alt Hacker NewsWatching that again reminds me that this guy is so poorly educated and not learned. Sure he was an engineering student at UIUC and wrote a neato browser, but wow he does not know history or philosophy well.
But he does the grifter trick of making coy observations like that 1920s bs. And he had so much time and wealth to improve those insights!
Or, he knows but this narrative makes him feel better about his behavior.
I'm not so sure he is grifting, do you have any clips where he slips and shows himself to be knowledgeable of his society and its history?
I have a similar view of Musk, Thiel and Karp, and some others I can't be bothered to remind myself of. Perhaps the Mandelsons belong to this crowd, but I suspect the Kochs have a bit more of an intellectual slant.
It's known to take a lot of discipline to keep your mind sharp and study when your power grows and other people make your life convenient and shielded from the misery of the masses. Marcus Aurelius makes this a core issue of his Meditations, the strife needed to make true and confident measurements of oneself and not get lost in superstition. Perhaps it is an impossible ideal but the ambition is at least interesting, in contrast to whatever Andreessen and his ilk are doing to themselves.