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Andrew McAfee (Andy)

Principal Research Scientist, MIT Sloan · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

academicauthorscientistfounder@amcafee ↗LinkedIn ↗andrewmcafee.org ↗Wikipedia ↗

Andrew McAfee studies how technological progress, AI, and organizational design transform business competition and the global economy. Along with frequent co-author Erik Brynjolfsson, he wrote influential books including Machine, Platform, Crowd and The Second Machine Age, as well as solo titles such as More from Less and The Geek Way.

8statements → 5claims → 4claims resolved → 50%fully supported → 4.25/5average certainty → 2.25/5average debate potential →

2 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 4 assertions · 1 opinion · 2 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Andrew argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
McAfee: Steve Jobs fought opening the App Store to developers for a year
“The compliments are so tricky that they actually tripped up Steve Jobs really badly. This is not lore. This is fact. He did not want to open up the app store to any outside developers. He thought he had to maintain super tight control over that digital environ…”
Andrew McAfee (Andy) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:10 a16z Podcast | Companies, Networks, Crowds

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
67% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

259 words/min while actually speaking · 2.6 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Andrew McAfee (Andy): no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to 2,339 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Andrew McAfee (Andy) is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

Everything Andrew McAfee (Andy) said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated
McAfee: Traditional companies will unequivocally survive despite blockchain decentralization
“The question gets teed up. Are we still going to have companies in the future? And as Eric and I started to think about all the stuff that we'd learned and tried to digest, our answer was an unequivocal yes.”
Andrew McAfee (Andy) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:12 a16z Podcast | Companies, Networks, Crowds
Assertion Supported
McAfee: Steve Jobs fought opening the App Store to developers for a year
“The compliments are so tricky that they actually tripped up Steve Jobs really badly. This is not lore. This is fact. He did not want to open up the app store to any outside developers. He thought he had to maintain super tight control over that digital environ…”
Andrew McAfee (Andy) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:10 a16z Podcast | Companies, Networks, Crowds
Opinion
McAfee: Increased computing power will not make central economic planning viable
“And the idea that we're out of that world because of Moore's law, because we have much more computational power now, I find that ludicrous.”
Andrew McAfee (Andy) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 18:02 a16z Podcast | Companies, Networks, Crowds
Assertion Supported
McAfee: Top performers in an NIH genomics challenge lacked biology backgrounds
“They interviewed the best performers that, who submitted the top performing algorithms None of them had a life sciences background. There was not a geneticist. There was not a biologist among them.”
Andrew McAfee (Andy) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 22:55 a16z Podcast | Companies, Networks, Crowds
Insight
McAfee: Apple's app ecosystem is an N-sided network
“This really starts to turn into three-dimensional chess because the right way to think about the app ecosystem in Apple is not any kind of one or two-sided network. It's an N-sided network.”
Andrew McAfee (Andy) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:53 a16z Podcast | Companies, Networks, Crowds
Assertion Partly supported
McAfee: A Topcoder challenge cut genome sequencing time to 10 seconds
“They had an algorithm that could do a run in about four hours with about 70% accuracy. There was a faculty member at Harvard Med School who made a big improvement to that algorithm. He developed one that got them up to about 75% accuracy. Kareem then worked wi…”
Andrew McAfee (Andy) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 22:22 a16z Podcast | Companies, Networks, Crowds
Insight
McAfee: Humans retain a massive advantage over AI as native speakers of human reality
“We are the native speakers of the human created world. Computers are doing this as their second language. We, I believe we have a massive advantage. We are the native speakers about this reality around us.”
Andrew McAfee (Andy) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 27:34 a16z Podcast | Companies, Networks, Crowds
Assertion Partly supported
McAfee: Steam-era companies failed by refusing to rethink factory workflows
“The companies that failed during the transition from steam power over to electric power, almost none of them failed because they refused to invest in electricity. That was not the failure mode. The failure mode was they refused to rethink what a factory could …”
Andrew McAfee (Andy) Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 32:51 a16z Podcast | Companies, Networks, Crowds

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Companies, Networks, Crowds Jan 2, 2019 10m
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