It Matters that Marc Andreessen is Sometimes Really Dumb

Optimizing for wealth is different from optimizing for wisdom. Why can't powerful tech elites see that?

Marc Andreessen is worth, per Wikipedia, $1.9 billion. That net worth is 10,000 times more than the median American’s, and a whole lot more than mine. He has power, money, and influence; he has shaped culture, technology, and lately, especially through his financial support of the Right, politics.

And yet, he is, apparently, galactically stupid when it comes to subjects outside his areas of expertise.

If you haven’t watched this yet, here is a 90-second clip of an interview he did with journalist David Senra, in which he says that introspection is a bad thing:

So you can really sink into it, here’s some of the transcript:

Senra: You don’t have any levels of introspection?

Andreessen: Yes. Zero. As little as possible.

Senra: Why?

Andreessen: I’ve just found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past, get stuck in the past. It’s just, it’s a real problem. And it’s a problem at work and it’s a problem at home… If you go back, like, 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective. Like, it’s the whole idea — I mean, just all of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are, you know, kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s…

Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff at any prior point, right? It’s all a new construct. It was, you know, well, first Western civilization had to kind of invent the concept of the individual, which was like a new concept, you know, several hundred years ago. And then, you know, for a long time, it was already the individual runs, right, and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology and does all these things.

And then, you know, kind of this kind of guilt-based whammy kind of showed up from Europe, a lot of it from Vienna, you know, 1910s, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement and kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to like, you know, basically second-guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self-criticize, right? The individual needs to feel guilt, and needs to look backwards, needs to, you know, dwell on the past. It never resonated with me.

The internet has had a field day with these remarks (which, to be fair, were off the cuff) and I won’t spend long on their obvious falsity and amorality here. Many commentator have noted that the great men people of history, including generations of entrepreneurs, did, in fact, practice a great deal of introspection: Thomas Edison, Marcus Aurelius, Charles Darwin, Nelson Mandela, Jane Goodall, Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, Warren Buffett, Sojourner Truth, Steve Jobs, Sun Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, Queen Elizabeth (I and II), Socrates, not to mention the progenitors of Andreessen’s own philosophy, including Nietzsche, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Very bad but impactful men did too — Mein Kampf is full of introspection, for example, as are the writings of Henry Ford. It’s just an absurd claim, historically.

Nor was introspection invented by Freud, for God’s sake. It’s central to to ancient Greek philosophy, the Bible (cf. Solomon, Moses, the Psalmist, Ecclesiastes), Augustine, Aquinas, Montaigne, Luther. It is the foundation of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur and its emphasis on tshuvah (repentance, return), the Catholic rite of confession, and centuries of Protestant reflections on the consciousness of sin and seeking of grace. It’s hard to take any of this seriously — it’s below high school level.

Andreessen also seems to confuse introspection with rumination, guilt, and regret. All of those may, at times, be appropriate, but they’re not the same thing, and in any event, reviewing one’s choices is what mature adults ought to do — not to endlessly self-criticize, but to ponder where one’s thoughts and deeds may have gone awry so that we can do better in the future.

Tech titans were divided on the interview. Many, including Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, were critical if not dismissive. Yet others affirmed. Elon Musk posted on X: “Reinforcing negative neural pathways via therapy or introspection is a recipe for misery. Don’t cut a rut in the road.”

That is astonishingly bad, unscientific, and telling advice from the world’s richest man, who is clearly profoundly unhappy, judging from his correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein, his apparently-drug-fueled misadventures in government, his multiple divorces and alienations from friends and family members, and his endless desire for more to fill a seemingly unfillable longing within.

Now, I am not a fair umpire here, because I definitely introspect too much. But somewhere between my penchant for over-analysis and the blithe, dismissive ignorance of an amoral narcissist there is a Golden Mean. And Andreessen is nowhere near it.

What matters here isn’t just that some billionaire said something dumb on the internet; that happens all the time. What matters is that Andreessen isn’t just a random tech VC; he’s often regarded as one of the intellectual leaders of the tech world, especially the segment of the industry that has, of late, embraced right-wing, quasi-libertarian, and sometimes quasi-fascist politics. Andreessen has written influential yet intellectually careless manifestos in the past, including the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” which Matthew Yglesias has fully and persuasively demolished here. His politics affect our lives, and so where he goes awry, and why, merits our attention. It’s a non-trivial cause of what sucks about our country right now.

2.

In The Nation, David Futrelle wrote a spot-on critique of Andreessen’s remarks aptly titled “Marc Andreessen’s Dangerously Unexamined Life” which links his move-fast-and-break-things, techno-optimist worldview with the depredations of Big Tech, the industry’s lack of accountability for countless ills. This is obviously correct.

For example, it might be worthwhile to reflect on how the technology industry’s incentive structures have led to a profound loss of privacy; radicalization and rage-bait; algorithms that promote hate without any responsibility on the part of the platforms; and the overall enshittification of the Internet. The Internet has degraded from a utopian network that would bring us all together and make knowledge available to everyone, into a significant cause of why we are so divided, angry, and deluded. Perhaps worth some introspection?

I’d also reflect on the existential threats AI poses to the American socio-economic order and the environment, and whether the techno-optimistic bet that AI will, itself, solve these problems is coherent. Must we really build the Doomsday Machine before the Chinese do? Is there no other way forward? Must we hurtle inexorably toward a future that very few people seem to actually want?

It would also be worth introspecting into Andreessen’s motivations for supporting the Trump regime, which has eroded democratic norms to an extent never before seen in history. Might those motivations be unduly selfish? How might a billionaire best balance his own economic self-interests against the existence of American democracy itself? Food for thought.

I might even introspect about how Palantir, OpenAI, and others have not only kowtowed to authoritarians but are actively helping them surveil and oppress vulnerable populations with the thinnest of rationales.

I could go on and on here. What I’m most interested in, though, is the way in which Andreessen’s comments reflect a blindingly obvious yet apparently not obvious fact about some Tech Right titans: they don’t know what they don’t know about.

August Sander, Businessman (gelatin print, 1930). Not Marc Andreessen.

This is a bizarre anomaly. Everyone in VC (or business in general?) knows that people and companies optimize for different things. (I once worked in tech myself — I co-founded an open source software company back in the first dot-com wave in 2000 which did alright.) Companies can optimize for immediate revenues or long-term growth, for seizing market share or turning a profit, for specializing or generalizing, and for dozens of other goals. And individuals can optimize for various goals as well: physical health or getting ahead in business, artistic achievement or putting food on the table, knowing a great deal about venture capital or knowing something about philosophy, ethics, and spirituality.

This is all so obvious that I hesitate to write it. So why don’t Andreessen, Musk, and Peter Thiel get it? These are men who, by birth and by choice, have optimized for certain kinds of success. They are like football players or basketball players: they have genetic abilities, talents, educational backgrounds, preferences, and choices that have led them to great success. But a football player is not necessarily a great chef, and Marc Andreessen is not necessarily a good futurist, ethicist, or philosopher. Isn’t that obvious?

Especially because he clearly hasn’t even done the reading. It would be one thing if he’d put in the time — if he took philosophy as seriously as he took computer science. But he clearly hasn’t. I mean, I programmed in BASIC in the 1980s, built websites in the 1990s, and co-ran my company in the 2000s. But Andreessen would never invest in a company in which I was the technologist. Isn’t that obvious?

So why is it not obvious to him?

3.

Well, the answer is obvious too: because he’s rich and people listen to him, for a variety of reasons.

Some listen out of purely self-interested motivations; if I do a fawning interview with Marc Andreessen, now I’m a big deal, and maybe he’ll invite me to some elite conference, or to do stuff for a16z. Even sitting in an audience, there’s a frisson of getting close to someone so famous and important.

Some listen because they, too, confuse financial success with wisdom in other areas. After all, Andreesen is super-rich and I’m not; he must know something I don’t know. Which he does, obviously — just not about some subjects on which he opines. But especially if wealth is one’s main metric for evaluating human excellence in general, it makes sense to listen to the wealthiest people. They’re the winners, right?

Others probably listen because Andreessen confirms their priors. Yes! I can imagine some tech bros saying, that is exactly right! To hell with accountability! Let’s move forward!

And a lot listen, I think, because Andreessen, Thiel, et al, just seem smart. They are smart, in their fields of expertise. They’re also articulate, wealthy, powerful white dudes who make big decisions that impact society and make history. They talk smart, act smart, and have the behavioral indicia of smartness. They have the confidence that comes with power.

And of course, there are endless echo chambers. Oligarchs also love to convene symposia, conferences, and meetings in Aspen or Davos where they say smart-sounding things to one another, or listen to carefully curated experts say smart-sounding things to them. Peter Thiel’s Hereticons is one prominent example; so are the countless junkets to which some of my colleagues have been invited. Once in a while, a dissenting voice gets through — Anand Giridharadas comes to mind — but, as Giridharadas has himself observed, more often than not the fundamentals of the oligarchical economy and value system remain unquestioned. That’s especially true for the supposedly ‘maverick’ conservatives who don’t do a lot of philanthropy, make a virtue of selfishness, and convene gatherings where these virtues are extolled. As Meryl Streep might say, Groundbreaking.

All these self-reinforcing circuits of delusion have even led to a neo-eugenicist view in which financial success is an indicator of whether one will be part of the elite who soon will actually run everything: Homo Deus, in Yuval Noah Harari’s term; the Founder Class; the citizens of the Network State; the Cognitive Elite. To these oligarch-intellectuals, becoming a captain of industry means one is qualified to effectively rule the human race, as if excellence along one vector of optimization implies excellence in all of them.

And what is the “useless class” (Harari again) supposed to do in an AI-driven future in which all our needs are met and most jobs are useless? Whatever; they’re just NPCs anyway; no one really cares.

To be clear, the technologies which Andreessen built and funded have greatly improved many aspects of our lives, including mine. I am not a Luddite by predilection or pragmatism: I’m writing these words on a laptop, Google Chrome, and a Substack UI. I used Claude to look up synonyms for the Tech Elite. I’m not putting out a paper zine. Technology, itself, is not the problem. Nor are technologists or venture capitalists.

The problem is that the Great Men of Capitalism once believed that, as Ben Parker and Andrew Carnegie put it, with great power comes great responsibility. Yet over and over again, tech elites like Andreessen have disclaimed responsibility for the social and political hellscapes they have helped to create, and are actively funding and arming a nationalist regime which, this week, is trying to stop millions of Americans from voting in the next election and conducting an increasingly unwinnable-seeming war.

And, it turns out, some of them are not only wildly uninformed about stuff, they don’t even know that they don’t know — on the contrary, they are proud of their ignorance, their impulsiveness, their lack of introspection. That has caused a lot of harm already, and depending on how the AI future turns out, it may cause even more harm yet to come. I mean, imagine if John Galt were just an idiot.

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Thanks for reading and thanks to my paid subscribers for enabling this newsletter to exist. I promise, once I make $1.9 billion, I will pay you back somehow.

There’s been some great stuff on Substack this past week:

• Alexander Ebert wrote a fascinating (if sometimes florid) essay on the Meaning Crisis as, itself, a kind of mass ritual of semiotic indeterminacy. A sample: “ None of this is to say that brainrot is good. What this is to say is that an age of mass ritual may be upon us. Not because we have returned to an extant religion. Not because we are exhuming Latin phrases. But because: THE MEANING CRISIS ITSELF WAS OUR SIGNAL THAT A MASS RITUAL WAS UPON US.” I’m going to think about this one some more.

• The redoubtable rayne fisher-quann did another amazing piece, this time a great screed on the manosphere called “Capitalism makes women of us all.”

• Here are some encouraging updates on judicial review of Trumpian authoritarianism from Jay Kuo.

• And here’s a very smart retort, by Irwin Kula, to a very poor essay on Zionism by Alana Newhouse.

Regards from Emory University, where I just gave a talk on our work studying experiences of and attitudes toward psychedelics in religious communities. Here’s hoping I can fly out of Atlanta tomorrow. See you next week.