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Marc Andreessen- Monitoring the Situation and the Future of Media

The a16z Show

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  • How CNN Invented The Current Thing Format
    • Marc Andreessen says CNN began around Reese Schoenfeld’s idea of constant live coverage of the current thing, which he called randomonium.
    • He cites the 1991 Gulf War as CNN’s breakthrough, then argues the internet recreated that format through X, streaming, and meme-driven live reaction. Transcript: Erik Torenberg We’ve been talking about this idea of 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? Marc Andreessen 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, which is a great title. So it’s the founder of CNN. It’s this guy, Ries 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, I can’t believe Ted said that over and over again. So like one of these real characters in the history of the 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 a completely loopy idea. Actually, Ted Turner wanted to be a 15-hour news channel because he assumed that there would be nobody watching over the nine hours overnight. And Reese 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 Reese Schoenfeld came up with called randomonium, which basically says at any 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. Erik Torenberg The current thing. Marc Andreessen 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, right, for as many minutes, hours, or days as that thing is the current thing. And then he called it randomonium because he basically said, 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 Baghdad With like bombing raids happening, all kinds of crazy stuff in the Iraqi government, 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 OG 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, you 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 part of it is streaming. And now there’s obviously streaming on X, but also streaming on other platforms, YouTube and Twitch and so forth. And so the internet reinvented this, right? So randomonium turned into the current thing, and then monitoring the situation legitimately, justifiably became a giant meme. And so it is time. Yes, it is clearly time to monitor the situation. (Time 0:01:59)
  • Why The Current Thing Never Stops
    • Andreessen argues current things accelerate because the internet creates a global village and turns every event into a viral meme cycle.
    • He says each outrage spike decays in about two and a half days, then gets replaced before the last one resolves. Transcript: Erik Torenberg 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 amount, the velocity of these moments just keeps on increasing. How do we make sense of that? Marc Andreessen Yeah. So I think there’s really 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, like the internet plugs you into the world, right? Like the global village. Erik Torenberg Yes. Marc Andreessen Marshall McLuhan. Okay. So let’s cite Marshall McLuhan actually for both of these. So Marshall McLuhan, he was the great media, media theorist of the 20th century. Yeah. He had two key concepts. So 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. He was just, in his mind, he was making an observation of what was happening, which is basically, basically what he meant by that is you need 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. And basically everybody’s up in each other’s business all the time. And I grew up in a small enough town, 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 like get to know them like way too well. Everybody’s completely up in each other’s business. Like there’s basically no privacy. And so, you know, and by the way, one of the reasons people leave small towns to go to the big city is because they want to get, you know, they want to get away from that. They want to get to a level of anonymity and have a lot more, you know, people running around. 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 is actually happening because 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? Like, 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. Like, and so it’s just like this, like really, really brain melting experience. So that’s part one. So we just, we experience reality differently as a result of that. And so the thought experiment I always have is, you know, we talk a lot about the impact of the internet, social media, and politics. It’s like, well, okay, like imagine having social media during World War II, right? Like we would have had a completely different national experience, you know, had like Pearl Harbor happened with like Twitter. Like it would have been a completely different experience than the way people live through Pearl Harbor and actually in 1941 with, you know, primarily with TV and radio. And so anyway, so there’s a 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 media technology actually determines a lot of the message of what’s received, a lot of the content. 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 emotional. 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 it’s going to enlighten every television shows like every television shows 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 like the happy ending, right? Where everybody kisses and hugs. And remember, Seinfeld was like 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, right? You learn the moral lesson and then you sort of reconcile with the people close to you. And so every real life experience would get wedged into the format of a television show and would be turned into like this, basically this morality play. Okay, so the internet version, I believe, the internet version of if it’s on television, it 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, it will spread virally across the thing. And then, you know, human beings, what they are, that will turn into a moral panic. You know, that’ll turn into a full-fledged, like, 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, you know, basically back and forth, you know, all of this, you know, 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, a viral moment, um, meme, uh, complex, and then, You know, basically moral panic, um, and, you know, search for scapegoats, um, right. Like a moral emergency. And, and, and that happens to every single new event that happens. Right. And so, 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 like 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. 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 experiences like a two and a half day, basically panic cycle. And then what happens… (Time 0:05:42)
  • Why Social Media Can Be Chaotic Yet Safer
    • Andreessen says social media produces both more truth and more lies because gatekeepers weakened while influence operations flourished.
    • He argues online conflict may reduce physical violence by channeling political rage into virtual combat instead of street fights. Transcript: Erik Torenberg Amen. And is the reason why you think it’s better is 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 or? Marc Andreessen So I would say this, we get, so a couple of things. Yeah. So one is, look, I would say there, you could say this, there are more truth and more lies, right? So I would say that 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 there are probably, probably, 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. And 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 should do 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 stage 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 this, all the, all these ops and bullshit, which 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. And then, but the slightly different argument that I would make is that previous forms of media were really good at generating physical violence. And so the – I mean there’s many, many examples that’s 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 sort of tragedy of the 20th century that followed – the Spanish Civil War was kind of basically the testbed for both communism and Nazism in the modern world. And, you know, its native media format was posters. And so literally, it was like the idea, the ability to do printed color propaganda posters was like the new media technology at that time, like right before radio. And the Spanish Civil War was like super violent. And then radio was the technology that led to, you know, 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 primarily a radio phenomenon, you know, kind of the rise of modern, you know, kind of, you know, it’s kind of modern liberalism. And then, you know, television, you know, was the native medium of like, you just, you know, television kind of kicked in starting around World War II. So it played a role. But if then, you know, television had a huge role to play 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 Europe. And so, you know, 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. And so my theory is the ability to directly participate in online virtual combat is shunting away a lot of the energy that in the 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, you know, 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 on the street, like, hurting people. (Time 0:14:11)
  • What Makes A Story Become The Current Thing
    • Andreessen says a current thing needs outrage, tribe formation, and moral stakes more than factual clarity or actual importance.
    • He argues ambiguous incidents work best because people can project larger political battles onto them and start a moral panic. Transcript: Erik Torenberg Return back to we’re talking about the current thing and how that’s accelerated over time. We previously had a conversation a while ago where we’re 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. Yeah. Marc Andreessen So again, it’s kind of this thing you kind of reverse engineer and it’s like, okay, to be a current thing, it has to, you know, again, to, to, to be this thing of, 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, it has to be something that activates outrage. Like it has to be something that activates the emotional kind of valence of, you have, 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 you can imagine a version of the news that’s called the importance. And the newspaper is like, here are all the important things that are happening today, right? And, of course, nobody would buy it because nobody cares, right? Because people want the news, right? They want the new thing, right? They want the hot thing. They want the exciting thing. They want the outrageous thing. And so the internet version of that is, right, they want the outrageous meme. And so it’s got to be something that provokes. And there’s something about this. Other people made this observation. But it’s like 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, or I don’t know, and 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, you know, there’s a little bit like West 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 a real argument to be had. Like, you know, there’s some underlying thing that actually like really matters. Maybe this event doesn’t matter as much, but like the actual underlying issue matters a lot. And then 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, you know, 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, you know, very exciting. And so it’s got to have – it’s got to have the – basically it has to have the formation of a moral tribe effect. So the psychological lens on this, they call moral tribes, and then there’s this concept of moral panic. It’s got to lead to a moral panic. It’s got to 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 like many, many, many, many different examples of current things that end up revolving back around the same handful of like underlying political Or moral questions. Right. Because because it’s really right. It’s really not about this. You know, what happened? You know, I don’t know. Jussie Smollett. I just watched this new there’s this new 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, the course of the movie, it turns out 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, you know, 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 Jesse Smollett. Anyway, so the Jesse 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 in the street, who the hell knows, but 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 that were like, of course, this is all fake and bullshit. Right. You had this chance for these moral tribes to pair up and fight. And so I think it basically has to have that. Yeah. Erik Torenberg And sometimes it’s very serious, uh, and, and the stakes are very high. And sometimes it’s, uh, just an episode that’s so, you know, funny and the astronomer, uh, CEO, HR as a, as an example. Uh, okay. Marc Andreessen So, well, this, okay. That’s a very important point. So very important point. So I would say two things. So one is, um, the truth or falsity of the actual event doesn’t seem to matter at all. 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 actually bad things happen, right? Actually bad things happen. And 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 for the purpose of the discussion 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… (Time 0:30:12)
  • How To Stay Sane Inside Viral Outrage
    • Keep part of your brain outside the outrage cycle and ask whether you are being slotted into a moral tribe.
    • Andreessen says viral videos often start halfway through events, so explicitly ask what happened before the clip began. Transcript: Marc Andreessen 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, right? 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 true. Right? And I, and I, and this, you know, this is a Rene Girard thing, which is this, the scapegoating cycle always works because people always forget that there’s a scapegoating cycle. Like, like whenever you have to like crucify the scapegoat, it’s always the most morally important thing that’s ever happened for the duration of that cycle, right. Until it’s forgotten by the next one. And so, so a big part of what I’m trying to do is explain why, like, as we surf all of these current 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. Like, 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. Erik Torenberg And it’s also important to understand because if people are ever involved in the cycle or implicated in it, they typically say, 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 the people don’t give a shit. People are predisposed to hate you and they’ll just find any sort of reason, you know, or certain people, perhaps. Marc Andreessen Yes, yes, yes. If yes, if you are. Yes, if you are actually if you’re actually innocent and if you’re caught up in one of these things, it’s horrifying. It’s terrifying. I mean, look at cancellation. I mean, this happened to a lot of people over the last decade. People would get canceled for things they literally never did. And for people then imputing beliefs or some, I don’t know, straight comment or misreported comment, and then it gets imputed into, you know, this person is a horrible racist and off And away it goes and they have to get fired and purred from society and have no way to come back or whatever the issue was, right? And there were these viral videos, oh, that’s the other thing. It’s 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, you know, and I’m not going to, I’m not going to litigate Rodney King, good or bad or whatever. It’s a whole separate conversation. But the Rodney 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, I’m not excusing anybody for anything or whatever. I’m just saying like 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 you don’t, you know, the Central Park Birdwatcher was the famous, like you don’t see the run-up of what happened before the 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’ve 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 kick, 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 a 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 contacts. 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, cause 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 cause they don’t put the evidence out until the trial. And so that, that’s another thing where people get used, basically. (Time 0:39:27)
  • Why Ops And Real Movements Blur Together
    • Andreessen says online ops are real, but many start as coordinated pushes and then become genuinely organic mass movements.
    • He uses Rosa Parks as an availability cascade example and notes dark money can fund issue influencers without standard disclosure rules. Transcript: Erik Torenberg I want to go back to this conspiracy. We have a friend who thinks everything is an op, and maybe I’m naive and I miss out on the ops that are actually there. But I’m curious what a mental model one might have to think about how much is coordinated versus not. I’ve been inspired by the idea of decentralizing or emergent collusion, just sort of 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 be, or it might explain why so many things seem coordinated. But 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 people calling for conspiracy. And so I’m curious what sort of mental model you might have for the idea of ops and how that might help one understand the social platforms today? Marc Andreessen 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 were alluding to this. And then there’s this thing which is like something can start as an op and then become real, right, which is kind of the point of the op, right? 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, we’re going to have our bot army and so 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 so, and then, you know, 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 actually, you’re actually trying to generate the thing. Actually, there’s a great paper on this. There’s a team of Quran, and it was the famous sort of guy who talks about preference falsification. 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 outrage cycle, their term for it, 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 a momentum as it goes. And then availability, they call it 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 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. Like, this is the specific person who’s been hurt by something. This is the specific whatever, you know, 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, I’ll give you the classic example. And again, this is not a value judgment. And, you know, this was like, you know, fantastically good that this happened. But Rosa Parks was a classic example of this. Like Rosa, like the story that we all got told in school was Rosa Parks was just like another, you know, sort of a random person, you know, with the thing on the bus. Rosa Parks was like an, she was a trained activist. Like she went to like, 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 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 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, you know, it’s like, 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. Okay, right? It might’ve 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 don’t 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 a 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 U S if I hire influencers to say good things about the shampoo, they, I 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 over the shampoo. If I donate money to a political candidate, I have to disclose that as part of election, 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. Erik Torenberg Yeah. Well, AI, right? A lot of paid doom out there. We were just talking about AILA’s new media fellowship for Doomers. And yeah, it’s a perfect example. And it seems to be having a real impact. Marc Andreessen 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. Like so there’s these influence operations that are happening. And they fall into this buck… (Time 0:43:31)
  • Why New Media Favors Both Clips And Depth
    • Andreessen says legacy media trust and business models are collapsing while podcasts, live streaming, and creator-led media gain power.
    • He rejects a pure short-form future, arguing the same internet also rewards three-hour podcasts, Substack essays, and practitioner explanations. Transcript: Erik Torenberg Yeah. The, um, That’s a great mental model for it. Thinking about the last topic for today, I want to close on this, sort of the bridge between legacy and new media, because we see, just to give some examples, obviously the New York Times Business, they’ve made the adjustment to the new world very well from a business perspective. We had CBS acquired the free press. And so there’s some acquisitions there, strategic acquisitions for legacy media companies who are trying 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 streamers. You know, Theo is, Theo, are you 21 years old? Yeah. You know, he’s born to be a Twitch streamer, but we also have… I mean, 21, I mean, over the hill. Yeah, exactly. You know. Has been by now. Marc Andreessen Gray hair, gray hair, washed. Erik Torenberg Yeah, washed. But we also have Mark Halperin, who, you know, as a legacy and legendary commentator and host, who, funny enough, you know, we’ve talked about Trump is the bridge figure in that he was Successful both in legacy and in this new media climate. And it’s rare for people to do both. Halpern, of course, interviewed, did a very famous interview with Trump when he was talking about the Bible verses and 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 playing out Or even the styles of what will work in this new format? Marc Andreessen Yeah, I mean, so I guess, I don’t know, maybe start with data, right? So the data shows that basically, just to 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 all 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 is part of this WTF happened in 1971 meme is when basically trust in centralized institutions in the U.S. Started to fall off a cliff. That’s true for many kinds of centralized institutions, and it’s been true for, you know, basically 55 years. But media is included in that. And so trust in centralized media is collapsing and, you know, keeps hitting new record lows. Basically, every time they run the survey, it collapses further. And so that’s certainly true. And then the business version of it is just very clear, which is, you know, we were talking 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 newspaper has collapsed. Almost every magazine has collapsed. You know, basically 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, it 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 changing of the guard, reordering of 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, you know, essentially all of the remaining old media properties that don’t figure out a way to adapt to the new world are gonna, They’re gonna get basically run, by private equity and that’ll be that, which is kind of the story of the newspaper industry these days. 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 obviously social media continues to grow as a phenomenon, continues to be very important. And so, yeah. And, you know, look, we’re still living in this. We’re still living 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 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 going to adapt to that. And they’re either going to adapt to it or 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, you know, most of his former colleagues. You know, there’s great examples that, you know, the New York Times has adapted to that in an interesting way. You know, the Hassan 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 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, you know, short form, you know, reels or short form video. And there you get like the full battery of accusations of like, you know, destroying attention span and everything’s trivial. But on the other side is the rise of the three-hour podcast, right? And so on the podcast side, you have this incredible phenomenon with three hours. And by the way, some of these, you know, Joe and Lex and others are now pushing this to the point where, you know, Lex now has like, in some cases, seven or eight hour podcasts. Right. I think it was it Balaji did like a 10 hour one, 10 hour one on Lex. Yeah. Yeah. So Balaji went for 10 hours of Lex. And so 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 listeners or viewers who actually listen to the whole thing. So like many, many, many Rogan podcast or Lex podcast, people actually listen to the full three hours. And so 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 trivial, 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 barbell. You also have this, you have this massive rise in substance. And on the substance side, I would point to the long-form podcast. 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, you know, courses on every topic are available. And you just, yeah, you have this ability, but 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 ChatGPD and On Claude, but like you set it loose and it will write yo… (Time 0:53:01)
  • Why The True Internet Candidate Hasn’t Arrived
    • Andreessen thinks the true internet election has not happened because recent winners still depended partly on television.
    • He calls Donald Trump a hybrid and predicts a future candidate may win while ignoring TV entirely and living natively online. Transcript: Erik Torenberg Yeah. And it, you know, 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, deep fakes 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 media formats or just how the 2028 election is different than the 2024 one in terms of this conversation. Marc Andreessen We’ve had deep fakes forever. Like people who believed all kinds of crazy bullshit. I mean, you know, it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident and they kicked off, it 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. It turns out we now know it was quite a elaborate fake. So the defake 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 defakes. But anyway, maybe that’s a separate conversation. The I think the the the the the the substantive comment I would make is so. So I actually think we have people talk about like famously talk about the 1960 election, Kennedy versus Nixon, where famously where television took over from radio, where if you they Had their famous debate. And if you listen to the radio, you thought Nixon won. And if you watched it on TV, you thought that Kennedy won. So, you know, the audio versus audio plus video. And so people have been talking for a long, you know, that was considered like the first television election where television was like the determining factor in who won or lost, along With, you know, maybe some shenanigans in Chicago. Anyway, speaking of deep things. So 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. Or by the way, people even point to 2008 with Obama fundraising. So yeah, 2008, Obama fundraising online. 2016, Trump using social media as a broadcast method, and then 2024 podcasts. So we’ve had three examples of internet mattering for 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 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. So 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 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, it’s pretty well, you know, quite well for him. And then he, and then he also like cares a lot about like affecting what’s on TV. And there’s this, 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, He’ll have it with the sound off, 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? And 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 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, you know, television programmers in history. And he’s a social media native. There will be an internet candidate. There will be an internet 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 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. (Time 1:01:24)