Learn. Share. Evolve…

0:00:02 He’s not trained in this business at all.
0:00:04 He doesn’t follow any of the protocol that you’re used to.
0:00:06 He’s just so uncomfortably unusual.
0:00:09 What he was trained on was he was trained on reality television.
0:00:12 I have not been on reality TV, but my understanding is if you’re trained on reality TV,
0:00:13 like your mission is to create drama.
0:00:15 Your mission is to be as interesting as possible.
0:00:17 And as controversial as possible, right?
0:00:19 The other thing he was trained in was professional wrestling.
0:00:21 Both reality TV and professional wrestling grew up together
0:00:23 in this sort of new alternate media landscape.
0:00:25 Pseudo-real entertainment.
0:00:27 Or maybe the most real thing.
0:00:29 Friend Rick Rubin says that these are actually the most real things,
0:00:30 not the least real things.
0:00:32 If you think professional wrestling is fake,
0:00:33 just wait until you read the newspaper.
0:00:39 In this episode, taken from the Ben and Mark show,
0:00:43 Mark Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and I sit down to map the evolution of media.
0:00:46 From Craigslist to Rogan, from Watergate to Trump,
0:00:51 from centralized institutions to the rise of internet native politicians and podcasters.
0:00:54 We look at how social platforms disrupted the media model,
0:00:57 how authenticity became the new currency,
0:00:59 and what it means to build,
0:01:02 and communicate in a fragmented post-press world.
0:01:04 Let’s get into it.
0:01:08 The content here is for informational purposes only,
0:01:12 should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice,
0:01:15 or be used to evaluate any investment or security,
0:01:20 and is not directed at any investor or potential investors in any A16Z fund.
0:01:24 Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may maintain investments
0:01:26 in the companies discussed in this podcast.
0:01:29 For more details, including a link to our investments,
0:01:32 please see A16Z.com slash disclosures.
0:01:36 Hey everybody, welcome to the Ben and Mark show.
0:01:39 I’m Eric Tarnberg, the newest GP at A16Z.
0:01:43 And before this, I was investing and also running a media company called Turpentine,
0:01:45 which I’m glad is now part of A16Z.
0:01:50 And we thought this would be a great excuse to do an episode on the evolution of media.
0:01:56 And you guys have had a front row to the evolution of media from a few different angles.
0:02:01 You’ve both invested in a lot of the major disruptions to legacy media
0:02:06 over the past couple decades, Facebook, Twitter, Substack, many others.
0:02:09 You’ve both been a creator and producer of media.
0:02:14 Benedict Evans once called A16Z a media company that monetizes via VC.
0:02:17 And you’ve both been subjects and participants,
0:02:19 sometimes unwillingly, of the press and media.
0:02:22 So you’ve seen it from many different vantage points.
0:02:26 And we thought this episode, we’d take a structural look at how the media has evolved.
0:02:30 Mark, why do you think it’s so important to look at it from a structural perspective?
0:02:33 And what inspired you to spend so much time thinking about media?
0:02:37 You know, if you’re like me, you kind of start out worshiping the press, right?
0:02:38 And so it’s like the world’s a complicated place.
0:02:41 And there are all these really smart people that spend all day trying to explain it.
0:02:44 So in my case, I started reading the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times in college
0:02:45 and I read it every day.
0:02:47 And I just thought it was amazing that for relatively little money,
0:02:49 they would kind of explain everything happened in the world.
0:02:54 Kind of the heyday of centralized media or kind of the tail decade of centralized media in the 1990s.
0:02:56 Maybe in retrospect, we all didn’t know how good we had it.
0:03:00 Then basically, of course, what happened was the internet actually worked
0:03:02 and it became a big factor.
0:03:04 And it started to actually change the business of the media.
0:03:07 And actually starting in the mid to late 1990s,
0:03:11 and maybe the internet itself and the web were kind of the early kind of changes that I saw.
0:03:13 But then, you know, Craigslist hit pretty hard pretty fast.
0:03:15 And if you’re going to go back and reconstruct the history of Craigslist,
0:03:19 you know, cut the legs out from under newspapers quite quickly in the internet revolution
0:03:21 because it took out classified advertising,
0:03:23 which it turned out had been a huge source of revenue.
0:03:23 Something like a third year.
0:03:25 Particularly for the local newspapers, right?
0:03:25 Yeah.
0:03:26 Yeah, that’s right.
0:03:30 Well, and some of the national newspapers are local newspapers in terms of their business models,
0:03:31 especially in those days.
0:03:34 The New York Times was a local New York newspaper just as much as it was a national paper.
0:03:36 And so they had a lot of local ads.
0:03:37 And then the Washington Post, actually.
0:03:40 I remember actually trying to subscribe to the Washington Post in college.
0:03:41 And it was basically impossible.
0:03:43 They basically didn’t have delivery outside the Washington area.
0:03:46 It was very much a local paper, even though it covered the national government.
0:03:48 And so as that started to happen,
0:03:51 then my company, Netscape, our company that Ben and I built in the 90s
0:03:54 was a major provider of software to these companies.
0:03:55 And so we actually had a full suite.
0:03:56 What was it called? The Publishing System?
0:03:58 Yeah, Publishing System, I think.
0:03:59 Yeah, the Netscape Publishing System.
0:04:01 And so we actually had at one point a full-fledged content management system,
0:04:04 publishing system, that a bunch of the major newspapers bought.
0:04:05 So we got to know them as businesses.
0:04:08 And then one of my earliest meetings I remember was actually with Dow Jones,
0:04:10 which owned the Wall Street Journal at that time,
0:04:13 that explained to me that adopting new technology for the Washington Post
0:04:16 is actually quite difficult because it turns out it was unionized.
0:04:18 And as late as, I forget the year, 19,
0:04:21 I don’t know how long this lasted, but for sure through the 1990s,
0:04:24 they actually had a full-time employee who actually hand-built all their servers
0:04:27 because it had been in a prior union contract
0:04:29 that all servers, to be used by the Wall Street Journal,
0:04:32 all servers were to be hand-built because that was a job
0:04:33 for somebody that at one point made sense.
0:04:37 Well, there’s an interesting meta point in there, which I think is also going to really relate
0:04:41 to manufacturing, which we won’t get in this episode, but in future episodes,
0:04:47 is the collective bargaining agreements tend to be very incompatible with technological change,
0:04:54 which is kind of a very orthogonal but salient issue to the general idea of collective bargaining
0:05:00 that it kind of assumes a fixed technology set, which is highly untrue in today’s world.
0:05:05 So there probably needs to be, you know, even if you’re pro-union, a real evolution to that idea.
0:05:08 Yeah, and very relevant as Ben says, not just more broadly a manufacturer,
0:05:10 but also a lot of the media companies now are unionized.
0:05:13 And a lot that weren’t unionized a decade ago are unionized now.
0:05:15 And Mark, you often support the unions, right?
0:05:16 You support the unions.
0:05:18 Yeah, well, yes.
0:05:20 When I’m in a bad mood and they’ve written a bad story about me,
0:05:24 I issue full-throated votes of support for the unions and their collective bargaining
0:05:25 and their ability to go on strike.
0:05:30 Their ability to completely destroy the revenue of their host organisms.
0:05:32 And so many of them are actually unionized in their tech staff,
0:05:34 and then they’re also now unionized on the reporting staff.
0:05:37 And it actually has been, I think, a, I mean, they should do whatever they think is right,
0:05:39 but it certainly doesn’t make it easier for businesses to adapt.
0:05:43 So that kind of got me thinking about, okay, this is an industry like any other industry,
0:05:44 and this is a business like any other business.
0:05:47 And I got to meet a lot of the CEOs and a lot of the publishers of major publications
0:05:49 and people running TV networks.
0:05:50 And they were excited about the internet.
0:05:51 They saw the opportunity.
0:05:52 They were worried about it.
0:05:53 They saw the Craigslist thing happening.
0:05:57 And then the music industry got hit super hard with Napster around the year 2000,
0:05:59 which was quite early for a lot of these changes.
0:06:01 And so that really freaked out every other media business
0:06:03 because they saw what was happening in music,
0:06:04 and they were worried about it happening to themselves.
0:06:07 And so, you know, so I’d say like, you know, anxiety kept rising.
0:06:09 The business structurally kept changing.
0:06:11 And by the way, certain media businesses have done extraordinarily well with the internet.
0:06:14 And actually, interestingly, the New York Times is actually one of those.
0:06:17 But many others have been, let’s say, structurally compromised or disadvantaged.
0:06:20 The most obvious observation to make is just if you just think about news.
0:06:23 So it’s like, how many news organizations should there be?
0:06:29 And in the old days, you would have three network news organizations, NBC, CBS, ABC News.
0:06:31 You’d have maybe three news cable channels.
0:06:34 You’d have one or two newspapers per city.
0:06:37 You’d have a handful of radio stations per city,
0:06:39 a handful of local television stations per city,
0:06:41 a handful of national news magazines.
0:06:43 You remember in the old days, it was Time Magazine, Newsweek, and U.S. News
0:06:45 were the three national news magazines.
0:06:49 And so in each discrete media market, you could have one or two or three news organizations.
0:06:51 And you could make the economics work.
0:06:55 But if the internet is a solvent that basically turns every media into every other kind of media,
0:06:59 right, where all of a sudden local TV is competing with national network TV,
0:07:02 competing with cable TV, competing with newspapers, competing with magazines.
0:07:05 Now, all of a sudden, you add it up and you’ve got 30, 40, or 50 news organizations
0:07:07 all competing directly with each other.
0:07:09 And that’s been the state of affairs for the last 20 years.
0:07:11 And by the way, that still hasn’t reconciled.
0:07:12 It’s actually really amazing.
0:07:14 I can never get anybody in the media to think about any of these terms.
0:07:16 It’s just literally too many competitors.
0:07:19 It’s simply an oversupply of news organizations.
0:07:21 And then what’s happened, you know, they haven’t rationalized, right?
0:07:24 So why do CBS News and CNN have separate reporting staffs?
0:07:27 Like, you know, universe of online streaming and internet content, it doesn’t make any sense.
0:07:30 There should have been some level of rationalization at some point, but there never was.
0:07:33 And so what’s happened against the structural analysis is what’s happened is every single
0:07:35 news organization now is subscale.
0:07:39 So you’ve got 30 subscale players competing with each other instead of three-scale players
0:07:39 competing with each other.
0:07:41 And some of that is regulation.
0:07:42 Some of that is bans on M&A.
0:07:43 Some of that is licensing.
0:07:45 Some of that is obstinance.
0:07:50 Also, the news business has this kind of characteristic that some businesses get into, which has this
0:07:53 pluses and minuses where it has a missionary component, right?
0:07:55 And so it’s got this thing of, well, we’re not just a business.
0:07:56 Like, we’re a calling.
0:07:56 We’re a cause.
0:07:58 We’re vital to the protection of democracy.
0:08:02 And like, there’s something admirable in that it is good, I think, to have a higher purpose
0:08:02 to what you do.
0:08:07 But that can also become an inhibitor to thinking, I would say, rationally and clinically about
0:08:08 the structure of one’s business.
0:08:11 And I think that that thinking in that industry may still be somewhat lacking.
0:08:17 And it felt like that ramped up at some point where a lot of media, particularly in tech,
0:08:21 turned from sort of reviewing gadgets to defending democracy.
0:08:29 I guess that evolution, you know, it’s an interesting and long evolution, I think, not just of tech
0:08:30 media, but all media where.
0:08:34 So my father was a writer and sometimes journalist.
0:08:36 He spent a lot of his career as a journalist.
0:08:43 And the thing that he used to argue, and if you think about kind of general, what we call
0:08:47 journalism, so the kind of modern state of things, centralized media, you know, it’s like
0:08:48 a hundred years running.
0:08:54 And what he said is in the early days, journalism was like literally reporting what you saw.
0:08:57 And the journalists themselves did not have college degrees.
0:09:01 They were just sort of regular people who reported what they saw.
0:09:07 And they didn’t have kind of strong ideological kind of or as strong ideological points of view
0:09:08 for the main part.
0:09:09 There certainly were some that did.
0:09:12 And then kind of journalism became a profession.
0:09:14 It became professionalized.
0:09:17 Not unlike how kind of politicians had become professionalized over the years.
0:09:24 And at that point, it became much more ideological and much less kind of reporting what you see.
0:09:33 And so that change, I think, started more in like the 1960s and 1970s than, you know, sort of not so recent.
0:09:48 Then when you added the internet to that, so you have the ideological bent, and then the internet and the change in the business model and the heavy competition for readers kind of moved the standard of truth way, way down.
0:10:00 So in terms of fact-checking and things like that, or caring what the facts are, so everything essentially became TMZ or the National Enquirer in terms of they’d go for a story, they’d get the story.
0:10:03 If they couldn’t get the facts, they’d write the narrative.
0:10:13 And we experience this all the time now, where somebody will like literally fact-check something with us, fact-check, and then we’ll say, no, that’s not true, and they’ll write it anyway.
0:10:20 And it’ll be something like as, you know, not like a fact, you know about this fact, but are you suing this company?
0:10:22 And we’ll go, no, and they’ll write this story anyway.
0:10:25 No, these guys, we’ve heard from others that they’re suing the company.
0:10:30 It’s like, well, if we’re not the definitive source on that, then okay.
0:10:39 So it really has changed quite a bit over the years, I think, culminating in this kind of activist tech press and all these things.
0:10:46 Journalist Wesley Lowery, I think, once called it moral clarity, sort of, in justifying what journalists needed to have.
0:10:55 Well, there’s also, there’s always been an inherent, well, not always, for many, many decades, to Ben’s point, there’s been an inherent conflict in the principles of journalism, just as I hear them.
0:10:58 You know, and one is, you know, one is, you know, objectivity, right?
0:11:03 So to be kind of above the fray and objectivity and tell both sides and, you know, accurately convey the facts.
0:11:06 But then they have these, they have these, they have these two other phrases that they’ll use.
0:11:07 And this, this goes back decades.
0:11:09 One is speak truth to power.
0:11:11 Right.
0:11:12 So, you know, which.
0:11:13 Who’s power?
0:11:14 Who’s truth?
0:11:15 Yeah, exactly.
0:11:17 And by the way, there’s a very interesting question on the PowerPoint.
0:11:20 Like, okay, so here’s a very interesting question.
0:11:21 Who’s more powerful, a CEO or a reporter?
0:11:33 And, you know, if you ask the reporter, he’s like, well, obviously the CEO is more powerful because he has, you know, 100,000 employees and billions in revenue and all this, you know, ability to determine the fate of industries and business and, you know, politics and so forth.
0:11:37 The counterargument is the reporter has the ability to get the CEO fired.
0:11:39 Right.
0:11:42 And so, and this actually just happened, I guess.
0:11:43 And not vice versa.
0:11:44 And not vice versa.
0:11:48 A CEO cannot get a reporter fired, but a reporter can very much get a CEO fired.
0:11:51 And so, so anyway, so there’s the whole speak truth to power thing.
0:11:56 And then there’s the other, the other, the other, the other phrase they used to use, what it was, it was like comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
0:11:57 Right.
0:12:03 And again, it’s this, it, it sets up, you know, it sort of defines this, this, this, this polarized oppositional role.
0:12:04 Right.
0:12:05 And, and it’s like, okay, fine.
0:12:09 Like, you know, it’s like, I’m a hundred percent supporter of the free press, a hundred percent supporter of the first amendment.
0:12:12 I’m a bigger supporter of the first amendment than most reporters I know.
0:12:20 But however, but, you know, like it’s not, you know, speak truth to power.
0:12:23 And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and be objective are two different things.
0:12:26 They really are like, you know, they’re really two different goals.
0:12:35 And I, I think that, I think in many ways that, that is at the heart of the, you know, that, that, that’s at the heart of kind of the internal conflict that runs inside these.
0:12:48 And again, you know, maybe you could think about this as a little bit, again, between this sort of contrast or conflict between like, you know, missionary and mercenary, you know, which is like, if it’s just a business, you could argue that it maybe should be like completely objective because people should pay for completely objective news.
0:12:55 Or you could argue by the way that it should be completely scurrilous because it should just be yellow journalism and sell as many, you know, copies as possible.
0:13:02 But it’s when it takes on this moral calling of, of speak truth to power that it has this goal and this sort of motivation.
0:13:11 And then, and then, you know, in, in our world, ultimately, therefore a political alignment and a set of political motivations that, you know, that, that, that basically override the business judgment.
0:13:14 And I think, you know, that, that’s been the story of a lot of the, a lot of the last decade for sure.
0:13:21 When, when did you guys start to notice that, that some of the legacy media was really failing to achieve its, its ideals?
0:13:31 And maybe Mark, we can get into Martin Gurry’s sort of analysis and some of the structural forces behind how social media and the internet has sort of accelerated that.
0:13:31 Yeah.
0:13:36 So we’ll tell the personal side of the story first and then, and then, you know, go to the theoretical, I think maybe.
0:13:40 So, so, you know, Ben, Ben spent a lot of time with the press over the years.
0:13:43 You know, I, I had done basically an East coast press tour.
0:13:54 So, so kids in the old days, what you used to do to deal with the press is once, once, if you were like a prominent public figure, CEO, or, you know, kind of major, you know, kind of person who’s in the news a lot.
0:13:58 And you had a, you know, you had your own, you know, kind of, you know, PR capability and resources.
0:14:07 What you would do is once a year, you would go do a press tour and you would fly to the East coast because they’re all on the East coast, which is a whole other, whole other dimension of this.
0:14:08 So you’d fly 3000 miles.
0:14:16 And then basically you’d go around and you’d meet, meet with all of the, meet with the reporters, but also the editors and publishers of all the major publications.
0:14:27 And I did this for, you know, I did this for many years going back to the nineties and I probably did it 20 times, you know, leading into, leading into, I’m going to talk about 2017 as the change, but leading in 2017.
0:14:37 And like, generally it had always been like, it had always been what I described as like a benign and even enjoyable experience, which is, you know, you kind of go there, they put together roundtables of all their, of all their reporters, you know, you visit their offices.
0:14:40 And so they, they would, you know, usually fill up a conference room with interested people.
0:14:45 And if you were, you know, considered high profile enough, they’d bring in the editor and the publisher.
0:14:48 And so you’d, you’d sit and you’d do open Q and A and discuss and so forth.
0:14:57 And, and then, you know, because I was in the internet, you know, involved in so many aspects of internet business, I would also have the business meetings, you know, so I’d meet with the publishers or the CEOs, you know, as well.
0:15:01 And at that time knew most of the major publishers and CEOs of the big media companies.
0:15:12 And so, you know, up until I would say through 2016, it was, you know, relatively benign experience, lots of, you know, curiosity about new technology, lots of curiosity about structural changes.
0:15:16 You know, they were very interested in the future, the media business, but very interested in having that conversation.
0:15:20 And, you know, we, we always had companies that were trying to help, you know, with, with different aspects of that.
0:15:21 So there, there was always a lot to talk about.
0:15:28 And then, you know, in the, in the, in the early 2010s, you had the rise of the new digital media companies, you know, of Vox and Buzzfeed and these guys.
0:15:34 And so the, you know, the legacy publishers were very interested in them and trying to figure out if they should compete with them or buy them or, or what.
0:15:45 And so, you know, generally very, you know, kind of very, you know, friendly is maybe the wrong term because they are, you know, they are in this sort of, you know, semi, semi adversarial positioning, you know, we’re power.
0:15:50 But, you know, still, like, I would say a lot of curiosity, a lot of open-mindedness.
0:15:54 2017, spring of 2017 was the last one that I did.
0:15:59 And I, I just, I remember it very vividly because it was a starkly different experience than the one in 2016.
0:16:04 I mean, it was like somebody had flipped a light switch and, and not, not in a good direction.
0:16:12 And I would say 2017 one was just like naked hostility, like, just like flat out naked, we hate you.
0:16:20 You know, people sitting across the table, arms folded, glaring, you know, one high profile business journalist who’s still very active.
0:16:24 We, we invited him to a dinner, three-hour dinner, which this made it super fun.
0:16:29 And he started out the dinner by loudly declaring that all tech companies were frauds.
0:16:31 This was all fraud.
0:16:32 This was all bullshit.
0:16:33 None of this was real.
0:16:40 And he didn’t believe a single thing that anybody like me would ever say and then crossed his arms and then refused to speak for the rest of the three hours.
0:16:44 And, you know, that, that was, that was relatively characteristic of the experience.
0:16:50 You know, you know, I’ll tell you, you know, that, you know, that really shook me because that’s like, all right, you know, something has changed.
0:16:54 You know, the, the, the easy answer for what changed, of course, is Trump.
0:16:57 And so that was when the narrative, you know, so sort of spring of 2017.
0:17:01 So that was when the Facebook Cambridge Analytica narrative was really kicking in.
0:17:07 And, you know, and then, you know, so social media, the theory, the theory went, the social media had been compromised and gotten Trump elected.
0:17:10 And then that was when the Russiagate stuff was kicking in.
0:17:16 And so you’ve got a Russian spy in the White House and like all the other, you know, kind of, you know, that sort of political activation that took place at that time.
0:17:21 You know, which, and by the way, that political activation was like super concentrated in the places where the journalists live, right?
0:17:23 And so like Brooklyn was like ground zero for it.
0:17:31 You know, Manhattan, you know, Boston, you know, with, with, with, with the major universities there, which is where a lot of the, a lot of the big press were at the time.
0:17:39 And so, you know, they just, they just had this extremely high level of, of, of, of activated energy, which clearly was translating to rage.
0:17:42 By the way, we did, we did one other, I did one other thing that year.
0:17:44 I think it was that year, I think it was 2017.
0:17:47 We, we, we also, another thing we did was we did a media party every year.
0:17:53 You know, so we, we had this old fashioned view, you know, that if you throw them to the big party and, you know, give them free food and give them free alcohol, they might like you more.
0:17:56 And so we, we had our media party, I think later that year.
0:18:01 And, you know, and I, I kind of went against my better judgment, having experienced what I experienced earlier in the year.
0:18:07 And, and I remember three top tech journalists cornered me on the, on the Facebook topic, Facebook destroying democracy topic.
0:18:09 I just, and they were just like absolutely adamant.
0:18:12 They were just absolutely appalled that Facebook was not censoring more.
0:18:20 Like they were just like completely appalled that Facebook was not censoring, you know, much, had much, did not have much tougher censorship rules on what people could say.
0:18:23 And, and I kind of had an out-of-body experience where I’m like, you know, these are three reporters.
0:18:30 Like, you know, you know, in the old days, you know, 20 years ago, you know, reporters were the most strident defenders of the first amendment.
0:18:32 And now they were like demanding censorship.
0:18:34 And I, and I, and of course I couldn’t help myself.
0:18:37 I pointed that out and they got extremely upset.
0:18:39 And I was like, whoop, this is over.
0:18:44 So basically like from my, from my perspective, you know, different people have different views.
0:18:50 From my perspective is the world changed like really profoundly dramatically in 2017 and set off a whole cascading series of changes since.
0:18:53 But, you know, we’re, we, we, we’ve never gone back to the way things were in 2016 or before.
0:18:58 And, and, and, and I mean, we could speculate as to whether we ever will, but I, I, I doubt it at this point.
0:19:13 Yeah. And, and that, that was, you know, also when Trump started calling them the fake news, which, you know, that, and, and that was actually in response to the kind of journalists saying that Facebook was fake news.
0:19:16 And Trump said, well, no, you’re fake news.
0:19:23 And that, that, that to me was when it was like, okay, we’re on this side, you’re on that side.
0:19:30 It was no longer, there was no longer any pretense, I guess, of, you know, objectivity.
0:19:32 Objectivity was gone at that point.
0:19:33 Yeah.
0:19:38 It was, you know, it was fairly amazing because, you know, it’s like, look, I, like I voted in 2016, I voted for Hillary.
0:19:39 I supported Hillary publicly.
0:19:44 I’m like, I’m not like, you know, at that, you know, at that time, I’m like, I don’t understand why I’m getting, you know, tagged with this.
0:19:47 And, and, and literally it was, you know, it was, you know, you’re an idiot, you’re a dupe.
0:19:50 You know, you got played, you got hacked, you got, you know, you got hacked by the Russians.
0:20:00 You know, I, I went to Hillary’s first, first public appearance after, in 2017, after she, after she lost it at stage, she gave a talk at Stanford as her first kind of big public out, outing.
0:20:05 And she, you know, she said like 20 feet away from me on stage that, you know, Trump is only president because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook.
0:20:06 Right.
0:20:09 You know, with, to insert fake news.
0:20:09 Right.
0:20:14 And so, you know, the, you know, so the unified kind of theory, you know, emerged around, around Russiagate.
0:20:25 And, you know, basically the, the, the tech companies were just like presumed guilty, even though, you know, we all at that time where it’s like, you know, 99.9%, you know, Democrats or, you know, Hillary supporters.
0:20:35 And so, yeah, and then, you know, look, people had a very, you know, basically people, people I know who went through that, you know, had two very, well, maybe three very different reactions to it.
0:20:42 One reaction was just like absolute terror of like, oh my God, like, you know, are the critics right?
0:20:48 And, you know, therefore, like, you know, all of the, you know, enormous pounding for censorship that then kicked in, including in the Valley and in many of the tech companies.
0:20:57 You know, you had other people who were like, oh my God, I’ve just seen behind the curtain, you know, like in the end of the Wizard of Oz and like, you know, these aren’t objective truth tellers, like there’s something else going on here.
0:20:59 And that was a very small number of people.
0:21:06 And then I think, you know, a lot of people entered a state of confusion of just not understanding the, the, the, you know, kind of how the world works and how the media works.
0:21:09 And that state of confusion for, I think for a lot of people actually probably still continues.
0:21:18 Yeah. And I think that, you know, one of the things that was interesting about that whole period was how much of it was Trump and not any of the facts.
0:21:28 So that, you know, first Obama clearly won in 2008 because of Facebook and he used it effectively and so forth.
0:21:40 And I think that the kind of internal knowledge of what happened from the kind of Facebook team was Trump was just way, way, way better at his usage of Facebook than Hillary was.
0:21:46 And Hillary used old techniques, Obama used new techniques, or Trump used new techniques.
0:22:01 Trump had the, the genius machine zone CEO working with him, who was like the kind of the best games distributor in the world, kind of working to distribute kind of Trump on Facebook.
0:22:05 And so, you know, that’s what actually happened.
0:22:11 You know, when the, when the Facebook team did the internal investigation, it was done by a guy who used to work for me, Alex Damos.
0:22:23 It was very earnest and very left wing, I would say, you know, what they found in terms of the quote unquote Russian hacking was just about effectively nothing.
0:22:24 Like there was nothing.
0:22:33 And so, but the dominant media narrative was that Facebook had been hacked by the Russians.
0:22:38 And I think like probably half the population still thinks that’s true, but it’s absolutely false.
0:22:46 It’s amazing how just in one election cycle, people turned on social media and free speech.
0:22:50 You were saying that, you know, Obama won thanks to it and people celebrated that.
0:22:52 People celebrated the Arab Spring.
0:22:55 Dick Costello called Twitter the free speech wing of the free speech party.
0:23:02 And just, you know, five years later, eight years later, oh, this whole, this whole free speech thing, you know, I don’t know about this anymore.
0:23:04 It’s cool.
0:23:12 Well, I mean, it shows you how polarizing Trump is too, you know, like it was all good until he got elected and then it was all bad.
0:23:13 Yeah.
0:23:18 Mark, maybe what does Martin Gurie bring to this analysis?
0:23:19 He’s really shaped your thinking here.
0:23:20 Yeah.
0:23:23 So Martin Gurie is a, is a good friend of ours and is a brilliant writer.
0:23:30 He spent 30 years in the CIA doing basically analysis of essentially regime change.
0:23:33 And, but he was in what was called the open source division for a long time.
0:23:36 And they, they, they were doing basically like global media monitoring.
0:23:43 And so he’s sort of a world expert at sort of the intersection of how the media operates and then kind of how changes happen in government and happen in political regimes.
0:23:51 And he wrote this book, I think actually pre-Trump, I think he wrote it in 20, I think he wrote it in the early 2010s and published it, self-published it originally, I think in 2015, if I recall correctly.
0:23:55 So kind of, so the book was kind of published at the same time that Trump was winning the nomination.
0:24:03 So it, it, you know, it, it, like it’s, it, it, it was very, it was very, it was very, it looks in hindsight, extremely prescient.
0:24:09 You know, yet even he, I think would, would say he, you know, he didn’t know, obviously that it was, the thesis was going to get proven as fast as it was.
0:24:21 By the way, the book is today available in a, in a formal edition by, from Stripe Press and you can buy it on Amazon and they have a really beautiful version of it with a, with a whole new section at the end on what happened since he wrote it.
0:24:29 But, um, it was very insightful and so it was, it was self-published on, on, on Kindle and then PDF bootlegs were kind of emailed around, uh, at the time.
0:24:36 Um, and it laid out this, basically this thesis, uh, which at the time sounded very radical and of course today just sounds like a description of what’s happening.
0:24:43 Um, and so the thesis basically, he focuses on this concept, the sort of, um, the sort of abstract concept of authority.
0:24:51 Um, and authority is, is, is not just somebody telling you what to do, but authority is basically any kind of centralized, um, uh, credentialed, uh,
0:24:55 uh, uh, uh, like authority figure, um, or like authoritative institution.
0:25:09 Um, so think, you know, somebody with a role in, in steering society and that might be anybody from, uh, you know, from a politician to a bureaucrat, uh, to a reporter, to a doctor, um, you know, to an expert, you know, credentialed expert of any kind.
0:25:15 So the, the, the, the people, and think of those just generally as like experts, um, and then, and then the other is, uh, institutional authority.
0:25:17 So the institutions that are supposed to guide our society.
0:25:24 And so that’s the government, government bureaucracies, the news organizations, the universities, um, foundations, NGOs, right?
0:25:29 Um, and, and, and by the way, like, and if you, and if you read the press, it’s actually very interesting.
0:25:34 If you, if you, if you read the press, you know, they, they, they, the, the, the standard form of article is expert says X, right?
0:25:42 Like, so the, the, you know, the go-to thing is always to basically say, you know, here’s, here’s this, here’s a way that the world works or something that happens according to an expert, right?
0:25:46 And, and the expert is a, is by definition, a credentialed expert, right?
0:25:47 So you’re not, you’re not allowed to be an independent expert.
0:25:51 You have to be a formal expert with the right, you know, the right diploma or the right certification.
0:26:03 And so the, and that, and that’s, that’s the linkage between the individual, uh, authority, individual authority figures and the institutions, which is the authority, the authority, the authoritative institutions, uh, certify the individuals, right?
0:26:09 So Harvard is the authoritative institution that certifies the experts who are professors and people with PhDs from Harvard and so forth and so on.
0:26:19 Um, and basically what he said was, he said all of that, everything I just described is basically an artifact of central, of centralization, um, and top-down, um, media.
0:26:31 Um, and so everything I just described is an artifact of, you know, the basically mass media, um, uh, you know, mass, mass education, centralized authority, the idea that there are a few really good universities that certify all the experts.
0:26:39 You know, the idea that there are a few, few large foundations that determine the future shape of society through their activism, the idea that there’s only one central government, um, right?
0:26:43 Um, you know, and there’s only a few politicians who are really in charge, right?
0:26:51 And so, um, so basically like that, that, that whole idea of authority, um, that you could basically trust and rely on is an artifact of the top-down centralized era.
0:26:57 Um, and that basically social media is kind of bottoms up peer-to-peer media, social media where people can just share, you know, with each other.
0:27:02 Um, uh, basically he made a very provocative claim at that point that that will basically destroy all authority.
0:27:09 Um, that, that basically that will ruin the reputation of all the certified experts and that that will basically destroy all of the authoritative institutions.
0:27:17 Um, and at, at first it’s like, it seemed like too radical of a thesis, which is, well, why will that, you know, just because people can talk openly about things like, why would that happen?
0:27:22 And he said, well, the reason is because none of these institutions are actually as perfect as they say they are, right?
0:27:24 They’re, they’re, they’re made up of people like anything else.
0:27:32 They’re right about some things, they’re wrong about other things, but to be authoritative, they project this image of, we are right 100% of the time.
0:27:34 You know, we, we are the authoritative source of truth.
0:27:38 Um, and, and he said, basically the, the, I’m going to use my metaphor here.
0:27:42 The, the social media is many things, but one of the things it is, is it’s an x-ray machine.
0:27:51 Um, and so when an expert, um, uh, you know, says something that turns out to be wrong, you know, in the old days, you know, nobody would necessarily write the story.
0:27:53 It’d be on page 34 or something in the new world.
0:27:55 It goes viral on social media.
0:28:05 And so the, the, the, the, the, the world that you experience with social media as a, as a consumer is completely different because what you’re seeing every day are, you know, dozens or hundreds of accounts about how the experts are wrong.
0:28:07 And he said, the thing is, they really are wrong.
0:28:12 Like, you know, now sometimes they’re accused of being wrong and they’re not, but like, they really are wrong a lot of the time because they’re people and they’re imperfect.
0:28:17 Um, and that they have basically built, they have basically built up these reputations that actually cannot be factually supported.
0:28:27 And that when people, you know, when, when, when populations realize that these authoritative sources are not actually correct all the time, uh, even though they have been claiming to be correct all the time.
0:28:31 You know, in essence, like they’ve written checks at the, you know, somebody said that your mouth writes checks, your body can’t cash.
0:28:39 Um, you know, they, you know, they’ve, they’ve written these checks about their, their, their, the quality of, of what they do that, that basically transparency doesn’t support.
0:28:43 Um, and so he said, inevitably you, you’ll basically see them crumb, you’ll see them crumble.
0:28:51 And, and, you know, one of the ways that you can see that very clearly is, uh, these large polling organizations like Gallup do these annual surveys of trust and institutions.
0:28:56 Um, and, and Gallup has done a big one for a long time that goes by every single class of like authoritative institution.
0:28:58 They go year by year, how much do you trust this thing?
0:29:06 And basically what you see essentially since Martin’s book came out, well, actually you see a long slide in institutional authority and trust that started actually in the 1970s.
0:29:13 And we could talk about that because it predates the internet, but then you see actually this, like basically this much faster collapse basically after 2015.
0:29:18 Um, and then in particular in the last three years, it’s just, the numbers have just caved in.
0:29:28 Um, and so the universities, for example, the, you know, their, their, their approval ratings in the, their sort of trust ratings for the population writ large have just, you know, completely cratered in the last three years, the medical profession.
0:29:33 Um, you know, the press, um, you know, many of the nonprofits, you know, the numbers are, are just collapsing.
0:29:38 And so, um, yeah, so it, it, yeah, it, you, you, you look back now and you’re like, oh, okay.
0:29:42 Yeah, that was, yes, that, that was a correct assessment that is actually playing out now.
0:29:45 Um, you know, a, a question from there would be like, how far does it go?
0:29:48 Um, and, you know, do the numbers literally converge to zero?
0:29:54 Um, and, and you have this interesting thing that’s preventing that from happening right now, which is more and more the numbers are partisan split.
0:29:58 Um, and so Democrats trust universities, Republicans don’t, you know, Democrats trust doctors.
0:30:04 Republicans, you know, Republicans don’t, um, or, or another version of this is, you know, who’s in the White House determines how people feel about the economy.
0:30:07 So, uh, when Biden was in the White House, Democrats felt great about the economy.
0:30:08 Republicans felt horrible.
0:30:10 Now that Trump’s in, Republicans feel great.
0:30:11 Democrats feel horrible.
0:30:13 There’s like a, just a straight inversion, uh, on.
0:30:16 Everything is partisan all the time.
0:30:27 Yeah, and, and so my, my, my, my point is that the partisanship is, I would argue the partisanship, the part, the partisanship, uh, is actually holding up the reputation of institutions that otherwise, where their, their ratings would, their, their, their trust ratings would literally go to zero.
0:30:29 Uh, which, which I think is probably what happens in the fullness of time.
0:30:33 Well, first off, what, what happened in the 70s, to, to give full context?
0:30:54 Yeah, so the, the, the, the, the, I would say there’s a, there’s a cultural argument, um, and the cultural argument has to do with basically the, you know, the social revolution in the 1960s, um, you know, and then it has to do with, uh, you know, especially Vietnam, um, and, you know, because Vietnam was just like basically, you know, gigantically controversial and, and, you know, sort of very discredited, uh, you know, for a long time.
0:30:55 And then obviously it ended very badly.
0:31:04 Um, and then Nixon, um, you know, Watergate, um, and then, um, and then just like, you know, reveals there were other things in the 70s at the time, the environmental movement.
0:31:06 It was revealing all these dirty secrets of industry.
0:31:10 The, um, you know, the church and Pike committee were revealing all these dirty secrets, the intelligence agencies.
0:31:14 And so, um, you know, you just kind of had this, you, you had kind of this activated social consciousness.
0:31:18 You had this new generation, the boomers that were like very, like politically activated, socially activated.
0:31:23 Um, and then you just had a, a lot of sort of data points that the institutions were going bad.
0:31:27 Um, and so that, you know, that’s one argument, um, that’s like the social cultural argument.
0:31:31 Um, you know, the other argument is actually, uh, the, a structural argument.
0:31:35 It’s, it’s, it’s when, uh, peak centralization started to collapse.
0:31:40 Um, and so our, our, um, our friend Balaji talks a lot about this concept of peak centralization.
0:31:50 And basically what he says is if you, if you look at basically, if you look at anything from governments to business to media, um, basically centralization in the world peaked in the 1950s.
0:31:55 Um, and so 1950s, the 1950s was at the point when you had the smallest number of countries in the history of the world.
0:31:58 Uh, total number of countries got down to like something like 60.
0:32:02 Um, you had the smallest number of, of media organizations.
0:32:09 Um, cause actually media going back before, you know, in the 18th and 19th centuries was actually much more decentralized, which, which we could talk about.
0:32:13 Um, but, but, but by the 1950s, it was this highly centralized environment that I talked about earlier.
0:32:17 Um, mass manufacturing had centralized production, um, right.
0:32:21 Um, public education had centralized, you know, the, the, the, the process of educating kids.
0:32:27 Um, and so you had all these areas of, of, of, of human activity that basically had been centralized in a small number of large organizations.
0:32:30 And, and, and when that happens, of course, those organizations get a tremendous amount of control.
0:32:35 Um, and so, for example, the editors at the major newspapers could absolutely decide what was news and what wasn’t.
0:32:38 And if they didn’t want something to be news, they just buried it.
0:32:40 Um, and it just, you know, didn’t matter.
0:32:46 And so, well, a famous example was, you know, what percentage of the U.S. population knew that FDR was in a wheelchair when he was president, right?
0:32:49 Um, or, or, you know, or what percentage knew all the stuff we now know Kennedy got up to.
0:32:54 Um, well, good thing that would never happen today with, uh, you know.
0:32:55 That would never, ever happen today.
0:32:56 Exactly.
0:32:58 Um, but, um.
0:33:00 Yeah, even the affairs that aren’t true get published to that.
0:33:01 Exactly.
0:33:10 So, um, so, so anyway, so, so, so, so, so, so that was, and so in, in, under peak centralization, you’re going to have maximum trust because you’re going to have basically the most information control.
0:33:11 Um, right?
0:33:13 You just, you’re not going to have the alternative point of view.
0:33:19 And so you’re just, everybody’s, you know, the theory goes, at least you’re going to have a much higher level of unanimity, which is going to come across in the surveys as trust.
0:33:21 And people aren’t going to have anything to compare to.
0:33:26 And then, and then basically the argument goes in the 1970s is when the media landscape started to decentralize.
0:33:31 Um, and so you had the, and this is sort of 70s into the 80s, I would say, because it took time.
0:33:42 But you had the rise of, uh, talk radio, uh, AM talk radio, um, and in particular, I was, you know, so Rush Limbaugh had a major impact on the information landscape because he was a completely different kind of voice than you were getting in the traditional press.
0:33:47 Um, and then you also had the rise of, um, tell the common points out, you had the rise of paperback books.
0:33:52 Um, and, and so you actually, the, the, the cost of books actually dropped dramatically in that period.
0:33:58 Um, and, and you could have, you know, you could do cheap paperback books on many, many topics that you could never get through the hardback, uh, publishing apparatus.
0:34:04 Um, newsletters, uh, mimeograph newsletters, photocopy newsletters actually became a big thing, uh, in that period.
0:34:10 And then, um, and then, and then cable TV emerged, uh, you know, kind of late in the 1970s and in the 1980s and started to really blow the doors open.
0:34:19 Oh, and then, by the way, I mean, even, I don’t know how to, how to measure this, but even, uh, um, uh, early computers, um, not so much the internet, but like bulletin board services.
0:34:27 And then, uh, CompuServe and Prodigy, um, you know, were, were getting, uh, created back then, which were, which were kind of pre-internet, you know, dial-up information services.
0:34:32 Uh, anyway, so you had like six or eight different technological changes that were happening that were kind of decentralizing media.
0:34:38 And then you kind of wonder, it’s like, okay, if, if I’m, if I’m a trusting individual, right?
0:34:42 If, if I’m inherently trusting individual, I’ll just, I’m just going to watch the five o’clock news and I’m just going to believe what they tell me.
0:34:45 But if I’m an inherently untrusting individual, I’m not going to do that.
0:34:49 And I’m going to seek out a newsletter or a paperback book or a talk radio, you know, something like that.
0:34:52 I’m going to seek out a cable, you know, new cable TV show.
0:34:54 I’m going to seek out a new source of information.
0:34:58 Of course, those sources of information need to differentiate themselves, uh, you know, from the mainstream.
0:35:00 And so they’re, they’re going to come up with these alternative narratives.
0:35:08 And, and, and so therefore the rise of the new technology equals the rise of a new audience equals the rise of an, of a new belief system that inherently is, is, is not trusting.
0:35:10 And so, so that, that, that would be the structural view.
0:35:13 And accelerating all the way to social media.
0:35:18 One, one question, Mark, you also like to ask is, uh, is social media the engine or the camera?
0:35:30 Is it sort of, um, creating new behavior or kind of just revealing behavior that was in that, you know, this, uh, I remember one interview you did with Kara and Reid Hoffman, I think around sort of the 2018, 2019 time.
0:35:39 And, and they’re both sort of saying, Hey, when can we go back to an era where we all had civil conversations and, and all got along and the sort of golden era.
0:35:43 And, and you were like, Hey, maybe it wasn’t, uh, it’s not as simple as, as we’re making it here.
0:35:47 Yeah. So that, that was also, I think that was also probably 2017.
0:35:50 And that was my, that was my last onstage appearance at a mainstream industry conference.
0:35:55 Um, and I knew, I knew it was, that was another one where I didn’t realize what I was getting into.
0:35:57 Cause Reid Hoffman had been a good friend of mine for a long time.
0:36:00 And, you know, Kara and I had been kind of hot and cold for a long time.
0:36:02 Um, but, um, you know, she’d done a lot of great work earlier in her career.
0:36:06 And I had, I’d known her for a long time and she’s running this very important conference.
0:36:10 And so I, I was excited to be, you know, on stage with Reid and my good friend Reid and with, with Kara.
0:36:15 And, you know, they just, you know, they, they, they, they both had become extreme, you know, they both had become extremely politically activated.
0:36:20 And so they, they both had, I would say, extremely, extremely negative, uh, you know, kind of responses to Trump.
0:36:26 Um, and, you know, Reid, Reid’s census, of course, become a, you know, one of the largest donors in American history for left-wing politics.
0:36:27 And of course, Kara’s Kara’s Kara.
0:36:29 People can draw their own judgments.
0:36:32 Um, many hours of YouTube video to watch.
0:36:40 Um, so, uh, I got on stage, you know, they basically started, you know, they, all of a sudden there’s like this, like extremely aggressive, I mean, they, they were attacked.
0:36:48 They were attacking me as much, but there was like an extremely aggressive kind of attack on, you know, basically, it was the beginning of the tech is enabling fascism, you know, kind of wave that they’ve, they’ve both gotten very into.
0:36:53 Um, and, and, and, you know, and again, they, they, you know, you kind of tell this, you know, you kind of tell the simplified version of the story.
0:36:57 And I, I even did a little bit of a, my earlier answer, which is, you know, at one point we trusted the media, now we don’t.
0:37:01 Well, number one, like, did we ever really trust the media that much?
0:37:02 Like, we say we did, but did we?
0:37:06 And my, my favorite example of that is, uh, the, sort of the legend of this guy, Walter Cronkite.
0:37:14 Um, and so, Walter Cronkite was a network news anchor for, uh, CBS News and for, you know, decades, he was considered the authoritative source of information.
0:37:16 He, he was like the peak, the peak reporter.
0:37:19 Like, if you can’t trust Walter Cronkite, like, who can you trust?
0:37:29 And so there was this famous moment, people talk about this, they, there was this famous moment in 1968, uh, it’s a Vietnam War had been going for, I think, four years at that point with America’s involvement in Vietnam, or maybe even five.
0:37:31 Um, and it was already going bad.
0:37:37 And, um, and Walter Cronkite did this, you know, went to Vietnam and came back and he did this thing where he came out against the Vietnam War.
0:37:44 Um, and, and it was, it was this, and it was this, it was this truth, you know, the legend, the legend is it was this truth to power moment, right?
0:37:48 Which is like, you know, you’ve got this authoritative source finally telling the American people the truth of this war.
0:37:52 is a disaster. But of course, this raises the question of like, well, he came out against the
0:37:58 Vietnam War in 1968, but it had already been going for four years. So like, what was his point of view
0:38:03 on the war prior to 1968? And of course, nobody wants to open that box, right? Because if you open
0:38:06 that box and if you go look at those, you know, if you can get access even to the four years of
0:38:11 network news broadcasts from 1964 to 1968, of course, what you’d find is he and everybody else
0:38:17 like him was 100% supportive of it. Right. And so, you know, it’s the whole thing. And of course,
0:38:20 and of course, the other thing was, you know, the media, you know, in those days, 1968 was, you
0:38:27 know, 1968 happened to be the presidential election year, right? And so the Vietnam War between 1964
0:38:34 and 1968 was a democratic war, right? It was a Kennedy Johnson project. If Nixon were to win in 1968,
0:38:37 it would become a Republican war, which is what it turned into. But it started as a democratic war.
0:38:42 And so he is actually, he flipped on it. He flipped from positive, negative on it at precisely the
0:38:45 point when the country flipped from a democratic president to Republican president. So probably
0:38:51 just a coincidence. Maybe not. And so, and, you know, and then there, by the way, there were huge
0:38:54 disputes in those days because there were a lot of people who were like, well, you’re betraying, you
0:38:57 know, you’re, you’re, the other point of view was like, if the media is coming out against a war with
0:39:01 American soldiers in the field, like you’re betraying those, those soldiers. And, you know, you had
0:39:04 celebrities who were going to Vietnam who were, you know, talking about how, you know, evil the whole
0:39:07 thing was and how great the North Vietnamese communists were. And, you know, are they sympathizing
0:39:11 with the enemy? And so, you know, even in those, you know, in those days, it’s not like everybody
0:39:16 just, uh, uh, uh, just, just, just, just, just agreed with everybody. Um, and so I, you know,
0:39:19 there, there, there, there is a lot of myth-making that takes place. Oh, and you know, the other
0:39:23 part of myth-making that takes place from that era is Watergate. Um, and so the way the Watergate
0:39:27 story gets told is you had these, you know, two plucky young, you know, reporters, um, Woodward
0:39:30 and Bernstein of the Washington Post, and they were able to, you know, kind of unspool the
0:39:37 story of, of presidential corruption, you know, take down Nixon, um, in what, 73, 74. Um,
0:39:41 you know, for a very, the, the, the whole, the whole story, if you’ve read the book or if
0:39:44 you, if you’ve even seen the movie, the whole story is they had this, like, they, they, they
0:39:47 cultivated this inside source to the government, who was this truth teller who, you know, gave
0:39:52 them all the secret information, who was this unimpeachable source called Deep Throat. Um,
0:39:56 you know, 30 years later, uh, we, we finally learned the identity of Deep Throat. It turns
0:40:01 out he was the number three executive in the, in the FBI. Right. Um, and, and specifically
0:40:05 in Hoover’s FBI. Right. And so the, the, this was like, you know, this was, he was like the
0:40:09 agent of what all these same people considered to be basically organized fascism. Um, you
0:40:12 who, you know, and, and, and now there’s like a completely different interpretation of Watergate,
0:40:18 which it was a war between the FBI and Nixon and the FBI took out Nixon. Um, and so like,
0:40:21 you know, even, even in those days, like how much of this was, oh, and then of course it
0:40:24 also turns out Bob Woodward had been a Navy intelligence officer prior to being a reporter
0:40:28 who had actually met, uh, Mark Felt, the Deep Throat source, uh, actually sitting on the,
0:40:32 on the couch outside of the Situation Room in the White House. Um, and so, you know, had
0:40:36 Felt recruited him, you know, to be an, you know, to be an asset, like what exactly was
0:40:41 the relationship? Um, and so, you know, even, even in those days, um, you know, there, there,
0:40:45 you know, there, there was more controversy than the sort of, you know, um, you know, uh,
0:40:48 the sort of, uh, rose colored glasses, you know, kind of, kind of, kind of view would
0:40:51 have it. Uh, you know, but, but to your question, the difference is like in those
0:40:53 days you could speculate about all this. You could, you know, talk to your friends and
0:40:57 neighbors about it. You could complain about it, whatever, in your private life, but you
0:41:00 couldn’t do anything about it. Um, you know, in the new world, you can, you can do something
0:41:05 about it, which is you can go online, um, and you could post, um, and, you know, yeah, and
0:41:08 it can go viral. And, and, and your point on engine versus camera, you know, that’s when
0:41:12 the camera turns into an engine, um, right. Which is you, you could, you could not only see
0:41:17 things, um, that you couldn’t see before, but you can, you can also, you know, help other
0:41:22 people see those things. Now, look, having said that, like, I’m not like, I, I think, I think
0:41:26 the internet contains multitudes. Um, and so, you know, is the internet just a camera
0:41:29 of things that you need to know that are true? No, there’s obviously huge amounts of, you
0:41:33 know, there’s the internet has full spectrum of things that are clearly fake. The things
0:41:36 are clearly real to everything in the middle. You know, I think there’s a very large number
0:41:40 of, of, uh, you know, there’s lots of less, as they say, ops. Um, you know, there’s lots
0:41:43 of propaganda. There’s lots of, uh, you know, campaigns of different kinds. Um, you know,
0:41:47 it’s a very, it’s a very complicated environment. It’s, it’s no single thing. Um, but for sure,
0:41:51 it is an x-ray machine and then for sure it is also, which is a camera. And then for
0:41:54 sure, it’s also a, an engine. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a way to actually drive change
0:41:56 in the information environment that people didn’t used to have.
0:42:01 Ben, I’m curious to hear more, more of your perspective on kind of your, your personal
0:42:05 evolution. You mentioned earlier that, that your father, uh, was a journalist and a, and a
0:42:09 political writer as well. You know, I’ve, I’ve seen you as mostly focused on, on, uh,
0:42:14 technology and, and, and business. But when, when did you start to realize that things
0:42:17 were, were changing in the media or that we were sort of entering a hyper-partisan era
0:42:21 or what were kind of your sort of inflection points in thinking about these topics?
0:42:27 A big thing that had an effect on me was actually, uh, my father’s, the beginning of his conversion
0:42:34 from the left to the right. So he was, uh, the editor of the editor in chief of Ramparts
0:42:40 magazine, which was the kind of the magazine of the new left back in the seventies. Um, you
0:42:46 know, he dropped out of, uh, politics for quite a while. Um, I think about eight years. Uh,
0:42:52 and then, you know, he, he was a journalist during that time. And one of the things that
0:42:58 happened that was, uh, kind of, you know, to Mark’s point about, um, the trusted experts
0:43:05 and the authorities, uh, and the institutions was he got tipped by a very good reporter from
0:43:12 the San Francisco Chronicle by the name of Randy Schultz about this, um, uh, potential, uh,
0:43:21 pandemic, um, uh, in the, in 1981, um, that was starting in San Francisco, uh, where kind
0:43:28 of gay men were kind of getting this very deadly disease. Um, and, uh, you know, and, but Randy
0:43:32 couldn’t write the story about it because there was so much pressure from the institutions to
0:43:39 not make it a gay disease, but the, the kind of right public policy at the time was to close
0:43:44 particularly the bath houses. So they had these things that were at bath houses in San Francisco
0:43:50 where, you know, gay men would kind of hook up and that kind of thing. Uh, and so they all knew about
0:43:54 this disease. There were only about a hundred cases. I think at the time it was a very small
0:43:59 number. And they were like, we got to close the bath houses now. Um, but everybody in the
0:44:04 medical establishment was afraid to do it, uh, you know, and everybody kind of, the press was kind
0:44:11 of very anti it. And so my father, you know, being my father and how he is just wrote the story and
0:44:16 was called whitewash and it was in California magazine. Um, kind of telling the story of this
0:44:22 coverup of this, you know, how this disease was spread. Um, and, you know, it was like the kind of
0:44:31 end of so many of his friends, um, you know, on the left. And then, you know, we got, there were
0:44:39 protests. Um, they, I, I, you know, they, they, they protested, uh, around, you know, our house and
0:44:45 that kind of thing that he was a homophobe and all this kind of thing. Um, but, you know, look, and
0:44:51 then Fauci who was actually in charge of, uh, you know, public health policy at the time kind of
0:44:58 reoriented it around, um, no, no, no, no, it’s not, uh, just gay sex. It’s any kind of sex and it’s,
0:45:03 you know, intravenous drug use and this kind of thing. Um, and the net net of that was like
0:45:10 the, you know, the, the, the bath houses weren’t closed and so forth. And it did become an epidemic,
0:45:15 uh, you know, where, you know, unlike COVID, it didn’t have to, you know, it was only spread
0:45:22 through, it was spread to like 98% or 95% through, uh, gay sex and, you know, the rest for intravenous
0:45:29 drug use and almost none, it turns out through heterosexual sex. Um, but we didn’t really address
0:45:37 it because of these politics. And so it kind of really gave me a good lesson that, okay, uh, you know,
0:45:42 the experts might not be true. And then, um, you know, we were always, you know, growing up in
0:45:48 Berkeley, we were always on the side of, you know, the left is like, well, you know, the left can do
0:45:54 very bad things as well. I’m like, you know, there’s a certain, there’s a certain level of like
0:45:59 politics and partisanship where you don’t even care about the people you care about. Like, you know,
0:46:04 the saddest thing in the world, we’re seeing all these people die. I mean, in the 80s, like if you went
0:46:08 through that, it was just horrible. Like, you know, so many, you know, people you knew and so forth, the
0:46:16 young people, healthy people all of a sudden die and it was preventable. And the people who were on their
0:46:23 side, like the pro-gay community were the ones who caused it. Like that whole thing, um, just made me very,
0:46:34 very aware, uh, of how, like the, the whole central system, uh, worked. Um, and, uh, I’d just say it’s quite
0:46:34 eye-opening.
0:46:40 Yeah. That whole story, by the way, is in David’s, David Horowitz’s book, uh, called Radical Son. Um, which is one of the
0:46:42 most, uh, it’s one of the most shattering.
0:46:44 And Prussian books, by the way.
0:46:45 Yeah. Yeah.
0:46:45 Yeah.
0:46:49 Yeah. But it’s an, it’s an absolutely shattering story given, given the, you know, there’s a
0:46:52 counterfactual universe in which, um, you know, it had been controlled and contained.
0:46:56 It really could have been, you know, like the whole flatten the curve thing on COVID was hard
0:47:00 because it spread so fast. But AIDS did not, like, if you look at it, it spread actually quite
0:47:06 slowly, um, you know, by comparison. So, like, those kinds of measures would have worked or, you
0:47:09 know, would have prevented probably 75% of the deaths.
0:47:10 Yeah.
0:47:16 In, in the same way that, uh, Peter Thiel’s book in 1995 was maybe, you know, a couple decades
0:47:23 prescient into sort of, uh, chronicling college campus activism. It seems like, uh, your, your
0:47:27 father’s work was, uh, you know, a few decades prescient. Uh, you know, I’m hearing for this
0:47:33 for the first time, but, you know, Fauci contributing to a noble lie, uh, or, or even something adjacent
0:47:35 to that, you know, decades before is, uh.
0:47:41 And look, I, I mean, I think Fauci, you know, whether you like him or not, he is, I think he’s,
0:47:46 he’s a bit of a sociopath. I mean, he is completely divorced from the truth. Uh,
0:47:51 and he feels no guilt about it. They, you know, he never felt any guilt about the whole
0:47:54 AIDS thing, despite being like a huge catalyst in that.
0:47:59 We’ve been talking about how the, the legacy media playbook was being disrupted by the internet.
0:48:05 And this is where it might be interesting to return back to the Trump phenomenon, less in
0:48:11 terms of the, the politics, but more in terms of the, the, the media impact, because it feels
0:48:16 like he was a part of a, of a new playbook. You know, Trump in the nineties was very different
0:48:21 than Trump in the mid, mid two thousands, um, or 2010s. And, and that same new playbook,
0:48:27 uh, that was sort of native to, to social media helped influence perhaps Elon, perhaps some
0:48:31 others. Mark, when you describe, what was this new playbook?
0:48:35 So I think Trump is a bridge figure. Um, I actually think Trump, with respect to like
0:48:40 media, um, the media, the way media works, I think Trump is a bridge figure. Um, and that
0:48:43 we’re going to see new variations from here that are going to be very interesting, but he’s a
0:48:47 bridge figure, which is he, he, you know, he’s of the generation that grew up, uh, you know,
0:48:52 with television, newspapers, you know, absolutely dominant. Um, and so he’s always had a very
0:48:56 intertwined relationship with newspapers and, and with television. Um, and obviously that culminated
0:49:00 him in having his own, you know, uh, top rated television show for 15 years, but also he was,
0:49:05 you know, he was, he was, he’s a, he was, Trump was a standard story in newspapers starting in like
0:49:09 1975. Um, I think the New York Times press profiled him in 75. And then he was a fixture,
0:49:15 as they say, in like New York media world and tabloids and major newspapers and entertainment
0:49:19 television and everything else. Um, you know, all the way through cable TV, he was on cable news all the
0:49:24 time. You know, he’d go on Oprah, um, uh, you know, when, when, and that was a big deal. Um,
0:49:27 and so he was always super intertwined and he talked to them constantly, by the way,
0:49:30 you know, he would, he would always, many stories in those days of, of Trump calling up and talking
0:49:34 to reporters and taking phone calls from reporters, um, you know, and, and, and the whole thing.
0:49:38 And so he’s, he’s got that element to it. And by the way, he continues that. It’s actually very
0:49:41 interesting. He, it’s very interesting to watch. Uh, this is one of the things that surprised me about
0:49:48 his new term, um, is he has opened up the Oval Office to the, uh, to the legacy press to an
0:49:54 extraordinary degree. Um, and so he has the love, hate relationship. It really is. It really is. And if,
0:49:56 if you, if you talk to reporters, by the way, if you talk to reporters at like, you know,
0:49:59 at these major newspapers, you know, kind of off the record, um, you know, they’ll tell you,
0:50:04 he calls them all the time. Um, and a lot of them have his cell phone number and he’ll pick up the
0:50:07 calls and he’ll talk to them and, and, you know, that he’s a source for a lot of stories. So he does
0:50:11 talk to them, um, even though he, he complains about them and then he, he’s done, you know, I don’t
0:50:15 know what the number is, but he’s done multiples, you know, he’s done wildly more, you know,
0:50:20 press questions, press conferences, press briefings in the first, you know, whatever, 70 days of,
0:50:24 of, of, of his new term than, you know, the, than the previous presidents did for, you know,
0:50:27 their entire, you know, for their, their entire runs. And, you know, he’s constantly talking to
0:50:31 them on, on, on Air Force One and he’s talking to them in the white house and he’s invited them to
0:50:35 the cabinet meetings and he’s having them over for dinner. And so, so he, he, he still has, he has
0:50:40 one foot kind of squarely in the kind of described as kind of legacy, uh, media world. But then the,
0:50:44 the, the other side of it is, you know, not only, not only was he a pioneer in going direct and
0:50:48 that he, you know, literally had his own, you know, TV show, um, with the apprentice, but,
0:50:51 but also, um, he was, people not forget, he wasn’t actually an early adopter on Twitter,
0:50:58 uh, for a public figure of, of that magnitude. Um, and so he started tweeting actively probably in,
0:51:04 I forget, like 2010 or 2011, which was, and that was still the like social media’s, you know,
0:51:09 what did your cat have for breakfast? Um, especially Twitter, like still people weren’t quite sure what
0:51:13 they thought of it. Um, and he leaned into it hard and, and, and there’s this, you know, kind of running
0:51:17 joke now, right. Where there, where there’s a Trump tweet for everything like, right. So, so anything that
0:51:20 happens, there was like a Trump tweet in like 2013, where like he said it or predicted it or
0:51:25 argued it. Um, right. And it’s just because like, he actually, and I, I don’t even know, I, I don’t
0:51:29 actually like to find out someday, but I actually don’t know who, who, like who got him spun up on
0:51:35 this or did he figure this all out himself? Um, but, um, you know, he, he became a true early adopter.
0:51:39 And so by, by the time the, um, so by the time the campaign started, he had already been a very,
0:51:44 you know, he was maybe the most kind of Twitter aware and Twitter sensitive kind of major celebrity
0:51:49 like that public figure like that. Um, you know, for probably four years, even prior to running for
0:51:54 office. Probably the first, certainly the first prominent politician that wrote his own tweets,
0:51:58 right? Like that, that, the only thing that was very, very different about him was that, I mean,
0:52:04 for better or worse, he’d write these, you know, uh, tweets that clearly came from him that, you know,
0:52:10 often with misspellings and all that kind of thing. Whereas like, if you look at, you know,
0:52:14 the presidential, uh, you know, Obama’s Twitter handle or Biden’s Twitter handle,
0:52:17 they’re clearly written by somebody else for the most part.
0:52:20 Yes. Uh, I mean, you know, and you get these famous Trump tweets, like, you know,
0:52:21 I’ve never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.
0:52:28 And you’re just like, you know, that’s a good point. I don’t think I have either.
0:52:33 And then, uh, you know, cause he’s legendary for drinking Diet Coke. And then he did this follow-up
0:52:36 where he’s like, I don’t know, it was like, uh, it was 2015 when he was running for president.
0:52:40 I guess somebody from the Coca-Cola company got mad at him or something. Cause he was always talking
0:52:43 about Coke. And he tweeted and he said, yeah, it’s like the Coca-Cola company is mad at me.
0:52:45 Uh, but that’s okay. I’ll keep drinking that garbage.
0:52:51 So he was like the OG shit poster troll.
0:52:56 Yeah. Shit posting. Right. And so it’s this level of, it’s this level of, I mean, it’s really,
0:52:59 really remarkable. It’s this level of like complete engagement and comfort in the legacy media and
0:53:03 then completely, uh, completely comfortable in the new media environment. Of course, you know,
0:53:08 culminating and literally starting his own Twitter competitor. Um, right. Um, and so like,
0:53:12 he’s got a foot in both camps, but I just, I describe that because I think he’s, I think he’s a,
0:53:15 he’s a very important bridge figure, but he’s a bridge figure. Um, I think there are internet
0:53:20 native politicians that haven’t emerged yet. Um, and I think we’re getting, you know, glimpses of that
0:53:25 with AOC and with, I think, uh, with president Bukele in El Salvador. Um, Jasmine Crockett,
0:53:30 Jasmine Crockett, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re getting these glimmers of what the kind of,
0:53:33 there are going to be politicians 10, 20 years from now where it’s going to be like,
0:53:36 oh, they took the, they took the Trump, you know, cause time will pass and things would get refined.
0:53:40 And so they will have taken the Trump playbook that they will, at some point, I think completely
0:53:44 disconnect from legacy media, um, and just run like a completely internet play. I actually think
0:53:48 that hasn’t happened yet. Um, now I’m, I’m sure Trump would argue that you don’t need to do that.
0:53:51 You can actually do both, but I do think there’s probably a pure form of it coming.
0:54:00 Yeah. And, and say more about the, the style that, that Trump and, and maybe Elon and others,
0:54:06 the sort of evolution has, has followed where it seems, um, like you’re less trying to be,
0:54:12 you know, unifying to everybody and more trying to, uh, you know, appeal to one specific tribe very
0:54:16 deeply and more perhaps consistent with the fragmentation or, or, or hyper partisanship
0:54:23 that’s, that’s permeated everything. Yeah. I think, I think a big part of that is the, um,
0:54:33 the Trump’s not a professional politician. Um, and so almost every politician outside of Trump,
0:54:38 like a huge number of them are like, their careers are in politics. Um, and when you’re in politics,
0:54:43 you get very intense media training around, you know, what you can say, what you can’t say,
0:54:48 how to position things, never answer the question you’re asked, only answer the question that you
0:54:53 want to, that you wish they would have asked. Like Mark and I have been through this media training.
0:55:01 It’s super sharp. And then you have a large constituency around you, a large staff that if
0:55:07 you ever go outside of that, they, um, you know, they correct you, they reprimand you, they retrain
0:55:12 you like, like, like it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a real system and process, um, which has basically
0:55:18 resulted in, you know, most politicians really lacking, uh, what you would call authenticity.
0:55:28 Um, and Trump being Trump is not listening to any, like, he’s just literally saying what’s on his mind,
0:55:37 um, all the time, every time. And that actually works much better in kind of the modern sort of,
0:55:44 uh, social media world. So it’s, it’s like a big part of it, I think as a function of that,
0:55:49 he’s not trained in this business at all, which is part of the reason why I think a lot of people
0:55:55 don’t like him, um, is because he doesn’t follow any of the protocol that you’re used to. He’s just
0:56:03 so uncomfortably unusual. Uh, and, you know, so that’s a little bit of a, uh, a two etched sword on
0:56:07 that. Yeah. No, no, I agree with everything you just said, but I’d also add what he, what he was
0:56:13 trained on was he was trained in reality television. Yeah. Right. Um, and so I have not been on reality
0:56:17 TV, but my understanding is if you’re trained in reality TV, like you, your mission is to create
0:56:21 drama. Right. It’s like, it’s like the opposite, it’s right. It’s the opposite training, right?
0:56:26 Your, your mission, right. Your mission is to be as interesting as possible. Um, and provocative as
0:56:29 possible. And as controversial as possible. Right. And as controversial as possible. And then of course,
0:56:33 the other thing he was trained in was professional wrestling. Um, which is the, you know, which,
0:56:36 and then I mean that in full seriousness, which is he would, you know, he was, he’s been very close
0:56:40 friends with the McMahons for a long time. Um, you know, Linda McMahon is a cabinet secretary.
0:56:43 Vince McMahon is one of his, you know, long, long time friends. Um, and he was actually,
0:56:47 Trump is the only presidential candidate in history who was actually in the world wrestling
0:56:53 federation hall of fame. Um, cause he was famously actually in a WWF match actually fighting, um,
0:56:57 which, which is on YouTube. And so, and, and, and the way I would describe it, Ben, see if you
0:57:03 agree with this is, um, like reality TV, like the Kardashians is like, is basically, um,
0:57:08 it’s like professional wrestling for women. And then, um, professional wrestling is like reality
0:57:13 TV for men. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s, I think that’s essentially, essentially right. Yeah.
0:57:17 Right. Exactly. And, and they, they grew up together, right? Both reality TV and professional
0:57:20 wrestling grew up together in this sort of new alternate media landscape. They were both very
0:57:25 controversial for a long time. You know, reality TV. Right. Pseudo real entertainment.
0:57:31 Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. Or maybe the most real thing, you know. Yeah. So yeah,
0:57:35 our friend Rick Rubin says that these are actually the most real things, not the least real things.
0:57:39 It’s like, if you think professional wrestling is fake, just wait until you read the, read the
0:57:45 newspaper. Um, so, um, but, um, you know, he, he, he, he was, you know, he, he was, you know,
0:57:49 he literally was a master of both reality TV with The Apprentice and also a master of, of, of,
0:57:52 of, uh, of professional wrestling. And to your point, Ben, like that, that’s a completely
0:57:56 different playbook, right? That, that’s a, that’s a playbook. That’s a playbook that, you know,
0:58:00 for better, for worse, masks much better to the new media environment, which is
0:58:05 personality driven, um, right. Individual over corporation, right. You, you don’t, you don’t
0:58:09 care. Like if you’re following WWF or reality TV, you’re not talking about, you know, brand
0:58:13 names. You’re talking about the people, um, to the point where the people actually then have
0:58:17 their own products. Right. Um, and you know, for example, you know, Kim Kardashian now has
0:58:19 this hugely successful line of women’s, you know, clothing, you know, multi-billion dollar
0:58:24 business. And many of these other, uh, you know, stories do as well. Um, but you, you,
0:58:28 individuals over corporate, individuals over corporate brands, and then, and then authenticity
0:58:34 over fakeness. Um, uh, it, right. What you see is what you get over, um, uh, over, over
0:58:40 plasticity and then, um, and then drama over, um, drama over, yeah, like heightened drama over
0:58:46 suppressed drama. Um, uh, and then, um, and then, and then, and then, um, and then, and then,
0:58:48 and then we’ll, we’ll get to this more, I know, but then, you know, going direct, right.
0:58:53 Which is, you know, a big thing that makes both reality TV work and that makes professional
0:58:57 wrestling work is that the, the key people involved in them have these direct relationships
0:59:00 with the audience, um, that are just completely different. You know, they, they, they didn’t
0:59:04 make their brands by being on network TV. They made their brands, uh, or being in profiled
0:59:08 newspapers, they made their brands, you know, in large part by going direct or like a very
0:59:14 obscure cable station, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense that in a supply constrained
0:59:20 world, you’d want to stay out of drama and in a, in a, you know, when the internet shifts
0:59:25 the sort of, um, the structural dynamics such that that demand is the scarcity, you’d want
0:59:31 to create drama, uh, to, to compete with all the other new voices that are emerging. So, so
0:59:36 with that, maybe let’s go more into. And by the way, this is a very, that point is so
0:59:47 important because so much of the extreme partisanship is caused by that, like the, either aversion
0:59:53 or attraction to the extreme drama, as opposed to specific policies. Like it’s kind of a, a
0:59:58 very interesting thing where now on the internet, everybody’s going to all Trump’s policies and
1:00:04 going back and having like Obama talk about the border or, you know, uh, tariffs or, or any
1:00:08 of the, or manufacturing, reshoring, manufacturing, all these kinds of ideas. And so you’re like,
1:00:12 well, the idea, if the ideas are the same, like, why is everybody so mad at Trump? Well,
1:00:20 it’s what you’re saying. It’s, he’s high drama and, you know, they want like stability, low drama.
1:00:26 And, and, and that’s more of the divide than the actual political positions in a lot of cases.
1:00:33 Like Trump being like pro-peace used to be like a very strong left-wing position, but not in
1:00:37 the way he is. And so that’s an important distinction.
1:00:42 Yeah. It’s a, so someone said something like, oh, we’re trying to figure out what the, what the new
1:00:46 left is all about. Maybe let’s just see whatever Trump, whatever positions Trump takes, that’ll be
1:00:49 the, whatever the opposite is, that that’ll be what the, the new left is.
1:00:54 Yeah. Which has been a very effective trick for him because he’s kind of taken over traditional,
1:01:02 uh, positions of the democratic party. Um, which has been kind of a, an effective political tool,
1:01:09 but the way he does it is he takes this high drama, um, reality TV approach to that issue. And then all
1:01:15 of a sudden it’s his issue and he wins it. And then, you know, he can corner them into a very
1:01:20 niche set of issues, uh, which they hang on to, um, whatever men and women supports, all that kind of
1:01:26 thing. Yeah. Kamala is for they, them, uh, yeah, that, that, you know, Trump is for you. There’s a
1:01:31 great, great advertisement to, to that effect. Mark, talk, talk about life, the movie, cause I think it,
1:01:33 it gets at some of these, uh, these ideas.
1:01:38 Neil Gabler. That’s a great, that’s a great book by the way. Yeah. So this is one of the great,
1:01:43 one of the great books in media theory. Um, so the author is Neil Gabler, um, and the book is called
1:01:48 life, the movie. Um, and it’s one of these books where you read it and you’re like, half the time
1:01:51 you’re like, this is all obvious. And the other half, you’re like, oh my God, like this is all just
1:01:54 getting started. And this is like really profound. And I have to really think about this much harder.
1:01:59 Um, so the book is from like 28 years ago, something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the book,
1:02:04 the book was written, uh, Gabler’s Gabler is a, um, sort of journalist, uh, writer. Um, he’s did a
1:02:09 big biography about Disney and says, he’s kind of very into, you know, Hollywood entertainment media.
1:02:14 Um, and so, but this was his kind of theory book and, and, and it, it came out. Yeah. It was like
1:02:19 the late nineties, um, or like 2000, right around that time. And it, it really built in, in, it really
1:02:24 built on what had happened in the, in, in the nineties on two mega stories, uh, which are, you know,
1:02:27 somewhat forget forgotten now, but were mega, mega, mega, mega stories at the time, which was the
1:02:33 Clinton Lewinsky affair on the one hand, and then the OJ, uh, case on the other hand. Um, and, and for
1:02:38 people who weren’t around then, um, both of those stories were just like absolute saturation bombing
1:02:42 of the media. Um, and, and, and, and specifically cable television, uh, cable news really came into its
1:02:46 own kind of during that period. And it was those two stories. And you, you could basically, as a cable
1:02:50 news station, you could just do 24 seven coverage of OJ or 24 seven coverage of Clinton Lewinsky and
1:02:53 drive ratings. So there were, there were kind of these mega stories and they, and they were these
1:02:57 stories that played out over years, right? Cause all these twists and turns and who was
1:03:00 telling the truth and who was lying and the accusations and the, you know, the conspiracy
1:03:04 theories and, you know, did the LAPD plant all the evidence and, you know, da, da, da, da, da. And
1:03:08 what did Hillary know? And when did she, did she actually throw, you know, a lamp at Bill’s head?
1:03:13 And, you know, it’s just like, these stories just had like, as they say, unbelievable legs. Um, and
1:03:17 then, you know, people started to talk in those days, you know, those are kind of the two big mega
1:03:21 stories where you started to hear this concept of like, basically, you know, there’d almost be seasons
1:03:26 to the drama, right? So, you know, season one of Clinton Lewinsky was the affair. Season two was,
1:03:31 you know, it becoming public. Season three was the congressional investigations, you know, whatever.
1:03:35 Season four was the, uh, you know, the star report, which is a whole nother, you know, the sort of
1:03:41 report that came out that was super salacious. Um, and so, um, and same thing with OJ, cause you know,
1:03:45 you have the trial, um, you know, the, you know, the entire thing. Um, and then, you know, OJ,
1:03:49 you know, he, he got off and then there was a second trial, um, with the, uh, civil trial that
1:03:53 he was convicted. And then there was the third trial for the, you know, his, his, uh, when he
1:03:59 held up a bunch of, a bunch of guys in, um, in, uh, in Las Vegas, uh, who were selling his memorabilia.
1:04:05 And then he actually, you know, went to prison for that. Um, and you know, was he, was he unfairly
1:04:09 convicted for that because, you know, it was revenge for, for this and that. Anyway, so like,
1:04:13 these were just like mega, mega stories. And so, um, Gabler sort of lays out this kind of theory,
1:04:16 very consistent with a lot of what we’ve been talking about. And in particular,
1:04:20 talking about this new media environment of cable, cable and AM radio and so forth. And
1:04:24 the early internet, um, it was like early internet, like, you know, there were internet news groups
1:04:27 that were, you know, super active and a lot of people like the star report is actually a good
1:04:31 example. One of the first PDFs that a lot of people downloaded and read was the star report,
1:04:36 which was the report on the Clinton Lewinsky affair by the independent council at that time. Um,
1:04:39 and so, um, I remember like millions of people downloaded their first PDF to be able to read that
1:04:43 report and find out what happened. So, so anyway, so he writes this book and basically what he
1:04:47 says in the book is basically what he says is, uh, life, the movies, he says, basically nonfiction
1:04:54 beats fiction. Um, he said in a, in a truly like open, decentralized, fully competitive, uh, media
1:04:59 environment, like the one that we, um, we’re talking about and we, we now live in. Um, he’s
1:05:05 like, basically essentially it was like, imagine how, how, imagine how stressful it is to be like a,
1:05:09 a fiction writer, like a novelist or a screenwriter right now. Like you’re trying desperately to come
1:05:14 up with enough interesting things to put into a two hour movie or a 300 page novel. Um, and then
1:05:18 in real life, you’ve got these stories that are like not just a single event, but like literally
1:05:23 like play out over many, many years with like unbelievable twists and turns. And it’s like all
1:05:29 real. Um, right. And basically, basically reality, basically reality is much stranger and more
1:05:33 bizarre than fiction. Uh, right. Right. Cause you think about it’s like fiction is where we make
1:05:36 things up. And then reality is like relatively boring in comparison. It’s like, no, no, no.
1:05:41 Reality is actually more interesting. Reality is stranger and more wild and it’s right. It’s
1:05:44 inherently unpredictable. And by the way, the stakes are higher cause like real people’s lives
1:05:49 are at stake and more unbelievable. Yeah. More unbelievable. Like, yeah, exactly. So, I mean,
1:05:51 you know, I’ll just give you an example. There’s an allegation, there’s an allegation. I don’t know
1:05:56 if it’s true, but there was an allegation that came out, uh, during the, uh, during the Clinton
1:06:01 Lewinsky thing, which is, uh, cause, um, you know, uh, Bill had lied to Hillary and everybody
1:06:05 else about the affair. And then the truth came out and Hillary got super mad. And so like,
1:06:08 there’s this story and I don’t know if this is true, but there’s a story that like Hillary didn’t
1:06:12 talk to Bill for like nine months or something. And then she finally basically talked to him and
1:06:16 then he bought, that was, and then the day after was the day he bombed. Ben, you remember he bombed,
1:06:21 what was it? Kosovo? Yeah. Kosovo. Yeah. And blew up the, I think it turned out to be like a
1:06:24 pharmaceutical plant or something like that. And, and, and so then there was this allegation that
1:06:28 basically Hillary, you know, what did Hillary do? Did she tell him that she’d only make up with him
1:06:33 if he like bombed Kosovo? Like, so like, you know, like I said, I don’t know if it’s true,
1:06:38 but like that, that’s such an inherently more interesting, like actual lives, wars, you know,
1:06:42 politics, presidential impeachments, people going to prison, like the stakes are just so much higher.
1:06:47 And so what, what Gabler basically said is fiction is effectively dead, um, uh, in terms of its cultural
1:06:51 relevance, basically not reality is going to dominate everything. And for basically for the rest of time,
1:06:58 we’re going to basically be living in effectively real life reality, omni-media reality television
1:07:03 shows encompassing kind of every aspect of our life. And, and, and, and, and that, you know,
1:07:07 and that basically that’s going to be our universe, which, you know, I would say if, I don’t know what
1:07:11 his opinion is of what’s happening right now, but I would say events since then have certainly for me
1:07:16 validated. It’s certainly gone in that direction. Yeah. Well, there, there’s this term that the term of
1:07:19 art now is, uh, the, uh, the, you know, there’s this thing that Marvel cinematic universe,
1:07:23 the MCU, which is like this whole world of all the Marvel movies and TV shows. And so,
1:07:27 and then there’s this theory that there’s like the Trump cinematic universe. Right. And then there’s
1:07:30 the, you know, there’s the democratic, you know, cinema is the, you know, the resistance cinematic
1:07:36 universe. Uh, and then there’s the COVID cinematic universe and there’s the, right. And so any of these
1:07:41 real life things that are happening, if you want to, you can enmesh yourself in them 24 seven.
1:07:47 Right. And, and this, this new media landscape will just like feed you infinite content, um, on,
1:07:51 on, on, on whatever these things are. And, and, and that does seem to be, uh, that does seem to
1:07:56 describe our times pretty accurately. Well, one, one quote, um, we talked about offline is the Dana
1:08:02 White. If the media hates it, you you’ve really got something. And I want to juxtapose that.
1:08:05 Yeah. He was referring to UFC. Yeah.
1:08:08 Yeah. But I want to go for it. Maybe you could describe, yeah, maybe you could describe if you
1:08:11 want to maybe describe the history of UFC in the media and how they dealt with it.
1:08:19 Yeah. Yeah. So, well, you know, when he started, um, and he acquired UFC, so it was started before him,
1:08:28 but he couldn’t get it on anything. Like there’s certainly not central media, um, not on cable TV,
1:08:37 done anything. And then I think he finally got it on Spike TV, uh, and Spike TV, um, I believe like
1:08:47 charged him to put it on Spike TV, if I recall correctly. Uh, so, you know, just basically no air
1:08:51 time at all. Like this is, you know, nobody’s going to like this. It’s crazy. It’s stupid.
1:08:58 Da da da da. Um, and, um, you know, and certainly no coverage, no, no media coverage, no sports
1:09:05 pages covered it, nothing like that. Uh, and you know, they, they built it up. Um, you know,
1:09:10 they, they paid to be on Spike TV. They kind of built up an audience slowly and all of a sudden,
1:09:16 you know, now it’s, uh, completely mainstream. Um, and I think, oh, maybe he was actually, uh,
1:09:22 referring to slap fights, which of course the media also hates. Uh, and I think it’s
1:09:27 just an internet phenomenon at this point, but a huge one. Yeah. So when you, when you listen to
1:09:31 his story, the way it played out is basically for the first several years of UFC, like it was just
1:09:35 like pushing this rock up a hill, as Ben said, where you couldn’t get coverage, you couldn’t get
1:09:39 anything, you couldn’t get distribution. Traditional media hated it. Um, and by the way, so, you know,
1:09:43 politicians and, you know, authority figures of all kinds. Um, and you know, that was a huge issue
1:09:47 in the early years. Um, right. And in contrast to other sports that would be on TV or have,
1:09:51 you know, have these big contracts or advertising deals or whatever. Um, but then this, this inversion
1:09:54 happened. And again, it’s sort of consistent with the, the, the sort of change in the media
1:09:58 landscape we’ve been talking about, um, where all of a sudden the media’s opposition became a selling
1:10:03 point. Right. Um, where the, the fact that the media hated it itself made it more enticing.
1:10:07 Right. So if, if the, it’s, you know, kind of rebellion, like if, if the authority figures
1:10:10 love it, you know, there must be something wrong with it. If the authority figures hate it,
1:10:15 uh, it must be really cool. Um, and so it really, um, it really started to invert at some
1:10:19 point in the 2000s and the sort of media hate started to work for him. And then, uh, the other
1:10:23 thing he says is, you know, he said they, they were the, they were the early adopter of social
1:10:27 media in sports. Like the minute he saw social media, he knew this was the future of everything
1:10:30 because it’s the thing that would route around these, you know, basically these, these, uh,
1:10:33 you know, these, these, these, these highly biased authority figures and, and let people
1:10:37 actually talk about the thing that they loved. By the way, the same thing happened with
1:10:41 the NBA, um, which is a kind of little known story. I got this whole story, uh, David Stern
1:10:46 before he passed away, told me the whole story, but the NBA, so the NBA was the first league
1:10:54 to kind of, well, it was the first league to like really integrate. Um, and so kind of in
1:10:59 the seventies, the teams became basically every team was almost all black players from the, you
1:11:06 know, no black players in the sixties. Uh, and the audience and the meat, the media turned
1:11:10 on them vicious, uh, and just said, it’s a drug league. Everybody’s talking cocaine, da, da,
1:11:17 da, da, um, to the point where media completely dropped the league. So famously that the magic
1:11:23 Johnson, um, finals where he scored 42 points playing center as a rookie wasn’t televised
1:11:29 live. It was on tape delay. Um, and so the way the NBA got around this was very similar to
1:11:34 the UFC is they got a contract with USA TV, uh, and they started getting the games on USA TV.
1:11:39 And then, uh, you know, all of a sudden they had the magic bird thing and, and that built
1:11:42 momentum. And then Michael Jordan came into the league and then that, you know, now it’s a huge
1:11:49 thing, but the media had like completely turned against the league to the point where they shut
1:11:55 them out of live broadcast, even for the NBA finals. And then the kind of entire thing
1:11:59 came back using kind of alternative media and going right to the people and that kind of thing.
1:12:05 So, and I think that, you know, to Mark’s point that probably enhanced it, that as an NBA fan,
1:12:11 you had to watch it on USA, you had to get cable and watch the USA TV station, um, which made you a
1:12:17 much more loyal fan in the way that the UFC fans are like massively loyal, uh, in an incredible way.
1:12:24 What’s fascinating about the NBA is it, as it, um, as well, um, as, as we’re talking about these
1:12:30 topics is it, it also sort of has demonstrated some of these trends where, you know, viewership in
1:12:34 the game is, is down, but people are obsessed with sort of the media around the game. Uh, people are
1:12:35 obsessed with the drama.
1:12:40 It’s all, yes, yes, yeah. Yeah. But there’s a few reasons for that one, but yeah, but that’s a,
1:12:49 that’s another one where, uh, the, it, it’s a move, uh, to social media off of. Yeah. Off of
1:12:54 kind of television media. Yeah. People called this past election, the podcast election, or, you know,
1:13:00 many people are noting sort of the influence of people like, like Rogan and, and others, um, you
1:13:05 know, Democrats are asking, why don’t we have our own Joe Rogan? You know, uh, Trump has been the,
1:13:09 the best politician of recent, of course, Obama was great in 2008, but Trump recently at using
1:13:15 these new channels and you talk to people on both sides of the aisle. Um, and, and, and when you
1:13:20 talk to your dumb friends, they’re, they’re saying, Hey, where’s our Joe Rogan or what’s our new media
1:13:26 strategy? How do you make sense of what’s, what’s happening there? Well, the, the, the Democrats had
1:13:32 Joe Rogan. His name was Joe Rogan. Yeah. So that, that, that was just an oops on their part, I think.
1:13:38 So, um, so let’s talk, talk structure and then, and then, and then come back to the specifics. So the,
1:13:43 the structural observation I would make is, um, is, is, is, so there’s this concept we talk a lot
1:13:47 in business, we call the barbell, um, or we call death, death of the middle, which is you, you, as,
1:13:52 as sort of, as, as industries mature, um, you tend to, you tend to start with things that are kind of
1:13:55 of a certain level of scale, a certain level of complexity, depth, price, whatever. And then you,
1:13:59 markets tend to polarize and then you tend to get this barbell effect where the things in the middle
1:14:03 start to die. And then you basically have the rise of the edges. Um, and so the classic example of this
1:14:08 is, uh, retail shopping. Um, you used to have general stores and then department stores that
1:14:12 had a pretty good selection of pretty good, pretty good things at pretty good prices. Um, and then over
1:14:16 the course of the last 30 years, you know, all of those kind of general purpose stores, department
1:14:21 stores have gotten wrecked and replaced by barbell on the barbell that you got Walmart and Amazon on the
1:14:26 one side of the, of the barbell, which was just massive selection that no department store can match
1:14:31 at lower prices, um, at higher scale. And then you’ve got the, the, the boutiques, you’ve got the
1:14:34 Gucci store and the Apple store on the other side, you know, selling something very specific and unique,
1:14:40 um, often at much higher prices. Um, and so one, one of our observations for a long time has been
1:14:44 that, that, that, you know, that tends to happen in many, many different industries. Um, uh, you know,
1:14:48 it’s happened in banks, it’s happened in, in, in ad agencies, many other media companies, many other,
1:14:52 many other industries. Um, it, it turns out, I think that’s what’s happening in media formats
1:15:00 right now. So the, um, the standard like television show is either, I think, 23 minutes, uh, with seven
1:15:05 minutes for commercials or like 43 minutes with like 17 minutes for commercials. Um, and then,
1:15:08 you know, if you watch cable news or whatever, you know, they’re, they’re, they, they, you know,
1:15:12 they have 43 minutes of content, let’s say in the hour, but then they break it up because of the
1:15:15 commercial breaks. They, they break it up where they, you know, they cut to commercial every five
1:15:20 minutes or something. And so any given interview can only be, you know, whatever, three or four minutes
1:15:24 long, if it’s live, um, or, or they have to go across, you know, multiple, multiple, multiple
1:15:28 segments. But, you know, it’s sort of the, the, you know, the cliche is you’re watching an interview
1:15:31 with somebody on, on cable news and it just starts to get interesting. And then the host says, well,
1:15:33 we’ll have to leave it there. You know, thank you for coming in. And it’s like, well, wait a minute.
1:15:38 It’s actually a technique, by the way, you know, like as soon as somebody says something
1:15:41 interesting, you’re like, well, yeah, gotta go.
1:15:44 Throw the commercial. And so, and it’s like, you know, why do you have to leave it there? You’ve got
1:15:48 the person in the studio, you could go for another hour, you could go for another three hours. Um,
1:15:52 but you know, you, you, you choose not to. Um, and, and even the long form, even, you know, 60
1:15:56 minutes, you know, which is the 43 minute version. It’s by the way, it’s not 60 minutes. It’s 43
1:16:00 minutes because of the commercials. But, but even there, it’s like a long form interview is like 20
1:16:04 minutes long. Right. Um, like that’s, that’s a huge, like for in the old media environment, if you got a
1:16:09 20 minute interview on the air on Sunday night, that was like a very, very big deal. Um, the cliche of
1:16:14 our time is that attention spans are collapsing. And this is the rise of, of social media and TikTok,
1:16:19 um, and short form video. And so the, the cliche is, you know, and you, you hear this constantly
1:16:24 is, you know, kids only want to watch two minute videos and the whole thing. Well, so it turns out,
1:16:27 I think it’s actually, no, it’s actually the barbell. Kids want to watch either two minute videos or
1:16:33 three hour Rogan episodes, right? It’s the barbell, right? And, and, and, and what is, and what is the
1:16:38 three hour Rogan episode or Lex Friedman episode have going for it? It, you know, it doesn’t have that
1:16:40 thing where, Oh, we’re, you know, just when it starts to get interesting, we’re going to leave it there.
1:16:46 You can actually fully articulate a point of view on any topic. Um, you know, and, you know,
1:16:50 part of this is the no gatekeepers thing. And so the range of topics has expanded a lot, but part of
1:16:54 it is you can actually talk for a long time. Um, and you can go on, you know, you can go on YouTube
1:16:58 and you can watch, you know, in some cases now, you know, in some cases now these are running six,
1:17:02 seven, eight hours long, right. Of, of people talking. I did Lex Friedman earlier this year.
1:17:06 I think it was three and a half hours. Um, and so it’s just this, you know, and with three and a half
1:17:10 hours, I mean, first of all, it’s all on demand and, you know, they segment the videos. And so you
1:17:14 can decide which parts of it you want to watch. But however, um, you know, if you’re an interesting
1:17:18 person, I have interesting things to say, you can like actually fully, fully articulate and explore
1:17:23 a topic. And I, and I think what, what basically that format, um, has, has uncovered is there’s
1:17:28 actually tremendous hunger, um, in the country and in the world for actual long form intelligent
1:17:33 commentary. Um, I, I should note that, you know, Charlie Rose was the, was the sort of, you know,
1:17:37 I think kind of test case for this. Um, and, um, you know, he’s, you know, been a friend
1:17:40 of mine for a long time and I was on, on the show multiple times and, you know, he got,
1:17:47 you know, he got, he got, he got, he got, uh, you know, he, he was, he toed as they say,
1:17:51 but you know, like he did this for a long time. Um, and you know, but he did this, but you know,
1:17:54 and his story is an hour long show, but he would let me, I think it was on public TV for a long
1:17:58 time and he would let people go for 50 minutes or something. Um, and so he proved it. And for some
1:18:03 reason, people didn’t pick up the hint until the podcasters came along. Um, cause there’s
1:18:05 nothing else like that. Like after Charlie Rose, there was nothing else like that until the
1:18:10 podcasters and then the podcasters picked it up and ran with it. Um, and so anyway, like I find
1:18:15 this to be like extremely encouraging. Like I think it just, it turns out that there are a large number
1:18:21 of people who have actually been starving, uh, for real discussion, uh, and real content. Um, I think
1:18:24 there’s a corollary to this, which is, I think the, I think the jury’s in now. I think you can make the
1:18:28 claim television makes you dumb in a, in a really fundamental way. Cause like literally it cuts
1:18:32 off all the interesting conversations, right. As they’re about to get, get interesting. It kind of,
1:18:35 it kind of has to be intellectually impoverishing as a consequence of
1:18:39 the structure of the business and of the format. Uh, but the podcasts don’t have that problem.
1:18:42 And again, look, it’s not that the podcasts are going to be perfect and it’s not like there’s
1:18:46 not going to be people on the podcast. We’re going to say crazy things or whatever. Um, but if you’re
1:18:50 interested in a topic, you can go online now and the world’s experts can explain it to you in
1:18:54 enormous detail. And it turns out the audience for that is very large. Oh, and then the other thing
1:18:58 is, you know, YouTube gives these guys, um, you know, data on completion rates and it, it like
1:19:02 the completion rates on, on these long form podcasts, it’s much higher than people, you know,
1:19:08 than people might expect. Um, and so, um, like it’s incredibly exciting that, that, that this,
1:19:12 this is a conceivable thing. And then, you know, maybe, maybe we might touch on like if, if this
1:19:17 holds, and as you said, like, you know, it is pretty clear 2024, the podcast thing was a very big deal
1:19:21 for Trump. And then it was a very big, you know, the books are coming out now on the 2024 campaign
1:19:25 and it’s becoming clearer and clearer. Like all the Kamala people now greatly regret that they didn’t put
1:19:30 her on, on more long form podcasts. Um, but you know, the other question is, is this, is this going
1:19:36 to change the skillset and aptitude, um, and ability, you know, is this going to change the
1:19:41 threshold for what it now is going to mean to run for office or to be an authority figure? Like it is,
1:19:44 you know, it is the new threshold that you have to be able to go on a long form podcast and talk for
1:19:49 three hours and be interesting. Um, because I can tell you like, to Ben’s point, traditional media
1:19:53 training does not teach you how to do that. And then a large number of people who have been in charge
1:19:57 of things for the last 50 years are definitely not able to do that. Um, and a lot of, you know,
1:20:01 a lot of, let’s say incumbent, uh, authority figures today are not able to do that. And so
1:20:04 is, is that going to be the new threshold for success in the public arena? I think is an interesting
1:20:10 question. Yeah. The, the other thing that’s on podcasts, which is, I think the thing that is
1:20:15 causing the Democrats fit right, fits right now in terms of how to counter the strategy is, um,
1:20:21 it’s a reversion to the old form of journalism that I mentioned at the very beginning of this
1:20:29 podcast, which is these podcasters are not trained journalists. They’re not trained experts. They,
1:20:35 they’re not highly schooled. They’re comedians, um, and you know, sports guys. And, you know,
1:20:42 so if you look at anyone from Charlemagne the God to Joe Rogan, to, uh, Theo Vaughn, like the big,
1:20:48 big podcasters are regular people who aren’t coming in with strong partisan points of view,
1:20:55 they’re coming in wanting to learn. Um, and so as a result, like they are actually open
1:21:04 to arguments on both sides, which is, um, the thing that they’ve a little bit outlawed in the kind of
1:21:09 traditional democratic media, which is you can’t be, you can’t platform that person. You can’t,
1:21:16 there, there was a huge rage at Bill Maher for meeting with president Trump. Um, so that whole
1:21:24 idea that, okay, we’re going to have a Democrat, a democratic podcaster is antithetical to podcasting,
1:21:29 which is no, we’re going to have a regular guy who just asks questions and wants to learn things is
1:21:37 what people want to see. Because I want somebody like me asking this guy who’s, uh, you know,
1:21:43 an expert or running for office, some questions, what I would ask. And that’s, I think that’s the
1:21:49 adjustment they’re going to have to make is like, okay, now this is going to be a real conversation,
1:21:57 which means it’s not going to be, uh, a priori partisan, which is a very new world. Um, and like,
1:22:05 when you watch like CNN or Fox or whatever, the host is always asking a gotcha partisan question.
1:22:13 Always. Um, you watch Joe Rogan or like the Brexit club, they’re not really like that. They’re
1:22:17 actually wanting to know the answer to the question. Yeah. As, as somebody who’s been on the receiving
1:22:21 end of both of those, it’s extremely, the first time if you’ve been, if you’re just dealing with
1:22:25 traditional press, you just like every single question is that attempt to blow you up and to
1:22:29 catch you in a like contradiction or to somehow get you to say something that’s going to wreck
1:22:34 your career, get you fired. Um, and you, which is why you need the media training, right? You don’t
1:22:38 need any media training to go on a podcast. Right. Right. You need the anti, you need the anti-media
1:22:41 training. Um, you know, the other thing, and maybe this is obvious now, but, um, you know,
1:22:45 the other thing is the three hour podcast doesn’t work if it’s everything it, you know, if you have
1:22:48 to stop every five seconds because some, you know, you have to accuse somebody of saying something
1:22:54 racist, right? Like, so this, this like, you know, or sexist or whatever, the, the, the, this, this,
1:22:58 this speech suppression thing, you know, that then this, this, this sort of puritanism that,
1:23:02 that sort of kicked in in a large part of American public life over the last 10 years with people
1:23:06 getting blown up for saying one thing wrong, like that just doesn’t, that just like kills your
1:23:10 ability. It kills your ability to have discussion. Um, which is of course what, what the intention of,
1:23:14 of, of, of it is. Um, and it certainly kills your ability to have a, uh, have a podcast. Um,
1:23:19 and so if, if there’s like the, you know, if, if you are in a, let’s say if you’re in a culture,
1:23:24 if you’re in a political culture that wants to censor and cancel people, like the format can’t work.
1:23:29 Like, I, I, I don’t know how you make it work. It’s just, it’s just like far too dangerous. Um,
1:23:35 and so it, it, it, it, it, like aspirationally what you could say is this could drive the Democrats
1:23:39 and the left back, you know, more of the direction of free speech and away from cancellation, but we’ll see
1:23:42 if they, uh, you know, we’ll see if they actually. Well, I think in order for this strategy to be
1:23:48 in fact, by the way, Gavin Newsom has, um, done a pretty good job of that. I mean,
1:23:53 you can argue to do whatever you want about Gavin Newsom and his, uh, evolving views. Um,
1:24:01 but his podcast is kind of in the correct direction. Now, of course, a lot of people in the Democratic
1:24:05 Party are furious at him for having Steve Bannon on, for having Charlie Kirk on and so forth.
1:24:11 But, and then, and then being kind of regular with them, just having a conversation, but that,
1:24:12 that is the right idea.
1:24:17 Well, it’s the right idea for a conversation and communication and getting, you know, involving,
1:24:21 you know, the Democrats towards a more, more back towards more open freedom of speech, more
1:24:25 interesting full conversations. We, we, we, we, we do have to see whether it’s going to work for him
1:24:26 electorally.
1:24:30 Yeah. That’s, that’s a different question, but I think at the podcast, if he wasn’t running,
1:24:37 if he was just a podcaster, I think his podcast would be pretty popular. I mean, I think it is
1:24:38 like fairly popular.
1:24:40 he’s probably the only politician right now with a true podcast.
1:24:41 Yeah.
1:24:43 That I know. Sure. Yeah.
1:24:44 Yeah.
1:24:49 Now, if he, if he, if he comes in 20th in the, uh, in the, in the, in the, in the 2027 primaries,
1:24:52 I will, um, uh, we can talk.
1:24:59 It’s a tricky thing given he’s running for office. I agree. I agree. Like it’s, you kind of want to be
1:25:00 on the other side, but yes.
1:25:04 Yeah. Do they really want, does his, does his, does his base really want him to do this? So yeah,
1:25:04 we’ll see. We’ll see.
1:25:10 Right. Kamala going on call her daddy didn’t achieve the same, you know, impact as, uh, Trump
1:25:13 and JD Vance going on, you know, Rogan and Theo Vala.
1:25:21 Well, yeah. And that was kind of like a weird choice because like, that’s a, you know, Joe Rogan
1:25:28 and, uh, you know, even like, you know, a lot of these podcasts, the breakfast club or, or Bill
1:25:34 Maher or whatever, like they talk about politics. She was probably the first politician ever
1:25:41 on call, you know, call her daddy. Like, like, it’s just, it was just a weird choice in that
1:25:46 way. Everybody’s like, why would a candidate go on that? That is a podcast, but it’s not
1:25:52 a podcast about this. Like that audience doesn’t care about this. That audience is into some
1:25:52 whole nother.
1:25:57 Well, and one of the great mysteries, one of the great mysteries, you know, and again, this
1:26:01 is coming out in the campaign books. Um, um, just, uh, this book, a fight that came out
1:26:05 with, uh, two, two top reporters, uh, last week, um, talks about this at great length and
1:26:09 one of the great mysteries of, of 2024 that will last forever. We’ll never know the answer
1:26:14 two is like, if, if Kamala had gone on Rogan and sat there for three hours, like would
1:26:17 it have, would it, and, and, you know, Rogan makes, Rogan makes almost all of his guests
1:26:19 look good, right? Like almost everybody comes out.
1:26:22 He’s very, very friendly, regardless of your point of view.
1:26:27 Right. But like, you know, would, would she, you know, would she, how, how, how well would
1:26:31 that have gone? Um, and you know, people have different theories on that and it’s one of
1:26:33 those, I think it’s going to be one of those great mysteries because we’ll never know.
1:26:39 Yeah. I think, look, I think the, one of the challenges with that whole campaign is,
1:26:47 you know, to this day, um, who knows what Kamala thought on so many issues. Um, you know,
1:26:51 just cause it, it never came out. Like there were the talking points. There was the, it was
1:26:59 very, very structured. Um, but you know, what was her real economic policy? What was her real
1:27:05 tech policy? What was her real foreign policy? Um, you know, it never felt like we got great
1:27:11 depth on that, uh, even in the debate, even, you know, in any of the formats. Um, whereas
1:27:18 you kind of knew exactly Trump’s positions by the end of the podcasts. And so would that have
1:27:24 helped her hurt? And if it would have helped, you know, I would say the people advising her
1:27:29 and her campaign did her a great disservice because, you know, we didn’t know what they,
1:27:34 we just didn’t know what that was. Like, I don’t know what it was, you know, at all. I paid very
1:27:40 close attention. Yeah. It’s fascinating. We’re sort of talking around it, but you know, when,
1:27:46 when your party is out of power, you have to learn sort of, uh, sort of the skills of subversion,
1:27:51 right. And, and, and comedy and, and sort of contrarian thinking, these, these are,
1:27:56 these are tools of, of, uh, of subversion or tools that you can afford that help you when you’re,
1:28:01 when you’re not in power, when you are in power, you know, asking too many questions, uh, comedy,
1:28:06 you know, that might not help you. Right. And, and it’s funny because when I was in college,
1:28:10 Democrats, um, when, when, when sort of Bush was in power, they had mastered the tools of subversion,
1:28:14 right. You know, Jon Stewart, uh, Steve Colbert, Dave Chappelle, they had the,
1:28:21 the comedians, they had the sort of contrarian intellectuals. And, and now that Democrats are
1:28:27 out of power and Republicans are in power, both the right has to learn how to sort of evolve from
1:28:32 the underdog who’s always questioning to the, to the establishment to, can you actually get things done,
1:28:38 um, and, and, and move the needle. And, and the left has to learn a little bit of, of some of these,
1:28:41 uh, these tactics that, that the right used when they were out of power.
1:28:47 I think that’s right. Although there is like this subtlety to it where there’s, you know,
1:28:52 there’s power in the white house and then there’s power in Congress and then there’s power in the press
1:29:01 and power in academia, um, and the other institutions. And so while the white house and Congress have moved
1:29:09 to, um, you know, right-wing power, the other institutions are still left-wing power. A lot of
1:29:14 the ones that kind of in the media, uh, and, you know, kind of the mainstream media. So,
1:29:24 you know, and I think that the Democrats like are to be fair to them are, are stuck a little bit in
1:29:30 between that because they’re protecting certain parts of the establishment and then against other
1:29:34 parts of the establishment. And that’s put them in. And I think they need to choose, right? Like,
1:29:38 uh, you know, like if I was running the democratic party, I would say, okay, look, we either have to,
1:29:47 we got to go full rebel and like, then we can’t be like, we, we actually have to be against CNN as well
1:29:52 as Fox news and all this shit and the New York times and the wall street journal and every single one of
1:29:56 them. And we got to be like, against the expert class, if we’re really going to be the rebels,
1:30:03 uh, because that’s what it takes to be a rebel. And that, that’s where they’re getting kind of
1:30:11 squeezed between kind of two ideas. Yeah. So let’s, um, we, we’ve been talking at a,
1:30:16 at a structural level, at a theoretical level. Why don’t we make this a little bit, uh, practical,
1:30:20 a little bit applied. Um, Mark, what would you say to that? Well, let’s, let’s start with Ben,
1:30:24 because Ben, Ben coaches our CEO. So I’m, I’m, I’m a true radical on, on, on this topic. So
1:30:30 let’s, let’s start with. Yeah. I think you, you’re a little more kind of further than I would be,
1:30:36 but look, we’re, we’re bigger and different than, than our companies are. So like, I think as a startup,
1:30:41 it’s going to be, so it used to be like, you know, when we started the firm, not that long ago,
1:30:49 you could tell your story to the biggest possible audience kind of through the media that, that was
1:30:54 like the tried true technique. And, you know, you would explain to them what you were doing and if
1:31:01 it was interesting to the world and they would tell it and so forth. Um, that’s become both difficult
1:31:08 and suboptimal. So difficult in that, uh, you know, it’s very possible that you go and say,
1:31:13 hey, we’ve got this interesting new product. And the story has come out that of all the possible
1:31:18 things that could go wrong with it, as opposed to, you know, the things that it could do. And it
1:31:23 doesn’t matter. It could be like a cure for cancer and the articles might be, they’re going to overpopulate
1:31:27 the earth by like having people live to it. By the way, this isn’t a made up thing.
1:31:33 These are actual stories that have come out. Um, so, so you have to be very, uh, so, so that’s a
1:31:41 difficult thing. Um, and then the other thing is like, it’s not going to be as clear as your story
1:31:48 coming from you. And because you can now tell your story from you, um, that ends up being much more
1:31:56 effective. So having a real direct content media strategy and capability and so forth, um, which is,
1:32:03 by the way, uh, not coincidentally, um, why we were so excited about having you join Eric is, you know,
1:32:11 you really need that capability if you’re gonna, you know, kind of reach the world with your message or
1:32:17 with your products and so forth. So that, you know, kind of went to being, um, a nothing to a nice to
1:32:22 have to like, it really has to be your core strategy for telling what you’re doing now.
1:32:30 Um, it just, look, as you grow, you end up showing up in the media, whether you like it or not. Uh,
1:32:36 and I think that it’s still, you know, and still a lot of people read it and still like, if you’re,
1:32:44 you know, if you’re building a product and your competitor, you know, puts a story in the press about
1:32:50 you who that’s, you know, bad or not true or whatever, that’s going to have a big effect,
1:32:55 you know, uh, on your customers, particularly if you’re an enterprise company, they’ll take that New
1:33:00 York Times article to every single one of, uh, your prospects and say, these guys are bad guys or
1:33:09 whatever. So you still need like a strategy for dealing, I think, with the press that deals with
1:33:13 that kind of thing, or you’re just very vulnerable and you can tell your story directly. Um,
1:33:18 but you know, then it depends, like if you’ve got a big enough megaphone, right?
1:33:23 I think Elon Musk doesn’t need to, he’s got the biggest megaphone, you know, and then he acquired
1:33:30 X, doesn’t need that part of the strategy. But like, if, if you’ve got like a somewhat big megaphone,
1:33:35 um, and you know, you have a certain number of followers and this and that and the other, then,
1:33:42 then I think you have to have a balanced approach or like have both approaches in order to keep yourself
1:33:48 out of the trouble. But I would never, like, I think there’s no reason to like tell your primary story through the press.
1:33:49 I think that’s very dangerous.
1:33:55 There’s always the question, you know, for founders of, hey, Elon is the best sort of entrepreneur in the world.
1:34:01 Where, where can I copy him? Or you sort of emulate what he’s done versus where is it? Uh,
1:34:05 don’t try this at home. Uh, you know, that’s, that’s, you know, Elon can get away with it, but, uh, you know, we can’t.
1:34:11 We’re sure. Yeah. Like he is, he’s, he’s, he’s special. He’s got very special capabilities.
1:34:17 And then look, he’s, you know, anytime, by, by the way, politics, um, would be the number one thing I
1:34:26 would say, don’t try it at home. Uh, in that, uh, it’s so, it’s almost always, you know, and I’m saying
1:34:33 this as a kind of firm that’s gotten very involved in politics. Um, but it was, unless it’s necessary, uh,
1:34:40 it’s, it’s very tough. Like that, that’s a very tough thing to meant to manage from like, uh,
1:34:45 okay, I’m evangelizing a new company and trying to get people to understand my products and what I’m
1:34:53 doing. And then, um, you’re, you’re in politics that, that one takes a very high, you know, probably
1:34:59 a higher degree of skill than I think I have right now. Um, in terms of like getting that right is,
1:35:06 is complex. Now it can be like, it can be a boost. It’s been, I think effective for, uh, Alex carpet,
1:35:11 Palantir. He’s done a tremendous job on it. Um, I still don’t really know what he thinks. You know,
1:35:17 he says like 99% of things he says are like Republican. And then he says he’s a Democrat.
1:35:23 You know, so like, uh, he’s very clever in that way, but like he, he’s, he’s definitely pulling it off.
1:35:28 And yeah, anything you would say is, is really, or we’d all say is sort of invest in the go direct,
1:35:36 um, capabilities, uh, you know, founders who have great sort of, um, you know, reputations,
1:35:43 public presences are able to, to, to recruit better, are able to have lower customer acquisition costs,
1:35:47 are able to have cheaper cost of capital because they can raise better. And people often,
1:35:53 you know, don’t invest enough in high quality talent, uh, or in their own capabilities to,
1:35:59 um, sort of get their, get their message out there or, or their, their company’s message.
1:36:03 Yeah. So this is a good, so there’s a good subtle point in this that you’re mentioning and Mark alluded
1:36:08 to earlier, which is like, people don’t trust companies. And you’d like, like the, you know,
1:36:13 the company, nobody like follows, like very few people follow the a 16 Z Twitter handle compared
1:36:19 to like, or the X handle versus who follows Mark or who follows Chris Dixon or who follows you or who
1:36:27 follows me. Um, so, so the person, particularly the person running the company is very, very important
1:36:31 that you let people know who you are. And one of the things, you know, early on in the firm that,
1:36:36 that worked extremely well for us was just like blogging. And this was the era of blogging. Um,
1:36:41 because then, you know, people knew what they were joining. They knew who they were taking money from
1:36:48 that kind of thing was actually in many ways, much more effective than anything we could do through
1:36:56 traditional media in that way. Um, and now that’s much more true. So being willing to articulate your
1:37:02 point of view, your things and so forth in an interesting way is, I think, essential now to a
1:37:07 marketing strategy. Yeah. People don’t, you know, want to hear from the Coinbase handle. They
1:37:11 want to hear from Brian Armstrong or people don’t, you know, open, not open AI. It’s, it’s Sam Altman.
1:37:15 And, and you guys were early to this calling your firm Andreessen Horowitz, uh, sort of the
1:37:18 identification of people with the company that that’s what people want to hear from.
1:37:18 No doubt.
1:37:24 Well, this has been a great discussion about the, uh, evolution of, uh, of media until next time.
1:37:25 Ben, Mark, thanks for coming on.
1:37:26 All right. Hey, thank you.
1:37:28 Great. Thanks, Eric. Thanks everyone.
1:37:35 Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode,
1:37:40 let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com/A16Z.
1:37:49 We’ve got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time.