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The a16z Show
Marc Andreessen: Monitoring the Situation and the Future of Media
01:07:18
Erik Torenberg and Theo Jaffee speak with Marc Andreessen, cofounder and general partner at a16z, about the launch of Monitoring the Situation (MTS), a new, always-on media network on X. They discuss the rise of the “current thing,” how narratives spread in real time, and why internet-native media is reshaping politics, culture, and attention.
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- [00:00]
A
If an alien invasion happens later this afternoon, it will be turned into a social media meme and it will go viral. If you track, like how distributed is media versus how centralized is media, like centralized media sort of peaked somewhere around 1970, where, you know, literally like all the newspapers in every city consolidated down to like a single newspaper and then you ended up with only three television networks and all the radio stations, independent radio stations, got bought up. Obviously those days are over. The shape of the media determines the behavior basically from here on out and until there's something that fundamentally displaces social media, like this is the world we live in.
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B
Monitoring the Situation, or mts, launched today as a new always on media network on X covering tech, business, politics and culture in real time. What happens when the news never stops and attention becomes the scarcest resource? In the early 1980s, CNN introduced 24 hour coverage built around whatever mattered most in the moment. Decades later, the Internet has taken that idea to its extreme, where global audiences cycle through new controversies every few days, often without resolution. Now that shift is accelerating. Social platforms turn events into viral narratives, compressing time, amplifying emotion, and reshaping how people interpret truth, conflict and influence. The tension is clear. More voices mean more access to information, but also more noise, more manipulation, and faster cycles of outage. This episode originally aired on Monitoring the Situation examines how media evolved into this system and what it means for politics, culture and decision making. Theo Jaffe and I speak with Marc Andreessen, co founder and general partner at E16Z.
- [01:47]
C
Very special guest, Marc Andreessen. Mark, thank you for joining Monitoring the Situation.
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A
Good morning. I could not be more excited. Let's monitor some Situation.
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C
Excellent. Well, first we'll get a bit meta here and we'll talk about media. We've been talking about this idea, Monitoring the Situation. We've been talking about investing in it for almost a year now. And when we were first talking about the idea, you had brought up the book about the history of cnn. You talked about this concept that they had called Randomonium. What did you find so interesting about the founding or the history of CNN and how it could apply to what we're doing here or this broader media moment?
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A
So one is, I'm old enough to remember when CNN started, although I didn't actually have cable TV at the time, so I didn't see it, but I remember it and the impact that it had. And then because I'm an obsessive, there's this book at one point that nobody's read. But the book is Called Me and Ted against the World and which is a great title. So it's the founder of cnn, it's this guy Reese Schoenfeld. And he's actually the guy who convinced Ted Turner to go into the satellite business which sort of created essentially modern cable tv, satellite tv and then led downstream to streaming and everything else going on today. And so this has been kind of lost to history. But Ted Turner was like a great, amazing example of like exactly the kind of great founder that we work with. Like just this like incredible will to power, very controversial character. Like every other thing out of his mouth, like horrified. Like he generated a huge number of headlines of like can't believe Ted said that over and over again. So like one of these real characters in the history media business. And then this guy Reese Schoenfeld, who was originally the lawyer that wired up Ted's first satellite deal. So the two of them came up with this crazy idea, I forget, like 1981 or something. And they said, how about having a 24 hour news channel right? This at the time was like just completely loopy idea. Actually Ted Turner wanted to be a 15 hour a day news channel because he assumed that there would be nobody watching over the nine hours overnight. And Reece was like, Nope, 24 hours. People are going to stay up all night to watch this thing. And the idea was, by the way, completely alien to what CNN is today. The idea was this concept that Reece Chunfeld came up with called Randomonium, which basically says point in time, there is something happening in the world that is like the most amazing, interesting, controversial, bonkers, compelling transfixing thing that you can imagine.
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C
The current thing.
- [03:47]
A
The current thing. The current thing. Exactly. The current thing. At any moment in time, there's the current thing. And so he's like, what should a 24 hour news channel be? Obviously what it should do is it should lock onto the current thing. It should then cover the current thing continuously for as many minutes, hours or days as that thing is the current thing. And then he called it Randomonium because he basically said for that period you just put whatever you get, you put on screen. And so you get whatever fragmentary reports or man on the street interviews or you know, whatever it is, you just slap the thing on the screen and if you get it wrong, you apologize later. But this is your real time, it's live. And then you just. People are just going to be glued to this thing. Okay, so that was the original CNN business plan. They then took a while to get up and running. But Then they actually did implement this. And for our older viewers will remember, as I do, the real breakthrough point was the 1991 Gulf War, the first invasion of Iraq. And that was the thing that really caused the whole thing to punch through. And there was like a week there where basically people were just glued to CNN around the clock because they had. It was like literally live on the ground coverage of they were in Bagh with like bombing raids happening, all kinds of crazy stuff and the Iraqi government and like just the whole thing. And so it was just like the most incredible show in the world. And then, quite honestly, they spent the next, whatever, 20 years basically trying to repeat that experience. And they repeated it every now and then with the Monica Lewinsky thing was that for a while and the OJ Trial, was that for a little bit. But it was just kind of hard to come up with the next thing like that. And then over the last 20 years, CNN has kind of become something completely different. Today, let's say that's not that at all. And then basically what's happened is the Internet reinvented randomonium. Right. And so, right. The experience of monitoring the situation on, especially know, on social media and especially, of course, on X. Right. Specifically. Right. And then, by the way, also streaming, Right. You know, the other. The other part of it is streaming. And now there's obviously streaming on X, but also, you know, streaming on other platforms, you know, YouTube and Twitch and so forth. And so the Internet reinvented this. Right. So randomonium turned into, you know, the current thing. And then monitoring the situation, you know, legitimately, justifiably became a giant meme. And so it is time, yes, it is clearly time to monitor the situation.
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C
And why do we think the amount of current things or random onion or situations just is continuously accelerating? It seems like it's, you know, just the, the amount, the sheer velocity of, of these moments just keeps on increasing. How do we make sense of that?
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A
Yeah, so I think there's really two. Two things that have happened that are really different and even, you know, different than in the days of cable TV and 24 hour news. So one is just like the Internet. For better or for worse, the Internet plugs you into the world. Right? The global village.
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C
McLuhan.
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A
Yes, Marshall McLuhan. Okay, so let's cite Marshall McLuhan actually for both of these. So Marshall McLuhan, who was the great media theorist of the 20th century. Yeah. He had two key concepts that are relevant here. So one is the global village. And so he had this concept of the global village. And the concept of the global village, by the way, he did not view as a positive, he was not endorsing it in his mind. He was making an observation of what was happening, which is basically what he meant by that, to conceive of what he meant by village to start with. So village basically means a community with a small enough number of people where everybody knows everybody else. So like think about a small town or a literal small village and everybody knows everybody else. And as a consequence of that, there's no privacy, right? And basically everybody's up in each other's business all the time. And I grew up in a small enough town, you know, in a rural town where I experienced this, I saw what it was like. And this is like that everybody knows everybody is. By the way, it's the same people year after year after year. You get to know them like way too well. Everybody's completely up in each other's business. Like there's basically, um. And so, you know, and by the way, one of the reasons people leave small towns to go to the big city is cause they want to get, you know, they want to get away from that. They want to, they want to get to a level of anonymity and, and, and have a lot more, you know, people running around. But, but the village kind of has that specific thing. And what he said was basically modern media is going to turn the entire world into a village. And so you're just going to be connected. And this is, you know, pre Internet when he said this, right? But you know, it's really happened with the Internet where it's just like, okay, you're connected to everybody all the time. And by the way, like by default, you know, he would find this to be like a very entertaining thing that this, he would say, of course you're getting all the downstream effects that you're getting, which is by default it's going to melt your brain, right? Like the human animal was not evolved. The human animal was evolved to have like, you know, there's a Dunbar's number. You can basically have a direct relationship with like 150 people. Sort of famously called the Dunbar number in sociology. But the global village expects you to have a Dunbar number of like 8 billion people, right? Because they're all right there and they're all up in your grill, right? And they're all telling you what they think of you and they're all like cursing at you and calling you names. And so it's just like this really brain melting experience. So that's part one. So we experience reality differently as a result of that. And so the thought experiment I always have is we talk a lot about the impact of the Internet social media on politics. It's like, well, okay, imagine having social media during World War II. We would have had a completely different national experience. Had Pearl harbor happened with Twitter, it would have been a completely different experience. The way people live through, you know, Pearl harbor in, in, in, in actually 1941, with, you know, with, primarily with TV and radio. And so anyway, so there, there's this global village thing and then there's this other thing that he said, which he originally said about television. He made this key observation. He said this is part of his thing where he said the medium is the message. So the actual medium of the, of, of the media technology actually determines a lot of the message of what's received, a lot of the content. And, and, and specifically he said this thing, he said if it's on television, it's a television show. And what he meant by that is if something's going to be on television, it's going to end up being turned into the equivalent of like a half hour comedy or an hour long drama. Right? Basically, you know, the two native media forms of television are the half hour comedy or the hour long drama. And so you're going to get this basically very emotion. You're going to get this very polished and sort of glossy and produced thing that's going to, it's going to be a story and it's going to run the way that a television story runs or a television show runs. And every television show is like, Every television show is like a morality play, right? Every television show basically tells a moral story of basically people behaving badly and then learning the error of their ways. And then famously, you have the happy ending where everybody kisses and hugs. And remember, Seinfeld was a huge variation of that because remember the motto of Seinfeld, Larry David's motto for Seinfeld was no learning, no hugging. And it's what made Seinfeld so unique because every other television show up until Seinfeld always ended with everybody learning and hugging. You learn the moral lesson and then you sort of reconcile with the people closer to you. And so every, every real life experience would get wedged into the format of a television show and would be turned into like this, basically this, basically this morality play. Okay? So the Internet version, I believe the Internet version of if it's on television, it's a television show. The Internet version is if it's on the Internet. It's a viral social media meme, right? If it's on the Internet, it doesn't matter what it is, by the way, if an alien invasion happens later this afternoon, it will be turned into a social media meme and it will go viral. And that's what will happen, right? And it will be turned into a viral meme and it will spread virally across the thing and then human beings, what they are, that will turn into a moral panic, that'll turn into a full fledged outrage. And how dare you. And people will line up on each side and sort of tribes will form and then people will go to war with each other on social media. And you'll have all these basically back and forth, all of this, both all the humor and all the rage of kind of how meme culture works. And so everything on the Internet, basically whatever happens in the real world becomes like a social media, basically social media viral moment meme complex. And then basically moral panic and search for scapegoats, like a moral emergency. And that happens to every single new event that happens. And then you combine these two and it's like, okay, for better, for worse, we're all in the same room now. We're literally in the same global village and we're sort of surfing controversial Internet meme moments over and over and over and over again. And as far as I can tell, like if you look at the numbers, basically what happens is each viral social media meme explosion, it basically is this huge spike up, up, and then it's like this half life decay. And it lasts about two and a half days, right? And so each social media basically experience is like a two and a half day basically panic cycle. And then what happens is the old one isn't necessarily ever like resolved or reconciled, but what happens is a new one appears, A new current thing appears, right? And just takes over the, you know, takes over the outrage, right? And all the emotional energy that applied to the old one applies to the new one. Everybody forgets the old one even happened like a week later. You can't even remember, like, like what was the social media like craze of like seven days ago? I mean, it might as well have been like a thousand years ago, like lost to the mist of time. Nobody knows, like seven days ago, whatever it was, was the most important thing that's ever happened. And seven days later it's like it never, it never not, not even a peak, like nothing. It's, it's like completely gone, right? And so you just, you're just going to have this like basically repeated sort of you know, emotional shotgun blast over and over every two and a half days, you know, essentially forever. By the way, this is like, this is, my theories is like it's now impossible to predict the outcome of politics, so everybody thinks they know what's going to happen in the midterm elections in November. And I'm like, okay, it's now whatever. It's April 20th, it's April 20th, the election is whatever, November 6th or whatever. All right, how many two and a half day cycles are there between April 20th and November 6th? And the math majors be able to calculate that in their head, but it's, I don't know, 100 or something, right? Or 120 or something like that. Whatever is the thing that we think is the thing that's going to tilt the election today is going to be 100 social media meme cycles old. Like, nobody's going to remember anything that's happening right now. The election is going to turn basically on whatever's happening in the economy, and then it's going to be whatever is like the viral meme panic that's happening like that day. Right? And so, and you could say, like, is this good or bad? I don't know. Is this better or worse than television? I don't know. By the way, is this better or worse than the days of radio or the days of, you know, I don't know, the printed, you know, the revolution that followed the arrival of the printing press. Is this better or worse than the days in which we were all reciting epic poetry around the campfire as our form of media? I don't know. You could have a big value discussion about which is better or worse. I have an argument, I will make that this notwithstanding all the craziness, this is better. But this is the nature of the world we live in. And look, put this. We're now on autopilot. The shape of the media determines the behavior basically from here on out. And until there's something that fundamentally displaces social media, like this is the world we live in, hence the need to monitor the situation.
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C
Amen. And is the reason why you think it's better it's because even though there's more noise, there's more signal, and as kind of a collective global brain, we get closer to the truth.
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A
Or so I would say this we get. So a couple things. Yeah. So one is, look, I would say there, you could say this, there are more truth and more lies. Right? So, so I would Say that it's, it's. Both of the following statements are true, which is there's more truth on social media than we had in previous forms of media. And they're probably, probably, I mean, I mean old media had a lot of lies by the way, so it's hard to say there are more lies, but let's just say there are plenty of lies in social media. Like there are plenty, you know, plenty of ops. In fact, one of the native forms of entertainment of social media is trying to spot the ops. Right. By the way, maybe I should pitch you a show on mts which is, you know, maybe every day we shoot an hour on let's spot the ops. Right? Like what, you know, which ones are real and organic, which ones, you know, which ones are staged bullshit, you know, with somebody getting paid behind the scenes. And so, you know, and everybody of course focuses on the downside and so they focus on the fact that there's all these ops and bullsh is certainly true, but there's also just like the ability for somebody to tell the truth is like much more direct and clear than it was before. Right? Because of, because of the, you know, the collapse of the gatekeepers. And so I think both of those are true. So I think that's true. But the slightly different argument that I would make is that previous forms of media were really good at generating physical violence. And so, I mean there's many, many examples of this in history. But the Spanish Civil War, which was kind of the war that kind of pre forecasted everything that was going to all this sor of tragedy of the 20th century that followed the Spanish Civil War, was kind of basically the test bed for both communism and Nazism in the modern world. And its native media format was posters. And so literally it was like the ability to do printed colored propaganda posters was like the new media technology at that time, like right before radio and the Spanish Civil War was super violent. And then radio was the technology that led to radio was the Nazi regime's native media format. Radio was the way that basically the fascist regimes got established as well as, by the way, as well as fdr, you know, was, was, was primarily a radio phenomenon. You know, kind of the rise of modern, you know, kind of, you know, it's kind of modern, modern liberalism. And then, you know, television, you know, was the native med medium of like, you just, you know, television kind of kicked in starting around World War II. So it played a role. But if, if then, you know, television had a huge role to play in, in the Vietnam War. And then in all of the violent riots of the 60s and 70s, you know, which were kind of, you know, super crazy, both, you know, across the US and European. And so television has a long history of leading to downstream violence. The fact that we haven't actually had the fact that political violence is an all time low in western society is something that people really don't talk about. And it feels like we must be in this super politically violent world because everybody's so angry about politics all the time. But measured political violence is at an all time low. So my theory is the ability to directly participate in online virtual combat is shunting away a lot of the energy past would have translated to street violence. Right. And so it's sort of this thing is if the virtual world can become arbitrarily rhetorically violent without people actually getting physically hurt, and that gives people a way to exercise all of their anger and rage over politics and to be able to attack the hated enemy without having it actually be something that translates to physical violence. And so, yeah, it's like, I don't know, social media wars up, you know, physical violence down. Nobody wants to hear that because everybody's so mad all the time about what's happening online. But I think that's like if you're sitting at home scrolling social media, getting mad, like at least you're not out on the street like hurting people. So that's my, that's my moral defense of the whole thing.
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C
Well, it's fascinating because there's kind of a different kind of ideological sorting happening because people, you say things like, hey, you know, now they can't even talk to their own families because they've sort of found their tribe online that, that agrees with them. And you know, it's no longer the people they, you know, it's no longer their families. And back in the day, you know, you didn't have as much, much sort of the logic goes as much political polarization of the idea that I can't even talk to someone not from the same side. Part of that perhaps is because the Internet allows them to find their tribe so strongly and so clearly that they're able to have an exclusionary tribe as well. But I guess one response to political polarization argument is that hey, at least it's not going to leading to physical combat that what might you say more broadly is it just overstated in general? Because people also have this idea of filter bubbles too. But of course, in some ways it's the opposite of the sense that the Internet exposes you to ideas that you wouldn't have seen otherwise.
- [18:52]
A
Right? Yeah. So I think people just have a really rose colored glasses view of the past. The past gets sanded off in part because we only interpret the past. Number one is we weren't there. And then the modern interpreters of the past are often quite honestly not telling us the truth about what happened because they have their own modern kind of gloss or spin they want to put on it. And so, but just the edges of the past get sanded off in retrospect. But it's just like, it's really significant. Like if you just like the easiest thing to do, these things just go on YouTube and watch old episodes of a TV show called all in the Family, which was a, which was a very famous successful TV show when I was a kid. And all in the Family was a microcosm, a fictional microcosm of basically the culture wars, political wars of the late 60s into the 1970s. And it was, and you know, there's famously this character, Archie Bunker, who sort of represented, you know, as this white guy and he, he basically represented great brilliant actor named Carol o' Connor played him. And he basically played a retrograde, basically Republican, you know, Nixon supporting Republican. And this would be in like, I don't know, 1972 or something, 1974, who just basically was, was, was painted in the show as like the most backwards, like basically archaic, you know, knuckle dragging, racist, sexist, just like the worst possible person in the world, world. And then there was his son in law played by young Rob Reiner, who, who, who Archie Bunker, nicknamed Meathead, which is what the character became known as. And, and, and Meathead was basically just the arch progressive liberal, right, you know, sort of like, you know, think, I don't know, young Gavin Newsom or something, right? Where just like he had just like the exact politically correct approved view of the time. And so he's like, you know, super at the time, you know, the equivalent then of super woke, super progressive, you know, super liberal, super enlightened on, on all these issues and, and the, the conc. You know, and the guy who did, created the show is this famous television producer named Norman Lear. And the conceit of the show was supposed to be a moral, it was supposed to be a moral lesson of Meathead giving basically moral lectures to Archie Bunker every week to try to get Archie Bunker to stop being such a backwards looking, like 1950s retrograde, basically racist, sexist guy and come into the modern world. And of course what happened was Carol o' Connor Number one, the actor was just like super funny, but the other was the political environment was superheated at that point. And of course, it turned out Archie Bunker ended up being the star of the show. And so the show ended up being the opposite of kind of what it was intended to be. That happened later in the 80s. That happened with a show called Family Ties, which was, again, it was a very similar thing, which it was these two parents, baby boomer parents in the 80s, and they were like, super, you know, it was very left wing producers who made the show, and the characters were like super proper left wing progressives. And then there was this character in the show, Michael J. Fox, their son, who was this teenage kid, and he played the. I forget the name if I'm blanking on the name of the character, but he played the son. And the son basically was a Reagan Republican as a teenager, right? And literally the son would, like, wear like sport jackets and ties to school and carry a briefcase. And they kind of wanted to make him into, like a stereotype of like, basically, you know, sort of a weird Republican, you know, kind of weirdo. And again, the same sort of weird thing happened, which is actually the Michael J. Fox character became, oh, Alex. Alex Keaton was. Alex was the character's name. Alex B. Keaton. You know, he essentially became. Became the star of the show. And so I bring up both of those shows because you can see in those shows, you can see the culture wars of the 70s, which were actually, like, super intense. You can see the culture wars of the 80s, which were super intense. Intense. You go back before that, and you have the Vietnam War and the. The. All the campus protests and the civil rights movement and all the riots and all the forced, you know, everything, you know, dropping the 101st Airborne into, you know, rural, you know, the rural south to, you know, basically, you know, desegregate the schools at literally at gunpoint. You go back before that, you had the Cold War, you know, you had the Red Scare, you know, it's now known as the Red Scare, but you had, you know, communists all through the US Government and you had all kinds of freakouts about that. You had the risk of nuclear annihilation. You go back before that, you had World War II, right, which was like this, like, just like incredible global orgy of viol. You go back before that, you had the Great Depression and, you know, the New Deal, which was hugely controversial. You go back before that, you had World War I, you know, and then you go. And then, you know, if you keep going Back, it's like you have the Civil War, and then you have the Napoleonic wars, and then you've got the French Revolution and, you know, and then you go back further than that. You've got the, you know, the, the democratic revolutions all through Europe. And then you've got the, you know, the Gutenberg printing press kicking off all kinds of violence, you know, throughout Europe in the 1600s. And so I just think, like, the history of Western civilization in America and European society is just like constant str and warfare to like, an absurd degree over this entire period. And we. We go back and we study the history and we're just kind of like, wow, like, those people were like, really, really, really violent. Like, really crazy and really violent. And boy, did they really like killing, right? I mean, it was not that long ago. I don't think it's anybody alive now, but it was not that long ago that, like, grown men, like, in serious positions of power and authority in the US if they got mad at each other, they would literally have a physical duel, right? Like, so, you know, you and I, you and I start going at it on social media, and we get to a point where we get really mad and I challenge you to a duel. And like, we show up in a field in a fucking park, you know, at like six in the morning with guns, right? And we like square off and march off and we turn around, we try to like, literally shoot each other to death as like a thing that they did. And that was like a normal part of life.
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C
Wait, Mark, I thought the past was all matriarchies and everyone just so peaceful
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A
and, oh, everybody was so wonderful. Everybody got along. Everybody, All. Yes. Until social media, everybody thought the same thing. Yes, exactly. And everybody was all. Yes, everybody was all calm and happy all the time. And so you look the way the world is conflict, just historically the way the world is conflict. And anyway, not to beat a dead horse, but there was plenty of conflict in the past. There were plenty of heated disagreements on the future shape of society. There were plenty of political wars. There were plenty of violent wars, by the way, just politics itself was much more violent. If you go back and you read about political movements a hundred years ago, they would literally form up in the street and fucking try to kill each other. Yeah, it was like a common thing. You know, strikes. I mean, even the history of the labor movement is full of this. Like, strikes became super violent and, you know, management would literally, you know, the strikers would try to attack their plants and the management literally would have like, machine guns and they'd be like machine gunning, they're striking workers. Crazy, crazy stuff. And so like we just, we, we live in a much crazier world than we want to give ourselves credit for. And the idea that like the current level of conflict is something new is just not true.
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C
And just to that end too, when people say, oh, ever since 2008 or you know, your smartphone sort of, you know, propagating that it's led to increased depression or things like that, is that also another example of, hey, we were underestimating how depressed people were prior and it's kind of a measurement thing or is it. Oh, but the, lots of other things happened in 2008 too, like, you know, political extremism and, and other things that, that make people more depressed or how, how do you engage in that, that topic?
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A
Well, so the funny thing is different Western countries have different, that show different data on the quote, unquote, rise in depression. And it basically, it basically it turns out it corre. Social benefits programs. And so basically if you get paid or if you get like special dispensation at school for having, you know, psychological issues, all of a sudden you see a massive spike in those psychological issues. The countries that don't have that, the other Western countries that don't have that don't show the same results. And so I actually think that's a statistical artifact of literally like government benefits programs. So I like, I don't even, yeah, I would, I would say I don't, I don't, I don't even, I don't even, I don't even concede the, you know, concede the premise of the question. But that's, that's, that's a longer debate. I would just say in general, I guess what I say, I am prepared to say that basically call it since I don't know, 2014 or something, I'm prepared to say it does feel like things have intensified. It does feel like things are wilder than they were before that. I think the most that I would be willing to say though is I think we might have lived through an era of what you might call suppressed volatility and call that maybe from the end of the Cold War through 2014, 14, where basically it just looked like the west had won everything. And then also it was sort of, by the way, it was sort of the peak heyday of centralized media. So if you just like, if you basically track, if you track like how distributed is media versus how centralized is media, like centralized media sort of peaked somewhere around 1970 where, you know, literally, like, all the newspapers in every city consolidated down to, like, a single newspaper. And then you ended up with only three television networks and all the radio stations, independent radio stations, got blocked, bought up. Let me give you an example. So historically. So historically, like, if you go back to the days of the American Revolution, it was common in even, like, midsize cities. You would have, like, 10 or 15 different newspapers, and each newspaper would represent, like, a different political point of view. And then the newspapers would have these, like, furious, you know, just like. Just like you would do today online. They would just have these furious, constant political, you know, fighting and accusations back and forth and arguments. And of course, the newspaper owners would be trying to egg all that stuff on because it sold papers. But it was, like, very common to have, like, many newspapers per city that would all fight with each other. And then the economics of centralized media meant that those all rolled up into single newspaper. And. And then. And then that single newspaper, you know, at least for a while, tried to be nonpartisan and tried to be even handed because it was trying to appeal to everybody. And then. And so. And again, same thing of just like, you know, like when I was a kid, it was three television networks that were all basically the same. They were all trying very hard to be even handed, at least, you know, kind of as best they could. There were, like, three national news magazines. You know, there were, like, I don't know, there was a small number of national radio networks. You know, there were two, you know, news wire services. And so I will concede, I think we lived through a period of suppressed volatility as a consequence of the fact that we had overly centralized media. I think if you go back before that, if you go back before that, if you go Back to the 1930s and before, media was much more fragmented. It was much more like it is today. And then, like I said, if you go all the way back, like 200, 250 years ago, it was extremely fragmented. If you read the accounts of Ben Franklin as a newspaper publisher and the stuff that he got up to with his newspaper. So, okay, great story. So Ben Franklin ran one of the newspapers in Philadelphia originally as a printer. Okay, so what would happen is Ben Franklin wants to become a commercial printer. He buys a printing press, he advertises whatever. He tries to get all the local businesses, like pamphlets in the printing press, but he doesn't have enough business for the printing press. And so he starts a newspaper to have something to print. And so he starts this newspaper. There's like, 15 other newspapers in Philadelphia at the time. But he's got to fill the newspaper with something. And so. And he's Ben Franklin. He's very creative. And so he creates basically sock puppets. He does basically. He does basically, basically ops. He had alts. Alts. He does alts. Yeah, exactly, alts. And they're all under pseudonyms. And so I forget all the names now, but he had all these different names for them. And I think at one point in his own newspaper, he had like 15 different alts going at it. And he wrote them all, but under different names. And they all had very different points of view. And then he would basically set them off to have these raging arguments with each other in his newspaper. And people would buy his. People would buy his newspaper to come. And then that culminated in the election of 1800, which was the famous election of Thomas Jefferson versus John Adams, which was sort of this newspaper centric election which was characterized by a level of slander. Like the degree to which partisans of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams attack each other in the 1800 election is like way beyond even what we see today on social media. Like, they accused each other of the most horrible shit you can possibly imagine. And it became like this giant scandal. And so the idea that there's whatever rhetorical combat or that there's this virtual environment in which there's lots of points of view and there's lots of, again, both. Lots of truths, lots of lies. This is not new. In fact, this is the natural order of things. We just live through a period of artificial volatility, artificial suppression of volatility, with media becoming over centralized. And obviously those days are over.
- [30:12]
C
I want to return back to. We were talking about the current thing and how that's accelerated over time. We previously had a conversation a while ago where we were talking about sort of the attributes of a current thing. And I remember you had this one theory that it can't be something too believable. It has to be almost surreal. Yeah. I'm curious if we just talk kind of, what are the attributes of something that becomes sort of the current thing or sort of the topic that people can't stop, quote, tweeting, sharing, et cetera.
- [30:40]
A
Yeah. So again, it's kind of this thing, you kind of reverse engineer it. It's like, okay, to be a current thing, it has to, you know, again, to be this thing, if it's on the Internet, it's a viral Internet meme kind of outrage cycle. So it. It has to be something that like, act. It has to be Something that activates outrage. Like, it has to be something that activates the emotional kind of valence of you. You have to get like the emotional reaction off of it, right? And so it, you know, it's, it's just like, by the way, this is just like also the history of the press in general. It's just like whatever, you know, I always say the news is called the news, not the importance, right? Like, like, you can imagine a version of the news that's called the importance. And, and the newspaper is like, here are all the important things that are happening today, right? And you. Nobody would buy it because nobody cares, right? Because people want the news, right? They want the news, the new thing, right? They want. Or, you know, they want. They want the hot thing, they want the exciting thing, they want the. They want the outrageous thing. And so the Internet version of that is. Right. They want. They want the outrageous meme. And so, so it's got to be something that provokes and you know, and there's something about this, you know, this, this is. Other people made this observation, but, you know, it's like, you know, kind of the ultimate male coded version of this is professional wrestling, right? The ultimate female coded version of this is like Real Housewives, like, you know, reality tv, like, you know, I don't know. Then the Apprentice, maybe somewhere in the middle, it's just like reality tv. Like, there has to be sparks. Like, it has to generate a level of emotional intensity driven by some level of outrage. And then I think it has to be the kind of thing where you can have tribes that form up and square off against each other, right? So there's like west side Story dynamic to it or something, right? Where it's just like, okay, you can imagine, you know, there's something that's worth arguing over where there's, you know, where there's a real argument to be had. Like there's some underlying thing that actually, like, really matters. Maybe, maybe this event doesn't matter as much, but like, the actual underlying issue matters a lot. And then it's going to. It's going to activate this tribal effect where you're going to be able to basically, you're going to become part of what they call a moral tribe. The people on the other side are going to become part of a moral tribe. And then you're going to got to go to war with each other. You're going to have a rumble, what they would have said in the old days, you're going to have a rumble, a rumble in the streets. Except you're not going to have a rumble in the streets, you're going to have a rumble online, right? You're going to go at it. And so it has to lend itself to that kind of basically tribal formation and kind of that beating back and forth. And of course, the tribes then attack each other on the issues, but then they also attack each other's values and they accuse each other of being horrible people. And then when it gets really into it, they start to dox each other and try to get each other fired, right? And it all becomes very exciting. And so it's gotta have the. Basically, it has to have the formation of a moral tribe effect. The psychological lens on this they call moral tribes. And then there's this concept, right, of moral panic. It's gotta lead to a moral panic. It's gotta lead to this kind of thing of, like, this is indicative of how society is going to shit, right? In, like, some important way. And by the way, this is why you can have many, many, many, many different examples of current things that end up revolving back around the same handful of underlying political or moral questions, right? Because it's really. Right. It's really not about the. What happened? I don't know. Jussie Smollett. I just watched there's this new Keanu Reeves movie on Apple TV where Keanu Reeves plays a movie star who gets canceled and his crisis lawyer, played by Jonah Hill. It turns out during the course of the show. I'll just spoil it. In the course of the movie, it. His crisis lawyer set up the Jussie Smollett was an op. It was a produced op. So in the movie world, the lawyer came up with the idea that there would be a black celebrity who would get attacked in the street by white racists. And that would be like a viral social media outrage thing. And then literally, the lawyer says, well, then of course, we went out and cast, and Jussie Smollett had the best pitch for why he should be the black guy. And then there was one of his underlings he's still mad at because the underling was tasked with the assignment of going out and hiring the attackers. But, you know, this is in the Haiti of diversity. And so he hired two black guys to be the attackers, right? And he's, like, all confused because he's like, am I supposed to hire black people, not hire black people? And it's like, well, not in this specific case. You weren't supposed to hire black people to attack Jussie Smollett anyway. So the Jussie Smollett thing is fresh in my mind. But it was a great example, which is like what happened on the street in Chicago that night during the whatever, whatever blizzard, cyclone thing. It was like, kind of matters, kind of doesn't matter. Whoever really knows, who knows? Whatever. We've got weird, grainy video, whatever. People say different things. I mean, I think we now know what happened. But like, in these events, like, what actually happened on the street, who the hell knows? But the, the fight, you see what I'm saying? Like, the moral tribes that were able to form up on, you know, one side where people are like, of course, this is what, you know, this is what happens to people all the time. And the people on the other side were like, of course this is all fake and bullshit. Right? You had this, you had this chance for these moral tribes to pair up and fight.
- [35:15]
C
Right?
- [35:16]
A
And so I think it basically has to have that.
- [35:21]
C
Yeah. And sometimes it's very serious and the stakes are very high, and sometimes it's just an episode that's so, you know, funny. And the astronomer CEO HR as an example.
- [35:34]
A
Okay, so this, okay, this is a very important point. So very important point. So I would say two things. So one is the truth or falsity of the actual event doesn't seem to matter at all. And, and I think this is, I think this actually throws people because you start to think these are all fake and they're not all fake. Like actual. Actually bad things happen, right? Actually bad things happen. And it's, it's actually like fully legitimate to get outraged about those things, but also people are going to get outraged about a lot of things that actually didn't happen. And so, so, so for the purpose of the discussion of, of the media, again, this Marshall McLuhan thing, if it's on the Internet, it's a viral social media outrage cycle, like whatever are the facts of the thing. It doesn't really matter. In fact, it's probably best. To your point, it's probably best if it's actually hard to tell what actually happened, because that makes it something that you can more easily argue about. And so that's one thing. And then to the point that you just made, I really agree with that also, which is the degree of importance of the actual issue doesn't matter that much. Right. And so if something happens to a single person and then something happens to 10,000 people, you can have the same level of outrage in each case. Like, the outrage doesn't scale with the number of people affected. Right. And in a lot of Ways maybe the outrage is even higher when it's a specific person because then it becomes personalized. Right. And then you get in the old, what is it, the old Stalin thing, which is the single death of the tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Like maybe it's even the small scale horrible things that happen that are the most emotionally intense because they're the things that you really, you're going to react to a person kind of the most intensely. And I think that's the thing. If you're doing the meta observation of this, it's like, okay, you just have to expect the same phenomenon, this outrage cycle to play out every time, regardless of truth or falsehood and regardless of the actual magnitude of the underlying issue. Because, because again, what's being argued about is not the specifics about what actually happened. That's not the point. The point is the ability to form up immoral tribes and then. And then. Yeah, and then have the rumble. Yeah, there's a. George Orwell actually has a great thing on this because George Orwell famously covered the Spanish Civil War, which was, as I said, is kind of the, it's kind of the original where a lot of this stuff sort of played out for the first time in the 20th century. And he did this thing one time where he talks about his version of this, he talks about the role of the attraction atrocity. And he said basically the key point of propaganda in any war. So you get two countries that go to war and they've each got a moral claim of why they're the justified. Nobody ever attacks, everybody's always defending. And I only attacked him first because he was going to attack me otherwise. And so each side in a war, each country has its own basically moral position why the war is justified. But he said, basically, Orwell said it's hard to sell these high blown, these high flying kind of abstract ideas of like why we need to go to war. And so he said what happens is the propaganda efforts of each government in a war become basically looking for atrocities. And so specific point events. A famous one is the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, but we can name many, many other examples. And so you're looking for these very specific events where something very specific and concrete happened that's clearly over the moral, beyond the realm of moral acceptance. Just clearly usually involving innocent people getting killed. And in the Spanish Civil War it was like nuns getting killed or something like that. And again, the point of the atrocity, the point of the atrocity is not that it affected 100,000 people. The point of the atrocity is, in fact, maybe the best atrocity only affects a small number of people because you want to personalize it. And then he says this. He says, the truth or falsehood of the atrocity, it doesn't matter at all if the atrocity is made up. The political value of the atrocity is just as high. Right? And so it doesn't matter. Like, once the atrocity cycle gets running, it doesn't matter whether the underlying thing is true or false, because the. Because the point of it is to have the. Have the atrocity be a propaganda win for moral justification and then. And then for moral demonization of the other side. And by the way, lest people think that I'm being cynical when I go through all this, I'm not saying I think this is all good. Like, I'm not saying I think that this world is great. I'm not saying that this. I think that this is all positive. I'm saying something different, which is, I think it's very important to understand how this actually works, because when you find yourself in the middle of one of these things, I think it's very useful to have at least a slice of your brain that's basically saying, all right, I need to be aware of the fact that I'm getting pulled into something, that I'm being triggered by emotion, and I'm being triggered and I'm being slotted into a moral tribe, and I'm mounting up to go to war with the hated enemy. And it's on the basis of something that very well might not be be true. Right? And this is a Rene Girard thing, which he says the scapegoating cycle always works because people always forget that there's a scapegoating cycle. Whenever you have to crucify the scapegoat, it's always the most morally important thing that's ever happened for the duration of that cycle until it's forgotten by the next one. And so a big part of what I'm trying to do is explain why as we surf all of these current fights, things that we like at least keep part of our brain and basically says, look, this is the state of the world we live in. This is the state of humanity. This is the state of the media. This is what's happening. We can like it or hate it, or we can debate the pros and cons, but it is what's happening. And all objective events are going to be filtered through that. And to the extent that you care about objective truth, you have to get through that and you have to get to the other side and be able to actually still deal with objective reality. But to do that, you need to understand the cycle.
- [40:55]
C
And it's also important to understand because if people are ever involved in the cycle or implicated in it, they typically say, oh, oh, but I'm innocent. Once everyone finds out the truth, they're going to exonerate me. They're going to clear me. And they, of course, don't fully appreciate that people don't give a shit. People are, you know, predisposed to, to, to hate you and they'll just find any sort of reason, you know, or certain people perhaps.
- [41:15]
A
Yes, yes, yes. If, yes, if you are. Yes, if you are actually, if you are actually innocent and if you're caught up in one of these things, it's, it's horrifying, it's terrifying. I mean, look at cancellation. I mean, this, this happened to a lot of people over the last decade. You know, people, people would get canceled for things they literally never did and for, you know, for, for, for people then imputing beliefs or, you know, some. I don't misreported comment. And then it gets imputed into, you know, this person is a horrible racist. And often away it goes and they have to get fired and purred from society and, you know, have no way to come back or, you know, or whatever the issue was, right? And you know, we, you know, there were these, you know, these viral videos or viral video, you know, oh, that's the other thing is like, okay, the viral videos. Viral videos, right, the viral videos. Viral videos have become so much like. By the way, the first viral video that mattered was actually Rodney King and it actually inaugurated. And I'm not going to, I'm not going to litigate Rodney King, good or bad or whatever, the whole separate conversation conversation. But the rotting King video starts with the beating. So it doesn't show everything that led up to that and that set the pattern. And again, I'm not excusing anybody for anything or whatever. I'm just saying the video started midway through the event. All of the really effective viral videos basically since then, including the ones that have been really important over the course of the last decade, they've all had that characteristic. They all start halfway through the event. So you don't see the run up and so the Central park birdwatcher was the famous. You don't see the run up of what happened before the video video started. What was the other one? Who was the other person who got like brutally canceled based on A video, I can't remember. I mean, there have been a whole bunch of them, but this is the thing, right? And so you get a viral video and it kicks off halfway into the event. Why does it, by the way, why does it kick off halfway into the event? That's because that's when the event became interesting enough to be able to put on video. Like, that's when people don't just, like, walk around with their phones out. That's when they pull the phone out. But by that point you've lost all the context. Right? And so. And again, this is one of those things where, okay, you're watching a viral video, you can feel yourself getting outraged. The key question ought to be, all right, what happened before that? Right? And you. And that takes work, right? Like, because it's not, it's not right there on the screen. And you have to, like, really try hard to, like, go back and like, figure out eyewitness reports. And by the way, like, if it's a criminal thing, half the time you don't find out what happened until the actual trial happens. So you don't find out for like another year because they don't put the evidence out until the trial. And so that's another thing where people get basically, people get used. Basically people get ginned up into these outreach cycles without actually having the context of or what happened.
- [43:31]
C
Yeah, the. I want to go back to this conspiracy. You know, we have a friend who thinks everything is an op. And maybe I'm naive and I miss out on. On the ops that are actually there. But I'm curious what mental model one might have to think about how much is coordinated versus not. I've been inspired by the idea of decentralized or emergent collusion, just sort of this, this idea that a lot of people have incentives to go in the same way that even if they're not coordinating explicitly, they almost might as well. And that, or it might explain why so many things seem coordinated. But, you know, ever since joining A16Z, so many people have impugned onto us things that we're not doing. And so it's made me skeptical of, of people calling for conspiracy. And so I'm curious what, what sort of meta model you might have for. For. For the idea of ops and how that might help one understand the, the. The social platforms today.
- [44:27]
A
Yeah. So I think as best I can tell, and it's tricky because it's hard to tell, and there are some real experts in this that really focus on this. But as far as I Can tell there's some truth on both sides. The answer is messy. And it's messy for two reasons. So messy. Number one is just like there are a lot of things that I think are happening that are truly organic. And then there are a lot of things that are happening that are ops. And I think there's a combination. And then I think maybe you're alluding to this. And then there's this thing where, which is like something can start as an OP and then become real. Right? Which is kind of the point of the op. Right. The, the, the right. The. If you say if you and I were going to be Machiavellian and we wanted to start a movement, right. And we wanted to start a moral outrage cycle because we had some underlying goal because we were either trying to win an election or trying to get a political something, you know, law passed or something like that. We were going to like, we're maximum like Machiavellian deviousness and we're going to like have a black budget, you know, and we're going to pay influencers to, you know, all this stuff that people say, you know, bot. We're gonna have our bot army and so forth forth. Like the point of it is not to just like have a bunch of propaganda online with a bot army behind it. The point is to get people to actually believe it. Right? That is the goal. Right. And then you don't want to have to pay for like every post, right. At some point you want them to be happening organically, even just out of self economic interest. And so you're actually trying to generate, you're actually trying to generate the thing. Actually there's a great paper on this. There's a Timur Kuran and there's the famous sort of guy who talks about preference, false fan classification. And then Cass Sunstein wrote this thing years ago where they talk about this phenomenon relevant here. They call it availability cascade. So their term for this kind of thing that we've been talking about, which is like a viral outreach cycle, their term for what they call availability cascade and what they mean by availability cascade is sort of. Cascade means basically the process. It's the sociological term for sort of an idea or concept kind of cascading through society, kind of building up momentum as it goes. And then availability they call based on the idea of availability bias, which basically is we tend to over focus on the thing that's right in front of us. And so we tend to over focus on the thing that's basically present in our mind at that Time, which may or may or may not be as important as other things that we're not focused on. But in the paper, the significance of it is, in the paper, they identify the role of a specific kind of person they call Availability Entrepreneur. And the role of the Availability Entrepreneur is to try to inject into the public consciousness availability bias as a deliberate exercise to basically say, this is the specific thing that you should be focused on right now. This is the specific person who's been hurt by something. This is the specific, whatever moral event that's happened. This is the specific issue. This is the specific thing. And basically what they say is like, every time you see an availability cascade, if you trace it back, there was always what they call the availability entrepreneur, which was basically the person who was like, aha, I am going to put, oh, I'll give you the classic example. And again, this is not a value judgment. And this was like, fantastically good that this happened. But Rosa Parks was a classic example of this. The story that we all got told in school was Rosa Parks was just like another sort of a random person with the thing on the bus. Rosa Parks was like an ash. She was a trained activist, like that. She. She went to like, the. There was this whole, like, school of activists and they, like, she was like a specifically trained. It was an. It was. There was an availability entrepreneur who set up an availability cascade targeted on Rosa Parks that ended up causing fundamental and obviously very, very positive changes to American society. But, like, it started as an op. Like, she started as. She started as an op, but the point of the OP was not to be the op. The point of it was to be what happened, which was to become a nationwide movement that ultimately led to. Led to funding fundamental change. And so anyway, the point is, like, just because things start as ops doesn't mean they're not real, right? And if the OP leads to real outcomes, then you might as well consider at some point, it's just a matter for historians of how it started. Like, it's a footnote to the Rosa Parks story today that she was a trained activist. It doesn't really matter because that OP unlocked a broad based, actual movement in American society that led to actually profound change. And so this is the problem with this topic, which is, oh, that's just an OP is basically like, cope. Like, okay, right, it might have started as an op, but if it ends up in a real thing, it doesn't matter. You see what I'm saying? It doesn't matter that it started as an op, right? And then by the way, conversely, it also doesn't matter if it didn't start as an op, because again, it's the same outcome. And so I do think, I kind of think both things are true. I do think there's this furious fight. I do think there are serious operators and, you know, you can go online and you can find out about these things. This is a big issue, by the way, in political influencer world right now. This is, this is actually a big thing. So if I want to run an advertising campaign to sell shampoo legally in the US If I hire influencers to say good things about the shampoo, they, I, I believe this to be true. They have to disclose that it's a paid commercial. They can't just like pretend that they just happen to stumble on the shampoo. If I donate money to a political candidate, I have to disclose that as part of federal election law. If I pay an influencer to take a position on a moral topic that is not a product that is sold or a political candidate, but it's just like a position on a moral or political thing that doesn't qualify either as an advertisement or as a political donation. It's fully legal to do that in the dark.
- [49:38]
C
Yeah, well, right, AI, right. A lot of, A lot of paid doom out there. We were just talking about Ayla's, you know, new media fellowship for Doomers. And yeah, it is a perfect example. And it, you know, seems to be having a real impact.
- [49:55]
A
This is a great example. So this is the thing where, you know, they're, they're living the meme. Right? They're living the meme. So, because, so there's a good. So I don't know if you may have covered all this already, but. Yeah, so like, we know we're in this AI. We're in this pitched AI policy battle and we know through that and we're deep into this, we know that there's dark money in AI. Like a lot of the AI Doomerism stuff is basically bought and paid for. So there's these influence operations that are happening and they fall into this bucket of. It's neither an advertisement to say AI is going to kill everybody, nor is it a political candidate. And so there are organizations and companies that are paying. And again, it's like not everybody who says that is being paid, but there is a lot of dark money in that world right now. And so. And of course, you know, the partisans in that world insist full on, of course, that there's, that of course, is absolutely not happening. Until yesterday when they just go ahead and, like, live the meme and they just, like, announce the program. And so they announced the program in black and white right there on a website. And it's like an influencer camp in which you're going to go, and by the way, it's free. Right. Which means, you know, you're, you know, you're being paid. And then they say, you know, where's the money coming from? And they say, oh, you know, we're a nonprofit being funded by, in this case, Miri, which is one organization with its own kind of interesting fund funding history. And then they say, and other donors. Right, right. And it's like, it's literally, you know, it's literally like, it's literally like, I don't know, is it a conspiracy if it's in plain sight? But. And I'm just, I'm picking on that one because that's the one that happened yesterday. But like, that, that for sure is happening all throughout politics. It's for sure happening on lots and lots of social issues. You know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a thing. And so, yeah, and so, like, but again, it goes back to this thing of like, okay, yes, there are ops. Yes. You can't believe what you see, by the way, there are bot farms. Like, there are ob. Bot farms, and they're obviously bot farms that are being deployed. You know, there, there are online influencers, some of them very controversial, where, you know, they clearly. There's clearly a bot army behind them. By the way, you could be an influencer online and have a bot army behind you and have nothing to do with the bot army. Right. Like, somebody could be paying for the bot army and you might not even know about it. Yeah, right. And again, today it's totally legal to do that because again, if you're not selling a product or you're not donating a political candidate, like, it's, it's actually in this great sector, actually fine to do. And so I think it's 100% the case that, like, there's ops all over the place. And quite frankly, like, the longer I, I, the more deeper I get into it, the more, like, yeah, there's probably more ops than I've been. That I've been. Than I, than I've been. I've been willing to acknowledge. But I would just say on the other side, it's like, I don't know, does it really matter? Like, is that really the thing? That's because the ops are only going to work be another way to put it is the ops are only going to work if they, if they resonate into something that people are going to pick up and run with. You know any anyway like to become a mass movement. This is like what Timur Kron says about the role, the availability entrepreneur. Like it's not enough to just like have your cause and then just like expect that you can kind of trick people into running with your cause. There has to be something to it that resonates with them, you know, kind of in them already that causes. Because it causes. That causes them to. And and if, if maybe they pick it up and run with it basement paid up and and by the way maybe in the counterfactual they would have picked up and run with it anyway, you know, without the app and you know, you'll never know.
- [53:01]
C
Yeah, the, the great mental model for it. Thinking about last topic for today. I want to close in this like sort of the bridge between legacy and new media because we see just give some examples. Obviously the New York Times business, they've made the adjustment to the new world very well from a business perspective. You know, we had CBS acquire the Free Press and so there's some, you know, acquisitions there, strategic acquisitions for legacy media companies who are trying to, to innovate. You know, on MTs ourselves, we're sort of experimenting with players from both worlds. You know, we have new school podcasters and Twitch streamer. You know, Theo. Is Theo, you 21 years old? Yeah, he's born to be a Twitch streamer, but we also have, I mean 21.
- [53:45]
A
I mean over the hill.
- [53:46]
C
Yeah, exactly. You know, has been by now gray hair.
- [53:50]
A
Gray hair.
- [53:51]
C
Washed. Yeah, washed. But we also have Mark Halperin who, you know, as you know, legacy and legendary, you know, commentator and host who, who funny enough, you know, we've talked about how Trump is the, is the bridge figure in that he was successful both in legacy and in this new media media climate. And it's rare for people to do both. Halperin, of course interviewed, did a very famous interview with Trump when he was talking about the Bible verses and you know, get getting him to mention some specific ones and you know, Trump of course didn't want to pick favorites. Anyway, I'm curious how you think about the sort of the bridge, either analysis of Trump as the bridge or more just how do you see legacy players and new media players sort of, you know, playing out or even the styles of what will work in this new, new format?
- [54:43]
A
Yeah, I mean, so I guess I don't know, maybe start with data, right? So the data shows that, basically focus on American data because of what I'm most familiar with. So just in the data you basically see a couple of things. So one is trust in centralized institutions of kinds is collapsing in the US So basically any kind of legacy or incumbent institution, you know, trust is collapsing fast. By the way, that collapse in trust didn't start with the Internet. It actually started around 1970. It actually, it actually is part of this, is part of this WTF happened in 1971 meme is when basically trust in centralized institutions in the US started to fall off a cliff. That's true for many kinds of centralized institutions and it's been true for, you know, basically 50, 55 years. But, but media is included in that. And so trust and centralized media is collapsing and you know, keeps hitting new record lows. Basically every time they run the survey, it collapses further. And so, so that's certainly true. And then you, and then the business version of it is just very clear, which is, you know, we've talked about CNN later, like your earlier, like, you know, ratings for all the centralized media properties are in full scale collapse. You know, cable news is collapsing. You know, almost every, almost every newspaper has collapsed. Almost every magazine has collapsed. You know, basically all the, all the, all the legacy formats have collapsed, you know, with only very rare exceptions. And so, you know, just, and then, by the way, correspondingly, it's just sort of obvious, you know, the rise of podcasts obviously is obvious now. And by the way, it's amazing. Like the election of 24 was the one where podcasts kind of flipped. The, you know, went from being like, I don't know if this matters to like, all of a sudden everybody's like, oh, wow, this matters like a lot. And so the rise of podcasts, of course, is undeniable at this point. The rise of social media, the rise of live streaming, you know, these things are clearly happening. And so like the, the, the, the changing of the guard, reordering of the, the businesses and of the cultural and social phenomena are clearly happening and I think are undeniable. You know, if you extrapolate forward, like, obviously all, you know, essentially all of the remaining old media properties that don't figure out a way to adapt to the new world are going to, you know, they're, they're, you know, going to get basically run by private equity and that'll be that, you know, which is kind of the story of the newspaper industry these days. Um, so, so I, you know that like it's almost like not even interesting to say that anymore just because it's like it's so obvious that that's happening. And then you know, obviously social media, you know, continues to grow as a phenomenon, continues to be very important. And so. Yeah, and you know, look, we're still, we're still living in this, we're still living in a, in a hybrid world today. Right. And so we're still living in a world in which like, you know, to some extent it still matters what's on tv, but like not nearly as much as it did. But you know, pretty soon it's not, it's not going to anymore. So, you know, so that world is changing fast. Yeah, I just think, yeah, the main thing is going to be, you know, the people who adapt to that are. The people who adapt to that are going to adapt to that and they're either going to adapt or they're not. You know, you mentioned Mark Halperin, you know, who's a good friend of both of ours, you know, I think is doing like an amazing job adapting to that. And in a way that's just like I would say shockingly different and better than most of his former colleagues. You know, there's great examples. The New York Times has adapted to that and interesting way, you know, the Hasan Piker apology newspaper has fully committed itself to the future, let's say. So you know, they're doing their thing. Yeah. You know, most legacy properties won't adapt, you know, they never do. There's going to be lots and lots of new things that emerge. And maybe I should say here again to not sound, not sound cynical about this, like it is really striking, I would say the following. So like, what are the two like mega, mega, mega trends in video and by the way also in politics over the course of the last like five years. It's basically two things. It's short form video in the form of TikTok, Instagram and X short form reels or short form video. And there you get the full battery of accusations of destroying attention span and everything's trivial. But on the other side is the rise of the three hour podcast. And so on the podcast side you have this incredible phenomenon with three hours. And by the way, some of these, Joe and Lex and others are now pushing this to the point where Lexington now has like in some cases seven or eight hour podcasts. Right. I think was it Biology did like
- [58:53]
C
a Lex 10 hour one. 10 hour one on Lex.
- [58:55]
A
Yeah, yeah. So biology went for 10 hours of Lex and so, and it's actually interesting because if you talk to those guys, they get data on completion rates and it's actually a very large percentage of their, of their listeners, reviewers who actually listen to the whole thing. So like many, many, many Rogan podcasts or Lex podcasts, people actually listen to the full, the full three hours. And so, so it's, it's the thing. I really rejected this idea that like, and I don't want people to think that I believe this is like this idea that everything is going to become just like short form social media bullshit like that. No, not at all. You have this correspond, you do have a lot of that, but you have this corresponding thing which is. You also, it's like a, it's like a barbell. You also have this, you, you have this massive rise in substance. And on the substance side I would point to the long form podcasts. I would point to substack, by the way. You know, there's a big push on X to have long form essays. I would push, you know, online, you know, online, online, you know, courses on every topic are available. And, and you have this ability, even AI. My favorite feature of AI is what they call deep research, which is a feature on both, I think it's on, particularly on ChatGPT and on Claude. But you set it loose and it will write you literally 30 pages. A 30 page answer. This is basically like a textbook on any topic. And so I think there is this other side which is you also have this growth in, you have this growth in. Oh, the other thing is just. And we're an example of this, the rise of the practitioner media, practitioner driven media. So people who are actually doing a thing, showing up and talking about it. Right? And of course, you know, that leads to howls of outrage of that's not journalism. If you don't have somebody asking like whatever, super, you know, snipey critical questions about it or whatever. But like the idea for somebody who is actually doing a thing, I mean, you know, Andre Carpathian, AI right, who just like shows up and like explains like here, here is how this all works is just like amazing. And you know, in old media, like basically like when I, when I was younger, Charlie Rose did that. So I grew up actually listening to Charlie Rose watching Charlie Rose. But Charlie Rose literally was on at fucking midnight. He was on CBS at midnight and he would have these hour long conversations with these super interesting people doing super interesting things, but he was on at midnight. And you had to stay up to midnight to watch Charlie Rose. It was one of the great things about getting a DVR is you could record Charlie Rose and watch it during normal daylight hours, but we lost that or we didn't have that for a very long time. And we have that now. And so I do think it's worth noting there is this incredible, in my view, clearly, incredibly positive, informative, educational, super helpful, super constructive thing on the other side, which is, of course, a lot of what we try to do.
- [61:24]
C
Yeah. And it, you know, if 2024 was the podcast election, it'll be interesting to see what 2028 will be. People have been very concerned, you know, or sort of predicting, you know, deepfakes for a while and how that might influence things, but we haven't really seen anything there. Super material, it seems. But it'll be interesting to see what, what media of formats or just how the 2028 election is. Is different than the 2024 one. In terms of this conversation.
- [61:51]
A
We've had deep fakes forever. Like, like people who believed all kinds of crazy. I mean, you know, was the Gulf of Tonkin incident and they kicked off the. Really kicked off the Vietnam War. Like, I think we now know that that was a fake. Like, it's actually quite well established. And then some people might say Russiagate. Turns out we now know it was a quite elabor. The deep fake thing I find very funny because it's like, it's not like we've been swimming in truth all this time and all of a sudden now there's going to be defects. But anyway, maybe that's a separate conversation. I think the substantive comment I would make is, so I actually think people talk about, like famously talk about the 1960 election, Kennedy versus Nixon, famously where television took over from radio, where they had their famous debate. And if you listened to it on the radio, you thought Nixon won. And if you watched it on tv, you thought that the Kennedy won. So audio versus audio plus video. And so people have been talking for a long. That was considered like the first television election where television was like the determining factor in who won or lost, along with maybe some shenanigans in Chicago. Anyway, speaking of deep things. So anyway, people have been talking for a while about when will there be the first Internet election? And, you know, people like to point to 2016 being, you know, Trump using social media or maybe 2024 being the podcast election. I actually think the first Internet election hasn't happened yet. By the way, people even point to 2008 with Obama fundraising. So, yeah, 2008, Obama fundraising online, 2016, Trump using using social media as a broadcast method and then 2024 podcasts. So we've had three examples of Internet mattering for election elections for sure. But I think we haven't had the true Internet election. And as a consequence of that, and by the way, we therefore haven't really had the true Internet candidate yet. And actually it's interesting, as people talk, this is not a pro or negative pro or con comment on Trump himself for the purpose of this discussion, but people talk about Trump as the Internet candidate, but he's really a hybrid in that he cares enormously about what's on tv and he's on TV a lot and he watches tv, TV all the time, famously, in order to. Because TV is basically how he gets a read on the pulse of sort of what's happening and of what people think about things and what people. So, like, I think Trump's kind of underlying theory is the things that are on TV are the things that the people running the TV network know that their viewers want to see. And so therefore if you watch us on tv, you can get a sense of what people actually think. And I, you know, and when, as TV has been the dominant medium for the last 60 or 70 years, you know, that, you know, it's a pretty good theory. Obviously it's worked pretty well, you know, quite well for him. And then he also cares a lot about affecting what's on tv. And there's this famous Trump story that lots of people have told where he'll be in a meeting and there'll be a TV on in the background. He'll be watching it and he'll have it with the sound off, but he'll be watching the chiron, the thing at the bottom of the screen, the text that shows what they're saying. And if he doesn't like what's on the chiron, he'll tweet something to change the subject. Right? So he'll tweet and then he'll literally watch and the chiron will change and he'll be like, ah, you know, so, right, he's right, he's able to. Cause, right, he's able single handedly with his power of his Twitter to turn one current thing into another current thing. Right, okay, so, but my point is like he's a hybrid, so he's very social media fluent, but he's also very television. And of course his entire career was made on television. So he's very television fluent. He's one of the best television programmers in history. And he's a social media native. There will be an Internet candidate. There will be an Internet president who gets elected, I believe, entirely based on the Internet, where they don't pay any attention at all to what's on TV because it doesn't matter to them one bit. And they're going to be entirely online and they're not going to care what's in the on TV and they're not going to care what's in the newspaper and they're going to be 100% a creature of the Internet. And I think we haven't. I believe we haven't seen that yet. I don't know when we're going to see it. I'm pretty sure it's possible. It's 28, probably. My guess is 32. Yeah. And so I think we all have. Yes, for better or for worse, we all have that to look forward to. Yeah.
- [66:01]
C
Well, I think that's a great note to wrap on. This has been a great discussion. All things media. Mark, thank you for coming on the first day of monitoring the situation.
- [66:11]
A
I am proud to be part of the monitoring.
- [66:16]
B
Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating, or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X16Z and subscribe to our substack@A16Z substack.com thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotion, promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management, LLC, A16Z or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.