Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Son-Hu. Today we're doing one of our book

podcasts around the new book, Just Out, Machine, Platform, Crowd. The authors previously

wrote the popular book, The Second Machine Age, and before that, their book was Race Against

the Machine. Sensing a bit of a theme here. So in this episode, we cover those themes, first starting

with a bit of Econ 101, around network effects, compliments, and other key concepts. Then we discuss how this all

plays out organizationally, especially given trends like machine learning, blockchain, and crowds,

and tackle the tricky question of whether networks can replace the firm. And where are we in

the classic question around the future of the firm?

And finally, what can companies do more concretely? Frank Chen joins the conversation in between as well to share his perspective on what he sees given his role as head of investing in research at A16.

But our main guest on the episode, both from MIT, are Eric Brinjolson and Andrew McAfee, who I'm going to call

Andy. Is that okay? Otherwise, I'm going to mistake you for my mom. Good. I don't want to be mistaken

for your mom. I want to be your mom. We kind of go way back in the sense that I met you years ago.

Not as far back as I go with my mom. No, no. You and I will do Andy, okay? All right, good. We're doing Andy. So this is your third book together.

The real thrust of your work is that this is unprecedented in the speed at which we're changing and what the effects are.

And I think a great theme for this conversation is to sort of break down how those changes

are going to play out and where they're happening.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, but let me just push back on that first part a little bit because in Silicon Valley, everybody agrees with that.

And we agree with it, to be clear.

But we were reading people who didn't.

One of the things that guys writing our first book, Race Against the Machine, was there were people who were talking about, quote, the great stagnation and how there were no good inventions anymore, nothing good was invented.

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