensity that raised the emotional stakes beyond anything we'd done before. Technology didn't diminish the craft, it expanded the canvas. It gave artists more room to create. A decade later, the canvas expanded again. When Disney released Pixar's Toy Story, it wasn't simply a technical milestone. It was proof that a fully computer-animated film could carry real emotional weight, that it could make audiences laugh, cry, and believe. At DreamWorks, we made the difficult decision to sunset hand-drawn animation and become a fully computer-animated studio. It was the right thing to do, but it was not without pain. It cost talented people their place in an industry where they had worked their whole lives. Some made the leap to the new tools and did the finest work of their careers. Some never did. Tools are never the point. The instruments change with every generation. What endures is taste and imagination. The magical ability to make an audience feel. One of the greatest storytellers of our generation, George Lucas, succinctly captured the eternal essence of this issue: “It’s not the how, it’s the why.” A Distinction With a Difference I asked one of the leading AI models a question that has been challenging me for months. What is the difference between reasoning and creating? Its answer changed how I think about almost everything happening in this industry. It said . . . Reasoning and creating are two distinct cognitive modes, though they also work together. Reasoning is fundamentally evaluative and analytical. It operates on what already exists: facts, premises, evidence. It moves toward a conclusion that was in a sense already implied by the input. Reasoning is constrained by logic and truth. Its goal is to arrive somewhere correct, not to invent somewhere new. Creating is fundamentally generative. It produces something that didn't exist before. And crucially, there's no single right answer waiting to be found. A blank page has infinite valid responses. Creation involves choices that can't be fully justified by logic alone. Taste, intuition and vision fill the gap where deduction runs out. Reasoning is what Silicon Valley has been perfecting. Creating is what Hollywood has been practicing for more than a century. AI today operates almost entirely on the reasoning side of the line. It can deduce, evaluate, optimize, and pattern-match brilliantly. And while it can create, there is a real distinction to being creative. What it doesn’t yet have is those things that make us human: empathy, devotion, serendipity, the kind of creativity that comes from a person trying to say something only they could say. When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done. By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new. One day, AI may close this gap. Three years ago, the leaders building AI would have called what they are achieving today, improbable, if not impossible. Impossible is no longer improbable. Today, the line between reasoning and creating is real. Even the leading technologists acknowledge we are not there yet. There is no scientific path to crossing this divide that anyone in the field can articulate today. Understanding that gap is where we will find common ground. A Path Forward In 2016, I closed one chapter in Hollywood with the sale of DreamWorks and opened another in Northern California, co-founding WndrCo. We’ve backed more than 50 founders building the next generation of technology and watched how breakthroughs in Silicon Valley emerge, first as experiments, then as platforms, and finally as infrastructure that reshapes entire industries. It's worth remembering that the last great revolution in animation also came from the north. Pixar was a Northern California company, forged not in the conventions of the Hollywood studio system, but in the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. I've spent years on both sides of this bridge. For sure, I don’t have all the answers (take Quibi, for one!). But, from my past and present vantage points of my long career, here is what I see . . . Brilliant people in Northern California building this technology have made something extraordinary. They have earned the right for the rest of us to be, if not believers, at least optimistic that what comes next will be remarkable. But they have not made an artist. The tools are powerful, but they are not what makes a story matter. That knowledge lives 350 miles to the south, inside people whose life's work has informed the very models you are building. The right path forward includes them by design, with credit, with consent, and with compensation. Build this with the storytellers. Not on top of them. Taste is not something that can be synthesized, it is uniquely human. At the same time, Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away. The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything. The north needs something from it that they cannot build and cannot buy: creativity. The kind that takes a blank page and conjures a single right answer where there was none and has held audiences for a century. Without it, the most powerful reasoning engine ever invented will still be missing the only thing that makes a story worth telling. The artists who learn to wield these new instruments will do things the engineers never dreamed of. They always have. Edison invented the motion picture but made terrible movies. It took Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and so many others to make movies emotional. Now, the canvas is about to expand yet again. We should decide now that we intend to paint on it. There are so many valuable lessons in history. This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms. Sousa did not stop the phonograph; he helped write the law that made sure composers got paid. And two years ago, when the writers and the actors walked out, they were fighting for the very things Sousa was fighting for in 1906. Consent, compensation, the basic recognition that human creative work has a price that must be paid. The terms of that fight are still being negotiated, but the principle is older than any of us. The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap. First, we must all agree that there should be terms. Then we can have the crucial debate about what fairness requires. What I Learned From Steve Jobs Years ago, Steve Jobs said, "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." He was describing a device. But he could just as easily have been describing this tale of two cities. What I See Coming Soon As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer. Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling. In the 1980s, animation was dismissed as a niche corner of the business. Today it is one of the most beloved and profitable forms of storytelling in the world. In live action, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson embraced new visual tools not as shortcuts, but as instruments, and expanded cinema in the process. Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process. Assuredly, I don’t have all the answers, but I am confident that the creative opportunities will expand yet again. How we come through this is a choice. The north has the new tools. The south has the creative soul. The best future will draw on the best of both worlds.