Marc Andreessen's Dark Period

While I generally try to maintain a positive and optimistic observer, sometimes I come across something that disappoints and angers me. This post is largely in that vein. Feel free to skip if you don't need the grumpy energy today.

Why podcasts?

I’m not much of a podcast person; I’ve never been able to fit them into my life. When I am driving, I enjoy listening to music. When I am walking or hiking, I like to hear the world. My workout activities are all active sports, so earphones are inappropriate. I read extensively I have listened to four or five podcast episodes in my life.  But I know the world is changing, and I want to experience this medium. And why not start at the top?  So, I spent some time listening to the Marc Andreessen episode of the Joe Rogan Experience.  In short — I am intrigued by Joe’s podcast and want to listen to more of it.  But I was disappointed and maybe even angry about Andreessen’s lack of leadership.   

An aside about the Joe Rogan Experience 

Joe Rogan is the top media personality in the podcast world, and maybe in general — everyone listens to Joe, and he has access to anyone.

Is the Joe Rogan Experience entertainment, or is it journalism?   Or is that a false dichotomy?  I don’t know.  Every media property has aspects of both — journalism must get views to pay the bills, and the market for people who want pure journalism is too small.   Regardless of whether this election was the “podcast election” or if the next election is, we should pay a lot of attention to podcasts and hold them to a high standard. 

It is impressive that Joe pumps 3 hours of content out a day. Joe is not a dumb guy; he reads broadly, talks to many people, and makes a lot of intellectual connections.  He manages to keep a conversation going for 3 hours, which is remarkable.  I don’t know that I can listen to this 3 hours a day, or even 3 hours a week — who has the time to listen to so much of this?  But there are some valuable connections in the episode, and I will dip my toes in again.

There are some things in this episode that were unappealing.  First, Joe celebrates his friends who troll on social networks like Bluesky.  Joe should operate at a higher standard as the top media personality in the podcast world (and maybe the entire media industry).  Joe is dismissive of legacy media for some of their failings; I’d like to see him lead the way in creating a better new media, and encouraging troll behavior is not leadership.

Second, Joe didn’t push back on most of Andreessen’s points — for instance, the debanking point, which I will discuss at greater length. Joe was a passive channel for whatever Marc threw out.  I don’t know if that is true for all of Joe’s episodes, but it was certainly true in this one.  I’d like to see Joe exercise more critical judgment in his questioning.  But maybe that is not what Joe is about, or maybe Joe is not for me.  

I will listen to more episodes — I want to better understand the Joe Rogan phenomenon.

Marc Andreessen

I met Marc once during his Netscape days, back when I was working on Internet Explorer.  He's obviously been very successful and impactful.

Marc talked about some ideas that I completely support.   He is a technology optimist — he sees many startups and brilliant young people and thinks young people are better trained than ever.  He is growth-oriented, believing that the only way out of our government deficit trap is growth; I agree completely, we have huge national ambitions, we don’t have the will to cut spending, we need to grow our way out of deficits.  He is enthusiastic about DOGE — if we can govern more cheaply and more effectively, I am all for it.  He is against unlegislated government outreach with no oversight.   These are all things I can get behind.

Early in the episode, both Marc and Joe spoke about the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.   They mentioned two meditations in particular:

• In a retelling of Meditations 7.3 (I think), Marc discussed how the best of society are retreating to their estates and tending their gardens and fishponds because society and government has become such intractable messes of problems.  And he admonishes people to re-engage.
• Marc also retold part of Meditations 5.  Every day you awaken, and you face incredible trials and pressure and pushback, and it is all just exhausting.   But you still have to get up and do the work; there is no shirking it. 

This is timeless advice — and it gave me great hope for the rest of the episode.  These messages of perseverance and engagement are powerful and motivating.  But I ended up deeply disappointed.  Marc used his pulpit to pursue his self-interest while cloaking himself in a false sense of public spirit.  I’ll give some examples.

One issue that Marc highlighted is what he calls “debanking” — the withdrawal of banking services from individuals or companies for political or other reasons.  This sounds like an excellent consumer protection idea — financial institutions have a lot of power, and ordinary consumers often find themselves on the wrong end of that power.  But Marc doesn’t care about the working person dealing with predatory lenders and payday loans and outrageous health care bills and inflation; those are not his issues at all.  He is worried about his 30 crypto startup execs who have been pushing crypto products, skating along the edge of securities laws, and attempting to disrupt the entire financial industry.  And along the way, some of these execs have found themselves without access to the services of the firms they are trying to disrupt.  I have not heard of a single case of “debanking” for startup founders working on space technology or SAAS software or AI or Biotech or any other startup domain — Marc is just upset because he poured a bunch of money into speculative crypto investments, and he wants a bunch of money back from them.  He has no interest in broad national economic issues; he just cares about his own pocketbook.  And this is a guy already sitting on a mountain of money.  

Marc also expresses contempt for “wokeness”.  It is easy to find stories of stupid DEI overreach, and Marc shared some.  But here’s my experience: I’ve sat in corporate boardrooms, looked around the room, and seen 49 middle-aged white dudes and one black woman, the VP of DEI.   Our society has a real problem — opportunity is not equally available to everyone, and our DEI efforts have been performative theater and ineffective.  Middle-aged white men continue to enjoy inequitable access to opportunity, and we should continue to work on that problem.  Marc has certainly not personally suffered from DEI efforts, and his complaining about some of the stupidest DEI initiatives solves nothing.  Marc (and Joe) also imply that the recent electoral Republican win was due to people being fed up with the wokeness of the coastal elites, but every analysis of the election I have read says the results were more about economics — about inflation and the unwillingness of the Harris campaign to address it.  It is easy to take potshots at stupid instances of DEI excess — but it is hard to actually wrestle with the root issues and suggest improvements.  And by attributing the loss to wokeness, Marc avoids taking up the real economic issues of the election, and instead focuses on his “debanking” issue.

I could go on.  Marc fuels division — he talks about the left in apocalyptic terms, and imagines that the country would have gone to a very dark place had Trump not won.  He thinks his views represent the real America.  He does not acknowledge how close the presidential election was.  

Look, Marc is a total winner in life.  He is a billionaire due to his A16Z work — which is great; I applaud his success.  Marc and A16Z get broad coverage for everything they do, and Marc has everyone in his Rolodex.   Some of his postings are nearly legendary — Software is eating the world, It’s time to build.  He has money, influence, power, and freedom; he can do anything, talk to anyone, and steer public discourse.  

He has shown he can act like a leader with his past postings.  But he seems to have retreated from that role, and now seems petty, self-interested, and intellectually dishonest.  He has narrowed himself.   He is steering away from the admonitions of Marcus Aurelius to which he claims to aspire: showing up every day despite the pressures and pushback and working on meaningful issues.  It is a loss for him and for the country. I hope he finds his way back someday.