> He is a smart person, but not as brilliant as I thought he was Yeah, one of the things that I keep coming back to is Acquired Situational Narcissism. I can n

> He is a smart person, but not as brilliant as I thought he was Yeah, one of the things that I keep coming back to is Acquired Situational Narcissism. I can name a number of very successful people who I used to listen to as insightful that now seem banal to me. I'm sure I've gotten more discerning, but I'm also sure, as in Andreessen's case, that there's been a real decline. A pretty easy explanation here is that being truly insightful is partly a function of circumstance. If you can say basically anything and have people around you exclaim, "Amazing! Brilliant!" then you don't have a lot of incentive for working harder. If you're insulated from reality by vast swathes of power and money, you don't get the corrective-whack-on-the-nose feeling from unpleasant encounters with reality. It's akin to how I think getting a permanent newspaper columnist is a curse. A lot of those people used to be really interesting once upon a time. But I think it's the very rare one who doesn't devolve into being almost cartoonishly predictable.