Hi, this is the A16Z podcast. This is Chris Dixon. I'm here today with Blake Masters,

who's the co-author of a new book called Zero to One, and his co-author is Peter Thiel.

And this came out of a class Peter taught at Stanford, which Blake wrote about and, or blogged about, rather.

And it became very popular. I know I read it all and

I think blogged about it and tweeted about it. So it's great to have you. Thanks for having me.

So let's just talk about some of the big themes of the book. I know there's sort of competition,

monopolies versus commodities. It's one big theme. There's this idea of sort of having a secret

for your startup idea. There's the idea of sort of power laws existing as, you know, in venture

capital and startups. Maybe can you kind of explain some of these ideas? Yeah, the biggest macro

theme in the book is the distinction that we draw between technology and globalization.

So zero to one, the title of the book, that's the shorthand for going from nothing and creating something, going from zero to one.

And that's the single word for that we say is technology.

In contrast, you have one to end copying something that already works.

That's globalization. And so the whole book is a call

to do new things on the theory that technology is not just gadgets. It's not just nice to have.

It could make the future better. Actually, the future is going to be radically better than what we

have now or it's going to be radically worse. And that's going to hinge on the question of whether

we can develop new technology.

So the idea is we've gotten good at globalization at one to end, but in the process neglected

to zero to one? Is that kind of...

Exactly, exactly. They're both progress, so it's like when you, you know, everyone hopes for

a future of progress, but we really need to distinguish between these two modes, kind of spreading old ways of creating wealth everywhere and then doing new things.

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