In venture capitalism, introspection is not a thing

I didn’t have it on my bingo card — or my prediction markets, I suppose — that introspection would become controversial in 2026. But that rascal Marc Andreessen proved otherwise.

Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape and a venture capitalist, recently offered on a podcast with David Senra that, nope, in no way was he introspective.

Asked about introspection, Andreessen said. “Zero, as little as possible.”

He offered a history lesson.

“If you go back before 100 years ago, it never, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective,” Andreessen said.

He added, “Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff at any prior point, right?”

Senra said that the founders he interviewed or read had that lack of introspection in common.

“I think, therefore, I am”? Think again, Descartes.

“The unexamined life is not worth living”? Not a thing, Socrates (as quoted by Plato).

David Brooks, in the Atlantic, had thoughts:

In this worn, domesticated world of ours, there are few truly pristine wildernesses, remote regions where no man has gone before, places unseen by human eyes and unexamined by human exploration. And so I suppose we should be especially grateful for the undiscovered country that is Marc Andreessen’s soul.

Brooks allows that the matter is a complicated one; but he sees two problems with Andreessen’s view:

Yet whatever truths it contains, Andreessen’s worldview still comes with a few problems. In the first place, he is an ignoramus of epic proportions. The idea that it would not have occurred to people to introspect before the 20th century would have been news to, say, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, Montaigne, Jane Austen, or George Eliot. Each of them produced stunning insights into the heart of human nature. Their lives demonstrate that although it’s possible to do introspection badly, it’s also possible to do it magnificently.

Andreessen’s second problem is that he is scientifically illiterate. The cognitive revolution of the past 30 years has shown that “feelings” are not passing fancies that get in the way of forming an objective view of reality. Emotions are vital to all rational thought. Our feelings help us assign value to things, and if you can’t do that, your decision-making landscape will be hopelessly flat. In his book Emotional, Leonard Mlodinow quotes the neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs: “An emotion is a functional state of the mind that puts your brain in a particular mode of operation that adjusts your goals, directs your attention, and modifies the weights you assign to various factors as you do mental calculations.” People who have brain lesions that make it impossible for them to process emotions are not a super-smart Mr. Spock; their life falls apart because they make terrible choices.

Andreessen might have stirred up a hornet’s nest, but — right on brand — he wasn’t troubled by it. He posted on X (Twitter): “It is 100% true that great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings. I regret nothing.” In a repost, he pointed critics to, among others, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

That didn’t help.

Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote, also in the Atlantic:

I’m currently teaching On the Genealogy of Morals to undergraduates, so I’m well aware of how exhilarating Nietzsche’s thought can be to young minds who could view it as a glorified permission structure. But for a multibillionaire trying to midwife a tech revolution, misreading Nietzsche in this way is a potentially world-historical mistake.

If Andreessen were anomalous in the tech founder community, his remarks probably would have provoked a one-day tweet-storm (X-storm?), and that would have been the end of it.

But we live in a world where Elon Musk (“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”) has the most money, a world in which Peter Thiel is lecturing in Rome on the coming of the Antichrist.

These are men of extraordinary wealth, men who seem to associate that wealth with innate wisdom. They share a belief in unfettered capitalism and economic growth as the only solutions to the world’s challenges.

Andreessen is a principal in Andreessen Horowitz ($90 billion in assets), a major investor in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency enterprises. The firm’s website features essays by Andreessen: “Why AI will save the world” and “The techno-optimist manifesto.”

A selection:

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable — playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir, and has invested through his Founders Fund (a reported $12 billion in assets, although estimates vary) in Musk’s SpaceX, the Boring Company, and Neuralink. He also has invested in Anduril, a defense firm specializing in autonomous systems. The Founders Fund lists investments in the prediction market firm Polymarket, as well as AI companies OpenAI, DeepMind, Cognition, and Crusoe.

Thiel, in a Cato Institute publication in 2009, wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel poured millions into JD Vance’s campaign for Senate in 2022.

Musk, while certainly erratic in his public stances — beyond a persistent gleam in his eye at any mention of Mars — inserted his acolytes (Musk-eteers, I suppose) into the newly monikered Department of Government Efficiency. Once so ensconced, they gleefully took a chain saw to large parts of the federal government’s administrative and intellectual infrastructure while simultaneously likely stripping away the digital privacy of millions of Americans.

In ordinary times, Andreessen, Thiel, and Musk might chafe under the strictures imposed by a functioning democracy — by their fellow citizens. But these are not ordinary times.

Donald Trump, on re-entering the White House, immediately rescinded regulations promulgated by the Biden administration on prediction markets and AI. He signed into law legislation establishing benchmark rules for cryptocurrency. His family is actively involved in all three industries.

With these three men and the White House deep in each other’s pockets, we probably should think of Andreessen’s “introspection” comment not as a passing remark but rather another manifesto of the age.