--:-- Erik Torenberg: He's not trained in this business at all. He doesn't follow any of the protocol that you're used to. He's just so uncomfortably unusual.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: What he was trained on was he was trained in reality television. I have not been on reality TV, but my understanding is if you're trained in reality TV, your mission is to create drama. Your mission is to be as interesting as possible. And as controversial as possible, right?
--:-- Erik Torenberg: The other thing he was trained in was professional wrestling. Both reality TV and professional wrestling grew up together in this new alternate media landscape. Pseudo-real entertainment. Or maybe the most real thing. And Fred Rick Rubin says that these are actually the most real things, not the least real things. If you think professional wrestling is fake, just wait until you read the newspaper.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: In this episode, taken from the Ben and Mark show, Mark Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and I sit down to map the evolution of media. From Craigslist to Rogan, from Watergate to Trump, from centralized institutions to the rise.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: I was GP at A16Z. And before this, I was investing and also running a media company called Turpentine, which I'm glad is now part of A16Z. And we thought this would be a great excuse to do an episode on the evolution of media. And you guys have had a front row to the evolution of media from a few different angles. You've both invested in a lot of the major disruptions to legacy media over the past couple of decades, Facebook, Twitter, Substack, many others. You've both been a creator and producer of media. Benedict Evans once called A16Z a media company that monetizes via VC. And you've both been subjects and participants, sometimes unwillingly, of the press and media. So you've seen it from many different vantage points and we thought this episode we'd take a structural look at how the media has evolved.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: Mark, why do you think it's so important to look at it from a structural perspective and what inspired you to spend so much time thinking about media?
--:-- Marc Andreessen: If you're like me, you start out worshiping the press. The world's a complicated place and there are all these really smart people that spend all day trying to explain it. In my case, I started reading the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times in college and I read it every day. I just thought it was amazing that for relatively little money, they would explain everything that happened in the world. That was the heyday of centralized media, or the tail decade of centralized media in the 1990s. In retrospect, we all didn't know how good we had it.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Then the internet actually worked and it became a big factor. It started to change the business of the media, starting in the mid to late 1990s. The internet and the web were the early changes. But then Craigslist hit pretty hard, pretty fast. If you reconstruct the history, Craigslist cut the legs out from under newspapers quite quickly because it took out classified advertising, which had been a huge source of revenue. Something like a third.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Particularly for the local newspapers, right?
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah, that's right. Some of the national newspapers were local newspapers in terms of their business models, especially in those days. The New York Times was a local New York newspaper just as much as it was a national paper. They had a lot of local ads. The Washington Post, I remember trying to subscribe to it in college. It was basically impossible. It didn't have delivery outside the Washington area. It was very much a local paper, even though it covered the national government.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: As that started to happen, my company, Netscape, the company that Ben and I built in the 90s, was a major provider of software to these companies. We had a full suite. What was it called? The publishing system?
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, the publishing system.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The Netscape publishing system. We had a full-fledged content management system that a bunch of the major newspapers bought. So we got to know them as businesses. One of my earliest meetings was with Dow Jones, which owned the Wall Street Journal. They explained to me that adopting new technology for the Washington Post is difficult because it was unionized. As late as the 1990s, they had a full-time employee who hand-built all their servers because a prior union contract required it. That was a job for somebody that at one point made sense.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: There's an interesting meta point there that will relate to manufacturing. Collective bargaining agreements tend to be very incompatible with technological change. That's a salient issue to the general idea of collective bargaining, which assumes a fixed technology set. That's highly untrue in today's world. So there probably needs to be, even if you're pro-union, a real evolution to that idea.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, and very relevant. It's not just manufacturing, but a lot of the media companies now are unionized. And a lot that weren't unionized are unionized now. Mark, you often support the unions, right?
--:-- Marc Andreessen: When I'm in a bad mood and they've written a bad story about me, I issue full-throated votes of support for the unions and their collective bargaining and their ability to go on strike. Their ability to completely destroy the revenue of their host organisms. Many of them are unionized in their tech staff, and they're also unionized on the reporting staff. They should do whatever they think is right, but it certainly doesn't make it easier for businesses to adapt.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: That got me thinking about this as an industry like any other industry, a business like any other business. I met a lot of the CEOs and publishers of major publications and people running TV networks. They were excited about the internet. They saw the opportunity. They were worried about it. They saw the Craigslist thing happening. Then the music industry got hit super hard with Napster around the year 2000, which was quite early for these changes. That freaked out every other media business because they saw what was happening in music and worried about it happening to themselves.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Anxiety kept rising. The business structurally kept changing. Certain media businesses have done extraordinarily well with the internet. The New York Times is actually one of those. But many others have been structurally compromised or disadvantaged.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The most obvious observation is about news. How many news organizations should there be? In the old days, you would have three network news organizations: NBC, CBS, ABC News. You'd have maybe three news cable channels. You'd have one or two newspapers per city. A handful of radio stations per city. A handful of local television stations per city. A handful of national news magazines. Time Magazine, Newsweek, and U.S. News were the three national news magazines. In each discrete media market, you could have one or two or three news organizations, and you could make the economics work.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: But the internet is a solvent that turns every media into every other kind of media. Local TV is competing with national network TV, competing with cable TV, competing with newspapers, competing with magazines. Now you've got 30, 40, or 50 news organizations all competing directly with each other. That's been the state of affairs for the last 20 years. It still hasn't reconciled. I can never get anybody in the media to think about any of these terms. There are simply too many competitors. It's an oversupply of news organizations.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: They haven't rationalized. Why does CBS News and CNN have separate reporting staffs? In the universe of online streaming and internet content, it doesn't make any sense. There should have been some level of rationalization, but there never was. Every single news organization is now subscale. You've got 30 subscale players competing with each other instead of three scale players competing with each other. Some of that is regulation. Some of that is bans on M&A. Some of that is licensing. Some of that is obstinance.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The news business has a characteristic where it has a missionary component. It's not just a business. It's a calling, a cause, vital to the protection of democracy. There's something admirable in having a higher purpose. But that can become an inhibitor to thinking rationally and clinically about the structure of one's business. That thinking may still be somewhat lacking. It felt like that ramped up at some point where a lot of media, particularly in tech, turned from reviewing gadgets to defending democracy.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: That evolution is interesting and long, not just of tech media, but all media. My father was a writer and sometimes journalist. He spent a lot of his career as a journalist. In the early days, journalism was literally reporting what you saw. The journalists themselves did not have college degrees. They were just regular people who reported what they saw. They didn't have strong ideological points of view for the most part.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Then journalism became a profession. It became professionalized, not unlike how politicians became professionalized. At that point, it became much more ideological and much less about reporting what you see. That change started more in the 1960s and 1970s. When you added the internet to that ideological bent, combined with the change in the business model and the heavy competition for readers, the standard of truth moved way down.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Everything essentially became TMZ or the National Enquirer. They'd go for a story, they'd get the story. If they couldn't get the facts, they'd write the narrative. We experience this all the time now. Someone will fact check something with us, we'll say, "No, that's not true," and they'll write it anyway. It'll be something like, "Are you suing this company?" We'll go, "No." And they'll write, "We've heard from others that they're suing the company." If we're not the definitive source on that, then okay. It really has changed quite a bit over the years, culminating in this activist tech press.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: There's always been an inherent conflict in the principles of journalism. One is objectivity. To be above the fray, tell both sides, accurately convey the facts. But then they have two other phrases they use, and this goes back decades. One is "speak truth to power."
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Who's power? Who's truth?
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Exactly. Here's a very interesting question. Who's more powerful, a CEO or a reporter? If you ask the reporter, they'll say, "Obviously the CEO is more powerful. He has 100,000 employees and billions in revenue and all this ability to determine the fate of industries and business and politics." The counterargument is the reporter has the ability to get the CEO fired. This just happened. And not vice versa. A CEO cannot get a reporter fired, but a reporter can very much get a CEO fired.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Then there's the other phrase: "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." It sets up this polarized oppositional role. I'm a hundred percent supporter of the free press, a hundred percent supporter of the First Amendment. I'm a bigger supporter of the First Amendment than most reporters I know. But "speak truth to power" and "be objective" are two different things. They really are two different goals. I think that is at the heart of the internal conflict that runs inside these organizations.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: You can think about this as a contrast between missionary and mercenary. If it's just a business, you could argue it should be completely objective because people should pay for completely objective news. Or you could argue it should be completely scurrilous, yellow journalism that sells as many copies as possible. But when it takes on this moral calling of "speak truth to power," it has this goal and motivation. In our world, that ultimately leads to a political alignment and a set of political motivations that override the business judgment. That's been the story of a lot of the last decade.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: When did you guys start to notice that some of the legacy media was really failing to achieve its ideals? Mark, we can get into Martin Gurri's analysis and the structural forces behind how social media and the internet accelerated that.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: We'll tell the personal side of the story first, then go to the theoretical. Ben spent a lot of time with the press over the years. I had done an East Coast press tour. In the old days, if you were a prominent public figure, CEO, or major person in the news, you would once a year fly to the East Coast because they're all on the East Coast. You'd meet with the reporters, editors, and publishers of all the major publications.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I did this for many years going back to the 90s, probably 20 times. Leading into 2017, it had always been a benign and enjoyable experience. They'd put together roundtables of their reporters. You'd visit their offices. They'd fill up a conference room with interested people. If you were high profile enough, they'd bring in the editor and the publisher. You'd sit and do open Q&A. I would also have business meetings with the publishers or CEOs. I knew most of the major publishers and CEOs of the big media companies.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Up through 2016, it was a relatively benign experience. Lots of curiosity about new technology, about structural changes. They were very interested in the future of the media business. We always had companies trying to help with different aspects of that. In the early 2010s, you had the rise of Vox and BuzzFeed. The legacy publishers were very interested in them, trying to figure out if they should compete with them or buy them. Generally, it was very friendly, or at least semi-adversarial. But there was a lot of curiosity and open-mindedness.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Spring of 2017 was the last one I did. I remember it very vividly because it was starkly different from 2016. It was like somebody had flipped a light switch, and not in a good direction. It was naked hostility. People sitting across the table, arms folded, glaring. One high profile business journalist who's still very active came to a three-hour dinner. He started by loudly declaring that all tech companies were frauds. This was all bullshit. None of this was real. He didn't believe a single thing anybody like me would ever say. Then he crossed his arms and refused to speak for the rest of the three hours. That was relatively characteristic of the experience.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: That really shook me. Something had changed. The easy answer for what changed is Trump. Spring of 2017 was when the Facebook Cambridge Analytica narrative was really kicking in. The theory went that social media had been compromised and gotten Trump elected. Then the Russiagate stuff was kicking in. You've got a Russian spy in the White House. That political activation was super concentrated in the places where the journalists live. Brooklyn was ground zero. Manhattan. Boston with the major universities. They had this extremely high level of activated energy, which translated to rage.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: We did one other thing that year. We had a media party every year. We had this old-fashioned view that if you throw them a big party and give them free food and free alcohol, they might like you more. I went against my better judgment after what I experienced earlier in the year. I remember three top tech journalists cornered me on the Facebook destroying democracy topic. They were absolutely adamant. They were appalled that Facebook was not censoring more. They were completely appalled that Facebook did not have much tougher censorship rules on what people could say.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I had an out-of-body experience. These are three reporters. Twenty years ago, reporters were the most strident defenders of the First Amendment. Now they were demanding censorship. I couldn't help myself. I pointed that out. They got extremely upset. I was like, "This is over." From my perspective, the world changed profoundly and dramatically in 2017 and set off a cascading series of changes. We've never gone back to the way things were in 2016 or before. We could speculate whether we ever will, but I doubt it at this point.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: That was also when Trump started calling them the fake news. That was in response to journalists saying that Facebook was fake news. Trump said, "No, you're fake news." That was when it was like, okay, we're on this side, you're on that side. There was no longer any pretense of objectivity. Objectivity was gone at that point.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: It was fairly amazing. I voted in 2016. I voted for Hillary. I supported Hillary publicly. I didn't understand why I was getting tagged with this. It was, "You're an idiot. You're a dupe. You got played. You got hacked by the Russians." I went to Hillary's first public appearance after she lost. She gave a talk at Stanford. She said 20 feet away from me on stage that Trump was only president because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook to insert fake news. The unified theory emerged around Russiagate. The tech companies were just presumed guilty, even though we were all 99.9% Democrats or Hillary supporters.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: People who went through that had two or three very different reactions. One was absolute terror: "Oh my God, are the critics right?" That led to the enormous pounding for censorship that kicked in, including in the Valley and in many tech companies. Other people were like, "Oh my God, I've just seen behind the curtain, like the end of the Wizard of Oz. These aren't objective truth tellers. There's something else going on here." That was a very small number of people. A lot of people entered a state of confusion, not understanding how the world works and how the media works. That state of confusion for a lot of people probably still continues.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: One of the interesting things about that whole period was how much of it was about Trump and not any of the facts. Obama clearly won in 2008 because of Facebook. He used it effectively. The internal knowledge from the Facebook team was that Trump was just way better at his usage of Facebook than Hillary was. Hillary used old techniques. Obama used new techniques. Trump used new techniques. Trump had the genius machine zone CEO working with him, who was the best games distributor in the world, working to distribute Trump on Facebook. That's what actually happened.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: 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. What they found in terms of the Russian hacking was effectively nothing. There was nothing. But the dominant media narrative was that Facebook had been hacked by the Russians. Probably half the population still thinks that's true, but it's absolutely false.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: It's amazing how just in one election cycle, people turned on social media and free speech. Obama won thanks to it and people celebrated. People celebrated the Arab Spring. Dick Costolo called Twitter the free speech wing of the free speech party. Five years later, eight years later, "Oh, this whole free speech thing, I don't know about this anymore."
--:-- Ben Horowitz: It shows you how polarizing Trump is. It was all good until he got elected, and then it was all bad.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: Mark, what does Martin Gurri bring to this analysis? He's really shaped your thinking here.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Martin Gurri is a good friend of ours and a brilliant writer. He spent 30 years in the CIA doing analysis of regime change. He was in the open source division for a long time, doing global media monitoring. He's a world expert on the intersection of how the media operates and how changes happen in government and political regimes.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: He wrote this book pre-Trump. I think he wrote it in the early 2010s and self-published it originally in 2015. The book was published at the same time that Trump was winning the nomination. In hindsight, it's extremely prescient. Even he would say he didn't know the thesis was going to get proven as fast as it was. The book is available today in a formal edition from Stripe Press. You can buy it on Amazon. They have a beautiful version with a whole new section on what happened since he wrote it.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: It laid out this thesis that at the time sounded very radical. Today it just sounds like a description of what's happening. He focuses on the concept of authority. Authority is not just somebody telling you what to do. It's any kind of centralized, credentialed authority figure or authoritative institution. That might be a politician, a bureaucrat, a reporter, a doctor, a credentialed expert of any kind. Then there's institutional authority: the institutions that are supposed to guide our society. The government, government bureaucracies, news organizations, universities, foundations, NGOs.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: If you read the press, the standard form of article is "Expert says X."
--:-- Marc Andreessen: So the go-to thing is always to basically say, here's a way that the world works or something happens according to an expert. And the expert is by definition a credentialed expert. So you're not allowed to be an independent expert. You have to be a formal expert with the right diploma or the right certification. And that's the linkage between the individual authority figures and the institutions, which is the authoritative institutions certify the individuals. 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.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Basically what he said was that everything I just described is an artifact of centralization and top-down media. Mass media, mass education, centralized authority. The idea that there are a few really good universities that certify all the experts. The idea that there are a few large foundations that determine the future shape of society through their activism. The idea that there's only one central government, only a few politicians who are really in charge. That whole idea of authority that you can trust and rely on is an artifact of the top-down centralized era.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Social media is bottoms-up, peer-to-peer media where people can just share with each other. He made a very provocative claim that this will basically destroy all authority. That it will ruin the reputation of all the certified experts and destroy all of the authoritative institutions. At first it seemed too radical. Why would that happen just because people can talk openly about things?
--:-- Marc Andreessen: He said the reason is because none of these institutions are actually as perfect as they say they are. They're made up of people like anything else. They're right about some things, wrong about other things. But to be authoritative, they project this image of being right 100% of the time. They are the authoritative source of truth.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Social media is many things, but one of the things it is is an x-ray machine. When an expert says something that turns out to be wrong, in the old days nobody would write the story, or it'd be on page 34. In the new world, it goes viral on social media. The world you experience as a consumer is completely different because you're seeing dozens or hundreds of accounts every day about how the experts are wrong.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The thing is, they really are wrong a lot of the time. They're people and they're imperfect. They've built up these reputations that cannot be factually supported. When populations realize that these authoritative sources are not actually correct all the time, even though they've been claiming to be, it's like they've written checks their bodies can't cash. He said inevitably you'll see them crumble.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: You can see this very clearly in the large polling organizations like Gallup that do annual surveys of trust in institutions. They go year by year, how much do you trust this thing? You see a long slide in institutional authority and trust that started in the 1970s, which predates the internet. Then you see a much faster collapse after 2015. In the last three years, the numbers have just caved in. Universities, the medical profession, the press, many of the nonprofits—their trust ratings have completely cratered.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: You look back now and you realize that was a correct assessment that is playing out now. The question is how far does it go? Do the numbers converge to zero? There's an interesting thing preventing that from happening right now: the numbers are becoming partisan split. Democrats trust universities, Republicans don't. Democrats trust doctors, Republicans don't. Who's in the White House determines how people feel about the economy. When Biden was in, Democrats felt great, Republicans felt horrible. Now that Trump's in, Republicans feel great, Democrats feel horrible. Everything is partisan all the time.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The partisanship is actually holding up the reputation of institutions that would otherwise have their trust ratings go to zero, which I think is probably what happens in the fall of this time.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: Well, first off, what happened in the 70s, to give full context?
--:-- Marc Andreessen: There's a cultural argument. It has to do with the social revolution of the 1960s, especially Vietnam. Vietnam was gigantically controversial and very discredited for a long time, and it ended very badly. Then Nixon, Watergate. The environmental movement was revealing dirty secrets of industry. The Church and Pike committees were revealing dirty secrets of the intelligence agencies. You had this activated social consciousness, a new generation of boomers that were politically and socially activated. You had a lot of data points that the institutions were going bad.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The other argument is actually a structural argument. It's when peak centralization started to collapse. Our friend Balaji talks a lot about this concept of peak centralization. If you look at anything from governments to business to media, centralization in the world peaked in the 1950s. That was when you had the smallest number of countries in history—something like 60. You had the smallest number of media organizations. Media in the 18th and 19th centuries was actually much more decentralized, but by the 1950s it was this highly centralized environment.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Mass manufacturing had centralized production. Public education had centralized the process of educating kids. All these areas of human activity had been centralized in a small number of large organizations. When that happens, those organizations get a tremendous amount of control. The editors at the major newspapers could absolutely decide what was news and what wasn't. If they didn't want something to be news, they just buried it.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: A famous example: what percentage of the U.S. population knew that FDR was in a wheelchair when he was president? Or what percentage knew all the stuff we now know Kennedy got up to?
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Good thing that would never happen today.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: That would never happen today.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Even the affairs that aren't true get published today.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Exactly. Under peak centralization, you're going to have maximum trust because you're going to have the most information control. You're not going to have alternative points of view. Everybody has a much higher level of unanimity, which comes across in surveys as trust. People don't have anything to compare to.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The argument goes that in the 1970s, the media landscape started to decentralize. You had the rise of talk radio, AM talk radio. Rush Limbaugh had a major impact on the information landscape because he was a completely different kind of voice than what you got in the traditional press. You also had the rise of paperback books. The cost of books dropped dramatically, and you could do cheap paperback books on many topics that you could never get through the hardback publishing apparatus. Newsletters—mimeograph newsletters, photocopy newsletters—became a big thing in that period. Cable TV emerged in the late 1970s into the 1980s and started to really blow the doors open. Even early computers, not so much the internet, but bulletin board services, CompuServe, Prodigy—these were pre-internet dial-up information services.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: You had six or eight different technological changes that were decentralizing media. If I'm a trusting individual, I'm just going to watch the 5 o'clock news and believe what they tell me. But if I'm an inherently untrusting individual, I'm going to seek out a newsletter, a paperback book, talk radio, a new cable TV show, a new source of information. Those sources need to differentiate themselves from the mainstream, so they come up with alternative narratives. The rise of new technology equals the rise of a new audience, equals the rise of a new belief system that is inherently not trusting.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: 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 creating new behavior or just revealing behavior that was there? I remember one interview you did with Kara and Reid Hoffman around 2018 or 2019. They were both saying, "When can we go back to an era where we all had civil conversations and all got along?" And you were like, "Maybe it's not as simple as we're making it here."
--:-- Marc Andreessen: That was probably 2017. That was my last onstage appearance at a mainstream industry conference. I didn't realize what I was getting into. Reid Hoffman had been a good friend of mine for a long time. Kara and I had been hot and cold for a long time, but she'd done great work earlier in her career. I'd known her for a long time, and she was running this very important conference. I was excited to be on stage with Reid and Kara.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: They had both become extremely politically activated. They both had extremely negative responses to Trump. Reid has become one of the largest donors in American history for left-wing politics. Kara is Kara. People can draw their own judgments. I got on stage and they started this extremely aggressive attack. It was the beginning of the "tech has enabled fascism" wave that they've both gotten very into.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I even did a little bit of my earlier answer. At one point we trusted the media, now we don't. But did we ever really trust the media that much? We say we did, but did we? My favorite example is the legend of Walter Cronkite. He was a network news anchor for CBS News. For decades, he was considered the authoritative source of information. If you can't trust Walter Cronkite, who can you trust?
--:-- Marc Andreessen: There was this famous moment in 1968. The Vietnam War had been going for four or five years and it was already going bad. Walter Cronkite went to Vietnam, came back, and came out against the war. The legend is that it was this truth-to-power moment—the authoritative source finally telling the American people the truth that this war is a disaster. But that raises the question: what was his point of view on the war prior to 1968? Nobody wants to open that box. If you go look at the four years of network news broadcasts from 1964 to 1968, what you'd find is he and everybody else was 100% in support of it.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The other thing is that 1968 was a presidential election year. The Vietnam War between 1964 and 1968 was a Democratic war—a Kennedy-Johnson project. If Nixon were to win, it would become a Republican war, which is what it turned into. He flipped from positive to negative on it at precisely the point when the country flipped from a Democratic president to a Republican president. Probably just a coincidence. Maybe not.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: There were huge disputes in those days. A lot of people were saying, "If the media is coming out against a war with American soldiers in the field, you're betraying those soldiers." You had celebrities going to Vietnam talking about how evil the whole thing was and how great the North Vietnamese communists were. Even in those days, it's not like everybody just agreed with everybody. There is a lot of myth-making that takes place.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The other part of myth-making from that era is Watergate. The story gets told that you have two plucky young reporters, Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post, who unspooled the story of presidential corruption and took down Nixon. The whole story is they cultivated this inside source called Deep Throat, this unimpeachable truth teller. Thirty years later, we finally learned his identity. It turns out he was the number three executive in the FBI. In Hoover's FBI. He was the agent of what all these same people considered to be organized fascism.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Now there's a completely different interpretation of Watergate: it was a war between the FBI and Nixon, and the FBI took out Nixon. 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, sitting on the couch outside the situation room in the White House. Had Felt recruited him to be an asset? What exactly was the relationship? Even in those days, there was more controversy than the rose-colored glasses view would have it.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: To your question, the difference is that in those days, you could speculate about all this, talk to your friends and neighbors, complain about it in your private life, but you couldn't do anything about it. In the new world, you can do something about it. You can go online and post.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: And go viral.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: And it can go viral. To your point on engine versus camera, that's when the camera turns into an engine. You can not only see things you couldn't see before, but you can also help other people see those things. Having said that, the internet contains multitudes. Is the internet just a camera of things that are true? No. There's obviously huge amounts of things that are clearly fake, things that are clearly real, and everything in the middle. There's lots of propaganda, lots of campaigns of different kinds. It's a very complicated environment. But for sure it is an x-ray machine. And for sure it is a camera. And for sure it is an engine—a way to drive change in the information environment that people didn't used to have.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: Ben, I'm curious to hear more of your perspective on your personal evolution. You mentioned earlier that your father was a journalist and a political writer. I've seen you as mostly focused on technology and business, but when did you start to realize that things were changing in the media or that we were entering a hyper-partisan era? What were your inflection points?
--:-- Ben Horowitz: A big thing that had an effect on me was my father's conversion from the left to the right. He was the editor-in-chief of Ramparts Magazine, which was the magazine of the new left back in the 70s. He dropped out of politics for about eight years and was a journalist during that time.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: One of the things that happened, to Mark's point about trusted experts and institutions, was he got tipped by a very good reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle named Randy Schultz about a potential pandemic in 1981 that was starting in San Francisco. Gay men were getting this very deadly disease. But Randy couldn't write the story because there was so much pressure from the institutions to not make it a gay disease. The right public policy at the time was to close the bathhouses in San Francisco where gay men would hook up.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: They all knew about this disease. There were only about 100 cases at the time. It was a very small number. They said, "We got to close the bathhouses now," but everybody in the medical establishment was afraid to do it. The press was very anti it. My father, being my father, just wrote the story. It was called "Whitewash" and was in California Magazine, telling the story of this cover-up of how the disease was spread.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: It was the end of so many of his friends on the left. There were protests around our house. They called him a homophobe. Fauci, who was in charge of public health policy at the time, reoriented it around "it's not just gay sex, it's any kind of sex, it's intravenous drug use." The net result was the bathhouses weren't closed. It did become an epidemic. Unlike COVID, it didn't have to be. It was spread 95% through gay sex, the rest through intravenous drug use, almost none through heterosexual sex. But we didn't address it because of these politics.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: It gave me a good lesson that the experts might not be true. Growing up in Berkeley, we were always on the side of the left. But the left can do very bad things as well. There's a certain level of politics and partisanship where you don't even care about the people. The saddest thing in the world was seeing all these people die in the 80s. So many people you knew, young healthy people, all of a sudden dying. It was preventable. The people who were on their side, the pro-gay community, were the ones who caused it. That whole thing made me very aware of how the whole central system worked.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: That whole story is in David Horowitz's book called Radical Son, which is one of the most shattering and prescient books.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: There's a counterfactual universe where it had been controlled and contained. It really could have been like the whole "flatten the curve" thing. On COVID it was hard because it spread so fast, but AIDS spread quite slowly by comparison. Those kinds of measures would have worked and probably prevented 75% of the deaths. In the same way that Peter Thiel's book in 1995 was a couple decades prescient on college campus activism, it seems like your father's work was a few decades prescient. Fauci contributing to a noble lie decades before.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Whether you like Fauci or not, I think he's a bit of a sociopath. He is completely divorced from the truth and feels no guilt about it. He never felt any guilt about the whole AIDS thing, despite being a huge catalyst in it.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: We've been talking about how the legacy media playbook was being disrupted by the internet. This is where it might be interesting to return to the Trump phenomenon, less in terms of politics, but more in terms of media impact. It feels like he was part of a new playbook. Trump in the 90s was very different than Trump in the mid-2000s or 2010s. That same new playbook native to social media helped influence perhaps Elon, perhaps some others. Mark, why don't you describe what this new playbook was?
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I think Trump is a bridge figure with respect to media and the way media works. We're going to see new variations from here that are going to be very interesting. He's of the generation that grew up with television and newspapers absolutely dominant. He's always had a very intertwined relationship with newspapers and television. That culminated in having his own top-rated television show for 15 years.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Trump was a standard story in newspapers starting in 1975. The New York Times profiled him in 75. He was a fixture in the New York media world, tabloids, major newspapers, entertainment television, all the way through cable TV. He was on cable news all the time. He'd go on Oprah. He was always super intertwined. He talked to them constantly. Many stories of Trump calling up reporters and taking phone calls from reporters.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: He continues that. It's very interesting to watch. 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. It's a love-hate relationship. If you talk to reporters at these major newspapers off the record, they'll tell you he calls them all the time. A lot of them have his cell phone number and he'll pick up the calls. He's a source for a lot of stories. He talks to them even though he complains about them.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: He's done wildly more press questions, press conferences, press briefings in the first 70 days of his new term than previous presidents did for their entire runs. He's constantly talking to them on Air Force One, in the White House. He's invited them to cabinet meetings. He's having them over for dinner. He has one foot squarely in the legacy media world.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: But the other side is that he was a pioneer in going direct. He literally had his own TV show with The Apprentice. People forget he wasn't an early adopter on Twitter for a public figure of that magnitude. He started tweeting actively probably in 2010 or 2011, which was still the era of "what did your cat have for breakfast?"
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Especially Twitter, like still, people weren't quite sure what they thought of it. And he leaned into it hard. There's this running joke now where there's a Trump tweet for everything. Anything that happens, there was a Trump tweet in 2013 where he said it or predicted it or argued it.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I'd actually like to find out someday who got him spun up on this, or did he figure it all out himself? But he became a true early adopter. By the time the campaign started, he had already been the most Twitter-aware and Twitter-sensitive major celebrity or public figure for probably four years prior to running for office.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: He was probably the first prominent politician that wrote his own tweets. For better or worse, he'd write these tweets that clearly came from him, often with misspellings and typos. Whereas if you look at Obama's Twitter handle or Biden's Twitter handle, they're clearly written by somebody else for the most part.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yes. You get these famous Trump tweets like, "I've never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke." And you're like, that's a good point. I don't think I have either. Then he did a follow-up in 2015 when he was running for president. Somebody from the Coca-Cola company got mad at him because he was always talking about Coke. He tweeted, "The Coca-Cola company is mad at me, but that's okay, I'll keep drinking that garbage." He was the OG shitposter troll.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah, shitposting. It's this level of complete engagement and comfort in the legacy media, and then completely comfortable in the new media environment. Culminating in literally starting his own Twitter competitor. He's got a foot in both camps. I describe that because I think he's a very important bridge figure.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I think there are internet-native politicians that haven't emerged yet. We're getting glimpses of that with AOC, with President Bukele in El Salvador, Jasmine Crockett. We're getting these glimmers. There are going to be politicians 10, 20 years from now where it's going to be like, "Oh, they took the Trump playbook." Time will pass and things will get refined. They will at some point completely disconnect from legacy media and just run a completely internet play. I actually think that hasn't happened yet. I'm sure Trump would argue 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.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: Yeah. Say more about the style that Trump and maybe Elon and others have followed. It seems like you're less trying to be unifying to everybody and more trying to appeal to one specific tribe very deeply, perhaps more consistent with the fragmentation or hyper-partisanship that's permeated everything.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, I think a big part of that is Trump's not a professional politician. Almost every politician outside of Trump, their careers are in politics. When you're in politics, you get very intense media training around what you can say, what you can't say, how to position things. Never answer the question you're asked, only answer the question you wish they would have asked. Mark and I have been through this media training. It's super sharp.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Then you have a large constituency around you, a large staff. If you ever go outside of that, they correct you, they reprimand you, they retrain you. It's a real system and process which has resulted in most politicians really lacking what you would call authenticity. Trump, being Trump, is not listening to any of that. He's just literally saying what's on his mind all the time, every time. That actually works much better in the modern social media world. A big part of it is a function of him not being trained in this business at all, which is part of why a lot of people don't like him. He doesn't follow any of the protocol you're used to. He's just so uncomfortably unusual. That's a bit of a two-edged sword.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: No, I agree with everything you just said, but I'd also add what he was trained on was reality television. I have not been on reality TV, but my understanding is if you're trained on reality TV, your mission is to create drama. It's the opposite training. Your mission is to be as interesting, provocative, and controversial as possible.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The other thing he was trained in was professional wrestling. I mean that in full seriousness. He's been very close friends with the McMahons for a long time. Linda McMahon is a cabinet secretary. Vince McMahon is one of his longtime friends. Trump is the only presidential candidate in history who was actually in the World Wrestling Federation Hall of Fame because he was famously in a WWF match, which is on YouTube.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Ben, see if you agree with this: Reality TV, like the Kardashians, is basically professional wrestling for women. And professional wrestling is reality TV for men.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, I think that's essentially right.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Right, exactly. They grew up together. Both reality TV and professional wrestling grew up together in this new alternate media landscape. They were both very controversial for a long time. Pseudo-real entertainment.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Or maybe the most real thing.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah. Our friend Rick Rubin says these are actually the most real things, not the least real things. If you think professional wrestling is fake, just wait until you read the newspaper.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: He was a master of both reality TV with The Apprentice and also a master of professional wrestling. To your point, Ben, that's a completely different playbook. That playbook maps much better to the new media environment, which is personality-driven, individual over corporation. 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 have their own products. Kim Kardashian has a hugely successful line of women's clothing, a multi-billion-dollar business. Individuals over corporate brands, authenticity over fakeness, what you see is what you get over plasticity, and heightened drama over suppressed drama.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: We'll get to this more, but going direct is a big thing that makes both reality TV and professional wrestling work. The key people involved have these direct relationships with the audience that are completely different. They didn't make their brands by being on network TV or profiled in newspapers. They made their brands in large part by going direct or being on a very obscure cable station.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah. It makes sense that in a supply-constrained world, you'd want to stay out of drama. When the internet shifts the structural dynamics such that demand is the scarcity, you'd want to create drama to compete with all the other new voices emerging.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: With that, maybe let's go more into—
--:-- Ben Horowitz: By the way, that point is so important. So much of the extreme partisanship is caused by that aversion or attraction to extreme drama, as opposed to specific policies. It's a very interesting thing where now on the internet, everybody's going back to all of Trump's policies and having Obama talk about the border, or tariffs, or manufacturing. You're like, well, if the ideas are the same, why is everybody so mad at Trump? It's what you're saying. He's high drama. They want stability, low drama. That's more of the divide than the actual political positions in a lot of cases. Trump being pro-peace used to be a very strong left-wing position, but not in the way he is. That's an important distinction.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Someone said something like, "We're trying to figure out what the new left is all about. Let's just see whatever positions Trump takes. That'll be the opposite. That'll be what the new left is all about."
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah, which has been a very effective trick for him because he's kind of taken over traditional positions of the Democratic Party. But the way he does it is he takes this high drama reality TV approach to that issue. All of a sudden it's his issue and he wins it. Then he can corner them into a very niche set of issues which they hang on to, whatever men and women sports, all that kind of thing.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you. There's a great advertisement to that effect.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: Mark, talk about Life the Movie, because I think it gets at some of these ideas.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Neil Gabler. That's a great book. The author is Neil Gabler and the book is called Life the Movie. It's one of these books where you read it and half the time you're like, "This is all obvious," and the other half you're like, "Oh my god, this is just getting started and this is really profound." The book is from about 28 years ago.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Gabler is a journalist and writer. He did a big biography about Disney and is very into Hollywood entertainment media. This was his theory book. It came out in the late 90s or around 2000. It built on what had happened in the 90s on two mega stories which are somewhat forgotten now but were mega at the time: the Clinton-Lewinsky affair on the one hand and the OJ case on the other.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: For people who weren't around then, both of those stories were absolute saturation bombing of the media. Cable television, cable news really came into its own during that period. It was those two stories. As a cable news station, you could just do 24/7 coverage of OJ or 24/7 coverage of Clinton-Lewinsky and drive ratings. They were mega stories that played out over years with all these twists and turns, who was telling the truth, who was lying, the accusations, the conspiracy theories. Did the LAPD plant all the evidence? What did Hillary know? Did she actually throw a lamp at Bill's head? These stories had unbelievable legs.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: People started to talk in those days about there being almost seasons to the drama. Season one of Clinton-Lewinsky was The Affair. Season two was it becoming public. Season three was the congressional investigations. Season four was the Starr Report, which was super salacious. Same thing with OJ. He had the trial, the entire thing. He got off, then there was a second trial with the civil trial that he was convicted. Then there was the third trial when he held up a bunch of guys in Las Vegas who were selling his memorabilia. He went to prison for that. Was he unfairly convicted because it was revenge for this and that? These were just mega stories.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Gabler lays out this theory, very consistent with what we've been talking about, particularly about this new media environment of cable, AM radio, and the early internet. The Starr Report is a good example. One of the first PDFs that a lot of people downloaded and read was the Starr Report, the report on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair by the independent counsel. Millions of people downloaded their first PDF to be able to read that report and find out what happened.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: He writes this book and basically says, "Life the movie." He says nonfiction beats fiction. In a truly open, decentralized, fully competitive media environment like the one we now live in, imagine how stressful it is to be a fiction writer, a novelist, or a screenwriter. You're trying desperately to come up with enough interesting things to put into a two-hour movie or a 300-page novel. Then in real life, you've got these stories that are not just a single event but play out over many years with unbelievable twists and turns. And it's all real.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Reality is much stranger and more bizarre than fiction. Fiction is where we make things up and reality is relatively boring in comparison? No. Reality is actually more interesting. Reality is stranger and more wild. It's inherently unpredictable. By the way, the stakes are higher because real people's lives are at stake.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: And more unbelievable.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah, exactly. I'll give you an example. There's an allegation that came out during the Clinton-Lewinsky thing. Bill had lied to Hillary and everybody else about the affair. The truth came out and Hillary got super mad. There's a story that Hillary didn't talk to Bill for like nine months. She finally talked to him, and the day after was the day he bombed Kosovo. It turned out to be a pharmaceutical plant or something. There was this allegation that Hillary told him she'd only make up with him if he bombed Kosovo. I don't know if it's true, but that's such an inherently more dramatic story. Actual lives, wars, politics, presidential impeachments, people going to prison. The stakes are just so much higher.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: What Gabler basically said is fiction is effectively dead in terms of its cultural relevance. Reality is going to dominate everything. For the rest of time, we're going to be living in effectively real-life, omnimedia reality television shows encompassing every aspect of our life. That's going to be our universe. I don't know what his opinion is of what's happening right now, but events since then have certainly validated that direction.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: There's this term of art now. There's the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the MCU, which is this whole world of all the Marvel movies and TV shows. There's this theory that there's the Trump Cinematic Universe, the Democratic or Resistance Cinematic Universe, the COVID Cinematic Universe. Any of these real-life things that are happening, if you want to, you can enmesh yourself in them 24/7. This new media landscape will just feed you infinite content on whatever these things are. That does seem to describe our times pretty accurately.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: One quote we talked about offline is that Dana White said, "If the media hates it, you've really got something." He was referring to UFC. Maybe you could describe the history of UFC and how the media dealt with it.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Yeah. When he started and acquired UFC, it was started before him, but he couldn't get it on anything. Certainly not on central media, not on cable TV, not on anything. I think he finally got it on Spike TV. I believe Spike TV charged him to put it on. Just basically no airtime at all. "Nobody's going to like this. It's crazy. It's stupid." Certainly no media coverage, no sports page coverage, nothing like that. They built it up. They paid to be on Spike TV, built up an audience slowly, and all of a sudden now it's completely mainstream.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: I think he was actually referring to slap fights, which the media also hates. It's just an internet phenomenon at this point, but a huge one.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: When you listen to his story, for the first several years of UFC, it was just pushing this rock up a hill. You couldn't get coverage, you couldn't get anything, you couldn't get distribution. Traditional media hated it. So did politicians and authority figures of all kinds. That was a huge issue in the early years, in contrast to other sports that would be on TV or have big contracts or advertising deals.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Then this inversion happened, consistent with the change in the media landscape we've been talking about. All of a sudden, the media's opposition became a selling point. The fact that the media hated it made it more enticing. It's a plight rebellion. If the authority figures love it, there must be something wrong with it. If the authority figures hate it, it must be really cool. It started to invert at some point in the 2000s, and the media hate started to work for him.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The other thing he says is they were the early adopter of social media in sports. The minute he saw social media, he knew this was the future of everything because it would route around these highly biased authority figures and let people actually talk about the thing that they loved.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: By the way, the same thing happened with the NBA. David Stern, before he passed away, told me the whole story. The NBA was the first league to really integrate. In the 70s, every team was almost all black players. The audience and the media turned on them viciously, saying it's a drug league, everybody's talking cocaine. The media completely dropped the league. Famously, the Magic Johnson finals where he scored 42 points playing center as a rookie wasn't televised live. It was on tape delay.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The way the NBA got around this was very similar to the UFC. They got a contract with USA TV and started getting the games on USA. All of a sudden they had the Magic-Bird thing and that built momentum. Michael Jordan came into the league and now it's a huge thing. But the media had completely turned against the league to the point where they shut them out of live broadcasts, even for the NBA finals. The entire thing came back using alternative media and going right to the people.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: To your point, that probably enhanced it. As an NBA fan, you had to watch it on USA. You had to get cable and watch the USA TV station, which made you a much more loyal fan in the way that the UFC fans are massively loyal in an incredible way.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: What's fascinating about the NBA as we're talking about this topic is it also has demonstrated some of these trends where viewership in the game is down, but people are obsessed with the media around the game.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yes, there's a few reasons for that, but it's another move to social media off of television media.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: People called this past election the podcast election. Many people are noting the influence of people like Rogan and others. Democrats are asking, "Why don't we have our own Joe Rogan?" Trump has been the best politician of recent times at using these new channels. When you talk to people on both sides of the aisle, your Dem friends are saying, "Hey, where's our Joe Rogan? What's our new media strategy?" How do you make sense of what's happening there?
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Well, the Democrats had Joe Rogan. His name was Joe Rogan. That was just an oops on their part, I think.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Let's talk structure and then come back to the specifics. The structural observation I would make is there's this concept we talk a lot in business called the barbell, or the death of the middle. As industries mature, you tend to start with things that are a certain level of scale, complexity, depth, price. Then markets tend to polarize. You get this barbell effect where the things in the middle start to die, and you have the rise of the edges.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The classic example is retail shopping. You used to have general stores and department stores that had a pretty good selection of pretty good things at pretty good prices. Over the last 30 years, all of those general purpose stores and department stores have gotten wrecked and replaced by a barbell. On one side, you got Walmart and Amazon with massive selection that no department store can match at lower prices at higher scale. On the other side, you've got the boutiques, the Gucci store, the Apple store, selling something very specific and unique, often at much higher prices.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: One of our observations for a long time has been that this tends to happen in many different industries. It's happened in banks, ad agencies, media companies, many other industries. It turns out that's what's happening in media formats right now.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The standard television show is either 23 minutes with seven minutes for commercials, or 43 minutes with 17 minutes for commercials. If you watch cable news, they have 43 minutes of content in the hour, but they break it up with commercial breaks every five minutes. Any given interview can only be three or four minutes long if it's live, or they have to go across multiple segments. The cliche is you're watching an interview on cable news, it just starts to get interesting, and the host says, "Well, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you for coming in." It's actually a technique. As soon as somebody says something interesting, they're like, "Yeah, gotta go. Throw the commercial."
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Why do you have to leave it there? You've got the person in the studio. You could go for another hour, another three hours, but you choose not to. Even 60 Minutes, which is the 43-minute version, a long-form interview there is like 20 minutes long. In the old media environment, if you got a 20-minute interview on the air on Sunday night, that was a very big deal.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The cliche of our time is that attention spans are collapsing, the rise of social media and TikTok and short-form video. You hear this constantly: kids only want to watch two-minute videos. It turns out, no, it's actually the barbell. Kids want to watch either two-minute videos or three-hour Rogan episodes. It's the barbell. What does the three-hour Rogan episode or Lex Friedman episode have going for it?
--:-- Marc Andreessen: It doesn't have that thing where, just when it starts to get interesting, we're going to leave it there. You can actually fully articulate a point of view on any topic. Part of this is the no gatekeepers thing, so the range of topics has expanded a lot. But part of it is you can actually talk for a long time. You can go on YouTube and watch, in some cases now, these are running six, seven, eight hours long of people talking.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I did Lex Friedman earlier this year. I think it was three and a half hours. With three and a half hours, it's all on demand and they segment the videos, so you can decide which parts you want to watch. But if you're an interesting person with interesting things to say, you can fully articulate and explore a topic. I think what that format has uncovered is there's actually tremendous hunger in the country and in the world for actual long-form intelligent commentary.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I should note that Charlie Rose was the test case for this. He's been a friend of mine for a long time, and I was on the show multiple times. He did this for a long time. It was an hour-long show, but he would let people go for 50 minutes or something. He proved it. For some reason, people didn't pick up the hint until the podcasters came along. After Charlie Rose, there was nothing else like that until the podcasters picked it up and ran with it.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I find this to be extremely encouraging. It turns out there are a large number of people who have been starving for real discussion and real content. I think the jury's in now. You can claim television makes you dumb in a really fundamental way because it literally cuts off all the interesting conversations. As they're about to get interesting, it has to be intellectually impoverishing as a consequence of the structure of the business and the format. Podcasts don't have that problem.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: It's not that the podcasts are going to be perfect, and it's not like there won't be people on podcasts who say crazy things. 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. The audience for that is very large. The other thing is, YouTube gives these guys data on completion rates, and the completion rates on these long-form podcasts are much higher than people might expect. It's incredibly exciting that this is a conceivable thing.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: As you said, it is pretty clear 2024, the podcast thing was a very big deal for Trump. The books are coming out now on the 2024 campaign, and it's becoming clearer and clearer. All the Kamala people now greatly regret that they didn't put her on more long-form podcasts. The other question is, is this going to change the skill set and aptitude and ability? Is this going to change the threshold for what it now means to run for office or to be an authority figure? It 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.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: To Ben's point, traditional media training does not teach you how to do that. A large number of people who have been in charge of things for the last 50 years are definitely not able to do that. A lot of incumbent authority figures today are not able to do that. Is that going to be the new threshold for success in the public arena? I think it's an interesting question.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: The other thing that's on podcasts, which I think 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. These podcasters are not trained journalists. They're not trained experts. They're not highly schooled. They're comedians and sports guys. If you look at anyone from Charlemagne Tha God to Joe Rogan to Theo Vaughn, the big podcasters are regular people who aren't coming in with strong partisan points of view. They're coming in wanting to learn.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: As a result, they are actually open to arguments on both sides, which is the thing they've outlawed in traditional Democratic media. You can't platform that person. There was a huge rage at Bill Maher for meeting with President Trump. The idea that we're going to have a Democratic podcaster is antithetical to podcasting. Having a regular guy who just asks questions and wants to learn things is what people want to see. I want somebody like me asking this guy who's an expert or running for office some questions, what I would ask. That's the adjustment they're going to have to make. 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.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: When you watch CNN or Fox, the host is always asking a gotcha partisan question. Always. You watch Joe Rogan or the Breakfast Club, they're not really like that. They're actually wanting to know the answer to the question.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: As somebody who's been on the receiving end of both of those, it's extremely different. If you're dealing with traditional press, every single question is an attempt to blow you up, catch you in a contradiction, or somehow get you to say something that's going to wreck your career and get you fired. Which is why you need the media training, right? You don't need any media training to go on a podcast. You need the anti-media training.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: The other thing, and maybe this is obvious now, is the three-hour podcast doesn't work if you have to stop every five seconds because you have to accuse somebody of saying something racist or sexist. This speech suppression thing, this puritanism that kicked in over the last 10 years with people getting blown up for saying one thing wrong, that kills your ability to have discussion, which is of course the intention of it. It certainly kills your ability to have a podcast. 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. It's far too dangerous.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Aspirationally, you could say this could drive the Democrats and the left back more in the direction of free speech and away from cancellation. But we'll see if they actually do.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: I think in order for this strategy to be effective, Gavin Newsom has done a pretty good job of that. You can argue whatever you want about Gavin Newsom and his evolving views, but his podcast is kind of in the correct direction. A lot of people in the Democratic Party are furious at him for having Steve Bannon on, for having Charlie Kirk on, and then being kind of regular with them, just having a conversation. But that is the right idea.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: It's the right idea for a conversation and communication and getting the Democrats towards more open freedom of speech, more interesting full conversations. We do have to see whether it's going to work for him electorally. That's a different question. But if he wasn't running, if he was just a podcaster, I think his podcast would be pretty popular. He's probably the only politician right now with a true podcast.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Yeah. Now, if he comes in 20th in the 2027 primaries, we can talk about it. It's a tricky thing given he's running for office. You kind of want to be on the other side, but yes.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Does his base really want him to do this? So, yeah, we'll see.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Kamala going on Call Her Daddy didn't achieve the same impact as Trump and J.D. Vance going on Rogan and Theo Vaughn.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: That was kind of a weird choice. Joe Rogan and a lot of these podcasts, The Breakfast Club or Bill Maher, they talk about politics. She was probably the first politician ever on Call Her Daddy.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Right. It was just a weird choice. Everybody's like, why would a candidate go on that? That audience doesn't care about this. That audience is into some whole other thing.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: One of the great mysteries of 2024 that will last forever, we'll never know the answer to, is if Kamala had gone on Rogan and sat there for three hours, would it have... Rogan makes almost all of his guests look good. Almost everybody comes out very, very friendly, regardless of your point of view. Would she... how well would that have gone? People have different theories on that, and I think it's going to be one of those great mysteries because we'll never know.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I think one of the challenges with that whole campaign is, to this day, who knows what Kamala thought on so many issues? It never came out. There were the talking points, it was very structured, but what was her real economic policy? What was her real tech policy? What was her real foreign policy? It never felt like we got great depth on that, even in the debate, even in any of the formats. Whereas you kind of knew exactly Trump's positions by the end of the podcast. Would that have helped or hurt? If it would have helped, I would say the people advising her in her campaign did her a great disservice. We didn't know what it was at all. I paid very close attention.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: We were sort of talking around it, but when your party is out of power, you have to learn the skills of subversion. Comedy and contrarian thinking are tools of subversion that help you when you're not in power. When you are in power, asking too many questions and comedy might not help you. It's funny because when I was in college, Democrats, when Bush was in power, had mastered the tools of subversion. Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Dave Chappelle. They had the comedians, they had the contrarian intellectuals.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: Now that Democrats are out of power and Republicans are in power, the right has to learn how to evolve from the underdog who's always questioning to the establishment. Can you actually get things done and move the needle? The left has to learn some of these tactics that the right used when they were out of power.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I think that's right, although there's a subtlety to it. There's power in the White House, power in Congress, power in the press, power in academia, and the other institutions. While the White House and Congress have moved to right-wing power, the other institutions are still left-wing power. The mainstream media. I think the Democrats are stuck a little bit in between because they're protecting certain parts of the establishment and against other parts of the establishment. They need to choose.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: If I was running the Democratic Party, I would say we either have to go full rebel. We can't be for CNN as well as Fox News and The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. We have to be against the expert class if we're really going to be the rebels, because that's what it takes to be a rebel. That's where they're getting squeezed between two ideas.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: We've been talking at a structural level, at a theoretical level. Why don't we make this a little bit practical, a little bit applied? Mark, what would you say to that? Let's start with Ben because Ben coaches our CEOs.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: I'm a true radical on this topic. So let's start with the modern.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Look, we're bigger and different than our companies are. As a startup, it used to be that you could tell your story to the biggest possible audience through the media. That was the tried and true technique. You would explain to them what you were doing, and if it was interesting to the world, they would tell it. That's become both difficult and suboptimal.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Difficult in that it's very possible you go and say, "Hey, we've got this interesting new product," and the story comes out about all the possible things that could go wrong with it. It doesn't matter. It could be a cure for cancer, and the articles might be about how they're going to overpopulate the earth by having people live too long. This isn't a made-up thing. These are actual stories that have come out. So you have to be very careful.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: The other thing is, it's not going to be as clear as your story coming from you. Because you can now tell your story from you, and that ends up being much more effective. Having a real direct content media strategy and capability is why we were so excited about having you join, Eric. You really need that capability if you're going to reach the world with your message or with your products. It went from being a nothing to a nice to have to really having to be your core strategy for telling what you're doing.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: As you grow, you end up showing up in the media whether you like it or not. A lot of people still read it. If you're building a product and your competitor puts a story in the press about you that's bad or not true, 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. You still need a strategy for dealing with the press that deals with that kind of thing, or you're just very vulnerable.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: You can tell your story directly, but it depends. If you've got a big enough megaphone, like Elon Musk, he doesn't need that part of the strategy. He's got the biggest megaphone, and then he acquired X. But if you've got a somewhat big megaphone and a certain number of followers, then I think you have to have a balanced approach, or have both approaches, in order to keep yourself out of trouble. I would never tell your primary story through the press. I think that's very dangerous.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: There's always the question for founders of, "Hey, Elon is the best entrepreneur in the world. Where can I copy him or 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.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: For sure. He's special. He's got very special capabilities. Politics would be the number one thing I would say don't try at home. It's almost always... I'm saying this as a firm that's gotten very involved in politics, but unless it's necessary, it's very tough. That's a very tough thing to manage. You're evangelizing a new company and trying to get people to understand your products, and then you're in politics. That takes a higher degree of skill than I think I have right now in terms of getting that right.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: It can be a boost. It's been effective for Alex Karp at Palantir. He's done a tremendous job on it. I still don't really know what he thinks. 99% of things he says are Republican, and then he says he's a Democrat. He's very clever in that way, but he's definitely pulling it off.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: Anything you would say is to invest in the go-direct capabilities. Founders who have great reputations and public presences are able to recruit better, have lower customer acquisition costs, and have cheaper cost of capital because they can raise better. People often don't invest enough in high-quality talent or in their own capabilities to get their message out there.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: This is a good subtle point that you're mentioning and Mark alluded to earlier. People don't trust companies. Very few people follow the a16z Twitter handle compared to who follows Mark or who follows Chris Dixon or who follows you or who follows me. The person running the company is very, very important. You need to let people know who you are.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Early on in the firm, what worked extremely well for us was blogging. People knew what they were joining, they knew who they were taking money from. That was in many ways much more effective than anything we could do through traditional media. Now that's much more true. Being willing to articulate your point of view in an interesting way is essential now to a marketing strategy.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: People don't want to hear from the Coinbase handle, they want to hear from Brian Armstrong. People don't want OpenAI, it's Sam Altman. You guys were early to this, calling your firm Andreessen Horowitz. The identification of people with the company is what people want to hear from.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: This has been a great discussion about the evolution of media. Until next time. Ben, Mark, thanks for coming on.
--:-- Marc Andreessen: Hey, thank you.
--:-- Ben Horowitz: Great. Thanks, Eric.
--:-- Erik Torenberg: Thanks, everyone. Thanks for listening to the a16z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com slash a16z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time. Thank you.
