New Media: Podcasts, Politics & the Collapse of Trust

20:02Marc Andreessen:And, and I kind of had an out of body experience where I'm like, you know, these are three reporters, like, you know, You know, in the old days, you know, 20 years ago, you know, reporters were the most strident defenders of the First Amendment. And now they were like demanding censorship. And I and I and of course, I couldn't help myself. I pointed that out and they got extremely upset. And I was like, well, this is over. So basically, like from my perspective, you know, different people have different views. My perspective is the world changed like really profoundly, dramatically in 2017 and set off a whole cascading series of changes since.

20:32Marc Andreessen:But, you know, we've never gone back to the way things were in 2016 or before. And I mean, we can speculate whether we ever will, but I doubt it at this point. Yeah. And that was also when Trump started calling them the fake news, which, you know, 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, that, 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.

21:14Marc Andreessen:yeah it was you know it's fairly amazing because you know it's like look i like i voted in 2016 i voted for hillary i supported hillary publicly i'm like i'm not like you know at that you know at that time i'm like i don't understand why i'm getting you know tagged with this and and and literally it was you know it was you know you're an idiot you're a dupe um you know you got played you got hacked you got you know you got hacked by the russians um you know i i went to hillary's first first public appearance after uh in 2017 after she after she lost it at stage she gave a talk at stanford as her first kind of big public out outing and um she you know she said like 20 feet away from me on stage that, you know, Trump is only president because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook, right?

21:49Marc Andreessen:You know, with to insert fake news, right? And so, you know, the unified kind of theory, you know, emerged around around Russiagate. And, you know, basically, the tech companies were just like, presumed guilty, even though, you know, we all at that time, where it's like, you know, 99.9%, you know, Democrats, or, you know, Hillary supporters. And so, yeah, and And then, you know, look, people had a very, you know, basically people, people I know who went through that, you know, had two very, well, maybe three very different reactions to it. One reaction was just like absolute terror of like, oh, my God, like, you know, are the critics right?

22:24Marc Andreessen:And, you know, therefore, like, you know, all of the, you know, enormous pounding for censorship that then kicked in, including in the Valley and in many of the tech companies. 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 and how the media works.

22:48Marc Andreessen:And that state of confusion for, I think, for a lot of people actually probably still continues. Yeah. And I think that, you know, one of the things that was interesting about that whole period was how much of it was Trump and not any of the facts. So that, you know, 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.

23:27Or Trump used new techniques. Trump had 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 Damos, who 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.

24:15And I think like probably half the population still thinks that's true, but it's absolutely false.

24:22Erik Torenberg:It's amazing how just in one election cycle, people turned on social media and free speech. You were saying that, you know, 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, you know, five years later, eight years later, oh, this whole this whole free speech thing. You know, I don't know about this anymore. It's cool. 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 Gurie bring to this analysis?

25:00Erik Torenberg:He's really shaped your thinking here.

25:02Marc Andreessen:Yeah, so Martin Gurie 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.

25:33Marc Andreessen:So kind of – so the book was kind of published at the same time that Trump was winning the nomination. So it – it was very – it looks in hindsight extremely prescient. Yet even he, I think, would say he didn't know obviously that it was going to 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.

26:12Marc Andreessen: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 authority figure or authoritative institution. So think, you know, somebody with a role in steering society, and that might be anybody from, you know, from a politician to a bureaucrat to a reporter to a doctor, you know, to an expert, you know, credential expert of any kind.

26:51Marc Andreessen:So 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? Right. And by the way, like if you if you read the press, it's actually very interesting. If you if you if you read the press, you know, they the standard form of article is expert says X. Right. Like so the you know, the go to thing is always to basically say, you know, here's here's this. Here's a way that the world works or something happens according to an expert.

27:24Marc Andreessen:Right. And the expert is a 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, you know, the right diploma or the right certification. And so that's the linkage between the individual authority figures in 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.

28:01Marc Andreessen:And so everything I just described is an artifact of, you know, the basically mass media, you know, mass education, centralized authority, the idea that there are a few really good universities that certify all the experts. You 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. Right. You know, there's only a few politicians who are really in charge. Right. And so basically like that whole idea of authority that you can basically trust and rely on is an artifact of the top-down centralized era.

28:34Marc Andreessen:And that basically social media is kind of bottoms up peer-to-peer media, social media where people can just share 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. institutions um 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 they're 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 we are the authoritative source of truth um and he said basically the, I'm going to use my metaphor here, the social media is many things, but one of the things it is, is it's an x-ray machine.

29:25Marc Andreessen: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, it'd 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. 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.

29:55Marc Andreessen:And that they have basically built, they have basically built up these reputations that actually cannot be factually supported. And that when people, you know, when, when, 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 at the, you know, somebody said that your mouth writes checks, your body can't cash. you know they you know they've written these checks about their their their the quality of what they do that that basically transparency doesn't support and so he said inevitably you you'll basically see them crumb you'll see them crumble and you know 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.

30:40Marc Andreessen: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, the, you know, their approval ratings in the, their sort of trust ratings for the population writ large have just, you know, completely cratered in the last three years, the medical profession, you know, the press, you know, many of the nonprofits, you know, the numbers are just collapsing.

31:15Marc Andreessen:And so, yeah, so it, yeah, you look back now and you're like, oh, okay, yeah, that was, yes, that was a correct assessment that is actually playing out now. You know, a question from there would be like, how far does it go? And, you know, 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 partisan 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.

31:46Marc Andreessen:So when Biden was 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 just a straight inversion on it. Everything is 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 where their ratings would, their trust ratings would literally go to zero, which I think is probably what happens in the fullness of time.

32:12Erik Torenberg:Well, first off, what happened in the 70s, to give full context?

32:16Marc Andreessen: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. Um, and, you know, because Vietnam was just like basically, you know, gigantically controversial and, and, you know, sort of very discredited, uh, you know, for a long time. And then obviously it ended very badly. Um, and then Nixon, um, you know, Watergate, um, and then, um, and then just like, you know, reveals there were other things in the seventies at the time, the environmental movement was revealing all these dirty secrets of industry.

32:48Marc Andreessen:The, um, you know, the church and Pike committee were revealing all these dirty secrets, the intelligence agencies. And so, um, you know, you just kind of had 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 sort of data points that the institutions were going bad. And so, you know, that's one argument. That's like the social cultural argument. You know, the other argument is actually a structural argument. It's when peak centralization started to collapse.

33:17Marc Andreessen: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 peaked in the 1950s. And so 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 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.

33:51Marc Andreessen: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. And so, for example, the editors of 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.

34:20Marc Andreessen:and it just you know didn't matter and so well a famous example was you know what percentage of the u.s population knew that fdr was in a wheelchair when he was president right um or you know what percentage knew all the stuff we now know kennedy got up to um well good thing that would never happen today with uh you know that would never ever happen today exactly um but um yeah even the affairs that aren't true get published to that exactly so um so so anyway so so so so so that And so under peak centralization, you're going to have maximum trust because you're going to have basically the most information control.

34:53Marc Andreessen:You're not going to have the alternative point of view. And so everybody's – 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 – 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, you know, 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.

35:24Marc Andreessen:And then you also had the rise of, tell the common 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. this. Newsletters, mimeographed newsletters, photocopy newsletters actually became a big thing in that period. And then cable TV emerged, you know, 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, but bulletin board services, and then CompuServe and Prodigy, you know, were getting created back then, which were kind of pre-internet, you know, dial up information services.

36:09Marc Andreessen: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 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, you know, something like that. I'm going to seek out a cable, you know, 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.

36:40Marc Andreessen: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.

36:53Erik Torenberg: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, you know, this, uh, I remember one interview you did with Kara and Reid Hoffman, I think around sort of the 2018, 2019 time. And, and they're both sort of saying, Hey, when can we go back to an era where we all had civil conversations and, and all got along and the sort of golden era and, and you were like, Hey, maybe it wasn't, uh, it's not as simple as, as we're making it here. Yeah.

37:27Marc Andreessen:So that, that was also, I think that was also probably 2017. And that was my, that was my last onstage appearance at a mainstream industry conference. And I knew, I knew, 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, you know, Kara and I had been kind of hot and cold for a long time. But, you know, she'd done a lot of great work earlier in her career. I had 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.

37:52Marc Andreessen:And, you know, they just, you know, they both had become extremely, you know, they both had become extremely politically activated. And so they both had, I would say, extremely, extremely negative, you know, kind of responses to Trump. And, you know, Reid's census, of course, become, you know, one of the largest donors in American history for left wing politics. And, of course, Kara's 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 was like an extremely aggressive kind of attack on, you know, basically.

38:25Marc Andreessen:It was the beginning of the tech is enabling fascism, you know, kind of wave that they've both gotten very into. And, you know, and again, 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 my earlier answer, which is, you know, at one point we trusted the media, now we don't. Well, number one, like, did 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 this guy, Walter Cronkite. And so Walter Cronkite was a network news anchor for CBS News.

38:53Marc Andreessen: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. 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 truth. The legend is it was this truth to power moment, which is like you've got this authoritative source finally telling the American people the truth that this war is a disaster.

39:32Marc Andreessen:But of course, this raises the question of like, well, he came out against the Vietnam War in 1968, but it had already been going for four years. So 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, 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?

40:06Marc Andreessen:And so the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1968 was a democratic war, right? 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 he is actually interesting. He flipped on it. He flipped from positive, 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, 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 soldiers.

40:42Marc Andreessen:And, you know, you had celebrities who were going to Vietnam who were, you know, 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 had 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.

41:14Marc Andreessen:you know, take down Nixon in, what, 73, 74. You know, 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, you know, gave them all the secret information, who was this unimpeachable source called Deep Throat. You know, 30 years later, we finally learned the identity of Deep Throat. It turns out he was the number three executive in the FBI, right? And specifically in Hoover's FBI, right? And so this was like, you know, this was, he was like the agent of what all these same people considered to be basically organized fascism.

41:51Marc Andreessen:You know, and now there's like a completely different interpretation of Watergate, which it 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, you know, had Felt recruited him, you know, to be an asset, like what exactly was the relationship. And so, you know, even in those days, you know, there was more controversy than the sort of, you know, the sort of rose colored glasses, you know, kind of view would have it.

42:30Marc Andreessen: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. Um, you know, in the new world, you can, you can do something about it, which is you can go online, um, and you can post, um, you know, yeah. And it can go viral. And, and, and your point on engine versus camera, you know, that's when the camera turns into an engine, um, right. Which is you, you could, you could not only see things, um, that you couldn't see before, but you can, you can also, you know, help other people see those things.

43:00Marc Andreessen:Now, look, having said that, like, I'm not like, I think, I think the internet contains multitudes. 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 are clearly real to everything in the middle. You know, I think there's a very large number of, of, you know, there's lots of lessons, they 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.

43:27Marc Andreessen: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 a an engine it's a it's a it's a way to actually drive change in the information environment that

43:37Erik Torenberg:people didn't used to have ben i'm curious to hear more more of your perspective on kind of your personal evolution you mentioned earlier that that your father uh was a journalist and a political writer as well you know i've seen you as mostly focused on on uh technology and and and business but when when did you start to realize that things were were changing in the media or that we were sort of entering a hyper-partisan era? 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.

44:12So he was the editor-in-chief of Ramparts Magazine, which was the 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, you know, he was a journalist during that time. And one of the things that happened that was kind of, you know, 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 Schultz about this potential pandemic in 1981 that was starting in San Francisco, where kind of gay men were kind of getting this very deadly disease.

45:08And, you know, and 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 100 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.

45:48And so my father, you know, being my father and how he is, just wrote the story and was called Whitewash and was in California magazine, 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, you know, on the left. And then, you know, we got there were protests.

46:17They protested around our house and that 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, 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 the net of that was like, the bathhouses 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.

47:02And, you know, the rest were 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 you know the experts might not be true and then you know we were always you know 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 I'm like you know there's a certain But 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.

47:44I 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.

48:17Marc Andreessen:That whole story, by the way, is in David Horowitz's book called Radical Son. Yeah. Which is one of the most, it's one of the most shattering. And Prussian books, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's an absolutely shattering story, given the, you know, there's a counterfactual universe in which, you know, it had been controlled and contained. It really could have been, you know, like the whole flatten the curve thing on COVID was hard because it spread so fast. But AIDS 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, would have prevented probably 75 % of the deaths.

48:52Erik Torenberg:In the same way that Peter Thiel'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 Fauci contributing to a noble lie or even something adjacent to that decades before. is... And look, 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 it.

49:36Erik Torenberg: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?

50:13Marc Andreessen:So I think Trump is a bridge figure. I actually think Trump, with respect to media, the media, the way media works, I think Trump is a bridge figure. And 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, you know, he's of the generation that grew up, you know, with television, newspapers, you know, 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, you know, top rated television show for 15 years. But also he was, you know, he was, he was, he's a, he was, Trump was a standard story in newspapers starting in like 1975.

50:48Marc Andreessen: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, when that was a big deal. And so he was always super intertwined. And he talked to them constantly, by the way. You know, 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.

51:16Marc Andreessen: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 legacy press to an extraordinary degree. And so he has the man. It's a 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 time. Like he talks to them all the time.

51:44Marc Andreessen:And a lot of them have his cell phone number and he'll pick up the calls and he'll talk to them. And, you know, that he's a source for a lot of stories. So he does talk to them, even though he complains about them. And then he's done, you know, I don't know what the number is, but he's done multiples. You know, he's done wildly more, you know, press questions, press conferences, press briefings in the first, you know, 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.

52:12Marc Andreessen: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, described as 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 not 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.

52:49Marc Andreessen: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 so anything that happens there was like a trump tweet in like 2013 where like he said it or predicted it or argued it um right and it's just because like he actually and i don't even know i i'd actually like to find out someday but i actually don't know who like who got him spun up on this or did he figure this all out himself um but um you know he became a true early adopter and so by by the time the um so by the time the campaign started he had already been a very you know he was maybe the most kind of twitter aware and twitter sensitive kind of major celebrity like that, public figure like that, you know, for probably four years, even prior to running for office?

53:31Probably the first, certainly the first prominent politician that wrote his own tweets, right? Like 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 that, you know, often with misspellings and octaps or 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.

53:59Marc Andreessen:Yes. I mean, you know, and 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 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, 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 He's 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 OK.

54:26Marc Andreessen:I'll keep drinking that garbage.

54:30Erik Torenberg:He was like the OG shit poster troll.

54:33Marc Andreessen:Yeah, shit posting. Right. And so it's this level of 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 completely comfortable in the new media environment. Of course, you know, culminating and literally starting his own Twitter competitor. Right. Right. And so like he's got a foot in both camps. But I just I describe that because I think he's 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, you know, glimpses of that with AOC and with I think with President Bukele in El Salvador.

55:06Marc Andreessen: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. is going to be like, oh, they took the Trump, you know, and time will pass and things would 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 pure form of it coming.

55:34Yeah.

55:35Erik Torenberg:And say more about the style that Trump and maybe Elon and others, the sort of 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.

56:26Never answer the question you're asked. only answer the question that you wish they would have asked. Like, Mark and I have been through this media 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. Like, it's a real system and process, which has basically resulted in, you know, most politicians really lacking what you would call authenticity. And Trump, being Trump, is not listening to any, like he's just literally saying what's on his mind all the time, every time.

57:12And 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, is a 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, so that's a little bit of a two-edged sword on that.

57:45Marc Andreessen:yeah no no 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 right um 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 it's like the opposite it's right it's the opposite training right your mission right your mission is to be as interesting as possible um and provocative and as controversial as possible right controversy as possible and then of course the other thing he was trained in was professional wrestling um which is the you know which and i mean that in full seriousness which is he would you know he was he's been very close friends with the mcmahon's for a long time um you know linda mcmahon is a cabinet secretary vince mcmahon is one of his you know long time friends um and he was actually trump is the only presidential candidate in history who's actually in the world wrestling federation hall of fame um because he was you know famously actually in a wwf match actually fighting um which which is on youtube and so and and and the way i would describe 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.

58:47Marc Andreessen:And then professional wrestling is like reality TV for men. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, I think that's essentially, 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. 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.

59:22Marc Andreessen: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's a completely different playbook, right? That's a playbook that, for better or for worse, maps 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. For example, Kim Kardashian has this hugely successful line of women's clothing, multi-billion dollar business, and many of these other stars do as well.

1:00:04Marc Andreessen:um but you individuals over corporate individuals over corporate brands and then and then authenticity over fakeness um uh right what you see is what you get over um uh over over plasticity and then um and then drama over um drama over yeah like heightened drama over suppressed drama um uh and then um and then and then and then um and then and then we'll get to this more i know but then you know going direct right which is you know 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.

1:00:41Marc Andreessen:You know, they didn't make their brands by being on network TV. They made their brands or being in profiled newspapers. They made their brands, you know, in large part by going direct. Or like a very obscure cable station, right? Yeah. Yeah.

1:00:54Erik Torenberg:Yeah, it makes sense that in a supply constrained world, you'd want to stay out of drama. 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 to compete with all the other new voices that are emerging so so with that maybe let's go more 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 reshoring, manufacturing, all these kinds of ideas.

1:01:49And so you're like, well, 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 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 pro-peace used to be a very strong left-wing position, but not in the way he is. And so that's

1:02:18Erik Torenberg:important distinction yeah it's uh so someone said something like oh we're trying to figure out what the 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 that'll be what the the new left yeah which has been a very effective trick for him because he's kind of taken over traditional uh positions of the democratic party um which has been kind of a 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.

1:02:54And 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.

1:03:04Erik Torenberg:Kamala is for they, them. Yeah, that, you know, Trump is for you. That's a great, great advertisement to that effect. Mark, talk about Life the Movie, because I think it gets at some of these ideas is it?

1:03:15Marc Andreessen:Neil Gabler. 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. Um, so the author is Neil Gabler, um, and the book is called life, the movie. Um, 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. Um, so the book is from like 28 years ago, something like Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the book was written, Gabler is a sort of journalist writer.

1:03:46Marc Andreessen:He did a big biography about Disney and is kind of very into 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 somewhat forgotten now, but were 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 for people who weren't around then, both of those stories were just like absolute saturation bombing of the media and specifically cable television.

1:04:23Marc Andreessen: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 24-7 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 did the LAPD plant all the evidence and da-da-da-da-da and what did Hillary know and did she actually throw a lamp at Bill's head?

1:04:50Marc Andreessen:And it's just like, these stories just had, 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 Clinton Lewinsky was the affair. Season two was, you know, it becoming public. Season three was the congressional investigations, you know, whatever. Season four was the, you know, the star report, which is a whole nother, you know, the sort of report that came out that was super salacious.

1:05:20Marc Andreessen:And so and same thing with O.J. because, you know, you have the trial. um you know that you know the entire thing um and then you know oj you know he got off and then there was a second trial um with the uh civil trial that he was convicted and then there was the third trial for the you know his his uh when he held up a bunch of bunch of guys in um in uh in las vegas uh who were selling his memorabilia and then he actually you know went to prison for that um and you know was he was he unfairly convicted for that because you know it was revenge for, for this and that. Anyway, so like, these were just like mega, mega stories.

1:05:53Marc Andreessen:And so, um, Gabler 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, cable and AM radio and so forth. And the early internet, um, it was like early internet, like, you know, there were internet news groups that were, you know, 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 Lewinsky affair by the independent counsel at that time.

1:06:17Marc Andreessen:And so I remember like 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. Basically what he says in the book is, basically what he says is, life the movie. He says basically nonfiction 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, he's like basically, essentially it was like, imagine how how imagine how stressful it is to be like a fiction writer like a novelist or a screenwriter right now like you're trying desperately to come up with enough interesting things to put into a two-hour movie or a 300-page novel um and then in real life you've got these stories that are like not just a single event but like literally like play out over many many years with like unbelievable twists and turns and it's like all real um right and basically basically Basically, reality is much stranger and more bizarre than fiction.

1:07:12Marc Andreessen: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 there's an allegation i don't know if it's true but there was an allegation that came out uh during the uh during the clinton lewinski thing which is uh because um you know bill had lied you know 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 it blew up the I think it turned out to be like a pharmaceutical plant or something like that.

1:08:04Marc Andreessen: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 like bombed Kosovo? So like, so like, you know, like I said, I don't know if it's true, but like that, that's such an inherently more like actual lives, wars, you know, politics, presidential impeachments, people going to prison, like the stakes are just so much higher. And so what Gabler 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, omnimedia reality television shows encompassing kind of every aspect of our life.

1:08:43Marc Andreessen:And that, you know, and that basically that's going to be our universe, which, you know, 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, the term of art now is, you know, there's this thing that Marvel Cinematic Universe, 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.

1:09:13Marc Andreessen: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 times pretty accurately.

1:09:35Erik Torenberg: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. Go for it.

1:09:48Marc Andreessen: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. So, well, you know, when he started and he acquired UFC, so it was started before him, but he couldn't get it on anything. Like there's certainly 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. Right. If I recall correctly. So, you know, just basically no airtime at all. Like this is, you know, nobody's going to like this. It's crazy. It's stupid. Da, da, da, da.

1:10:36And, you know, and certainly no coverage, no media coverage, no sports pages covered it, nothing like that. and you know they they built it up um you know they 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 uh completely mainstream um and i think oh maybe he was actually uh referring to slap fights which of course the media also hates uh and i think it's just an internet phenomenon at this point but a huge one yeah so when you when

1:11:09Marc Andreessen: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, you know, politicians and, you know, authority figures of all kinds. And, you know, that was a huge issue in the early years. Right. In contrast to other sports that would be on TV or have, you know, have these big contracts or advertising deals or whatever. But then this this inversion happened.

1:11:33Marc Andreessen:And again, it's sort of consistent with the sort of change in the media landscape we've been talking about. where all of a sudden the media's opposition became a selling point, right? Where the fact that the media hated it itself made it more enticing, right? So it's a quiet rebellion. Like if the authority figures love it, you know, 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, you know, he said they were the early adopter of social media in sports.

1:12:05Marc Andreessen:It's 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, you know, 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 70s, the teams became basically every team was almost all black players from no black players in the 60s.

1:12:44And 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, 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 usatv and they started getting the games on usatv and then you know all of a sudden they had the magic bird thing and and that built momentum and then michael jordan came into the league and then you know 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.

1:13:34And 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 like massively loyal in an incredible way.

1:14:00Erik Torenberg:What's fascinating about the NBA as well, as we're talking about this topic, is 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. Yes, yes, yeah. There's many reasons for that one, but yeah, that's another one where it's a move to social media off of. off of kind of television media. People called 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?

1:14:45Erik Torenberg:You know, Trump has been the best politician of recent. Of course, Obama was great in 2008, 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 Democrats, 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 Joe Rogan. His name was Joe Rogan. Yeah. So that was just an oops on their part, I think.

1:15:16Marc Andreessen: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 in business we call the barbell or we call death of the middle, which is you as sort of as industries mature, you tend to you tend to start with things that are kind 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.

1:15:47Marc Andreessen: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've 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.

1:16:19Marc Andreessen:And so one of our observations for a long time has been that, that, you know, that tends to happen in many, many different industries. Um, uh, you know, it's happening in banks, it's happening in, in, in ad agencies, many other media companies, many other, many other industries. Um, it turns out, I think that's what's happening in media formats right now. So the, um, the standard, like television show is either, I think 23 minutes, uh, with seven minutes for commercials or like 43 minutes with like 17 minutes for commercials. Um, and then, you know, if you watch cable news or whatever, you know, they're, they, you know, they have 43 minutes of content, let's say in the hour, but then they break it up because of the commercial breaks.

1:16:54Marc Andreessen:They, they break it up where they, you know, they cut to commercial every five minutes or something. And so any given interview can only be, you know, whatever, three or four minutes long if it's live, um, or, or they have to go across, you know, multiple, multiple segments, but, you know, it's sort of the, you know, the cliche is 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. 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 you're like well yeah gotta go throw the commercial and so and it's like you know 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 um but you know you you choose not to um and even the long form even you know 60 minutes you know which is the 43 minute version it's by the way it's not 60 minutes it's 43 minutes because of the commercials but but even there it's like a long form interview is like 20 minutes long right um like that's 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.

1:17:50Marc Andreessen: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 two minute videos or three hour Rogan episodes, right? It's the barbell, right? And, And what is the three-hour Rogan episode or Lex Friedman episode have going for it? It doesn't have that thing where, oh, just when it starts to get interesting, we're going to leave it there.

1:18:23Marc Andreessen: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.

1:18:53Marc Andreessen:But however, you know, if you're an interesting person, 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. um i i should note that you know charlie rose was the was the sort of you know i think kind of test case for this um and um you know he's you know been a friend of mine for a long time and i was on on the show multiple times and you know he got you know he got he got he got uh you know he was he too'd as they say but you know like he did this for a long time um and you know but he did this but you know and it was an hour-long show but he would let me i think it was on public tv for a long time and he would let people go for 50 minutes or something um and so he proved it and for some reason people didn't pick up the hint until the podcasters came along um 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 um and so anyway like i find this to be like extremely encouraging like i i think it just it turns out that there are a large number of people who have actually been starving uh for real discussion uh and real content um i think there's a corollary to this which is i think the i think the jury's in now i think you can make the claim television makes you dumb in a really fundamental way.

1:20:09Marc Andreessen:Cause like literally it cuts off all the interesting conversations, right. As they're about to get, get interesting. It kind of, it kind of has to be intellectually impoverishing as a consequence of the structure of the business and of the format. Uh, 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. We're going to say crazy things or whatever. Um, 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.

1:20:33Marc Andreessen:And it turns out the audience for that. It's very large. Oh, and then the other thing is, you know, YouTube gives these guys, you know, data on completion rates and it like the completion rates on these long form podcasts, it'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, you know, 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.

1:21:05Marc Andreessen: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.

1:21:38Marc Andreessen:And 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 that's on podcasts, which is, I think, the thing that is causing the Democrats fits right now in terms of how to counter the 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 sports guys.

1:22:16And so if you look at anyone from Charlemagne Tha 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 be you can't platform that person you can't there was a huge rage at bill maher for meeting with president trump um so that whole idea that okay we're going to have a democrat 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.

1:23:13Because I want somebody like me asking this guy who's an expert or running for office some questions, what I would ask. And 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.

1:23:58Marc Andreessen: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're just dealing with traditional press, you just like every single question is an attempt to blow you up and to catch you in a contradiction or to somehow get you to say something that's 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. Right. You need the anti-media training. The other thing, and maybe this is obvious now, But, you know, the other thing is the three hour podcast doesn't work if it's everything, you know, if you have to stop every five seconds because, you know, you have to accuse somebody of saying something racist.

1:24:31Marc Andreessen:Right. Like so this this like, you know, or sexist or whatever, this speech suppression thing, you know, that in this this 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. Like 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 you're in a political culture that wants to censor and cancel people, the format can't work. I don't know how you make it work.

1:25:09Marc Andreessen:It's just far too dangerous. And so it's like aspirationally, what you could say is this could drive the Democrats and the left back, you know, more in the direction of free speech and away from cancellation. But we'll see if they, you know, we'll see if they actually. 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.

1:25:48And then being kind of regular with them, just having a conversation. But that is the right idea.

1:25:55Marc Andreessen:Well, it's the right idea for a conversation and communication and getting, you know, involving, 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.

1:26:36it's a tricky thing given he's running for office i agree i agree like it's you kind of want to be

1:26:40Marc Andreessen:on the other side but yes yeah do they really want this is does his does his base really want

1:26:45Erik Torenberg:him to do this so yeah we'll see we'll see right kamala going on call her daddy didn't achieve the same you know impact as uh trump and jd vance going on you know rogan and theo vaughan well yeah and that was kind of like a weird choice because like that's a you know joe rogan and uh you know even like you know a lot of these podcasts the breakfast club or or bill maher or whatever like they talk about politics she was probably the first politician ever on call you know call her daddy like like it's just right 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.

1:27:30Like that audience doesn't care about this. That audience is into some whole nother.

1:27:35Marc Andreessen:Well, and one of the great mysteries, one of the great mysteries, you know, and again, this is coming out in the campaign books. It is this book, A 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, yeah. Right.

1:28:05Marc Andreessen:But like, you know, would she, you know, would she, how well would that have gone? And, you know, people have different theories on that. And it's one of those, I think it's going to be one of those great mysteries because we'll never know. Yeah, I think, look, 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, you know, just because it never came out. Like there were the talking points. It was very, very structured. But, you know, what was her real economic policy? What was her real tech policy? What was her real foreign policy?

1:28:45You know, 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 podcast. And so would that have helped or hurt? 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.

1:29:18Erik Torenberg:Yeah, it's fascinating. We're sort of talking around it. But you know, when, when your party is out of power, you have to learn sort of sort of the skills of subversion, right? And comedy and, and sort of contrarian thinking, these are, these are tools of, of, of subversion or tools that you can, that help you when you're 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 sort of Bush was in power, they had mastered the tools of subversion, right? You know, Jon Stewart, Steve Colbert, Dave Chappelle, they had the comedians, they had the sort of contrarian intellectuals.

1:30:00Erik Torenberg: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'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.

1:30:46The 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, 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 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 got to go full rebel and like then we can't be like we 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 robots, because that's what it takes to be a rebel.

1:31:42And that's where they're getting kind of squeezed between kind of two ideas. Yeah. So let's, we've been talking at a

1:31:53Erik Torenberg: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?

1:32:01Marc Andreessen:Well, let's start with Ben, because Ben Coaches our CEOs. So I'm a true radical on this topic. So let's start with the modern. Yeah, I think you're a little more kind of further than I would be. But look, we're bigger and different than our companies are. So like, 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 were doing and if it was interesting to the world and they would tell it and so forth.

1:32:40That's become both difficult and suboptimal. So difficult in that, you know, it's very possible that you'd 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, you know, the things that it could do. And 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 like having people live to it. By the way, this isn't a made up thing. This is actual stories that have come out. So you have to be very, so that's a difficult thing.

1:33:17And then the other thing is like, it's not going to be as clear as your story coming from you. and 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 gonna kind of reach the world with your message or with your products and so forth. So that kind of went to being a nothing to a nice to have to like, it really has to be your core strategy for telling what you're doing.

1:34:05Now, it just, look, as you grow, you end up showing up in the media, whether you like it or not. And I think that it's still, you know, and still a lot of people read it. And still like, if you're, you know, 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. 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.

1:34:53And you can tell your story directly. But, you know, then 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 know, 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 like have both approaches in order to keep yourself out of trouble. But I would never, like, I think there's no reason to like tell your primary story through the press.

1:35:30I think that's very dangerous.

1:35:31Erik Torenberg: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. Elon can get away with it, but we can't. Of course we are. 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 at home in that it's so, it's almost always, 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.

1:36:19Like 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 that one takes a very high, you know, probably a higher degree of skill than I think I have right now in terms of like getting that right is is complex. Now, look, 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. You know, he says like 99 % of things he says are like Republican. And then he says he's a Democrat.

1:37:00Marc Andreessen:You know, so like he's very clever in that way. But like he's definitely pulling it off.

1:37:05Erik Torenberg:And yeah, anything you would say is really or we'd all say is sort of invest in the go direct capabilities. You know, founders who have great sort of, you know, reputations, public presences are able to recruit better, are able to have lower customer acquisition costs, are 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 there's a good subtle point in this that you're mentioning and Mark alluded to earlier, which is people don't trust companies.

1:37:49The company follows, very few people follow the A16Z Twitter handle compared to the X handle versus who follows Mark or who follows Chris Dixon or 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. It was actually in many ways much more effective than anything we could do through traditional media in that way.

1:38:33And 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.

1:38:47Erik Torenberg:People don't want to hear from the Coinbase handle. They want to hear from Brian Armstrong. Or people don't, you know, 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 and a great first day for me. And until next time, Ben, Mark, thanks for coming on. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Eric. Thanks, everyone.