a16z Podcast - Ben and Marc on New Media: Podcasts, Politics & the Collapse of Trust

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

On this episode of The Ben & Marc Show, a16z co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz sit down with Erik Torenberg— General Partner at a16z and founder of the media company Turpentine—to unpack how the internet shattered the old media order and reshaped the way power works in America.What begins as a look at the evolution of media quickly becomes something bigger: a conversation about truth, trust, and the collapse of institutional authority. They explore how social media became both an x-ray and an engine, why authenticity now beats polish, and how the rules of politics, and journalism, have permanently changed.Together, they break down:-Why 2017 marked a structural break between tech and the press-Trump’s real training ground-The tension between objectivity, activism, and “speaking truth to power”-Why podcasters. not pundits, are setting the agenda- How the barbell strategy is reshaping media: short-form virality meets long-form depthWith stops at Watergate, the rise of Rogan, the fall of legacy gatekeepers, and the media playbooks behind Obama, Trump, and the Kardashians—this episode explores how we got here, what’s next, and what it means for founders, voters, and anyone trying to build (or tell) a story. Timecodes: 0:00 Introduction0:55 The Evolution of Media: From Centralization to Fragmentation2:34 The Internet’s Impact on Traditional Media4:06 Unionization and Technological Change in Media6:39 Oversupply and Competition in News Organizations8:44 The Changing Role and Ideology of Journalism11:46 Speak Truth to Power: Conflicts in Journalism13:39 The 2016 Election and the Collapse of Media Trust23:20 Martin Gurri and the Crisis of Authority31:34 Decentralization: From the 1970s to Social Media48:06 Trump, Reality TV, and the New Media Playbook59:10 Drama, Authenticity, and the Barbell Effect in Media1:16:40 Podcasts, Direct Communication, and the Future of Authority1:34:48 Advice for Founders and the Importance of Personal Branding1:37:35 Conclusion & Final Thoughts Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

He's not trained in this business at all. He doesn't follow any of the protocol that you're used to. He's just so uncomfortably unusual. What he was trained on was he was trained in reality television. I have not been on reality TV. My understanding is if you're trained in reality TV, like your mission is to create drama. Your mission is to be as interesting as possible.

And as controversial as possible, right? The other thing he was trained in was professional wrestling. Both reality TV and professional wrestling grew up together in this sort of new alternate media landscape. Pseudo-real entertainment. Or maybe the most real thing. Friend Rick Rubin says that these are actually the most real things, not the least real things. If you think professional wrestling is fake, just wait until you read the newspaper. In this episode, taken from the Ben and Mark show, Mark Andreessen, Ben Horitz, and I sit down to map

the evolution of media. From Craigslist to Rogan, from Watergate to Trump, from centralized institutions to the rise of internet native politicians and podcasters. We look at how social platforms disrupted the media model, how authenticity became the new currency, and what it means to build, lead, and communicate in a fragmented, post-press world. Let's get into it. The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice,

or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com slash disclosures. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Ben and Mark show. I'm Eric Thornburg, the newest GP at

A16Z. And before this, I was investing and also running a media company called Turpentine, which I'm glad is now part of A16Z. We thought this would be a great excuse to do an episode on the evolution of media. You guys have had a front row to the evolution of media from a few different angles. You've both invested in a lot of the major disruptions to legacy media over the past couple of decades, Facebook, Twitter, Substack, many others. You've both been a creator and producer of media. Benedict Evans once called A16Z a media company that monetizes via VC. And you've both been subjects and participants, sometimes unwillingly, of the press and

media. So you've seen it from many different vantage points and we thought this episode we'd take a structural look at how the media has evolved. Mark, why do you think it's so important to look at it from a structural perspective, and what inspired you to spend so much time thinking about media? You know, if you're like me,

you kind of start out worshiping the press, right? And so it's like the world's a complicated place, and there are all these really smart people that spend all day trying to explain it. So in my case, I started reading The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times in college, and I read it every day. And I just thought it was amazing that for relatively little money, they would kind of it. So in my case, I started reading the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and college and read it every day. And it was amazing that for relatively little money, they would kind of explain everything that happened in the world. They kind of had a heyday of centralized media or kind of a tail decade of centralized media in the 1990s.

Maybe in retrospect, we all didn't know how good we had it. Then basically, of course, what happened was the internet actually worked and it became a big factor and it started to actually change the business of the media. actually starting in the middle late 1990s and maybe the internet itself and the web were kind of the early kind of changes that I saw but then you know Craigslist hit pretty hard pretty fast and if you're gonna go back and reconstruct the history of Craigslist you know cut the legs out from other newspapers quite quickly in the internet revolution because it took out classified advertising which it turned out had been a huge source of revenue

something like a third of the local newspapers big enough for the local newspapers, right? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, and some of the national newspapers are local newspapers in terms of their business models, especially in those days. The New York Times was a local New York newspaper just as much as it was a national paper, and so they had a lot of local ads. And then the Washington Post actually, I remember actually trying to subscribe to the Washington Post in college, and it was basically impossible.

They basically didn't have delivery outside the Washington area. It was very much a local paper, even though it covered the national government. So as that started to happen, then my company Netscape, our company that I built in the 90s was a major provider of software to these companies. So we actually had a full suite. What was it called? The publishing system? Yeah, publishing system, I think.

Yeah, the Netscape publishing system. So we actually had at one point a full-fledged content management system, publishing system that a bunch of the major newspapers bought. So we got to know them as businesses. One of my earliest meetings I remember was actually with Dow Jones, which owned the Wall Street Journal at that time, that explained to me that adopting new technology for the Washington Post is actually quite

difficult because it turns out it was unionized. And as late as, I forget the year, I don't know how long this lasted, but for sure through the 1990s, they actually had a full-time employee who actually hand-built all their servers because it had been in a prior union contract that all servers to be used by the Wall Street Journal, all servers were to be hand-built because that was a job for somebody that at one point made sense. There's an interesting meta-point in there which I think is also going to really relate

to manufacturing, which we won't get in this episode, but in future episodes is the collective bargaining agreements tend to be very incompatible with technological change, which is kind of a very orthogonal, but salient issue to the general idea of collective bargaining that kind of assumes a fixed technology set, which is highly untrue in today's world. So there probably needs to be, you know, even if you're pro-union a real evolution to that idea Yeah, and very relevant as Ben says not just for brotherly manufacturer But also a lot of the media companies now are unionized and a lot that weren't unionized that category unionized now

And it's actually support the unions, right? You support the unions Yeah, well, yes when I'm in a bad mood and they written a bad story about me I issue full-throated votes of support. Yes for the unions and their collective bargaining and their ability to go on strike. Their ability to completely destroy the revenue of their host organisms. And so many of them are actually unionized in their tech staff and then they're also now unionized on the reporting staff and it actually has been, I think, a, I mean, they should do whatever they think is right, but it certainly doesn't make it easier for businesses to adapt. So that kind of got me thinking about, okay, this is an industry like any other industry and this is a business like

any other business. And I got to meet a lot of the CEOs and a lot of the publishers of major publications and people running TV networks. And they were excited about the internet. They saw the opportunity. They were worried about it. They saw the Craigslist thing happening. You know, and then the music industry got hit super hard with Napster around the year 2000, which was quite early for a lot of these changes.

And so that really freaked out every other media business because they saw what was happening in music and they were worried about it happening to themselves. And so, you know, so I'd say like, you know, anxiety kept rising, the business structurally kept changing. And by the way, certain media businesses have done extraordinarily well with the internet.

And actually the, interestingly, the New York Times is actually one of those. But many others have been, let's say, structurally compromised or disadvantaged. The most obvious observation to make is just, if you just think about news. So it's like, how many news organizations should there be? And in the old days, you would have three network news

organizations, NBC, CBS, ABC News. You'd have maybe three news cable channels. You'd have one or two newspapers per city. You'd have a handful of radio stations per city, a handful of local television stations per city, a handful of national news magazines. You remember in the old days, it was Time Magazine, Newsweek, and US News were the three national news magazines. And so in each discrete media market, you could have one or two or three news magazines. You remember in the old days, it was Time Magazine, Newsweek, and US News were the three national news magazines.

And so in each discrete media market, you could have one or two or three news organizations. And you could make the economics work. But if the internet is a solvent that basically turns every media into every other kind of media, where all of a sudden local TV is competing with national network TV, competing with cable TV, competing with newspapers, competing with magazines,

now all of a sudden you add it up and you've got 30, 40, or 50 news organizations all competing directly with each other. And that's been the state of affairs for the last 20 years. And by the way, that still hasn't reconciled. It's actually really amazing. I can never get anybody in the media to think about any of these terms. It's just literally too many competitors.

It's simply an oversupply of news organizations. And then what's happened, you know, they haven't rationalized, right? So why does CBS News and CNN have separate reporting staffs? Like, you know, universal online streaming and internet content? It doesn't make any sense. There should have been some level of rationalization at some point, but there never was.

And so what's happened against the structural analysis is what's happened is every single news organization now is subscale. So you've got 30 subscale players competing with each other instead of three scale players competing with each other. And some of that is regulation. Some of that is bans on M&A. Some of that is licensing.

Some of that is obstinance. Also is bans on M&A, some of that is licensing, some of that is obstinance. Also, the news business has this kind of characteristic that some businesses get into, which has its pluses and minuses where it has a missionary component, right? And so it's got this thing of, well, we're not just a business, like we're a calling, we're a cause, we're vital to the protection of democracy. And like there's something admirable in that it is good, I think, to have a higher purpose to what you do, but that can also become an inhibitor

to thinking, I would say, rationally higher purpose to what you do. But that can also become an inhibitor to thinking, I would say, rationally and clinically about the structure of one's business. And I think that that thinking, that industry may still be somewhat lacking. And it felt like that ramped up at some point where a lot of media, particularly in tech, turned from reviewing gadgets to defending democracy.

Do you guess that evolution? It's an interesting and that evolution, you know, it's an interesting and long evolution, I think, not just of tech media, but all media where, so my father was a writer and sometimes journalist. He spent a lot of his career as a journalist. And the thing that he used to argue, and if you think about kind of general, what we call journalism, so the kind of modern state of things, centralized media,

you know, it's like 100 years running. And what he said is, in the early days, journalism was like literally reporting what you saw. And the journalists themselves did not have college degrees. They were just sort of regular people who reported what they saw. And they didn't have kind of strong ideological kind of of or as strong ideological points of view for the main part there certainly were some that did and then kind of journalism became a profession it became professionalized not unlike how kind of politicians had become professionalized over the years and

At that point it became much more ideological and much less kind of reporting what you see and much more ideological and much less kind of reporting what you see. And so that change, I think, started more in like the 1960s and 1970s than, you know, sort of not so recent. 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. 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 go for a story, they get the story. If they couldn't get the facts, they'd write the narrative 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. And it'll be something like as, you know, not like a fact, you know about this fact, but are you suing this company?

We'll go, no. And they'll write this anyway. No, these guys, we've heard from others that they're suing their company. It's like, well, if we're not the definitive source on that, then okay. 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. This journalist, Wesley Lowery, I think once called it moral clarity, sort of in justifying what journalists needed to have. Well, there's also, there's always been an inherent, 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. You know, and one is, you know, one is objectivity, right? So to be kind of above the fray, objectivity and tell both sides

and, you know, accurately convey the facts. But then they have these, they have these two other phrases that they'll use and this goes back decades. One is speak truth to power. Right? So you know which... Who's power, who's truth? Yeah, exactly. By the way, there's a very interesting question on the PowerPoint. Okay, so here's a very interesting question. Who's more powerful, a CEO or a reporter? And you know, if you ask the reporter, he's like well obviously the CEO's more powerful, a CEO or a reporter? And if you ask the reporter, he's like, well, obviously,

the CEO is more powerful because he has 100,000 employees and billions in revenue and all this ability to determine the fate of industries and business and politics and so forth. The counter argument is the reporter has the ability to get the CEO fired. Right? And so this actually just happened.

I guess there was a little bit. And not vice versa. And not vice versa. And not vice versa. A CEO cannot get a reporter fired, but a reporter can very much get a CEO fired. And so, anyway, so there's the whole speak truth to power thing, and then there's the other phrase they used to use, but it was like, comfort the afflicted

and afflict the comfortable. And again, it sets up, it sort of defines this polarized oppositional role. And it's like, okay, fine. Like, you know, it's like I'm 100% supporter of the free press, 100% supporter of the First Amendment. I'm a bigger supporter of the First Amendment than most reporters I know.

But, however, you know, like it's not, you know, speak truth to power and be objective are two different things. They really are. Like, you know, they're really two different things. They really are. They're really two different goals. And I think that, I think in many ways that is at the heart of the, that's at the heart of kind of the internal conflict that runs inside these. And again, maybe you can think about this as a little bit again between this sort of conflict between like missionary and mercenary, 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. Or you could argue, by the way, that it should be completely scurrilous because it should just be yellow journalism and sell as many copies as possible. But it's when it takes on this moral calling of speak truth to power that it has this goal and this sort of motivation. And then, you know, in our world, ultimately, they're for a political alignment. And I set up political motivations that basically override the business judgment.

And I think that's been the story of a lot of the last decade, for sure. When did you guys start to notice that some of the legacy media was really failing to achieve its ideals? And maybe, Mark, we can get into Martin Gri's sort of analysis and some of the structural forces behind how social media and the internet has sort of accelerated that.

Yeah, so we'll tell the personal side of the story first and then go to the theoretical, I think, maybe. So Ben spent a lot of time with the press over the years. I had done basically an East Coast press tour. So kids in the old days. What you used to do to deal with the press is if you were a prominent public figure, CEO, or a major person who's in the news a lot,

and you had your own PR capability and resources, 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 in the East Coast, which is a whole other dimension of this. So you'd fly 3,000 miles. And then basically you'd go around and you'd meet with all of the reporters

but also the editors and publishers of all the major publications. And I did this for many years going back to the 90s and I probably did it 20 times, leading into, I wouldn't talk about 2017 as the change, but leading into 2017. 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 reporters, you know, you visit their offices, and so they would usually fill up a conference room with interested people. And if you were, you know, considered high-profile enough, they'd bring in the editor and the publisher, and so you'd sit and you'd do open Q&A and discuss and so forth. 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. And at that time, knew most of the major publishers and CEOs of the big media companies. And so, you know, up until, I would say, through 2016, it was a relatively benign experience. Lots of curiosity about new technology, lots of curiosity about structural changes. They were very interested in the future of the media business,

but very interested in having that conversation. And we always had companies that were trying to help with different aspects of that. So there was always a lot to talk about. And then in the early 2010s, you had the rise of the new digital media companies, Vox and Buzzfeed and these guys. And so the legacy publishers were very interested in them

and trying to figure out if they should compete with them or buy them or what. And so generally very, kind of very, friendly is maybe the wrong term because they are in this sort of semi adversarial positioning word power. But, you know, still, like I would say a lot of curiosity, a lot of open-mindedness. 2017, spring of 2017 was the last one that I did.

And I just, I remember it very vividly because it was a starkly different experience than the one in 2016. I mean, it was like somebody had flipped a light switch and not in a good direction. And I would say 2017 one was just like naked hostility, just like flat out naked, we hate you. People sitting across the table, arms folded, glaring.

One high profile business journalist who's still very active, we invited him to a dinner, three hour dinner, which this made it super fun. And he started out the dinner by loudly declaring that all tech companies were frauds. This was all fraud. This was all bullshit. None of this was real.

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. And you know, that was relatively characteristic of the experience. You know, I'll tell you, that was relatively characteristic of the experience. You know, I tell you, that really shook me because that's like, all right, something has changed.

You know, the easy answer for what changed, of course, is Trump. And so that was when the narrative, you know, sort of spring of 2017. So that was when the Facebook Cambridge Analytica narrative was really kicking in. And then, you know, so social media, the theory went, the social media had been compromised, you got Trump elected. And then that was when the Russiagate stuff was kicking in. And so you've got a Russian spy in the White House,

and like all the other kind of, that sort of political activation that took place at that time. And by the way, that political activation was like super concentrated in the places where the journalists live, right? And so like Brooklyn was like ground zero for it. Manhattan, Boston, with the major universities there,

which is where a lot of the big press were at the time. And so, they just had this extremely high level of activated energy, which clearly was translating to rage. By the way, we did one other thing that year, I think it was that year, I think it was 2017, we also did a thing we did was we did a media party every year, I think it was that year, I think it was 2017. We also did a thing we did, was we did a media party every year.

So we had this old fashioned view, that if you throw them a big party and give them free food and give them free alcohol, they might like you more. And so we had our media party, I think later that year. And I kind of went against my better judgment, having experienced what I experienced earlier in the year. And I remember three top tech journalists

cornered me on the Facebook topic, Facebook destroying democracy topic. And they were just absolutely appalled that Facebook was not censoring more. They were just completely appalled that Facebook was not censoring, did not have much tougher censorship rules on what people could say. And I kind of had an out-of-body experience where I'm like, these are three reporters. You know, in the old days, you know, 20 years ago, you know, reporters were the most strident defenders of the First Amendment.

And now they were like demanding censorship. And of course, I couldn't help myself. I pointed that out and they got extremely upset. And I was like, whoop, this is over. So basically, like from my perspective, you know, different people have different views. From my perspective, the world changed really profoundly dramatically in 2017 and set off a whole cascading series of changes since. But we've never gone back to the way things were in 2016 or before.

And we could speculate as to whether we ever will, but I doubt it at this point. Yeah, and that was also when Trump started calling them the fake news. is also when Trump started calling them the fake news, which, and that was actually in response to the kind of journalists saying that Facebook was fake news. And Trump said, well, no, you're fake news.

And that to me was when it was like, okay, we're on this side, you're on that side. It was no longer, there was no longer any pretense, I guess, of, you know, objectivity. Objectivity was gone at that point. Yeah. It was, you know, it was fairly amazing because, you know, it's like, look, I voted, in 2016, I voted for Hillary. I supported Hillary publicly.

I'm like, I'm not like, you know, at that time, I'm like, I don't understand why I'm getting, you know, tagged with this. And literally it was, you know, it was, you know, you're an idiot, you're a dupe, you know, you got played, you got hacked, you got hacked by the Russians. You know, I went to Hillary's first public appearance after, in 2017, after she lost it at stage. She gave a talk at Stanford.

It's her first kind of big public outing. And she said like 20 feet away from me on stage that Trump is only president because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook, right, to insert fake news, right? And so the unified kind of theory emerged around Russiagate and basically the tech companies were just like presumed guilty even though we all at that time was like 99.9% Democrats or Hillary supporters. And so, yeah. And then, look, people had a very,

basically people I know who went through that had two very, well, maybe three very different reactions to it. One reaction was just like absolute terror of like, oh my God, are the critics right? And therefore, all of the enormous pounding for censorship that then kicked in, including in the Valley and in many of the tech companies, 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. And that was a very small number of people. And then I think, you know, a lot of people entered a state of confusion of just not understanding the, you know, kind of how the world works, how the media works and that state of confusion for, I think for a lot of people entered a state of confusion of just not understanding the, kind of how the world works, the media works in that state of confusion for, I think for a lot of people actually

probably still continues. Yeah, and I think that, one of the things that was interesting about that whole period was how much of it was Trump and not any of the facts. So that, first Obama clearly won in 2008 because of Facebook, and he used it effectively and so forth.

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. And Hillary used old techniques, Obama used new techniques, art Trump used new techniques 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 and so you know

that's what actually happened, you know, when the Facebook team did the internal investigation, it was done by a guy who used to work for me, Alex Stamos. 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. Like, there was nothing.

And so, but the dominant media narrative was that Facebook had been hacked by the Russians. And I think like probably half the population still thinks that's true, but it's absolutely false. It's amazing how just in one election cycle, people turned on social media and free speech. You were saying that Obama won thanks to it and people celebrated that. People celebrated the Arab Spring. Dick Costello called Twitter the free speech wing of the free speech party.

And just five years later, eight years later, oh, this whole free speech thing. I don't know about this anymore. It's cool. 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. Yeah. Mark, what does Martin Guree bring to this analysis?

He's really shaped your thinking here. Yeah, so Martin Guree is a good friend of ours and is a brilliant writer. He spent 30 years in the CIA doing basically analysis of essentially regime change. But he was in what was called the open source division for a long time and they were doing basically like global media monitoring. 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.

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. So kind of, so the book was kind of published at the same time that Trump was winning the nomination. So it, you know, it, like, it's, it, it, it was very, it was very, it looks in hindsight, extremely prescient.

You know, yet even he, I think would say, you know, he didn't know obviously that he was gonna get proven as fast as it was. By the way, the book is today available in a formal edition from Stripe Press. You can buy it on Amazon. They have a really beautiful version of it with a whole new section at the end

on what happened since he wrote it. But it was very insightful. And so it was self-published on Kindle, and then PDF bootlegs were kind of emailed around at the time. And it laid out basically this thesis, which at the time sounded very radical, and of course today just sounds like a description of what's happening. And so the thesis basically, he focuses on this concept,

the sort of abstract concept of authority. And authority is not just somebody telling you what to do, but authority is basically any kind of centralized credentialed like authority figure or like authoritative institution. So think somebody with a role in steering society, and that might be anybody from a politician to a bureaucrat to a reporter to a doctorrat, to a reporter, to a doctor, to an expert, credential expert of any kind, so that the people,

and think of those just generally as like experts. And then the other is institutional authority, so the institutions that are supposed to guide our society. And so that's the government, government bureaucracies, the news organizations, the universities, foundations, NGOs, right? And by the way, if you read the universities, foundations, NGOs. And by the way, if you read the press, it's actually very interesting, if you read the press, the standard form of article is expert says X.

So the go-to thing is always to basically say, here's a way that the world works or something that happens according to an expert. And the expert is by definition a credentialed expert, right? So you're not allowed to be an independent expert. You have to be a formal expert with the right diploma or the right certification. And so that's the linkage between the individual authority figures and the institutions, which is the authoritative institutions certify the individuals, right? 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. And basically what he said was, he said all of that, everything I just described is basically an artifact of centralization and top-down media. And so everything I just described is an artifact of basically mass media, mass education, centralized authority, the idea that there are a few really good universities that certify all the experts,

the idea that there are a few large foundations that determine the future shape of society through their activism, the idea that there's only one central government, and there's only a few politicians who are really in charge, right? And so, basically, like, that whole idea of authority that you could basically trust or rely on is an artifact of the top-down centralized era. 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. Basically, he made a very provocative claim at that point that that will basically destroy all authority. That basically that will ruin the reputation

of all the certified experts and that that will basically destroy all of the authoritative institutions. And at first 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? And he said, well, the reason is because none of these institutions are actually as perfect as they say they are.

Right? They're made up of people like anything else. 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. You know, we are the authoritative source of truth. And he said basically, I'm gonna use my metaphor here,

the social media is many things, but one of the things it is is it's an X-ray machine. And so when an expert says something that turns out to be wrong, you know, in the old days, you know, nobody would necessarily write the story, it would be on page 34 or something. In the new world, it goes viral on social media. And so the world that you experience with social media 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. And he said, the thing is, they really are wrong.

Now, sometimes they're accused of being wrong and they're not. But they really are wrong a lot of the time because they're people and they're imperfect. And they have basically built up these reputations that actually cannot be factually supported. And that when people, when populations realize that these authoritative sources are not actually correct all the time, even though they have been are not actually correct all the time,

even though they have been claiming to be correct all the time. In essence, like they've written checks at the, somebody said, your mouth writes checks, your body can't cash. They've written these checks about the quality of what they do that basically transparency doesn't support. And so he said, inevitably, you'll basically

see them crumble. And one of the ways that you can see that very clearly is these large polling organizations like Gallup do these annual surveys of trust in institutions. And Gallup has done a big one for a long time that goes by every single class of like authoritative institution. They go year by year how much you trust this thing.

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. And we can talk about that because it predates the Internet. But then you see actually this like basically this much faster collapse basically after 2015. And then in particular in the last three years, it's just the numbers have just caved in. And so the universities, for example, you know, their approval ratings in the, their sort of trust ratings for the population writ large have population writ large have just completely cratered in the last three years, the medical

profession, the press, many of the nonprofits, the numbers are just collapsing. And so, yeah, you look back now and you're like, oh, okay, yeah, that was a correct assessment that is actually playing out now. A question from there would be like, how far does it go? And do the numbers literally converge to zero? And you have this interesting thing that's preventing that from happening right now, which is more and more the numbers are part of this split. And so Democrats trust universities, Republicans don't.

Democrats trust doctors, Republicans don't. Or another version of this is, who's in the White House determines how people feel about the economy. So when Biden was in the White House, Democrats people feel about the economy So when Biden is in the White House Democrats felt great about the economy Republicans felt horrible now that Trump's in Republicans feel great Democrats feel horrible. There's like us just a straight-in version on Everything is partisan all the time. Yeah And so my point is that the partisanship is I would argue the partisanship the part the partisanship Is actually holding up the reputation of institutions that otherwise the where their institutions that otherwise where their trust ratings would literally go to zero, which I think is probably what

happens in the fullness of time. First off, what happened in the 70s to give full context? Yeah, so I would say there's a cultural argument. And the cultural argument has to do with basically the social revolution in the 1960s. And then it has to do with especially Vietnam. Because Vietnam was just like basically gigantically controversial and sort of very discredited for a long time and then obviously ended very badly.

And then Nixon, water date, and then just like reveals there were other things in the 70s at the time, the environmental movement was revealing all these dirty secrets of time. The environmental movement was revealing all these dirty secrets of industry. The, you know, the church and Pike committee were revealing all these dirty secrets of the intelligence agencies.

And so, you know, you just kind of had this, you had kind of this activated social consciousness. You had this new generation, the boomers, that were like very, like politically activated, socially activated. And then you just had a lot of sort of data points that the institutions were going bad. And so that, you know so that's one argument.

That's like the social cultural argument. The other argument is actually a structural argument. It's when peak centralization started to collapse. And so our friend Balaji talks a lot about this concept of peak centralization. And basically what he says is if you look at basically if you look at anything from governments to business to media Basically centralization in the world peak in the 1950s And so 1950s the 1950s was at the point when you had the smallest number of countries in the history of the world Total number of countries got down to like something like 60

You had the smallest number of of media organizations Because actually media going back before, you know, in the 18th and 19th centuries was actually much more decentralized, which we could talk about. But by the 1950s, it was this highly centralized environment that I talked about earlier. Mass manufacturing had centralized production, right?

Public education had centralized, you know, the process of educating kids. And so you had all these areas of human activity that basically had been centralized in a small number of large organizations. And so you had all these areas of human activity that basically had been centralized in a small number of large organizations. And when that happens, of course, those organizations get a tremendous amount of control. And so, for example, the editors at the major newspapers

could absolutely decide what was news and what wasn't. And if they didn't want something to be news, they just buried it and it just didn't matter. And so a famous example was, what percentage of the US population knew that FDR was in a wheelchair when he was president, right? Or, you know, what percentage knew all the stuff we now know Kennedy got up to.

Well, good thing that would never happen today with, you know, the president. That would never, ever happen today, exactly. But. Yeah, even the affairs that aren't true get published. Exactly. Exactly, so anyway, so that was, and so in under peak centralization, you're going to have maximum trust because you're going to have basically the most information control.

Right? You're not going to have the alternative point of view. 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. And people aren't going to have anything to compare to. And then basically the argument goes in the 1970s is when the media landscape started to decentralize. And so you had the fruit. And this is sort of 70s into the 80s, I would say,

because it took time. But you had the rise of talk radio, AM talk radio. And in particular, 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. And then you also had the rise of, Tyler Cowen points out,

you had the rise of paperback books. And so, actually, the cost of books actually dropped dramatically in that period. And you could have, you know, you could do cheap paperback books on many, many topics that you could never get through the hardback publishing apparatus. Newsletters, mimeograph newsletters, photocopy newsletters actually became a big thing in that period.

And then cable TV emerged kind of late in the 1970s into the 1980s and started to really blow the doors open. Oh, and then by the way, I mean, even, I don't know how to measure this, but even early computers, not so much the Internet. Bulletin boards. Bulletin board services. And then CompuServe and Prodigy were getting created back then, which were kind of pre-internet, you know, dial-up information services.

Anyway, so you had like six or eight different technological changes that were happening that were kind of decentralizing media. And then you kind of wonder, it's like, okay, if I'm a trusting individual, right, if I'm inherently a trusting individual, I'm just going to watch the five o'clock news and I'm just going to believe what they tell me.

But if I'm an inherently untrusting individual, I'm not going to do that, and I'm going to seek out a newsletter or a paperback book or a talk radio or something like that. I'm going to seek out a new cable TV show. I'm going to seek out a new source of information. Of course, those sources of information need to differentiate themselves from the mainstream.

And so they're going to come up with these alternative narratives. And so therefore, the rise of the new technology equals the rise of a new audience, equals the rise of a new belief system that inherently is not trusting. So that would be the structural view. And accelerating all the way to social media, one question Mark you also like to ask is social media the engine or the camera? Is it sort of creating new behavior or kind of just revealing behavior that was?

And I remember one interview you did with Kara and Reid Hoffman, I think around sort of the 2018, 2019 time and they're both sort of saying, hey, when can we go back to an era where we all had civil conversations and all got along and the sort of golden era and you were like, hey, maybe it wasn't, it's not as simple as we're making it here. Yeah, so I think that was also probably 2017,

and that was my last onstage appearance at a mainstream industry conference. And I knew, and that was another one where I didn't realize what I was getting into, because Reid Hoffman had been a good friend of mine for a long time, and Karen and I had been kind of hot and cold for a long time, but she'd done a lot of great work earlier in her career, and I'd known her for a long time, and she's running this very important conference.

And so I was excited to be, you know, on stage with Reid and my good friend Reid and with Kara. And, you know, they just, you know, they both had become extremely politically activated. And so they both had, I would say, extremely negative, you know, kind of responses to Trump. And you know, Reid's sense has, of course, become one of the largest donors in American history for left-wing politics. And of course, Kara's Kara. People can draw their own judgments. Many hours of YouTube video to watch. So I got on stage, you know, they basically started, you know, all of a sudden there's like this like extremely aggressive. I mean, they were attacking me as much, but there's like an extremely aggressive

kind of attack on, you know, basically 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. And you know, and again, they, you know, you kind of tell this, you know, you kind of tell the simplified version of the story and I even did a little bit of it in my earlier answer, which is, you know, at one point we trusted the media now we don't. Well, number one, like, do we ever really trust the media that much? Like we say we did, but did we? And my favorite example of that is sort of the legend of this guy Walter Cronkite. And so Walter Cronkite was a network news anchor for CBS News. And for, you know, decades, he was considered the authoritative source of information. He was like the peak reporter. Like if you can't trust Walter Cronkite,

like who can you trust? And so there was this famous moment. People talk about this. There was this famous moment in 1968. The Vietnam War had been going for, I think, four years at that point, with America's involvement in Vietnam, or maybe even five. And it was already going bad. And Walter Cronkite did this, went to Vietnam and came back and he did this thing where he came out against the Vietnam War.

And it was this, and it was this truth, the legend is it was this truth to power moment, right? Which is like, you know, you've got this authoritative source finally telling the American people the truth that this war is a disaster. But of course, this race is the question of like, well, he came out against the Vietnam War in 1968, but it had already been going for four years. So like, what was his point of view on the war prior to 1968?

And of course, nobody wants to open that box, right? Because if you open that box, and if you go look at those, you know, if you can get access even to the four years of network news broadcasts from 1964 to 1968, of course, what you'd find is he and everybody else like him was 100% in support of it, right? And so, you know, it's the whole thing. And of course, the other thing was, you know, the media, you know, in those days, 1968 was, you know,

1968 happened to be the presidential election year, right? And so the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1968 was a Democratic war. It was a Kennedy-Johnson project. If Nixon were to win in 1968, it would become a Republican war, which is what it turned into. But it started as a Democratic war. And so it's actually interesting.

He flipped on it. He flipped from positive and negative on it, at precisely the point when the country flipped from a Democratic president to Republican president. So probably just a coincidence. Maybe not and so And you know and then there by the way there were huge disputes in those days because there were a lot of people who were Like well, you're betraying You know

You're the other point of view was like if the media is coming out against a war with American soldiers in the field like you're betraying Those those soldiers and you know you had celebrities who were going to Vietnam who were you know talking about how you know? even the whole thing was and how great the North Vietnamese communists were and you had celebrities who were going to Vietnam who were talking about how evil the whole thing was and how great the North Vietnamese communists were and are they sympathizing with the enemy. And so even in those days, it's not like everybody just agreed with everybody. And so there is a lot of myth making that takes place. And the other part of myth making that takes place

from that era is Watergate. And so the way the Watergate story gets told is you have these two plucky young reporters, Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post, and they were able to kind of unspool the story of presidential corruption, take down Nixon in what, 73, 74. The whole story, if you've read the book or if you've even seen the movie, the whole story is they had this like, they cultivated this inside source to the government, who was this truth teller who gave them all the secret information, who was this unimpeachable source called Deep

Throat. Thirty years later, we finally learned the identity of Deep Throat. It turns out he was the number three executive in the FBI, and specifically in Hoover's FBI. And so this was like, you know, he was like the agent of what all these same people considered to be basically organized fascism. And now there's like a completely different interpretation

of Watergate, which was a war between the FBI and Nixon and the FBI took out Nixon. And so like, you know, even in those days, like how much of this was, oh, and then of course, it also turns out Bob Woodward had been a Navy intelligence officer prior to being a reporter who had actually met Mark Felt, the deep throat source, actually sitting

on the couch outside of the Situation Room in the White House. And so had Felt recruited him to be an asset, like what exactly was the relationship? And so even in those days, there was more controversy than the sort of rose colored glasses, you know, kind of you would have it. You know, but to your question, the difference is,

like in those days, you could speculate about all this, you could, you know, talk to your friends and neighbors about it, you could complain about it, whatever, in your private life, but you couldn't do anything about it. You know, in the new world, you can do something about it, which is you can go online and you can post. And you know.

And it can go viral. Yeah, and it can go viral. And you could post. And go viral. Yeah, and it can go viral. And to your point on engine versus camera, that's when the camera turns into an engine, right? Which is you can not only see things that you couldn't see before, but you can also help other people see those things. Now, look, having said that, I think

the internet contains multitudes. And so is the internet just a camera. And so, you know, is the internet just a camera of things that you need to know that are true? No, there's obviously huge amounts of, you know, there's, the internet has full spectrum of things that are clearly fake, the things that are clearly real, everything in the middle. You know, I think there's a very large number of, you know, there's lots of, let's say, ops, you know, there's lots of propaganda, there's lots of, you know, campaigns of different kinds. You know, it's a very, it's a very complicated environment. It's no of propaganda. There's lots of campaigns of different kinds. It's a very complicated environment.

It's no single thing. But for sure, it is an X-ray machine, which is a camera. And then for sure, it's also an engine. It's a way to actually drive change in the information environment that people didn't use to have. Ben, I'm curious to hear more of your perspective on kind of your personal evolution. You mentioned earlier that your father was a journalist and a political writer as well.

I've seen you as mostly focused on technology and business, but when did you start to realize that things were changing in the media or that we were sort of entering a hyper-partisan era or what were kind of your sort of inflection points in thinking about these topics? A big thing that had an effect on me was actually my father's the beginning of his conversion

from the left to the right. So he was the editor of the editor in chief of Ramparts Magazine, which was that kind of the magazine of the new left back in the seventies. He dropped out of politics for quite a while, I think about eight years. And then, he was a journalist during that time. And one of the things that happened that was kind of, to Mark's point about the trusted experts and the authorities and the institutions was he got tipped by a very good reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle by the name of Randy

Scheltz about this potential pandemic in 1981. It was starting in San Francisco where kind of gay men were kind of getting this very deadly disease. where kind of gay men were kind of getting this very deadly disease. And, you know, but Randy couldn't write the story about it because there was so much pressure from the institutions to not make it a gay disease. But the kind of right public policy at the time was to close particularly the bathhouses. So they had these things that were at bathhouses in San Francisco where, you know,

gay men would kind of hook up and that kind of thing. And so they all knew about this disease. There were only about a hundred cases, I think at the time, it was a very small number. And they were like, we got to close the bathhouses now. But everybody in the medical establishment was afraid to do it, you know, and everybody kind of, the press was kind of very anti it.

And so my father, you know, being my father and how he is, just wrote the story and was called Whitewash and it was in California magazine, kind of telling the story of this coverup of this, you know, how this disease was spread. And, you know, it was like the kind of end of so many of his friends on the left. And then there were protests.

They protested around our house and that kind of thing, that he was a homophobe and all this kind of thing. that he was a homophobe and all this kind of thing. But, you know, look, and then Fauci, who was actually in charge of, you know, public health policy at the time, kind of reoriented it around, no, no, no, no, it's not just gay sex, it's any kind of sex and it's, you know,

intravenous drug use and this kind of thing. And then that of that was like, the, you know, the bathhouses weren't closed and so forth and it did become an epidemic, where unlike COVID, it didn't have to, it was only spread through, it was spread like 98% or 95% through gay sex and the rest through intravenous drug use and almost none,

it turns out through heterosexual sex. But we didn't really address it because of these politics. And so it kind of really gave me a good lesson that, okay, the experts might not be true. And then we were always, growing up in Berkeley, we were always on the side of, you know, the left is like, wow, you know, the left can do very bad things as well. And like, you know, there's a certain level of like politics

and partisanship where you don't even care about the people you care about. Like, you know, the saddest thing in the world we're seeing all these people die. I mean, in the 80s, like if you went through that, it was just horrible. Like, you know, so many, you know, people you knew and so forth,

the young people, healthy people, all of a sudden die. And it was preventable. And the people who were on their side, like the pro-gay community were the ones who caused it. Like that whole thing just made me very, very aware of how like the whole central system worked. And I just say it's quite eye-opening. Yeah, that whole story, by the way,

is in David Horowitz's book called Radical Son, which is one of the most, it's one of the most shattering things. And Prussian books, by the way. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it's an most shattering. And prescient books, by the way. Yeah. But it's an absolutely shattering story, given there's a counterfactual universe in which it had been controlled and contained.

It really could have been. The whole flatten the curve thing on COVID was hard because it spread so fast. But AIDS did not. If you look at it, it spread actually quite slowly by comparison. So those kinds of measures would have worked or would have prevented probably 75% of the deaths.

In the same way that Peter Thiel's book in 1995 was maybe a couple of decades prescient into sort of chronicling college campus activism, it seems like your father's work was a few decades of pressure. I'm hearing for this for the first time, but Fauci contributing to a noble lie, or even something adjacent to that decades before is... I mean, I think Fauci, whether you like him or not, he is...

I think he's a bit of a sociopath. I mean, he is completely divorced from the truth and he feels no guilt about it. He never felt any guilt about the whole AIDS thing despite being like a huge catalyst in it. We've been talking about how the legacy media playbook was being disrupted by the internet. And this is where it might be interesting to return back to the Trump phenomenon, less in terms of the politics,

but more in terms of the media impact, because it feels like he was a part of a new playbook. Trump in the 90s was very different than Trump in the mid-2000s or 2010s. And that same new playbook that was sort of native to social media helped influence perhaps Elon, perhaps some others. Mark, why don't you describe what was this new playbook?

So I think Trump is a bridge figure. I actually think Trump, with respect to like media, the way media works, I think Trump is a bridge figure in that we're going to see new variations from here that are going to be very interesting. But he's a bridge figure, which is he's of the generation that grew up with television and newspapers, absolutely dominant. And so he's always had a very intertwined relationship

with newspapers and with television. And obviously, that culminated in having his own top rated television show for 15 years. But also, Trump was a standard story in newspapers, starting in like 1975. I think the New York Times first profiled him in 75 and then he was a fixture, as they say in like New York media world and tabloids and major newspapers and entertainment television and everything else, you know, all the way through cable TV.

He was on cable news all the time. You know, he'd go on Oprah, you know, when, when, and that was a big deal. And so he was always super intertwined. And he talked to them constantly, by the way. He would always, many stories in those days of Trump calling up and talking to reporters and taking phone calls from reporters, you know, and the whole thing. And so he's got that element to it.

And by the way, he continues that. It's actually very interesting. It's very interesting to watch. This is one of the things that surprised me about his new term is he has opened up the Oval Office to the To the legacy press to an extraordinary degree And so he has the love-hate relationship It really is it really is and if you if you talk to reporters by the way if you talk to reporters that like

You know at these major newspapers, you know kind of off the record, you know They'll tell you he calls them all the teeth like he talks to them all the time And a lot of them have his cell phone number and he'll'll pick up the calls, and he'll talk to them, and that he's the source for a lot of stories. So he does talk to them, even though he complains about them. And then he's done, I don't know what the number is, but he's done multiples, he's done wildly more press questions, press conferences, press briefings

in the first, whatever, 70 days of his new term than the previous presidents did for their entire runs. And he's constantly talking to them on Air Force One, he's talking to them in the White House and he's invited them to the cabinet meetings and he's having them over for dinner. So he still has one foot kind of squarely in the kind of legacy media world. But then the other side of it is not only was he a pioneer in going direct and that he literally had his own TV show with The Apprentice, but also he was – people now forget – he was actually an early adopter on Twitter for a public figure of that magnitude. And so he started tweeting actively probably in, I forget, like 2010

or 2011, which was – and that was still the, like, social media's, you know, what did your cat have for breakfast? And especially Twitter, like, still people weren't quite sure what they thought of it. And he leaned into it hard. And there's this, you know, kind of running joke now, right, where there's a Trump tweet for everything. Like, right, so anything that happens, there was like a Trump tweet in like 2013 where, like, he said it or predicted it or argued it.

Right? And it's just because, like, he actually, and I don't even know, I'd actually like to find out someday, but I actually don't know who got him spun up on this or did he figure this all out himself. But he became a truly adopter. And so by the time the campaign started, he had already been a very,

he was maybe the most kind of Twitter aware and Twitter sensitive kind of major celebrity like that, public figure like that, for probably four years, even prior to running for office. Probably the first, certainly the first prominent politician that wrote his own tweets. Like the other thing that was very, very different about him was that, I mean, for better or worse,

he'd write these tweets that clearly came from him, that often with misspellings and all that kind of thing. Whereas like if you look at, you know, the presidential, you know, Obama's Twitter handle or Biden's Twitter handle, they're clearly written by somebody else for the most part. Yes. I mean, you know, then you get these famous Trump tweets like, you know, I've never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.

And you're just like, you know, that's a good a thin person drinking Diet Coke. And you're just like, you know, that's a good point. I don't think I have either. And then, you know, because he's legendary for drinking Diet Coke. And then he did this follow up where he's like, I don't know, it was like, I was like, it was 2015 when he was running for president, I guess somebody from the Coca Cola company got mad at him or something. Because he was always talking about Coke. And he tweeted and he said, yeah, it's like the Coca Cola company is mad at me. But that's okay, I'll keep drinking that garbage. So it's this-

He was like the OG shit poster troll. Yeah, shit posting, right. And so it's this level of, I mean, it's really, really remarkable. It's this level of like complete engagement and comfort in the legacy media and then completely comfortable in the new media environment. Of course, you know, culminating and literally starting

as one Twitter competitor. And so, he's got a foot in both camps, but I describe that because I think he's a very important bridge figure, but he's a bridge figure. I think there are internet native politicians that haven't emerged yet. And I think we're getting glimpses of that with AOC and with I think with President Bukele and El Salvador.

Jasmine Crockett. Jasmine Crockett. Jasmine Crockett. You know, we're getting these glimmers of what the kind of, there are going to be politicians 10, 20 years from now where it's going to be like, oh, they took the Trump, you know, and time will pass and things will get refined. And so they will have taken the Trump playbook. They will, at some point, I think,

completely disconnect from legacy media and just run like a completely internet play. I actually think that hasn't happened yet. Now I'm sure Trump would argue that you don't need to do that. You can actually do both. But I do think there's probably a peer reform of it coming. Yeah. And say more about the style that Trump and maybe

Elon and others, the evolution has followed, where it seems like you're less trying to be unifying to everybody and more trying to appeal to one specific tribe very deeply and more perhaps consistent with the fragmentation or hyper partisanship that's permeated everything. Yeah. I think a big part of that is Trump's not a professional politician. And so almost every politician outside of Trump, like a huge number of them, are like their careers are in politics. And when you're in politics, you get very intense media training around what you can

say, what you can't say, how to position things. Never answer the question you're asked. Only answer the question that you want to, that you wish they would have asked. Like, Mark and I, through this immediate training, it's super sharp, and then you have a large constituency around you, a large staff that if you ever go outside of that, they correct you, they reprimand you, they retrain you. It's a real system and process, which has basically resulted in most politicians really

lacking what you would call authenticity. Trump, being Trump, is not listening to any, like he's just literally saying what's on his mind all the time, every time. And that actually works much better in kind of the modern sort of social media world. So it's like a big part of it, I think, as the function of that he's not trained in this business at all, which is part of the reason why I think a lot of people don't like him, is because he doesn't follow any of the protocol that you're used to. He's just so uncomfortably unusual. And, you know, that's a little bit of a too etch sword on that.

Yeah. Now, I agree with everything you just said, but I'd also add what he was trained on was he was trained in reality television. Yeah. And so I have not been on reality TV, but my understanding is if you're trained in reality TV, like your mission is to create drama.

Right, it's like the opposite training, right? Your mission is to be as interesting as possible. Yeah. And provocative as possible. And as controversial as possible, right? And controversial as possible. And then of course, the other thing he was trained in was professional wrestling, which is the,

you know, which, and I mean that in full seriousness, which is, you know, he's been very close friends with the McMahons for a long time. You know, Linda McMahon is the cabinet secretary, Vince McMahon is one of his, you know, long time friends. And he was actually, Trump is the only presidential candidate in history who's actually in the World Wrestling Federation

Hall of Fame, because he was, you know, famously actually in a WWF match actually fighting, which is on YouTube. And so, and the way I would describe it, Ben, if you agree with this is like, reality TV, like the Kardashians is like, is basically, it's like professional wrestling for women. And then professional wrestling is like reality TV for men.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's essentially right, yeah. Right, exactly. And they grew up together, right? Both reality TV and professional wrestling grew up together in this sort of new alternate media landscape. They were both very controversial for a long time. You know, reality TV- Right, pseudo real entertainment.

Yeah, that's right. Or maybe the most real thing, you know. Yeah. So yeah, our friend Rick Rubin says that these are actually the most real things, not the least real things. It's like, if you think professional wrestling is fake, just wait until you read the newspaper.

So, but, you know, he was, you know, he literally was a master of both reality TV with The Apprentice and also a master So, but, you know, he was, you know, he was, you know, he literally was a master of both reality TV with the apprentice and also a master of professional wrestling. And to your point, Ben, like that, that's a completely different playbook, right? That's a playbook that, you know, for better, for worse,

mass much better to the new media environment, which is personality driven, right? Individual over corporation. You don't care, like if you're following WWF or reality TV, you're not talking about brand names, you're talking about the people. To the point where the people actually then have their own products.

And for example, Kim Kardashian has this hugely successful line of women's clothing, multi-billion dollar business, and many of these other stories do as well. But individuals over corporate brands, and then authenticity over fakeness. Right, what you see is what you get over plasticity, and then drama over, yeah, like heightened drama over suppressed drama.

And then we'll get to this more, I know, but then going direct, right, which is a big thing that makes both reality TV work and that makes professional wrestling work is that the key people involved in them have these direct relationships with the audience that are just completely different. They didn't make their brands by being on network TV, they made their brands or being in profile TV. They made their brands or being in profile newspapers. They made their brands in large part by going direct. Or like a very obscure cable station, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense that in a supply constrained world, you'd want to stay out of drama. And when the internet shifts the structural dynamics such that demand is the scarcity scarcity you'd want to create drama to to compete with all the other new voices that are emerging. So with that maybe let's go more into And by the way this is a very that point is so important because so much of the extreme partisanship is caused by that, like the either aversion or

attraction to the extreme drama, as opposed to specific policies. Like it's kind of a very interesting thing where now on the internet everybody's going to all Trump's policies and going back and having like Obama talk about the border or, you know, tariffs or any of the or manufacturing, reshoring manufacturing, all these kinds of ideas. And so you're like, well, if the ideas are the same, why is everybody so mad at Trump? Well, it's what you're saying.

He's high drama. And they want stability, low drama. And that's more of the divide than the actual political positions in a lot of cases. Like Trump being like pro-peace used to be like a very strong left-wing position, but not in the way he is. And so that's an important distinction. Yeah, so someone said something like,

oh, we're trying to figure out what the new left is all about, maybe let's just see whatever positions Trump takes, whatever the opposite is, that figure out what the new left is all about. Maybe let's just see whatever Trump, whatever positions Trump takes, that'll be the, whatever the opposite is, that'll be what the new left is about. Yeah, which has been a very effective trick for him because he's kind of taken over traditional positions of the Democratic Party, which has been kind of an effective political tool. But the way he does it is he takes this high drama, reality TV approach to that issue, and then all of a sudden it's his issue, and he wins it.

And then he can corner them into a very niche set of issues, which they hang on to, whatever men and women supports, all that kind of thing. Yeah. Kamala's for they, them. That, you know, Trump's for they, them. Trump is for you. There's a great advertisement to that effect.

Mark, talk about Life the Movie, because I think it gets at some of these ideas. Neil Gabler, that's a great book, by the way. Yeah, so this is one of the great books in media theory. So the author is Neil Gabler, and the book is called Life the Movie. And it's one of these books where you read it and you're like, half the time you're like, this is all obvious. And the

other half you're like, oh my God, like this is all just getting started. And this is like really profound. And I have to really think about this much harder. So the book is from like, 28 years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the book was written, Gabler is a sort of journalist writer. He did the big biography of Walt Disney and is kind of very into, you know, Hollywood entertainment media. And so, but this was his kind of theory book and it came out, yeah, it was like the late 90s or like 2000 right around that time. And it really built in, it really built on what had happened in the 90s on two mega stories, which are, you know, forget forgotten now, but were mega, mega, mega, mega stories at the time, which was the Clinton-Lewis affair

on the one hand and then the OJ case on the other hand. And for people who weren't around then, both of those stories were just like absolute saturation bombing of the media. And specifically cable television, cable news really came into its own kind of during that period. And it was those two stories. And you could basically, as a cable news station, you could just came into its own kind of during that period and it was those two stories.

And you could basically as a cable news station, you could just do 24-7 coverage of OJ or 24-7 coverage of Clinton-Lewinsky and drive ratings. So they were kind of these mega stories. And they were these stories that played out over years, right, because all these twists and turns and who was telling the truth and who was lying and the accusations and the conspiracy theories and, you know, did the LAPD plant all the evidence and, you know, da-da-da-da-da, and what did Hillary know and when did she actually throw, you know, a lamp at Bill's head?

You know, it's just like these stories just had, like, as they say, unbelievable legs. And then, you know, people started to talk in those days. You know, those are kind of the two big mega stories where you start to hear this concept of like basically, you know, there would almost be seasons to the drama, right? So, you know, season one of Clint Lewinsky was the affair. Season two was it becoming public. Season three was the congressional investigations. Whatever.

Season four was the Star Report, which is a whole other sort of report that came out that was super salacious. And so same thing with OJ, because you had the trial, the entire thing. And then OJ, he got off. And then there was a second trial with the civil trial that he was convicted.

And then there was the third trial when he held up a bunch of guys in Las Vegas who were selling his memorabilia. So he went to prison. And then he actually went to prison for that. And was he unfairly convicted for that, because it was revenge for this and that. Anyway, so these were just mega, mega stories.

And so Gavril sort of lays out this kind of theory, very consistent with a lot of what we've been talking about, and in particular talking about this new media environment of cable and AM radio and so forth and the early internet. It was like early internet. Like there were internet news groups that were super active.

And a lot of people, like the Star Report is actually a good example. One of the first PDFs that a lot of people downloaded and read was the Star Report, which was the report on the Clinton-Luinsky affair by the independent council at that time. And so I remember millions of people downloaded their first PDF to be able to read that report and find out what happened.

So anyway, so he writes this book. And basically what he says in the book is, basically what he says is, life of the movie. He says basically non-fiction beats fiction. He said in a truly open, decentralized, fully competitive media environment, like the one that we were talking about and we now live in, he's like basically, essentially it was like,

imagine how stressful it is to be like a fiction writer, like a novelist or a screenwriter right now. You're trying desperately to come up with enough interesting things to put into a two-hour movie or a 300-page novel. And then in real life, you've got these stories that are not just a single event, but literally play out over many, many years with unbelievable twists and turns.

And it's all real. And basically, reality is much stranger and more bizarre than fiction, right? Because you think about it, it's like fiction is where we make things up, and then reality is like relatively boring in comparison. It's like, no, no, no, reality is actually more interesting.

Reality is stranger and more wild, and it's inherently unpredictable, and by the way, the stakes are higher, because like real people's lives are at stake. More unbelievable. Yeah, more unbelievable. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I'll just give you an example.

There's an allegation. I don't know if it's true, but there was an allegation that came out during the Clinton Lewinsky thing, which is because Bill had lied to Hillary and everybody else about the affair. And then the truth came out and Hillary got super mad. And so like, there's this story,

and I don't know if this is true, but there's a story that like Hillary didn't talk to Bill for like nine months or something. And then she finally basically talked to him. And then he bought that was, and then the day after was the day he bombed. Ben, you remember he bombed, what was it, Kosovo? Yeah, Kosovo, yeah.

And blew up the, I think it turned out to be like a pharmaceutical plant or something like that. And so then there was this allegation that basically Hillary, what did Hillary do? Did she tell him that she'd only make up with him if he like bomb Kosovo?

Like, so like, I don't know if that's true, but that's such an inherently more, like, actual lives, wars, politics, presidential impeachments, people going to prison, like the stakes are just so much higher. And so what Gabbler basically said is fiction is effectively dead in terms of its cultural relevance. Basically, not reality is going to dominate everything. And for basically for the rest of time, we're going to basically be living in effectively

real life reality, omni media, reality television shows encompassing kind of every aspect of our life. And that basically that's going to be our universe, which I would say if, I don't know what his opinion is of what's happening right now, but I would say events since then have certainly, for me, validated. It's certainly gone in that direction.

Yeah. Well, there's this term that the term of art now is, there's this thing that Marvel Cinematic Universe, the MCU, which is like this whole world of all Marvel movies and TV shows. And so, and then there's this theory that there's like the Trump cinematic universe, right? And then there's the, you know, there's the MCU, which is like this whole world of all the Marvel movies and TV shows. And so, and then there's this theory that there's like the Trump cinematic universe, right? And then there's the, you know, there's the Democratic, you

know, the Resistance cinematic universe. And then there's the COVID cinematic universe. And there's the, right? And so any of these real life things that are happening, if you want to, you can enmesh yourself in them 24-7, right? And this new media landscape will just feed you infinite content on whatever these things are. And that does seem to describe our time pretty accurately.

One quote we talked about offline is the Dana White, if the media hates it, you've really got something. And I want to juxtapose that. He was referring to UFC. Yeah, but I want to juxtapose that. He was referring to UFC. Yeah, but I want to juxtapose. Go for it. Maybe you could describe, if you want to, maybe describe the history of UFC and the media

and how they dealt with it. Yeah, yeah. Well, when he started, and he acquired UFC. So it was started before him. But he couldn't get it on anything. They're selling not central media, not on cable TV, not on anything. And then I think he finally got it on Spike TV.

And Spike TV, I believe, like charged him to put it on Spike TV. If I recall correctly. So, just basically no airtime at all. Like this is, nobody's going to like this. It's crazy, it's stupid, dah, dah, dah, dah. And certainly no coverage, no media coverage, no sports pages covered it, nothing like that.

And they built it up. They paid to be on Spike TV, they kind of built up an audience slowly and all of a sudden, you know, now it's completely mainstream. And I think, oh, maybe he was actually referring to slap fights, which of course the media also hates. And I think it's just an internet phenomenon at this point, but a huge one. Yeah, so when you listen to his story, the way it played out is basically for the first several years of UFC, it was just like pushing this rock up a hill,

as Ben said, where you couldn't get coverage, you couldn't get anything, you couldn't get distribution. Traditional media hated it. And by the way, politicians and authority figures of all kinds. And that was a huge issue in the early years, in contrast to other sports that would be on TV or have these big contracts or advertising deals or whatever.

But then this inversion happened, and again, it's consistent with the change in the media landscape we've been talking about, where all of a sudden the media's opposition became a selling point, where the fact that the media hated it itself made it more enticing. So it's a glad rebellion. If the fact that the media hated it itself made it more enticing. Right. So if the, and it's in the Clyde Rebellion, if the authority figures love it,

there must be something wrong with it. If the authority figures hate it, it must be really cool. And so it really started to invert at some point in the 2000s. And the sort of media hate started to work for him. And then the other thing he says is he said they were the early adopter of social media in sports. Like the minute he saw social media,

he knew this was the future of everything, because it's the thing that would route around these, you know, basically these highly biased authority figures and let people actually talk about the thing that they loved. By the way, the same thing happened with the NBA, which is a kind of a little known story. I got this whole story, David Stern, before he passed away, told me the whole story, but the NBA,

so the NBA was the first league to kind of, well, it was the first league to like really integrate. And so kind of in the seventies, the teams became basically, every team was almost all black players from, you know, no black players in the sixties. And the audience and the media turned on them vicious and just said, it's a drug league,

everybody's on cocaine, da da da da, to the point where media completely dropped the league so famously that the Magic Johnson finals where he scored 42 points playing center as a rookie wasn't televised live, It was on tape delay. And so the way the NBA got around this was very similar to the UFC, is they got a contract with USA TV.

And they started getting the games on USA TV. And then, all of a sudden they had the magic bird thing and that built momentum. And then Michael Jordan came into the league and then now it's a huge thing. But the media had like completely turned against the league to the point where they shut them out of live broadcasts, even for the NBA finals.

And then the kind of entire thing came back using kind of alternative media and going right to the people and that kind of thing. So, and I think that, you know, to Mark's point, that probably enhanced it that as an NBA fan, you had to watch it on USA, you had to get cable and watch the USA TV station, which made you a much more loyal fan

in the way that the UFC fans are massively loyal in an incredible way. What's fascinating about the NBA as well, as we're talking about these topics, it also sort of has demonstrated some of these trends where viewership in the game is down, but people are obsessed with sort of the media around the game.

People are obsessed with the drama. Yeah, yeah, it's all holy, yes, yes, yeah. But there's many reasons for that one, but yeah, but that's another one where it's a move to social media That's another one where it's a move to social media off of kind of television media. People call this past election the podcast election or many people are noting sort of the influence of people like Rogan and others.

Democrats are asking, why don't we have our own Joe Rogan? Trump has been the best politician of recent, of course Obama was great and so has Nate, but Trump recently at using these new channels and you talk to people on both sides of the aisle and when you talk to your dumb friends, they're saying, hey, where's our Joe Rogan or what's our new media strategy?

How do you make sense of what's happening there? Well, the Democrats had a Joe Rog Well, the Democrats had Joe Rogan. His name was Joe Rogan. So that was just an oops on their part, I think. So let's talk structure and then come back to the specifics. So the structural observation I would make is, so there's this concept we talk a lot of business, we call it the barbell, or we call it death of the middle, which is you, as sort of, as industries mature, you tend to start with

things that are kind of of a certain level of scale, a certain level of complexity, depth, price, whatever, and then markets tend to polarize, and then you tend to get this barbell effect where the things in the middle start to die, and then you basically have the rise of the edges. And so the classic example of this is retail shopping. You used to have general stores and then department stores that had a pretty good selection of pretty good things at pretty good prices.

And then over the course of the last 30 years, all of those kind of general purpose stores, department stores have gotten wrecked and replaced by Barbell. And the Barbell, you got Walmart and Amazon on the one side of the Barbell, which is just massive selection that no department store can match at lower prices at higher scale. And then you've got the boutiques. You've got the Gucci store and the Apple store

on the other side, selling something very specific and unique, often at much higher prices. And so one of our observations for a long time has been that that tends to happen in many different industries. It's happened in banks. It's happened in banks. It's happened in ad agencies, many other media companies, many other industries.

It turns out, I think that's what's happening in media formats right now. So the standard television show is either, I think, 23 minutes with seven minutes for commercials or 43 minutes with 70 minutes for commercials. And then 43 minutes with like 17 minutes for commercials. And then if you watch cable news or whatever, they have 43 minutes of content, let's say, in the hour. But then they break it up because the commercial breaks.

They break it up where they cut to commercial every five minutes or something. And so any given interview can only be whatever, three or four minutes long if it's live. Or they have to go across multiple segments. But it's sort of the cliche, as you're watching an interview with somebody on cable news, and it just starts to get interesting,

and then the host says, well, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you for coming in. And it's like, well, wait a minute. Why do you have to- It's actually a technique, by the way. As soon as somebody says something interesting, you're like, whoa, gotta go. Throw the commercial. And it's like, why do you have to leave it there?

You've got the person in the studio. You could go for another hour. You could go for another three hours. But you choose not to. And even the long form, even 60 minutes, which is the 43 minute version. By the way, it's not 60 minutes. It's 43 minutes because of the commercials.

But even there, it's like a long form interview is like 20 minutes long. That's a huge, like in the old media environment, if you got a 20 minute interview on the air on Sunday night, that was like a very, very big deal. The cliche of our time is that attention spans are collapsing and this is the rise of social media and TikTok and short form video.

And so the cliche is, you know, and you hear this constantly is, you know, kids only want to watch two minute videos and the whole thing. Well, so it turns out, I think it's actually, no, it's actually the barbell. Kids want to watch either twominute videos and da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da we're going to leave it there. You can actually fully articulate a point of view on any topic. And part of this is the no gatekeepers thing. And so the range of topics has expanded a lot. But part of it is you can actually talk for a long time.

And you can go on YouTube. And you can watch, in some cases now, these are running six, seven, eight hours long of people talking. I did Lex Friedman earlier this year. I think it was three and a half hours. And so it's just this, you know, and with three and a half hours, I mean, first of all, it's all on demand and, you know, they segment the videos

and so you can decide which parts of it you want to watch. But, however, you know, if you're an interesting person and have interesting things to say, you can like actually fully, fully articulate and explore a topic. And I think what basically that format has uncovered is there's actually tremendous hunger in the country and in the world for actual long-form intelligent commentary.

I should note that Charlie Rose was the sort of, I think, kind of test case for this. And he's been a friend of mine for a long time. And I was on the show multiple times. And he got he got he got he was he was Me tooed. Me tooed, as they say. But look, he got, he got, you know, he was, he was on person. He metude as they say, but you know, like he did this for a long time. And, you know, but he did this, you know,

and he was for, it was an hour long show, but he would let, I think it was on public TV for a long time and he would let people go for 50 minutes or something. And so he proved it. And for some reason, people didn't pick up the hints until the podcasters came along. Cause there's nothing else like that.

Like after Charlie Rose, there was nothing else like that until the podcasters and then the podcasters picked along. Because there's nothing else like that. Like after Charlie Rose, there was nothing else like that until the podcasters, and then the podcasters picked it up and ran with it. And so anyway, I find this to be extremely encouraging. I think it turns out that there are a large number of people who have actually been starving for real discussion and real content. I think there's a corollary to this, which is I think

the jury's in now. I think you can make the claim television makes you dumb in a really fundamental way, because like literally it cuts off all the interesting conversations, right, as they're about to get interesting. It kind of has to be intellectually impoverishing as a consequence of the structure of the business and of the format. But the podcasts don't have that problem. And again, look, it's not that the podcasts are going to be perfect, and it's not like there's not going to be people on the podcast who are going to say crazy things or whatever. But if you're interested in a topic, you can go online now, and the world's experts can explain it to you in enormous detail.

And it turns out the audience for that is very large. Oh, and then the other thing is, you know, YouTube gives these guys, you know, data on completion rates. And it's like the completion rates on these long-form podcasts, it's much higher than people, you know, than people might expect. And so it's incredibly exciting that this is a conceivable thing. And then maybe we might touch on, if this holds, and as you said, it is pretty clear, 2024, the podcast thing was a very big deal for Trump.

And then the books are coming out now on the 2024 campaign, and it's becoming clearer and clearer. Like, all the Kamala people now greatly regret that they didn't put her on more long-form podcasts. But, you know, the other question is, is this going to change the skill set and aptitude and ability, you know, is this going to change the threshold for what it now is going to mean to run for office or to be an authority figure? Like, you know, is the new threshold that you have to be able to go on a long-form podcast and talk for three hours and be interesting?

Because I can tell you, like, to Ben's point, traditional media training does not teach you how to do that. And then a large number of people who have been in charge of things for the last 50 years are definitely not able to do that. And a lot of, you know, a lot of, let's say, incumbent authority figures today are not able to do that. And so is that going to be the new threshold for success in the public arena, I think, is an interesting question.

Yeah, the other thing on podcasts, which is I think the thing that is causing the Democrats fits right now in terms of how to counter this strategy, is it's a reversion to the old form of journalism that I mentioned at the very beginning of this podcast, which is these podcasters are not trained journalists, they're not trained experts, they're not highly schooled, they're comedians and, you know, sports guys. And, you know, so if you look at anyone from Charlemagne the God to Joe Rogan to

Theo Vaughn, like the big podcasters are regular people who aren't coming in with strong partisan points of view. They're coming in wanting to learn. And so as a result, like they are actually open to arguments on both sides, which is the thing that they've a little bit outlawed in the kind of traditional democratic media, which is you can't platform that person.

There was a huge rage at Bill Maher for meeting with President Trump. So that whole idea that, okay, we're going to have a democratic podcaster is antithetical to podcasting, which is no, we're going to have a regular guy who just asks questions and wants to learn things, is what people want to see. Because I want somebody like me asking this guy who's an expert or running for office some questions, what I would ask.

I think that's the adjustment they're going to have to make, is like, okay, now this is going to be a real conversation, which means it's not going to be a priori partisan, which is a very new world. And like when you watch like CNN or Fox or whatever, the host is always asking a gotcha partisan question. Always. You watch Joe Rogan or like the Breakfast Club, they're not really like that. They're actually wanting to know the answer to the question.

Yeah. As somebody who's been on the receiving end of both of those, it's extremely, the first time if you've been, if you just deal with traditional press, you're just like every single question is an attempt to blow you up. It's like catch you in a contradiction or to somehow get you to say something that's gonna wreck your career, get you fired. Which is why you need the media training.

You don't need any media training to go on a podcast. Right, right, you need the anti media training. The other thing, and maybe this is obvious now, but the other thing is the three hour podcast doesn't work if it's everything, if you have to stop every five seconds because you have to accuse somebody of saying something racist.

So this like, or sexist or whatever, this speech suppression thing, this sort of puritanism that sort of kicked in in a large part of American public life over the last 10 years with people getting blown up for saying one thing wrong, that just doesn't, that just like kills your ability, it kills your ability to have discussion, which is of course what the intention of it is. And it certainly kills your ability to have a podcast.

And so if there's like the, you know, if you are in a, let's say if you're in a culture, if you're in a political culture that wants to censor and cancel people, like the format can't work. Like, I don't know how you make it work. It's just, like, far too dangerous. And so, like, aspirationally, what you could say is this could drive the Democrats and the left back

more in the direction of free speech and away from cancellation. But we'll see if they actually are. Well, I think in order for this strategy to be effective, by the way, Gavin Newsom has done a pretty good job of that. I mean, you can argue to do whatever you want about Gavin Newsom and his evolving views. But his podcast is kind of in the correct direction. Now, of course, a lot of people in the Democratic Party

are furious at him for having Steve Bannon on, for having Charlie Kirk on, and so forth. And then being kind of regular with them, just having a conversation. But that is the right idea. Well, it's the right idea for a conversation and communication and getting, you know, evolving, you know, the Democrats towards a more back towards more open, freedom of speech, more interesting, full conversations. We do have to see whether it's going to work for him electorally.

Yeah, that's a different question. But I think if he wasn't running, if he was just a podcaster, I think his podcast would be pretty popular. I mean, I think it is like fairly popular. He's probably the only politician right now with a true podcast. Yeah, that I know, sure, yeah. Now, if he comes in 20th in the 2027 primaries, I will, we can talk. It's a tricky thing given he's running for office. I agree, I agree. Like it's, you kind of want to be on the other side,

but yes. Yeah, do they really want, does his base really want him to do this? So yeah, we'll see, we'll see. Right, Kamala going on Call Her Daddy didn't achieve the same impact as Trump and JD Vans going on, Rogan and Theovol.

Well, yeah, and that was kind of like a weird choice because like that's a, you know, Joe Rogan and, you know, even like, you know, a lot of these podcasts, the Breakfast Club or Bill Maher or whatever, they talk about politics. She was probably the first politician ever on Call Her Daddy. It was just a weird choice in that way.

Everybody's like, why would a candidate go on that? That is a podcast, but it's not a podcast about this. That audience doesn't care about this. That audience is into some whole other thing. Well, and one of the great mysteries, one of the great mysteries, and again, this is coming out in the campaign books. Just this book, Fight, that came out with two top reporters

last week talks about this at great length. And one of the great mysteries of 2024 that will last forever, we'll never know the answer to, is like if Kamala had gone on Rogan and sat there for three hours, like would it have, would it? And you know, Rogan makes almost all of his guests look good, right? Like almost everybody comes out.

He's very, very friendly, regardless of your point of view. Right, but like, you know, would she, you like, you know, how well would that have gone? And, you know, people had different theories on that. And it's one of those, I think it's gonna be one of those great mysteries because we'll never know. Yeah, I think, like, I think that one of the challenges with that whole campaign is, you know, to this day,

who knows what Kamala thought on so many issues. Just because it never came out. Like there were the talking points, it was very, very structured. But what was her real economic policy? What was her real tech policy? What was her real foreign policy? It never felt like we got great depth on that,

even in the debate, even, you know, in any of the formats. Whereas you kind of knew exactly Trump's positions by the end of the podcasts. And so would that have helped or hurt? And if it would have helped, you know, I would say the people advising her in her campaign did her a great disservice helped, you know, I would say the people advising her in her campaign did her a great disservice because, you know, we didn't know what they, we just didn't know what that was.

Like I don't know what it was, you know, at all. I paid very close attention. Yeah. It's fascinating. We're sort of talking around it, but you know, when your party is out of power, you have to learn sort of the skills of subversion, right? And comedy and sort of contrarian thinking, these are tools of subversion

or tools that help you when you're not in power. When you are in power, you know, asking too many questions, comedy, you know, that might not help you, right? And it's funny because when I was in college, Democrats, when Bush was in power, they had mastered the tools of subversion, right? John Stewart, Steve Colbert, Dave Chappelle, they had the comedians, they had the sort of contrarian intellectuals.

And now that Democrats are out of power and Republicans are in power, both the right has to learn how to sort of evolve from the underdog who's always questioning to the establishment, to can you actually get things done and move the needle, and the left has to learn a little bit of some of these tactics that the right used when they were out of power. I think that's right, although there is like this subtlety to it where there's power in the White House

and then there's power in Congress and then there's power in the press and power in academia and the other institutions. And so while the White House and Congress have moved to right-wing power, the other institutions are still left-wing power, a lot of the ones that kind of, and the media, and kind of the mainstream media.

So, and I think that the Democrats, are to be fair to them, are stuck a little bit in between that because they're protecting certain parts of the establishment and then against other parts of the establishment and that's put them in. And I think they need to choose, right? Like, you know, like if I was running the Democratic Party,

I would say, okay, look, we either have to, we gotta go full rebel and like then we can't be like, we actually have to be against CNN as well as Fox News and all this shit and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and every single one of them and we got to be like against the expert class if we're really gonna be the rebels because that's what it takes to be a rebel and that that's where they're getting kind of squeezed between kind of two ideas.

Yeah. So let's, we've been talking at a structural level, at a theoretical level. Why don't we make this a little bit practical, a little bit applied. Mark, what would you say to that? Well, let's start with Ben, because Ben Coaches is our CEO.

So I'm a true radical on this topic. So let's start with the moderate. I think you're a little more kind of further than I would be. But we're bigger and different than our companies are. So I think as a startup, it's going to be, so it used to be like when we started the firm, not that long ago, that you could tell your story to the biggest

possible audience kind of through the media. That was like the try true technique and you would explain to them what you're doing and if it's interesting to the world and they would tell it and so forth. That's become both difficult and suboptimal. So difficult in that it's very possible that you go and say, hey, we've got this interesting new product and the story has come out that of all the possible things that could go wrong with it, as opposed to the things that it could do.

It doesn't matter, it could be like a cure for cancer and the articles might be, they're going to overpopulate the earth by having people live too. By the way, this isn't a made up thing. These are actual stories that have come out. So you have to be very, so that's a difficult thing. Then the other thing is it's not going to be as clear as your story coming from you.

Because you can now tell your story from you, that ends up being much more effective. So having a real direct content media strategy and capability and so forth, which is by the way, not coincidentally, why we were so excited about having you join Eric, is you really need that capability if you're going to reach the world with your message or with your products and so forth. So that went to being nothing to a nice to have too.

It really has to be your core strategy for telling what you're doing. Now, as you grow, you end up showing up in the media whether you like it or not. And I think that it's still, and still a lot of people read it and still like if you're building a product and your competitor puts a story in the press about you

that's bad or not true or whatever, that's going to have a big effect on your customers, particularly if you're an enterprise company, they'll take that New York Times article to every single one of your prospects and say, these guys are bad guys or whatever. You still need a strategy for dealing, I think, with the press that deals with that kind of thing,

or you're just very vulnerable. And you can tell your story directly. But then it depends. If you've got a big enough megaphone, I think Elon Musk doesn't need to. He's got the biggest megaphone, and then he acquired X. Doesn't need that part of the strategy. But if you've got a somewhat big megaphone,

and you have a certain number of followers, and this and that and the other, then I think you have to have a balanced approach, or have both approaches in order to keep yourself out of trouble. But I think there's no reason to like tell your primary story through the press. I think that's very dangerous.

There's always the question, you know, for founders of, hey, Elon is the best sort of entrepreneur in the world. Where can I copy him or sort of emulate what he's done versus where is it, don't try this at home. You know, that's, you know, Elon can get away with it, but you know, we can't. We're sorry, yeah, like he is, he's special. He's got very special capabilities.

And then look, he's, you know, anytime, by the way, politics would be the number one thing I would say, don't try it at home. In that it's so, it's almost always, you know, and I'm saying this as a kind of firm in that it's almost always, you know, and I'm saying this as a kind of firm that's gotten very involved in politics, but it was, unless it's necessary, it's very tough.

Like that's a very tough thing to manage from like, okay, I'm evangelizing a new company and trying to get people to understand my products and what I'm doing. And then you're in politics, that one takes a very high, probably a higher degree of skill than I think I have right now

in terms of like getting that right is complex. Now, it can be a boost that's been, I think, effective for Alex Carpet Palantir. He's done a tremendous job on it. I still don't really know what he thinks. He says like 99% of things he says are like Republican and then he says he's a Democrat. So like he's very clever in that way,

but like he's definitely pulling it off. And yeah, I think you would say is really, or we'd all say is sort of invest in the Go Direct capabilities. Founders who have great sort of reputations, public presences are able to recruit better, are able to have lower customer acquisition costs costs or able to have cheaper cost of capital because they can raise better and people often, you know, don't invest enough in high quality talent or in their own capabilities to sort of get their message out there or their company's message. Yeah, so this is a good, so there's a good subtle point in this that you're mentioning

and Mark alluded to earlier, which is people don't trust companies. The company follows, very few people follow the A16Z Twitter handle compared to the X handle versus who follows Mark or who follows Chris Dixon, who follows you or who follows me. So the person, particularly the person running the company, is very, very important that you let people know who you are. And one of the things, you know, early on in the firm that worked

extremely well for us was just like blogging, and this was the era of blogging. Because then, you know, people knew what they were joining, they knew who they were taking money from, that kind of thing, was actually in many ways much more effective than anything we could do through traditional media in that way. And now that's much more true. So being willing to articulate your point of view, your things and so forth in an interesting way

is I think essential now to a marketing strategy. Yeah, people don't wanna hear from the Coinbase handle, they want to hear from Brian Armstrong or people don't, not OpenAI, it's Sam Altman. And you guys were early to this calling your firm Andreessen Horowitz. Sort of the identification of people with the company, that's what people want to hear from. I doubt. Well, this has been a great discussion about the evolution of media.

Until next time. Ben, Mark, thanks for coming on. All right, thank you. Great, thanks Eric. Thanks everyone. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com

slash A16Z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time.