Billionaire investor and Donald Trump adviser Marc Andreessen thinks corporate culture is about to undergo a radical change. Speaking with Erik Torenberg on the Moment of Zen podcast, Andreessen said that the reign of extreme wokeness, particularly in corporate America and the media, is rapidly coming to an end.

The catalyst? A combination of rising legal risks, the deflation of wokeness as a cultural force, and a change in leadership at the Department of Justice. Andreessen highlighted that with the appointment of Harmeet Dhillon to head the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, the federal government may soon begin to challenge and reverse many of the DEI-driven policies that have dominated corporations, universities, and other large institutions over the past decade.

This shift, he argues, could trigger a major pullback in DEI initiatives across the private sector, as companies scramble to comply with the law and distance themselves from policies that may now be seen as legally and culturally untenable.

Erik Torenberg: You're optimistic now that this reign of soft authoritarianism, aka extreme wokeness, is over. There's a question of will it just come back again in four years? Now that Trump will take power, will they sort of summon the resistance antibodies again? Talk a little bit about your perspective.

Marc Andreessen: I think that "wokeness is over" is a little bit too glib, and the main reason why that's the case I think, you know, maybe is self-evident, which is basically the bureaucracies of corporate America and of the government and of nonprofits, foundations, schools, universities, the media companies, the press — basically, the big bureaucracies, what we refer to as sort of the managerial class. The cathedral, Curtis' term, or James Burnham's term, the managerial class, the managers who sort of run everything — and by everything being like basically all of the large incumbent institutions — like, wokeness has become standard policy, right? And in like every large organization in the country, like the mandate number one is be compliant, right? Whatever is required to be compliant is like holy, right? It's like the thing that cannot be — you must be compliant. You must check off all the compliance boxes. Whether you win or not in the market is kind of optional, but you must be compliant. Whether you actually teach students anything is optional, but you must be compliant.