Episode Details

Marc Andreessen went on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently and was asked one question.

Sell it.

He sputtered. He invoked Newton. He invoked alchemy. He invoked his eleven-year-old. He produced the phrase thought at scale, for everybody, in perpetuity — three lies in one sentence. Not free. Not for everybody. Not thought. Then he stopped.

That’s the argument. The richest evangelist of the most-capitalized technology in human history, handed an open microphone on the largest podcast in the world, cannot name one human being his capital was built to serve.

He talked about Newton.

I am writing this from a car. I am driving through Detroit.

Hundreds of city blocks. Boarded homes. Streets where the curb is still cut for the driveway that used to be there. Schools with the windows out. A church with the cross still on the roof and the doors chained. Block after block. Mile after mile. The grid of a city that once built the engine of the American century, and the houses where the people who built it raised their children, and the silence where their grandchildren should be.

This is not new. I have seen this before.

Buick City opened in Flint, Michigan in 1985. It was built on the site of the original Buick Motor Company plant, which had been there since 1904. By the late 1980s it employed more than 28,000 people. It built the Buick LeSabre and the Buick Park Avenue. It won J.D. Power awards. It was, at the time, one of the most productive auto assembly complexes in North America.

It closed in 1999. The buildings were demolished between 2002 and 2013. The site is a flat field now. The workforce was not relocated. The city was not relocated. The houses where the workers lived are the houses I am looking at versions of, forty miles south, today, through this windshield.

I worked for General Motors from 1989 to 2004. I was there for the closing. I drove through Flint then. I am driving through Detroit now. The streets look the same. The decision that produced the streets was the same.

The decision was this: the people who live here are not in the room when we decide their lives.

That is the entire decision. Everything that followed — the lead in the water, the schools collapsing, the third generation that has never seen a shift change, the boarded blocks I am passing right now — followed from that one decision. It was not an accident. It was not the market. It was a decision made by people, in rooms, who had concluded that the formation of the people in Flint did not count on the balance sheet that mattered.

Capital walked. Formation stayed. Formation cannot walk. It is in bodies, in neighborhoods, in the way a man teaches his son to hold a wrench. You cannot relocate it. You can only abandon it.

They abandoned it.

Forty miles south of Flint is Lansing. Same company. Same era. Same workforce stock. Same union. Same state.

Lansing Grand River opened in 2001. I helped launch it. We won the J.D. Power Gold Award. We ran a Walden Pond immersion for the launch team — we lived inside the work, named what we saw, wrote it down. Lansing Delta Township came next. Both plants are still running. Both cities are still standing.

The difference was not skill. The workers in Flint were the same workers as the workers in Lansing. Some of them were literally the same workers — the ones who could move. The difference was whether the capital decided to stay in the room with the people.

Lansing got the room. Flint did not.

Detroit, outside this windshield, did not.

This is the part most people do not understand, because most people did not stand in Flint in 1999 and watch the gates close on men who had given the company their hands.

Deindustrialization is a word. It is also a smell. It is the silence where a shift change used to be. It is the specific human face of a team leader who taught you everything and th