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

22:46You 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. It shows you how polarizing Trump is too. It was all good until you got elected, and then it was all bad. Mark, maybe what does Martin Grewey bring to this analysis? He's really shaped your thinking here. Yeah, Samarton Gury 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.

23:31But 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 happening 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 the book was published at the same time the Trump was winning the nomination. So it, you know, it was very, it was very, it looks in reference to hindsight extremely prescient.

24:04You know, even he, I think, would say he didn't know obviously that he was going to get proven as fast as it was. By the way, the book is today available in a formal edition by from Strype 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. So it was self -published on Kindle and then PDF bootlegs were kind of emailed around at the time. And it laid out this, basically, this thesis, which at the time sounded very radical, and of course, today just sounds like a description of what's happening.

24:37And 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, you know, somebody with a role in steering society and that might be anybody from a politician to a bureaucrat, to a reporter, to a doctor, you know, to an expert, you know, credentialed expert of any kind, so the people and think of those just generally as like experts. And then the other is institutional authority.

25:15So the institutions that are supposed to guide our society. And so that's the government, government bureaucracies, the news organizations, the universities, foundations, and Geos, right? And by the way, like if you read the press, it's actually very interesting. If you read the press, the standard form of article is expert says X, right? 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, right? And the expert is by definition a credential 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.

25:52And so that's the linkage between the individual authority, individual authority figures in the institutions, which is the authority, the authority, the authority of institutions certify the individuals, right? So Harvard is the authority of 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 the, basically mass media, mass education, centralized authority, the idea that there are a few really good universities that certify all the experts.

26:32You know, 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. So basically that whole idea of authority that you could basically trust and rely on is an artifact of the top down centralized era. And that basically social media is kind of bottoms up here to peer media, social media where people can share with each other. Basically, he made a very provocative claim at that point that that will basically destroy all authority.

27:03That 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's like, it seemed like too radical of a thesis, which is, well, why will that, you know, just because people can talk openly about things like why would that happen? 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.

27:32We are the authoritative source of truth. And he said, basically, the, the, the, I'm gonna use my metaphor here, the, the social media is many things. One of the things it is, is an X -ray machine. And so, when an expert, you know, says something that turns out to be wrong, you know, in the old days, you know, nobody would necessarily write the story, be on page 34 or something, in the new world it goes viral on social media. And so, the, the, the world that you experience on social media as a, as a consumer is completely different, because what you're seeing every day are dozens or hundreds of accounts about how the experts are wrong.

28:05And he said the thing is they really are wrong. Like, you know, now sometimes they're accused of being wrong and they're not, but like they really are wrong a lot of the time because they're people and they're imperfect. And they have basically built, they have basically built up these reputations that actually cannot be factually supported and that when people, you know, when populations realize that these authoritative sources 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 that the, you know, Somebody said, your mouth raised, checks your body, can't cash.

28:32You know, they've written these checks about their 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, sentence Martin's book came out. Well, actually, you see a long slide in institutional authority and trust that started actually in the 1970s.

29:06And we could talk about that because it predates the internet. But then you see actually this, like basically this much faster collapse, basically after 2015. And then in particular in the last three years, it's just the numbers that just caved in. And so the universities, for example, their approval ratings and their sort of trust ratings for the population writ large are just completely created in the last three years, the medical profession, the press, many of the nonprofits, the numbers are just collapsing. So, yeah, so you look back now and you're like, oh, okay, yeah, that was a correct assessment.

29:41That is actually playing out now. A question from there would be like, how far does it go? And you know, 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 and 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 is in the White House, Democrats feel great about the economy. Republicans feel horrible. Now, from St.

30:09Republicans feel great. Democrats feel horrible. It's like just a straight inversion on everything as partisan all the time. Yeah. And so, my point is that the partisanship is, I would argue, the partisanship, the partisanship is actually holding up the reputation of institutions that otherwise were their ratings, their trust ratings were literally good as zero, which I think is probably what happens in the fall in a certain time. Well, first off, what happened in the 70s to give full context? Yeah, so the, 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.

30:47Because Vietnam was just like basically you know, gigantically controversial and, you know, sort of very discredited, you know, for a long time and then obviously ended very badly. And then Nixon, you know, water date, and then, and then just like, you know, reveals there were other things in the 70s at the time, environmental movement was revealing all these dirty secrets of industry. The, you know, the church and pipe committee were revealing all these dirty secrets the intelligence agencies. And so, you know, you just kind of have this, you had kind of this activated social consciousness. You have this new generation, the boomers that were like very, like politically activated, socially activated, and then you just had a lot of data points that the institutions were going bad.

31:24That's one argument. That's like the social cultural argument. The other argument is actually the structural argument. It's when peak centralization started to collapse. Our friend biology 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 peaked in the 1950s. And so in the 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.

31:59You had the smallest number 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 when that happens, of course, those organizations get a tremendous amount of control.

32:31And 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, you know, didn't matter. And so a famous example was, you know, what percentage of the US population knew that FDR was in a wheelchair when he was president, right? Or, you know, or what percentage knew all the stuff we now know Kennedy got up to. Well, good thing that would never happen today with that, you know, that would never, never happen today. Exactly. But yeah, he even the affairs that aren't true, get published.

33:00To that 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. 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 first, 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.

33:35And in particular, I was, you know, so Rush Lambo 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, tell the common points that you had the rise of paperback books. And so 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. New's letters, memograph newsletters, photocopy newsletters actually became a big thing in that period.

34:05And then cable TV emerged, you know, kind of late in the 1970s, into the 1980s and started to really blow the doors open. 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. Oh, it's in board services. And then CompuServe and Prodigy, you know, we're 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 wondered, it's like, okay, if I'm, if I'm a trusting individual, right, If I'm inherently trusting individual, I'm just going to watch the 5 o 'clock news and I'm just going to believe that they tell me.

34:42But if I'm 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, 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. And so that would be the structural view.

35:11And 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 there's both sort of saying, saying, hey, when can we go back to an era where we all had civil conversations and all got along and sort of gold and era and you were like, hey, maybe it wasn't as simple as we're making it here. Yeah, so that was also, I think that was also probably 2017 and that was my last onstage appearance at a mainstream industry conference.

35:51And I knew, I knew, that was another one where I didn't realize what I was getting into because Reed Hoffman had been a good friend of mine for a long time and Karen and I had I worked earlier in a career. I had known her for a long time, and she's running this very important conference. And so I was excited to be on stage with Reed and my good friend Reed and with Kara. And they both had become extremely, they both had become extremely politically activated. And so they both had, I would say, extremely negative, responses to Trump. And Reed senses, of course, become one of the largest donors in American history for left -wing politics.

36:26And of course, Kara is Kara. People can draw their own judgments. It's many hours of YouTube video to watch. So I got on stage, they basically started, all of a sudden there's like this extremely aggressive, I mean, they were attacking me as much, but there was like an extremely aggressive attack on, you know, basically it was the beginning of the tech as an able -eat fascism, you know, kind of wave that they've both gotten very into. And you know, and again, you kind of tell this, 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.

36:57Well, 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 the sort of the legend of the Sky Walter Cronkite. And so Walter Cronkite was a network news anchor for CBS News and for 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. It's a Vietnam war had been going for, I think, four years at that point. it was the American involvement of Vietnam, or maybe even five.

37:30And it was already going bad. And Walter Cronkite did this, you know, went to Vietnam, and came back and he did this thing where he came out against the Vietnam War. And it was this, and it was this, it was this truth, you know, 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 of this war, is it, is it 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 more prior to 1968?

38:00And 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 broadcast from 1964 to 1968, of course, what you find is he and everybody else like him was 100 % support of it. Right. And so, so, you know, it's the whole thing. And of course, 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, right? It was a Kennedy Johnson project.

38:32If 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 he flipped on it. He flipped from positive negative on it, a precise at the point when the country flipped from a Democratic president to a Republican president. So probably just a coincidence, maybe not. And so, and then there, by the way, there were huge disputes in those days, because there There are a lot of people who are like, well, the other point of view was if the media is coming out against a war with American soldiers in the field, like you're betraying those soldiers 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 they sympathizing with the enemy.

39:08Even in those days, it's not like everybody just to agree with everybody. There is a lot of myth making that takes place. And the other part of myth making it 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. For 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 of the government, who was this truth teller who gave them all the secret information, who was this unappetable source called Deep Throat.

39:5230 years later, we finally learned that 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, 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 even in those days, how much of this was, oh, and then of course it also turns out Bob Woodward had been an EV 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.

40:31And so, had felt recruited him to be an asset, like what exactly was a relationship. And so even in those days, there was more controversy than this sort of, the sort of rose color glasses, you know, kind of you would have it. But your question, the difference is, like in those days, you could speculate about all this, you could 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 could do something about it, which is you can go online and you could post. And you can go viral.

41:04Yeah, and it can go viral. And your point on engine versus camera, that's when the camera turns into an engine, right? Which is, you could 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 of things that you need to know that are true? No, there's obviously huge amounts of... The Internet has full spectrum of things that are clearly effective, things are clearly real to everything in the middle. I think there's a very large number of...

41:37There's lots of lessons. They say ops. There's lots 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 and then for sure it is also, 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 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.

42:11But when did you start to realize that things were changing in the media or that we were sort of entering a hyperpartisan era or what were kind of your Sort of inflection points and 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 70s 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, you know, Timork'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 Schelz about this potential pandemic in 1981.

43:17We're starting in San Francisco where kind of gay men were kind of getting this very deadly disease. 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 bath houses. So they had these things that were at bath houses in San Francisco where you know gay men would kind of hook up in that kind of thing. And so they all knew about this disease. There were only about 100 cases, I think, at the time was a very small number. And they were like, we got to close the bath houses now.

43:58But 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. Hidden was called Whitewash and it was in California magazine. I'm kind of telling the story of this cover -up 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 we got, there were protests, they protested around our house and that kind of thing that he was a homophobic and all this kind of thing.

44:44But then Fauci, who is actually in charge of public health policy at the time, kind of three oriented it around, no, no, no, it's not just gay sex. It's any kind of sex and it's intravenous traduous and this kind of thing. And the net net of that was like the, the bath houses weren't closed and so forth and it did become an epidemic, you know, where, you know, unlike COVID, it didn't have to, you know, it was only spread through, it was spread like 98 % or 95 % through gay sex. and the rest for intravenous drug use and almost none, it turns out through heterosexual sex. But we didn't really address it because of these politics.

45:31And 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 all on the side of, the left is like, wow, the left can do very bad things as well. I'm like, you know, there's a certain next, but there's 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.

46:08The young people, healthy people, all the 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 the whole central system worked. And I just say it's quite eye -opening. That whole story, by the way, is in David David Horowitz's book called Radical Son, which is one of the most, it's one of the most shattering. And it's just appreciate books, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's an absolutely shattering story given given the you know there's a kind of fashion universe in which you know it had been controlled to contain it.

46:53It really could have been you know like the whole flat and the curve thing on covid was hard because it spread so fast but eights did not like if you look at it it spread actually quite slowly you know by comparison so like those kinds of measures would have worked or you know what a prevent it probably 75 % of the deaths. In the same way that Peter Teel's book in 1995 was maybe a couple decades prescient into chronicling college campus activism. It seems like your father's work was a few decades prescient. I'm hearing for this for the first time, but Fouchy contributing to a noble lie or even something adjacent to that decades before is.

47:35And like, I mean, I think Fauci, you know, 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. You know, he never felt any guilt about the whole AIDS thing despite being like a huge catalyst in that. 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.

48:19And that same new playbook that was sort of native to social media helped influence, perhaps Elon, perhaps some others. Mark, when you described what was this new playbook? So I think Trump is a bridge figure. I actually think Trump, what's your spectral like media? The media, the way media works. I think Trump is a bridge figure and that we're gonna see new variations from here that are gonna be very interesting. But he's a bridge figure, which is he grew, he's of the generation that grew up with television newspapers, absolutely dominant. And so he's always had a very intertwined relationship with newspapers and with television.

48:55And obviously that culminated in having his own you know, top -rated television show for 15 years, but also he was, you know, he was, he was, he was, he was, Trump was a standard story in newspapers starting in like 1975. I think the New York Times for his profile, him in 1975, and then he was a fixture, as they say, in the New York media world and tabloids and major newspapers and entertainment television and everything else, you know, all the way to cable TV, he was on cable news all the time. You know, he'd go on Oprah, you know, 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 reporters and taking phone calls from reporters and the whole thing.

49:35And 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 legacy press to an extraordinary degree. And so he has the name. So I've had relationship. It really is. And if you talk to reporters, by the way, if you talk to reporters, like, you know, if he's major in newspapers, kind of off the record, they'll tell you, he calls them all the time. And a lot of them have his cellphone number and he'll pick up the calls and he'll talk to them and that he's a source for a lot of stories.

50:07So 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, then 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. And so he still has one foot kind of squarely in the kind of, describe his kind of legacy media world. But then the other side of it is, not only was he a pioneer going direct and that he literally had his own TV show with the apprentice, but also he was, people not forget, he was an actually an early adopter on Twitter for a public figure of that magnitude.

50:55and 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? 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, so anything that happens, there was like a Trump tweet in like 2013, where, like, he said it or predicted it or did it. Right? And it's just because like he actually, and I don't even know, I don't actually like to find out someday, but I actually don't know who got him spun up on this or did he figure this out himself, but he became a truly adopter.

51:35And so by the time the campaign started, he had already been a very, he was maybe the most kind of Twitter where in Twitter sensitive kind of major celebrity like that, public figure like that, probably four years, even prior to running for office. Probably the first, certainly the first prominent politician that wrote his own tweets, right? That, the only thing that was very, very different about him was that. I mean, for better or worse, he'd write these, you know, tweets that clearly came from him, but often with misspellings and all the apps or that kind of thing. Whereas 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.

52:17Yes. I mean, you know, then you get these famous 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 point. I don't think I have either. And then he did a phenocase dysledgender for drinking diet coke and then he did his follow up where he's like, I don't know. It was like, say, it was 2015. What is it for him 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.

52:45I'll keep drinking that garbage. which... So... He was like the... It's the... It's the... It's the... It's the... It's the shitposting, 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 and legacy media and then completely... Completely comfortable in the new media environment. Of course, you know, culminating, and literally starting his own Twitter competitor. Right? And so, like, he's got a foot in both cans, but I just... I describe that because I think he's a... I think he's a very important bridge figure, but he's a bridge figure.

53:14I think there are internet native politicians that haven't emerged yet. And I think we're getting glimpses of that with AOC and with President Buckleley and El Salvador. Jasmine Crockett. Jasmine Crockett. We're getting these glimmers of what the kind of, there are going to be politicians 10, 20 years from now where it's gonna be like, oh, they took the Trump, you know, it's 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 like a media and just run like a completely internet play. I actually think that hasn't happened yet.

53:46Now, 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 pure form of it coming. Yeah. And say more about the style that that Trump and maybe Elon or others, the sort of evolution has followed where it seems like you're less trying to be, you know, unifying to everybody and more trying to appeal to one specific tribe very deeply and more perhaps consistent with the fragmentation or hyperparsanship that's permeated everything. Yeah, I think a big part of that is the Trump's done a professional politician. And so almost every politician outside of Trump, like a huge number of them, are like their careers are in politics.

54:37And when you're in politics, you get very intense media training around, you know, 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, but there's this media training, it's super sharp. And then you have a large constituency or any large staff that if you ever go outside of that, they correct you, they reprimand you, they retrain you, like it's a real system in process, which is basically resulted in most politicians really lacking what you would call authenticity.

55:20And 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 a function of it, 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 two -inch thought on that. Yeah. No, no, no, I agree with everything you just said.

56:06But I also had what he was trained on was he was trained in reality television. Yeah. Right. And so I have not been on reality TV. My understanding is if you're trained in reality TV, like your mission is to create drama. Right. It's like it's like the opposite. Right. It's the opposite training. Right. Your mission is to be as interesting as possible. And provocation is possible, right? And as conservatives' possible, right? And controversy is possible. And then of course, the other thing he was trained in was professional wrestling, which is, you know, in, I mean, that in full seriousness, which is he was, you know, he's been very close friends with the McNanns for a long time.

56:39You know, Linda McNann is a cabinet secretary of Vince McNann 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 of 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've described it, Ben, see 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, I think that's essentially right, yeah.

57:14Right, 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 through a controversy for a long time, you know, reality TV. Sudo real entertainment. Yeah, that's right. Or maybe the most real thing, you know. Yeah. So yeah, we're a friend of your president. A friend recruitment 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. 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.

57:50And to your point, that's a completely different playbook. That's a playbook. That's a playbook that for better for worse mass, much better to the new media environment, which is personality driven, individual over corporation. You don't care 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 usually successful line of women's clothing, multi -billion dollar business. and many of these other, you know, stories do as well. But individuals over corporate brands and then authenticity over fictus.

58:30Right, what you see is what you get over plasticity and then drama over, drama over, yeah, like heightened drama over suppressed drama. And then, and then, and then, 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 newspapers. They made their brands in large part by going direct or a very obscure cable station.

59:11Yeah. It makes sense that in a supply constrained world, you'd want to stay out of drama and And in a, you know, when the internet shifts the sort of the structural dynamics such that that demand is the scarcity you'd want to create drama to compete with all the other new voices that are emerging. So with that, maybe let's go more into it. 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 we're now on the internet.

59:55Everybody'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, the idea, if the ideas are the same, like, why is everybody so mad at Trump? Well, it's what you're saying. He's high drama. And, you know, they want like stability, low drama. And, 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.

1:00:35And so, but that's an important distinction. Yeah. Someone said something like, oh, we're trying to 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. 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 effect of political till, 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.

1:01:12And then, you know, he can corner them into a very niche set of issues, which they hang on to, whatever men and women's sports, all that kind of thing. Yeah. Kamala's for they then, you know, that, you know, Trump is for you. There's a great, great advertisement to that, to that effect. Mark, talk about life of the movie because I think it, it gets at some of these, these ideas that we've been through. Neil Gablewere, that's a great, that's a great book, by the way. Yeah, so this is one of the great, one of the great books in media theory. So the author's Neil Gablewere and the book is called Life of the Movie.

1:01:44And it's one of these books where you read it and you're like half the time you're like, this is obvious in 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. So yeah, yeah, yeah, so the book was written. Gabbler's, Gabbler's a, the fan, so journalist writer, he did a big biography of Walt Disney and it's kind of very into Hollywood entertainment media. And so this was his kind of theory book and it came out, Yeah, I was like the late 90s, or like 2000, right around that time.

1:02:17And it really built in, it really built on what had happened in the 90s on two mega stories, which are, you know, someone forget, forgot now, but we're mega, mega, mega mega stories at the time, which was the Clinton, Lewinsky affair on the one hand and then the OJ case on the other hand. And, and for people who weren't around then, both of those stories were just like absolute saturation, saturation, bombing of the media. And, and, and, 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 do 24 seven coverage of OJ or 24 seven coverage of Clinton, Lewinsky, and Drever ratings.

1:02:51So they were the kind of these megastories. 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 did the LAPD plan until the evidence and you know, did it, did it, did it, what did Hillary know and when did she actually throw all the amp and it fills head. And you know, it's just like, these stories just had like, is they say unbelievable legs. And then people started to talk in those days. Those are kind of the two big megastories where you started to hear this concept of like basically, there'd almost be seasons to the drama, right?

1:03:22So season one of Clint Lewesky was the affair. Season two was it becoming public. Season three was the rational investigations. Whatever season four was the star report, which is a whole another sort of report that came out that was super salacious. And so, and same thing with OJ, because you know, you have the trial, you know, the entire thing. And then, you know, OJ, you know, 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 for the, you know, his, his, when he held up a bunch of, a bunch of guys in, in Las Vegas, who were selling his memorabilia.

1:04:00So he went to, and then he actually went to prison for that. And you know, was he, was he unfairly convicted for that because, you know, it was revenge for this and that. Anyway, so these were just mega megastores. And so Galberg 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. There were internet news groups that were super active. And a lot of people, like the Star Report, actually a good example.

1:04:28One of the first PDFs that a lot of people downloaded in red was the Star Report, which was the report on the Clinton -Lewinsky affair by the independent council at that time. And so I remember millions of people download of their first PDF, be able to read that report, and find out what had happened. So, so anyway, so he writes his book, and basically what he says in the book is, basically what he says is, life, the movie. He says, basically, not fiction beats fiction. He said in a truly like open, decentralized, fully competitive media environment, like the one that we were talking about and we now live in.

1:04:59He's like basically, essentially it was like, imagine how, 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, right, because you think about a stick fiction is where we make things up and then reality is like relatively boring in comparison.

1:05:35It's like, no, no, no, reality is actually more interesting. Reality is stranger and more wild and it's, right, it's inherently unpredictable. And by the way, the stakes are higher because like real people's lives are at stake and more unbelievable. Yeah, more unbelievable. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, you know, I'll just give you an example. There's an allegation. There's an allegation. I don't know if it's true, but there's 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.

1:06:04And so there's this story. And I don't know if this is true, but there's a story that Hillary didn't talk to Bill for like nine months or something. And then she finally basically talked to him, and then the day after was the day he bombed Ben, you remember he bombed? What was it, Kosovo? Yeah, Kosovo. And blew up the, I think it turned out to be a pharmaceutical plant or something like that. And so then there was this allegation that basically Hillary, you know, what did Hillary do? Did she tell him that she'd only make up with him if he liked Bob Kosovo? Like, it's so like, you know, like, is that, I don't know if that's true, but like that, that's such an inherently more intro, like actual lives, wars, you know, politics, presidential impeachment, people going to prison, like the stakes are just so much higher.

1:06:42And so what Gabri basically said is, fiction is effectively dead. In terms of its cultural relevance, basically not reality's gonna dominate everything. And for basically for the rest of time, we're going to basically be living in effectively real life reality. I'm an immediate 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 a validating. It's certainly gone in that direction. Well there's this term that the term of art now is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the this whole world of all the Marvel movies and TV shows.

1:07:23And 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, it's the, 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 in -mess yourself in the 24th, 7th. Right? And this new media landscape will just like feed you infinite content on whatever these things are. and that does seem to be, that does seem to describe our time as pretty accurately. One quote, we talked about offline as the Zeyna White.

1:07:57If the media hates it, you've really got something. And I want to juxtapose it. It was referring to UFC. Yeah, but I want to juxtapose it. Maybe you could describe it. Maybe you could describe it if you want to. Maybe describe the history of UFC and the media and how they dealt with it. Yeah, so, well, you know, when he started, And he acquired UFC, so it was started before him, but he can't get it on anything. Not like, they're starting that 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 charge -tam to put it on Spike TV.

1:08:41Right. It's like, by recall correctly. So, you know, just basically, no ear time at all. Like this is, you know, nobody's gonna like this. It's crazy. It's stupid. And, you know, and certainly no coverage. No media coverage. No sports pages covered it. Nothing like that. And, you know, they built it up. You know, they paid to be on Spike TV. They kind of built up an audience slowly and all of the sudden, you know, now it's, completely mainstream. And I think 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 I hear it.

1:09:26Yeah, so when you listen to his story, the way it played out is basically for the first several years of UFC, like 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, so politicians and, you know, authority figures and 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 made it more enticing.

1:10:05So if you've, it's the inter -clad rebellion, if the authority figures love it, they must do something wrong with it. If the 30 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 that 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 30 figures and let people actually talk about the thing that they loved.

1:10:36By the way, the same thing happened with the NBA, which is a kind of little non -story. I got this whole story, David Stern before he passed away. He 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 70s, the teams became basically, every team was almost all black players from the, you know, no black players in the 60s and the audience and the media turned on them vicious and just said it's a drug league, everybody's son cocaine did it 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 was in televised life.

1:11:24It was on tape the lay. And so the way the NBA got around this was very similar to the UFC is they got a contract with USATV and they started getting the games on USATV 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 that's a huge thing. But the media had completely turned against the league to the point where they shut them out of live broadcasts even for the NBA finals and then the entire thing came back using kind of alternative media and going right to the people I'm not kind of think. So, and I think that, you know, to Mark's point, that probably enhanced it.

1:12:04That is an NBA fan. You have to watch it on USA. You have 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 like massively loyal in an incredible way. With facemate, the NBA is it as well, as we're talking about these topic, is it also sort of has demonstrated some of these trends where you know, viewership in the game is down, but people are obsessed with sort of the media around the game. People are obsessed with the job. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's actually reasons for that one, but yeah, but that's another one where it's a move to social media off of...

1:12:47Yeah. Off of kind of television media, yeah. People called this past election, the podcast election, or many people are not doing 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 is 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 dimf at the Democrats had Joe Rogan.

1:13:27It's named Joe Rogan. So those are just an oops on their part, I think. So let's talk structure and then come back to this specific. So the structural observation I would make is, this is a concept we talk a lot in business, we call the barbell, or we call death of the middle, which is as sort of as industries mature, you tend to start with things that are kind of a certain level of scale, certain level of complexity, depth, price, whatever. And then you, markets tend to polarize. And then you tend to get the barbell effect where the things in the middle start to die. And then you basically have the rise of the edges.

1:14:02And 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 to pretty good things and pretty good prices. And then over the course of the last 30 years, you know, all of those kind of general -purpose stores, department stores have gotten wrecked and replaced by barbell. And the barbell that 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.

1:14:37And so one of our observations for a long time has been that that tends to happen in many different industries. It's happening in banks, it's happening 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 23 minutes with 7 minutes for commercials or 43 minutes with 70 minutes for commercials. And then if you watch cable news or whatever, 43 minutes of content, let's say in the hour, but then they break it up because of the commercial breaks, they break it up where they cut commercial every 5 minutes or something.

1:15:16And so any given interview can only be, you know, whatever three or four minutes long if it's live Or they have to go across, you know, multiple multiple segments But you know as it's sort of the you know the cliche as you you're watching an interview somebody on cable news And it just starts to get interesting and then the host says well, we'll have to leave it there You know, thank you for coming in and it's like well wait a minute It's actually a technique by the way, you know like as soon as somebody says something interesting and they're like What yeah, yeah, I gotta go through the commercial and so and it's like, you know Why do you have to leave it there?

1:15:44You'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, right? Like that's a huge, like for 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 in short form video.

1:16:16And so the cliche is, you know, and you hear this constantly is, you know, kids only want to watch two minute videos and touch it, touch it, touch it, touch it. The whole thing. Well, so it turns out, I think it's actually, it's actually the barbell. Kids want to watch either two minute videos or three hour Rogan episodes. Right, it's the barbell, right? And what is the three hour Rogan episode or like three minute episode have going for it? It doesn't have that thing where, just when it starts to get interesting, we're gonna leave it there. You can actually fully articulate a point of view on any topic.

1:16:46And part of this is the no date keepers 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. Right, 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, and with three and a half hours, I mean, first of all, it's all on demand. And they segment the videos. and so you can decide which parts of it you want to watch. But however, if you're an interesting person, I have interesting things to say, you can actually fully articulate and explore a topic.

1:17:19And 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, you know, he got, he got, you know, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was unversed. As they say, but, you know, look, he did this for a long time. And, you know, but he did this, but, you know, and he was for his 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.

1:17:57And so he proved it and for some reason, people didn't pick up the hints until the podcasters came 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 I've been around 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 could make the claim television makes you dumb in a really fundamental way, because literally it cuts off all the interesting conversations right as they're about to get interesting.

1:18:32It kind of has to be intellectually appoverishing as a consequence of the structure of the business and of the format, but the podcast don't have that problem. And again, look, it's not that the podcast are going to be perfect and it's not like there's not going to be people on the podcast. We're 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 a enormous detail and it turns out the audience for that is very large. Oh, and then the other thing is YouTube gives these guys data on completion rates and it's like the completion rates on these long -form podcasts.

1:19:01It's much higher than people, you know, than people might expect. And so like it's incredibly exciting that this is a conceivable thing. And then maybe we might touch on like if this holds, and as you said, like, you know, it is pretty clear, 2024, the podcast thing was a very big deal for Trump. And then it was a very big, you know, the books are coming out now on the 2024 campaign, and it's becoming clearer and clearer. Like all the common people not 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, 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?

1:19:40Like, is the new threshold that you have to be able to go on a long -for -podcast and talk for three hours and be interesting? Because I can tell you, 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, let's say incumbent authority figures today are not able to do that. So is that going to be the new threshold for success in the public arena? I think it was an interesting question. Yeah, the other thing that's on podcast, which is I think the thing that is causing the Democrats fit right 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 These podcasters are not trained journalists.

1:20:27They're not trained experts. They're not highly schooled. They're comedians and sports guys. So if you look at anyone from Showermain the God to Joe Rogan to Theo Vom, 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 be, you can't platform that person. You can't, there was a huge rage at Bill Mara for meeting with President Trump.

1:21:14So, that whole idea that, okay, we're gonna have a Democrat, a Democratic broadcaster is antithetical to podcasting, which is, no, we're gonna 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, you know, an expert or running for office some questions. What I would ask and that's 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, got you partisan question, always.

1:22:07You 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 in the receiving end of both of those, it's extremely, the first time you've been, if you just deal with traditional press, you just like every single question that attempt to blow you up, it's like catch you in a like contradiction or to somehow get you to say something is going to 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. Yes. Right. You need the anti media training.

1:22:39The 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 cue somebody of saying something racist. So this like, sexist or whatever, this speech suppression thing, this sort of peortanism that sort of kicked in in a large part of American public life over the last 10 years, when people getting blown up for saying one thing wrong. like that just doesn't, that just like kills your ability, it kills your ability to have discussion, which is of course what the attention of it is.

1:23:11And it certainly kills your ability to have a podcast. And so if there's like the, you know, if you are 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 it's like aspirationally what you can say, say as this could drive the Democrats on the left back, you know, more of the direction of free speech in a way from cancellation. But we'll see if they, you know, we'll see if they actually. I think in order for this strategy to be effective, by the way, Gavin Newsom has done a pretty good job with that.

1:23:48I mean, you can argue to do whatever you want about Gavin Newsom and his evolving to use. But his podcast is kind of in the correct direction. Now, of course, Of course, a lot of people in the Democratic Party are furious at them for having Steve Van and on for having Charlie Kirk on and so forth. But 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.

1:24:23We do have to see whether it's going to work for him literally. Yeah, that's a different question. but I think at the podcast, if he wasn't running, if he was just a podcast, 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 the true podcast. Yeah. That I know. Sure. Yeah. No. If he comes in 20th in the 20th, 27th primaries, I will. We can talk. It's a tricky thing given his running process. I agree. I agree. Like it's you kind of want to be on the other side, but yes, do they really want this is this is this is really want him to do this.

1:25:04So yeah, we'll see. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Kamala going on call her daddy didn't achieve the same, you know, impact as Trump and JD Vans going on, you know, Rogan and Theo Vaughan. Well, they, yeah, the and that was kind of like a weird choice because like that's a But Joe Rogan and even like a lot of these podcasts, the Breakfast Club or Bill Mar or whatever, they talk about politics. She was probably the first politician ever on Caller 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. Like that audience doesn't care about this.

1:25:51That audience is into some whole netherworld. Well, one of the great mysteries, one of the great mysteries, you know, and again, this is coming out in the campaign books. I just saw this book a fight that came out with two type reporters last week. I'm talking about this a great length. And one of the great mysteries of 2024 that will last forever. We'll never know the answer to is like if if Kamala had gone on Rogan and sat there for three hours, like would 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.

1:26:22Right. But like, you know, would she, you know, would she have, 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 one of those great mysteries, because we'll never know. Yeah, I think, well, I think that one of the challenges with that whole campaign is, you know, this day, who knows what Kamala thought on so many issues. 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 in any of the formats, whereas you kind of knew exactly Trump's positions by the end of the podcast.

1:27:17And so would that have helped or heard? And if it would have helped, you know, I would say the people advising her and 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 were sort of talking around it, but when your party is out of power, you have to learn sort of the skills of subversion, 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, asking too many questions, comedy, that might not help you.

1:28:03right. 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 moved 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.

1:28:41I think that's right, although there's 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 in the media, and you know, kind of the mainstream media. So, you know, and I think that the Democrats, like, 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.

1:29:32And 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 got to 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 in 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 going to be the rebels because that's what it takes to be a rebel. And 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.

1:30:13Why 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 are CEO, so I'm a true radical on this topic. So let's start with a model. I think you're a little more kind of further than I would be, but a lot of where 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, you know, 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 tried true technique, and you know, you would explain to them what you're doing, and if it was interesting to the world, than they would tell it and so forth.

1:30:58That's become both difficult and suboptimal. So difficult in that, you know, it's very possible that you go and say, hey, we've got this interesting new product and the stories come out that of all the possible things that could go wrong with it as opposed to, you know, the things that it could do. And it does matter. It could be like a cure for cancer and the articles might be, they're going to overpopulate the earth by like having people live to. By the way, this isn't a made up thing. This is our actual story that have come out. So you have to be very, so that's a difficult thing. And then the other thing is like it's not going to be as clear as your story coming from you.

1:31:42And 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 kind of reach the world with your message or with your products and so forth. So that that kind of went to being nothing to a nice to have to, like it really has to be your core strategy for telling what you're doing. Now, it just look as you grow, you end up showing up in the media, whether you like it or not.

1:32:30And 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 who that's bad or not true or whatever, that's gonna 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. So you still need like 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 the other story directly.

1:33:14But you know, and it depends like if you've got a big enough megaphone, right? I think Elon Musk doesn't need to, he's got the biggest megaphone, you know, and then he acquired X. Doesn't need that part of the strategy, but like if you've got like a somewhat big megaphone And you have a certain number of followers and this and that and the other than I think, you have to have a balanced approach or have both approaches in order to keep yourself out of trouble. But I would never, like I think there's no reason to tell your primary story through the press. I think that's very dangerous. There's always the question for founders of, hey, Elon is the best entrepreneur in the world.

1:33:56Where can I copy him or you 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 like he's, you know, anytime, by the way, politics, I would be the number one thing I would say, don't try it home, in that it's so, 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. That's a very tough thing to manage from like a, okay, I'm evangelizing a new company and trying to get people to understand my products and what I'm doing.

1:34:46And then you're in politics that that one takes a very high, you know, probably a higher degree of skill 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, you would say is really, or we'd all say is sort of invest in the go direct capabilities.

1:35:31You know, founders who have great sort of, you know, reputations, public presences are able to recruit better or able to have lower customer acquisition 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. So this is a good, so there's a good subtle point in this that you're mentioning in Mark alluded to earlier, which is like people don't trust companies anymore. Like the company, like follows like very few people at fall, the A16Z Twitter handle compared to like or the X handle versus who follows Mark or who follows Christyx and who who follows you or who follows me.

1:36:21So 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 early on in the firm that worked extremely well for us was just like blogging and this was the era of blogging. Because then people knew what they were joining. They knew 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. Now, that's much more true. 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.

1:37:05People don't want to hear from the Coinbase handle they want to hear from Brian Armstrong or people don't open AI, it's Sam Altman. You guys were early to this calling your firm in Jason Horowitz, sort of the identification with people with the company that that's that people want to hear from. Well, this has been a great discussion about the evolution of media until next time. Ben, Mark, thanks for coming on. Hey, thanks. Great. Thanks, Eric. Thanks, everyone.

1:37:32Thanks 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.