I used to think no tech bro was as clueless as Sam Altman or as out-of-touch as Mark Zuckerberg or as…whatever TF is wrong with Elon Musk – but that was before I read this wild podcast exchange between David Senra and venture capitalist Marc Andressen:
David Senra: You said something that I love and I never hear other entrepreneurs talk about, but I think it’s super important that you don’t have any levels of introspection.
Marc Andressen: Yes, zero, as little as possible. Move forward, go. Yeah, I don’t know […] Like Sam Walton didn’t wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up. He’s like, I like building Walmart. I’m going to keep building Walmart […] if you go back, like, 400 years ago, it never would have occurred anybody to be introspective […] it’s all a new construct. It was, you know, well, first Western civilization had to kind of invent the concept of the individual, right? Which was like a new concept, you know, several hundred years ago […] 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. […] The individual needs to feel guilt, and needs to look backwards, needs to, you know, dwell on the past. It never resonated with me.
It’s telling that he hears the word “introspection” and his mind goes straight to guilt. While I grew tired of teaching instructors harping on ‘reflections’, it’s mostly because thinking about what went right, what went wrong, and what I could do better felt natural and instinctive rather than something we need to ritualize. I definitely didn’t learn it from that Freud weirdo. Sure, introspection can lead to guilt if you realize you said or did something wrong – and I have a sneaking suspicious that Andressen has done a lot of things that are wrong. He’s right when he says dwelling in the past is harmful, but he’s confusing introspection with rumination. The point of contemplating mistakes is doing better going forward instead of repeating them. Especially mistakes that can upend businesses or even (especially) lives.
Sometimes introspection is as a simple as “Oops. I combined ‘x’ with ‘z’ and started a fire. I should be more careful.” Other times it’s “Oops. I put my foot in my mouth and now everyone’s making fun of me because I think modern Western society invented introspection and outed myself as a sociopath.”
I mean…Shakespeare and other writers well before him, ancient philosophers including Eastern philosophers, even children…
Not Andressen, though.
Zero percent.
On the flipside, we’d all be better off if Peter Thiel spent less time in his head (and even less time trying to get into everyone else’s business). Here’s possibly the most important and scary thing Thiel has ever said:
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
And here’s why you should care about Thiel’s anti-democratic views. He’s a cofounder of Palantir, the AI surveillance company charged with making a mega database of everyone in the US, as well as a major financial backer of the current VP. He has also one-upped Musk by linking the threat of AI regulations to…well, yeah.
The same man who favors monopolies over competition, pushes for single party rule, and has many government contracts in AI surveillance and weapons software fears that reigning in the abuse of AI will bring about totalitarianism (has Thiel met Thiel?) and maybe even the end times.
I don’t even know where to start with fellow cofounder and current Palantir CEO Alex Karp. At least Thiel is coherent enough you know what kind of crazy you’re dealing with. Then again, maybe Karp is telling us exactly who (or what) he is when he accuses Germany of overcorrecting post-WW2, and claims some cultures are superior to others, but I don’t really know how to square those sentiments with his background.
All these unhinged technocrats make my skin crawl.
We’re in danger, girl (or boy).
