Marc Andreessen on how the internet changed news, politics, and outrage | The a16z Show

Each viral social media meme explosion is like a 2½-day panic cycle. It was not that long ago that grown men in serious positions of power and authority in the U.S. got mad at each other and would literally have a physical duel, and that was a normal part of life. If you're sitting at home scrolling social media and getting mad, at least you're not out in the street hurting people.

The fact that political violence is at an all-time low in Western society is something that people really don't talk about. The news is called the news, not the importance. If you can imagine a version of the news called “The Importance,” where the newspaper says, “Here are all the important things that are happening today,” nobody would buy it because nobody cares. People want the news. They want the hot thing. They want the outrageous thing.

Marc, thank you for joining Monitoring the Situation. Good morning.

I could not be more excited. Let's monitor the situation.

Excellent. First, we'll get a bit meta here and talk about media. We've been talking about this idea at Monitoring the Situation for almost a year now, including investing in it. When we were first talking about the idea, you brought up the book about the history of CNN. You talked about this concept they called Randomonium. What did you find so interesting about the founding and history of CNN, and how could it apply to what we're doing here or to this broader media moment?

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, I remember it and the impact that it had. Because I'm obsessive, I found this book that nobody's read. It's called Me and Ted Against the World, which is a great title.

It's about the founder of CNN, Reese Schonfeld. He was actually the guy who convinced Ted Turner to go into the satellite business, which essentially created modern cable and satellite TV and eventually led downstream to streaming and everything else going on today.

This has been kind of lost to history, but Ted Turner was an amazing example of exactly the kind of great founder that we work with: an incredible, larger-than-life personality, a controversial character, and somebody who generated a huge number of headlines. Every other thing out of his mouth horrified people: “I can't believe Ted said that.” He was one of these real characters in the history of the media business.

Reese Schonfeld was originally the lawyer who wired up Ted's first satellite deal. The two of them came up with this crazy idea in, I think, 1981. They said, “How about having a 24-hour news channel?” At the time, this was a completely loopy idea.

Ted Turner wanted it to be a 15-hour-a-day news channel because he assumed that nobody would be watching overnight. Reese said, “Nope, 24 hours. People are going to stay up all night to watch this thing.”

The idea was completely alien to what CNN is today. It was this concept that Reese Schonfeld came up with called Randomonium. It basically says that, at any point in time, something is happening in the world that is the most amazing, interesting, controversial, bonkers, compelling, transfixing thing you can imagine.

The current thing.

The current thing. Exactly—the current thing. At any moment in time, there's a current thing. So he said, “What should a 24-hour news channel be? Obviously, it should be the thing that's happening right now. It should lock onto the current thing and cover it continuously for as many minutes, hours, or days as that thing remains the current thing.”

He called it Randomonium because, for that period, you just put whatever you get on the screen. You get fragmentary reports, man-on-the-street interviews, or whatever it is, and you just put the thing on the screen. If you get it wrong, you apologize later, but this is real-time. It's live. People are just going to be glued to this thing.

That was the original CNN business plan. It took a while to get up and running, but they eventually implemented it. Older viewers will remember that the real breakthrough point was the 1991 Gulf War—the first invasion of Iraq.

There was about a week when people were glued to CNN around the clock. They had live, on-the-ground coverage. They were in Baghdad, with bombing raids happening and all kinds of crazy stuff going on, while the Iraqi government was doing the whole thing. It was the most incredible show in the world.

They spent the next 20 years trying to repeat that experience. They repeated it every now and then with the Monica Lewinsky story and the O.J. Simpson trial, but it was hard to come up with the next thing like that.

Over the last 20 years, CNN has become something completely different. It is not that at all today. What's happened is that the internet reinvented Randomonium.

The experience of monitoring the situation, especially on social media and, of course, on X, is the other part of it. There's also streaming on X and on other platforms like YouTube and Twitch. The internet reinvented this. Randomonium turned into the current thing, and monitoring the situation legitimately and justifiably became a giant meme. So it is time to monitor the situation.

Why do we think the number of current things—Randomonium, or situations—is continuously accelerating? It seems like the velocity of these moments just keeps increasing. How do we make sense of that?

I think there are really 2 things that have happened that are different from even the days of cable TV and 24-hour news. One is that, for better or worse, the internet plugs you into the world.

McLuhan.

Yes. Marshall McLuhan. Let's cite Marshall McLuhan for both of these.

Marshall McLuhan, the great media theorist of the 20th century, had 2 key concepts that are relevant here. One is the global village. He did not view the global village as a positive. He wasn't endorsing it; he was making an observation about what was happening.

You need to understand what he meant by “village” to begin with. A village basically means a community with a small enough number of people that everybody knows everybody else. Think about a small town or a literal small village: everybody knows everybody else, and as a consequence, there's no privacy. Everybody is up in each other's business all the time.

I grew up in a small enough rural town that I experienced this. Everybody knew everybody else. The same people were there year after year, and everybody was completely up in everybody else's business. There was basically no privacy.

One of the reasons people leave small towns to go to the big city is that they want to get away from that. They want anonymity and a lot more people running around. But the village has that specific quality.

What he said was that modern media was going to turn the entire world into a village. You were going to be connected, and this was before the internet. It's really happened with the internet, where you're connected to everybody all the time.

He would find it entertaining that this is happening because he would say, of course you're getting all the downstream effects. By default, it's going to melt your brain. The human animal was not evolved—the human animal evolved to have a direct relationship with about 150 people.

It’s famously called the Dunbar number in sociology. But the global village expects you to have a Dunbar number of 8 billion people, right? They’re all right there and all up in your grill, telling you what they think of you, cursing at you, and calling you names. It’s a really brain-melting experience. That’s part one: We experience reality differently as a result of that.

The thought experiment I always have is that we talk a lot about the impact of the internet and social media on politics. Imagine having social media during World War II. We would have had a completely different national experience. Had Pearl Harbor happened with Twitter, it would have been a completely different experience from the way people lived through Pearl Harbor in 1941, primarily with TV and radio.

There’s this other thing that he said, which he originally said about television. He made this key observation as part of his idea that “the medium is the message”: The actual medium of media technology determines a lot of the message that’s received, and a lot of the content. Specifically, he said, “If it’s on television, it’s a television show.”

What he meant by that is, if something is going to be on television, it’s going to end up being turned into the equivalent of either a half-hour comedy or an hour-long drama. Those are the 2 native media forms of television. You’re going to get this very emotional, polished, glossy, produced thing that’s going to be a story and run the way a television story or television show runs.

Every television show is a morality play, right? Every television show basically tells a moral story about people behaving badly, then learning the error of their ways, followed by the happy ending where everybody kisses and hugs. Seinfeld was a huge variation on that. Larry David’s motto for Seinfeld was “No learning, no hugging,” and that was what made Seinfeld so unique, because every other television show up until Seinfeld always ended with everybody learning and hugging. You learn the moral lesson and then reconcile with the people close to you.

Every real-life experience would get wedged into the format of a television show and turned into a morality play. The internet version of “If it’s on television, it’s a television show” is, “If it’s on the internet, it’s a viral social-media meme.” It doesn’t matter what it is. If an alien invasion happens later this afternoon, it will be turned into a social-media meme and go viral. It will spread across the internet, and then, because of what human beings are like, it will turn into a moral panic.

That will turn into full-fledged outrage: “How dare you?” People will line up on each side, tribes will form, and people will go to war with each other on social media. You’ll have all these back-and-forths, all the humor and all the rage of how meme culture works. Everything that happens in the real world basically becomes a social-media viral moment, a meme complex, then a moral panic, a search for scapegoats, and a moral emergency. That happens to every single new thing that happens.

You combine those 2 things and, for better or worse, we’re all in the same room now. We’re literally in the same global village, surfing controversial internet meme moments over and over again. As far as I can tell, if you look at the numbers, each viral social-media meme explosion is basically a huge spike up, followed by a half-life decay that lasts about 2.5 days. Each social-media experience is essentially a 2.5-day panic cycle.

The old one isn’t necessarily ever resolved or reconciled. What happens is that a new one appears—a new current thing—and takes over the outrage and all the emotional energy that applied to the old one. Everybody forgets the old one even happened. A week later, you can’t even remember what the social-media craze of 7 days ago was. It might as well have been 1,000 years ago, lost to the mists of time. Nobody knows. Seven days ago, whatever it was, was the most important thing that had ever happened, and 7 days later it’s as if it never happened—not even a peep. It’s completely gone.

You’re going to have this repeated emotional shotgun blast over and over every 2.5 days, essentially forever. By the way, this is why one of my theories is that it’s not possible to predict the outcome of politics. Everybody thinks they know what’s going to happen in the midterm elections in November. I’m like, okay, it’s April 20, and the election is November 6 or whatever. How many 2.5-day cycles are there between April 20 and November 6? Math majors should be able to calculate that in their heads, but it’s 100 or something—120 or something like that.

Whatever we think is going to tilt the election today is going to be 100 social-media meme cycles old. Nobody is going to remember anything that’s happening right now. The election is going to turn on whatever’s happening in the economy, and then on whatever viral meme panic is happening that day.

You could ask whether this is good or bad. I don’t know. Is this better or worse than television? I don’t know. Is this better or worse than the days of radio, or the days of the print revolution that followed the arrival of the printing press? Is this better or worse than the days when we were all reciting epic poetry around the campfire as our form of media? I don’t know. You could have a big value discussion about which is better or worse.

I have an argument that, notwithstanding all the craziness, this is better. This is the nature of the world we live in, and it puts us on autopilot. The shape of the media determines behavior from here on out, and until there’s something that fundamentally displaces social media, this is the world we live in. Hence the need to monitor the situation.

Amen. Is the reason why you think it’s better that, even though there’s more noise, there’s more signal, and as a collective global brain we get closer to the truth?

I would say there are a couple of things. One is that there are more truths and more lies. I think both of the following statements are true: There’s more truth in social media than we had in previous forms of media, and there are probably more lies. 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.

There are plenty of ops. In fact, one of the native forms of entertainment on social media is trying to spot the ops. Maybe I should pitch you a show for MTS: Every day, we should do an hour on “Let’s Spot the Ops.” Which ones are real and organic? Which ones are staged? Is somebody getting paid behind the scenes?

Everybody focuses on the downside. They focus on the fact that there are all these ops, which is certainly true. But there’s also the ability for somebody to tell the truth much more directly and clearly than before, because of the collapse of the gatekeepers. I think both of those things are true.

The slightly different argument I would make is that previous forms of media were really good at generating physical violence. There are many examples of this in history, but the Spanish Civil War was the war that forecast everything that was going to follow—the tragedy of the 20th century. The Spanish Civil War was basically the test bed for both communism and Nazism in the modern world.

And, you know, its native media format was posters. Literally, the ability to print color propaganda posters was the new media technology at that time, right before radio. The Spanish Civil War was super violent. Then radio was the Nazi regime’s native media format. Radio was the way that the fascist regimes got established, as well as, by the way, FDR, who was primarily a radio phenomenon. It was the rise of modern liberalism.

Television was the native medium of the period. It kicked in starting around World War II, so it played a role, but it then had a huge role to play in the Vietnam War and in all of the violent riots of the ’60s and ’70s, which were super crazy both across the United States and Europe. Television has a long history of leading to downstream violence.

The fact that we have actually had political violence at an all-time low in Western society is something that people really don’t talk about. 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.

My theory is that 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. If the virtual world can become arbitrarily rhetorically violent without people actually getting physically hurt, that gives people a way to exercise all of their anger and rage over politics and to attack the hated enemy without having it actually translate to physical violence.

So, yeah: social media wars up, 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 characteristic. If you’re sitting at home scrolling social media and getting mad, at least you’re not out on the street hurting people. That’s my moral defense of the whole thing.

Well, it’s fascinating because there’s a different kind of ideological sorting happening. People say things like, “Hey, now they can’t even talk to their own families because they’ve found their tribe online that agrees with them.” It’s no longer their families.

Back in the day, you didn’t have as much political polarization—or, at least, this is the logic—as much political polarization, or the idea that I can’t even talk to someone who isn’t from the same side. Part of that, perhaps, is because the internet allows people to find their tribe so strongly and so clearly that they’re able to have an exclusionary tribe as well.

I guess one response to the political polarization argument is, “Hey, at least it’s not going to lead to physical combat.” What might you say more broadly? Is it just overstated in general because people also have this idea of filter bubbles? Of course, in some ways it’s the opposite, in the sense that the internet exposes you to ideas that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Right. I think people just have a really rose-colored-glasses view of the past. The past gets sanded off, in part because we weren’t there. The modern interpreters of the past, quite honestly, often aren’t telling us the truth about what happened because they have their own modern gloss or spin they want to put on it. The edges of the past get sanded off in retrospect.

The easiest thing to do is just go on YouTube and watch old episodes of a TV show called All in the Family, which was a very famous, successful TV show when I was a kid. All in the Family was a fictional microcosm of the culture wars and political wars of the late ’60s into the 1970s.

There was famously this character, Archie Bunker, who sort of represented—he was a white guy, and he basically represented a retrograde, Nixon-supporting Republican. This would have been in, I don’t know, 1972 or 1974. Carroll O’Connor, a great, brilliant actor, played him. He was painted in the show as the most backwards, archaic, knuckle-dragging racist and sexist—just the worst possible person in the world.

There was his son-in-law, played by a young Rob Reiner, whom Archie Bunker nicknamed “Meathead,” which is what the character became known as. Meathead was basically the arch-progressive liberal. Think young Gavin Newsom, or something, where he had the exact politically correct, approved view of the time: super-woke, super-progressive, super-liberal, super-enlightened on all these issues.

The conceit of the show—and the person who created it was the famous television producer Norman Lear—was supposed to be a moral lesson, with Meathead giving moral lectures to Archie Bunker every week to try to get him to stop being such a backwards-looking, 1950s, retrograde, basically racist, sexist guy and come into the modern world.

Of course, what happened was, number one, Carroll O’Connor was just super funny. But the other thing was that the political environment was superheated at that point, and it turned out Archie Bunker ended up being the star of the show. The show ended up being the opposite of what it was intended to be.

That happened later in the ’80s in a show called Family Ties. Again, it was a very similar thing: two baby boomer parents in the ’80s, with very left-wing producers who made the show. The characters were proper left-wing progressives. Then there was Michael J. Fox, who played their teenage son, Alex P. Keaton.

Alex was basically a Reagan Republican as a teenager. He would wear sport jackets and ties to school and carry a briefcase. They wanted to make him into a stereotype of a weird Republican, basically a weirdo. Again, the same weird thing happened: the Michael J. Fox character became the star of the show.

I bring up both of those shows because you can see the culture wars of the ’70s, which were super intense, and the culture wars of the ’80s, which were super intense. You go back before that and you have the Vietnam War, all the campus protests, the civil rights movement, all the riots, and everything involved in dropping the 101st Airborne into the rural South to desegregate the schools at literally gunpoint.

You go back before that and you have the Cold War and the Red Scare. There were communists all through the U.S. government, and there were all kinds of freak-outs about that. You had the risk of nuclear annihilation. You go back before that and you had World War II, which was this incredible global orgy of violence.

You go back before that and you had the Great Depression and the New Deal, which was hugely controversial. You go back before that and you had World War I. Then you have the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the French Revolution. You go back further than that and you have the democratic revolutions all through Europe, and then the Gutenberg printing press kicking off all kinds of violence throughout Europe in the 1600s.

I just think the history of Western civilization and American and European society is constant strife and warfare to an absurd degree over this entire period. We go back and study the history and we’re just kind of like, “Wow, those people were really, really, really violent. Really crazy and really violent. Boy, did they really like killing.”

It was not that long ago—and I don’t think there’s anybody alive now—but it was not that long ago that grown men in serious positions of power and authority in the United States, when they got mad at each other, would literally have a physical duel.

Right? You and I start going at it on social media, and we get to a point where you get really mad and I challenge you to a duel. We show up in a field in a park at 6:00 in the morning with guns, right? We square off and march off, and then we turn around and try to literally shoot each other to death. That was a thing they did, and that was a normal part of life.

Wait, Marc, I thought the past was all matriarchies and everyone was so peaceful.

Oh, everybody was so wonderful. Everybody got along. Everybody all—

Yes, until social media, everybody thought the same thing.

Yes, exactly, and everybody was all—

Yes, everybody was all calm and happy all the time.

So, look, historically, the way the world has been is conflict. Anyway, not to beat a dead horse, but there was plenty of conflict in the past. There were plenty of heated disagreements about the future shape of society. There were plenty of political wars. There were plenty of violent wars.

By the way, politics itself was much more violent. If you go back and read about political movements 100 years ago, they would literally form up in the street and try to kill each other.

And so we live in a much crazier world than we want to give ourselves credit for, and the idea that the current level of conflict is something new is just not true.

Yeah.

It was a common thing. Strikes—I mean, even the history of the labor movement is full of this. Strikes became super violent. Management would literally have machine guns, and the strikers would try to attack their plants, and management would be machine-gunning their striking workers. Crazy, crazy stuff. And so we live in a much crazier world than we want to give ourselves credit for, and the idea that the current level of conflict is something new is just not true.

And just to that end, too, when people say, “Oh, ever since 2008, when your smartphone started proliferating, it’s led to increased depression or things like that,” is that also another example of, hey, we were underestimating how depressed people were prior and it’s a measurement thing? Or were there a lot of other things happening in 2018, like political extremism and other things, that make people more depressed? How do you engage in that topic?

Well, the funny thing is different Western countries show different data on the so-called rise in depression. It basically turns out that it correlates to social benefits programs. If you get paid, or if you get special dispensation in school for having psychological issues, all of a sudden you see a massive spike in those psychological issues. The other Western countries that don’t have that don’t show the same results.

I actually think that’s a statistical artifact of government benefits programs. I would say I don’t even concede the premise of the question, but that’s a longer debate.

I would just say, in general, I’m prepared to say that, basically, call it since—I don’t know—2014 or something, it does feel like things have intensified. It does feel like things are wilder than they were before. I think the most that I would be willing to say, though, is that we might have lived through an era of what you might call suppressed volatility, maybe from the end of the Cold War through 2014, where basically it just looked like the West had won everything.

And, by the way, it was also sort of the peak heyday of centralized media. If you track how distributed media is versus how centralized media is, centralized media sort of peaked somewhere around 1970, when literally all the newspapers in every city consolidated down to a single newspaper. Then you ended up with only 3 television networks, and all the independent radio stations got bought up.

Historically, if you go back to the days of the American Revolution, it was common that even in mid-size cities you would have 10 or 15 different newspapers. Each newspaper would represent a different political point of view. The newspapers would have these furious, constant political fights and accusations back and forth—just like you would do today online. They would have these furious, constant political fights and accusations back and forth. Of course, the newspaper owners would be trying to egg all that stuff on because it sold papers, but it was very common to have many newspapers per city that would all fight with each other.

The economics of centralized media meant that those all rolled up into a single newspaper. That single newspaper, at least for a while, tried to be nonpartisan and even-handed because it was trying to appeal to everybody. The same thing happened when I was a kid: There were 3 television networks that were all basically the same. They were all trying very hard to be even-handed, at least as best they could. There were 3 national news magazines, a small number of national radio networks, and 2 news wire services.

I’ll concede that I think we lived through a period of suppressed volatility as a consequence of having overly centralized media. If you go back before that, if you go back to the 1930s and before, media was much more fragmented. It was much more like it is today. If you go all the way back 200 or 250 years ago, it was extremely fragmented.

If you read the accounts of Ben Franklin as a newspaper publisher and the stuff that he got up to with his newspaper—

Okay, great story.

Ben Franklin ran one of the newspapers in Philadelphia, originally as a printer. What would happen is that Ben Franklin wanted to become a commercial printer, so he bought a printing press. He advertised it and tried to get all the local businesses to print pamphlets on the printing press, but he didn’t have enough business for the printing press. So he started a newspaper to have something to print.

There were 15 other newspapers in Philadelphia at the time, but he had to fill the newspaper with something. He was Ben Franklin, so he was very creative. He created basically sock puppets. He basically did alts, and they were all under pseudonyms. I forget all the names now, but he had all these different names for them.

At one point, in his own newspaper, he had 15 different alts going at it. He wrote them all, but under different names, and they all had very different points of view. He would basically set them off to have these raging arguments with each other in his newspaper. People would buy his newspaper to follow this.

That culminated in the election of 1800, which was the famous election of Thomas Jefferson versus John Adams. It was sort of this newspaper-centric election, characterized by a level of slander. The degree to which partisans of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams attacked each other in the 1800 election is way beyond even what we see today on social media. They accused each other of the most horrible things you can possibly imagine, and it became this giant scandal.

The idea that there’s rhetorical combat, or that there’s a virtual environment in which there are lots of points of view and, again, both lots of truths and lots of lies, is not new. In fact, this is the natural order of things. We just lived through a period of artificial suppression of volatility, with media becoming overcentralized. Obviously, those days are over.

I want to return to what we were talking about: the current thing and how that’s accelerated over time. We previously had a conversation where we were talking about 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.

I’m curious if we could talk about the attributes of something that becomes the current thing, or the topic that people can’t stop quote-tweeting and sharing.

Yeah, so again, you kind of reverse-engineer it. To be a current thing, it has to be—again, if it’s on the internet, it’s a viral internet meme kind of outrage cycle—it has to be something that activates outrage. It has to be something that activates the emotional valence. You have to get the emotional reaction off of it, right?

By the way, this is also just the history of the press in general.

I always say the news is called “the news,” not “the importance,” right? You can imagine a version of the news called “The Importance.” The newspaper would say, “Here are all the important things that are happening today.” Of course, nobody would buy it because nobody cares, right? People want the news; they want the new thing. They want the hot thing, the exciting thing, the outrageous thing.

The internet version of that is that they want the outrageous meme, so it has to be something that provokes. There’s something about this—other people have made this observation—but the ultimate male-coded version is professional wrestling, right? The ultimate female-coded version is The Real Housewives. Reality TV—I don’t know—and The Apprentice is maybe somewhere in the middle. It’s just reality TV: there have to be sparks. It has to generate a level of emotional intensity driven by some level of outrage.

I think it has to be the kind of thing where you can have tribes form up and square off against each other, right? There’s a little bit of a West Side Story dynamic to it, where you can imagine there’s something worth arguing over. There’s a real argument to be had; there’s some underlying thing that actually really matters. Maybe the event itself doesn’t matter as much, but the actual underlying issue matters a lot.

It’s going to activate this tribal effect where you’re going to become part of what they call a moral tribe. The people on the other side will become part of a moral tribe, and then you’re going to go to war with each other. 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. It has to lend itself to that kind of tribal formation and that beating back and forth.

The tribes then attack each other on the issues, but they also attack each other’s values, and they accuse each other of being horrible people. When it really gets into it, they start to dox each other and try to get each other fired, right? Then it all becomes very exciting.

It basically has to have the formation of a moral tribe effect. The psychological lens on this is what they call moral tribes, and then there’s this concept of moral panic. It has to lead to a moral panic—a sense that this is indicative of how society is going in some important way.

This is why you can have many different examples occurring that end up revolving back around the same handful of underlying political or moral questions, right? It’s really not about what happened. I just want to say there’s this new Keanu Reeves movie on Apple TV, where Keanu Reeves plays a movie star who gets canceled, and his crisis lawyer is played by Jonah Hill.

I’ll spoil the movie: it turns out during the course of the movie that his crisis lawyer set up the Jussie Smollett incident. It was a produced op. In the movie, 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 a viral social media outrage thing. Then the lawyer literally says, “Well, then, of course, we went and cast Jussie Smollett. He had the best pitch for why he should be the Black guy.”

There was one of his underlings whom he’s still mad at because the underling was tasked with going out and hiring the attackers. But this was in the heyday of diversity, so he hired 2 Black guys to be the attackers, right? He’s all confused because he’s like, “Am I supposed to hire Black people or not hire Black people?” And it’s like, “Well, not in this specific case. You weren’t supposed to hire Black people to attack Jussie Smollett.”

Jussie Smollett is fresh in my mind, but it was a great example. What happened on the street in Chicago that night, during whatever blizzard-cyclone thing it was, kind of matters and kind of doesn’t matter. Who really knows? We’ve got weird, grainy video, and people say different things. I think we now know what happened, but in these events, what actually happened in the street? Who the hell knows?

But the fight—you see what I’m saying? The moral tribes were able to form up: people on 1 side were like, “Of course this is what happens to people all the time,” and the people on the other side were like, “Of course this is all fake.” You had this chance for these moral tribes to pair up and fight. I think it basically has to have that.

Sometimes it’s very serious, and the stakes are very high, and sometimes it’s just an episode that’s funny, with the Astronomer CEO-and-HR scandal as an example.

This is a very important point. I would say 2 things. 1 is, the truth or falsity of the actual event doesn’t seem to matter at all. I think this actually throws people, because you start to think these are all fake, and they’re not all fake. Actually bad things happen, and it’s fully legitimate to get outraged about these things. But people are also going to get outraged about a lot of things that didn’t happen.

For purposes of discussing the media, this is the Marshall McLuhan thing: if it’s on the internet, it’s a viral social media outrage cycle. Whatever 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 hard to tell what actually happened, because that makes it something you can more easily argue about.

To the point that you just made, I really agree with that also: the degree of importance of the actual issue doesn’t matter that much, right? If something happens to a single person, and then something happens to 10,000 people, you can have the same level of outrage in each case. The outrage doesn’t scale with the number of people affected. In a lot of ways, maybe the outrage is even higher when it’s a specific person, because then it becomes personalized.

Then you get the old Stalin thing: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Maybe it’s even the small-scale horrible things that happen that are the most emotionally intense, because they’re the things that you’re really going to react to. You’re going to react to a person kind of the most intensely.

If you’re making the meta-observation of this, you basically have to expect the same phenomenon—the outrage cycle—to play out every time, regardless of truth or falsehood and regardless of the actual magnitude of the underlying issue. What’s being argued about is the specifics of what actually happened. That’s not the point. The point is the ability to form up into moral tribes and then have the rumble.

George Orwell has a great thing on this. He famously covered the Spanish Civil War, which was, as I said, kind of the original place where a lot of this stuff played out for the first time in the 20th century. He did this thing where he talks about the role of the atrocity.

He said, basically, that the key point of propaganda in any war is this: you get 2 countries to go to war, and they’ve each got a moral claim for why they’re justified. Nobody ever attacks; everybody’s always defending. “I only attacked him first because he was going to attack me otherwise.”

Each side in a war, each country, has its own moral position for why the war is justified. But Orwell said it’s hard to sell these high-blown, high-flying, abstract ideas about why we need to go to war. What happens is that the propaganda efforts of each government in a war become basically a search for atrocities.

You look for specific events. A famous 1 is the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, but we could name many other examples.

And so you're looking for these very specific events where something very specific and concrete happened that's clearly beyond the realm of moral acceptability. Usually, it's involving innocent people getting killed. In the Spanish Civil War, it was nuns getting killed or something like that, right? Again, the point of the atrocity is not that it affected 100,000 people. In fact, maybe the best atrocity only affects a small number of people because you want to personalize it.

And then he says this: “The truth or falsity of the atrocity doesn't matter at all.” If the atrocity is made up, the political value of the atrocity is just as high. Once the atrocity cycle gets running, it doesn't matter whether the underlying thing is true or false, because the point is to have the atrocity be a propaganda win for moral justification and then for moral demonization of the other side.

And, by the way, lest people think that I'm being cynical when I go through all this, I'm not saying I think this is all good. I'm not saying I think this world is great. I'm not saying that I think this is all positive. I'm saying something different, which is that 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 being slotted into a moral tribe, and I'm mounting up to go to war with the hated enemy on the basis of something that very well might not be true.”

And this is the René Girard thing, which is that the scapegoating cycle always works because people always forget that there's a scapegoating cycle. Whenever you have to crucify the scapegoat, it's always the most morally important thing that's ever happened for the duration of that cycle, until it's forgotten by the next one.

And so a big part of what I'm trying to do is explain why, as we surf all of these current things, we at least keep part of our brain that basically says, “Look, this is the state of the world we live in. This is the state of humanity. This is the state of the media. This is what's happening. We can like it or hate it, or we can debate the pros and cons, but it is what's happening, and all objective events are going to be filtered through that. To the extent that you care about objective truth, you have to get through that, and you have to get to the other side to be able to actually still deal with objective reality.” But to do that, you need to understand the cycle.

And it's also important to understand this 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.” They don't fully appreciate that people are predisposed to hate you, and certain people will just find any sort of reason.

If you are actually innocent and you're caught up in one of these things, it's horrifying. Look at cancellation. This happened to a lot of people over the last decade. People would get canceled for things they literally never did, with people then imputing beliefs, or some stray comment, or a misreported comment, and then imputing that this person is a horrible racist. Off and away it goes, and they have to get fired and purged from society, with no way to come back—or whatever the issue was, right?

The other thing is the viral videos. By the way, the first viral video that mattered was actually Rodney King. I'm not going to litigate whether the Rodney King video was 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. It actually inaugurated the pattern.

All of the really effective viral videos since then, including the ones that have been really important over the course of the last decade, have had that characteristic. They all start halfway through the event. You don't see the run-up. The Central Park birdwatcher was the famous one—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 brutally canceled based on a video? I can't remember. There have been a whole bunch of them.

This is the thing: you get a viral video, and it kicks off halfway into the event. Why does it kick off halfway into the event? That's because that's when the event became interesting enough to put on video. People don't just walk around with their phones out; that's when they pull the phone out. But by that point, you've lost all the context.

So, again, you're watching a viral video, and you can feel yourself getting outraged. The key question ought to be, “All right, what happened before that?” That takes work because it's not right there on the screen. You have to really try hard to go back and figure out eyewitness reports. By the way, if it's a criminal thing, half the time you don't find out what happened until the actual trial happens. You don't find out for another year because they don't put the evidence out until the trial.

That's another thing where people get used. Basically, people get ginned up into these outrage cycles without actually having the context of what happened.

Yeah. 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 your mental model might be for how much is coordinated versus not.

I've been inspired by the idea of decentralized, or emergent, collusion—this idea that a lot of people have incentives to go in the same way, so even if they're not coordinating explicitly, they almost might as well be, or something that might explain why so many things seem coordinated.

But ever since joining a16z, so many people have imputed to us things that we're not doing, and so it's made me skeptical of people calling for conspiracy. 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.

Yeah. I think, as best I can tell—and it's tricky because it's hard to tell—there are some real experts in this who really focus on it. But as far as I can tell, there's some truth on both sides. The answer is messy, and it's messy for 2 reasons.

Reason number 1 is just that there are a lot of things happening that I think are truly organic. Then there are a lot of things happening that are ops. I think there's a combination. And then I think maybe you were alluding to this: something could start as an op and then become real, which is kind of the point of the op, right?

If you and I were going to be Machiavellian and wanted to start a movement, and we wanted to start a moral outrage cycle because we had some underlying goal—we were either trying to win an election or trying to get a political something, a law passed, or something like that—we would be going for maximum Machiavellian deviousness. We would have a black budget, pay influencers to do all this stuff that people say, and have our bot army, and so forth.

The point of it is not just to have a bunch of propaganda online with a bot army behind it. The point is to get people to actually believe it. That is the goal. You don't want to have to pay for every post. At some point, you want them to be happening organically, even just out of self-economic interest. And so you're actually trying to generate the thing.

There's a great paper on this. There's a guy, Timur Kuran, who's famous for talking about preference falsification.

And then Cass Sunstein wrote about this phenomenon years ago. They call it availability cascades. Their term for this kind of thing we’ve been talking about—a viral outrage cycle—is an availability cascade. A cascade means the process—it’s the sociological term for an idea or concept cascading through a society, building momentum as it goes. “Availability” is based on the idea of availability bias, which is that we overfocus on the thing that’s right in front of us. We tend to overfocus on the thing that’s present in our mind at that time, which may or may not be as important as other things we’re not focused on.

But in the paper, the significance is that they identify the role of a specific kind of person they call an availability entrepreneur. The role of the availability entrepreneur is to inject availability bias into the public consciousness as a deliberate exercise—to basically say, “This is the specific thing you should be focused on right now.” This is the specific person who’s been hurt by something; this is the specific moral event that’s happened; this is the specific issue; this is the specific thing. What they say is that every time you see an availability cascade, if you trace it back, there was always what they call the availability entrepreneur—the person who was like, “Aha, I know. I’ll give you the classic example.”

Again, this is not a value judgment, and this was fantastically good that it happened. But Rosa Parks was a classic example of this. The story that we all got told at school was that Rosa Parks was just some random person on a bus. Rosa Parks was a trained activist. There was this whole school of activists, and she was specifically trained. There was an availability entrepreneur who set up an availability cascade targeted at Rosa Parks that ended up causing fundamental, and obviously very positive, changes to American society.

It started as an op. She started as an op. But the point of the op was not to be the op. The point of it was to become what happened, which was to become a nationwide movement that ultimately led to fundamental change. The point is that just because things start as ops doesn’t mean they’re not real.

If the op leads to real outcomes, then you might as well consider it—at some point, it’s just a matter for historians—how it started. 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 profound change. This is the problem with this topic: “Oh, that’s just an op” is basically cope. It might have started as an op, but if it ends up in a real thing, it doesn’t matter that it started as an op. You see what I’m saying?

Conversely, it also doesn’t matter if it didn’t start as an op, because again, it’s the same outcome. So I do think both things are true. I do think there’s this furious fight. I do think there are serious operators, and you can go online and find out about these things. This is a big issue, by the way, in the political influencer world right now. This is actually a big thing.

If I want to run an advertising campaign to sell shampoo, legally in the US, if I hire influencers to say good things about the shampoo, they—I believe this to be true—have to disclose that it’s a paid commercial. They can’t pretend they just happened to stumble on this shampoo. If I donate money to a political candidate, I have to disclose that as part of federal election law. If I pay an influencer to take a position on a moral topic that isn’t a product that’s sold or a political candidate, but is just 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.

Yeah. Well, right. AI, right? A lot of paid doom out there. We were just talking about Aella’s new media fellowship for doomers, and it seems to be having a real impact.

This is a great example. So this is the thing, right? They’re living the meme. They’re living the meme. I don’t know if you’ve covered all this already, but we know we’re in this AI policy battle, and we know through that—and we’re deep into this—that there’s dark money in AI. A lot of the AI doomers and stuff are basically bought and paid for. There are influence operations happening, and they fall into this bucket: it’s neither an advertisement to say AI is going to kill everybody nor a political candidate.

There are organizations and companies that are paying for that. Again, not everybody who says that is being paid, but there is a lot of dark money in that world right now. Of course, the partisans in that world insist—full-on, of course—that this is absolutely not happening, until yesterday, when they went ahead and lived the meme and announced the program.

They announced the program in black and white, right there on the website. It’s an influencer camp in which you’re going to go do that—and, by the way, it’s free, which means you’re being paid. Then they say, “Where’s the money coming from?” And they say, “Oh, we’re a nonprofit being funded by—in this case, MIRI,” which is one organization with its own kind of interesting funding history. Then they say, “And other donors.” Right? It’s literally— is it a conspiracy if it’s in plain sight?

I’m just picking on that one because that’s the one that happened yesterday, but that is for sure happening all throughout politics. It’s for sure happening on lots and lots of social issues. It’s a thing.

And so it goes back to this thing: yes, there are ops; yes, you can’t believe what you see. By the way, there are bot farms. There are obviously bot farms, and they’re obviously being deployed. There are online influencers, some of them very controversial, where it’s clear there’s a bot army behind them. By the way, you could be an influencer online and have a bot army behind you and have nothing to do with a bot army. Somebody could be paying for the bot army, and you might not even know about it.

Again, today it’s totally legal to do that, because if you’re not selling a product or donating to a political candidate, it’s actually in this gray area. It’s actually fine to do. I think it’s the case that there are ops all over the place. Quite frankly, the deeper I get into it, the more I think there are probably more ops than I’ve been willing to acknowledge.

But I would just say on the other side: does it really matter? Is that really the thing? The ops are only going to work—the other way to put it is, the ops are only going to work if they resonate into something that people are going to pick up and run with anyway. To become a mass movement, this is what Timur Kuran says about the role of the availability entrepreneur: it’s not enough to have your cause and expect that you can trick people into running with your cause. There has to be something to it that resonates with them, something in them already. Maybe they pick it up and run with it based on the paid op, and by the way, maybe in the counterfactual they would have picked it up and run with it anyway, without the op, and you’ll never know.

Yeah. That’s a great mental model for it. Let’s think about one last topic for today. I want to close on the bridge between legacy and new media, because we see it in a few examples. Obviously, The New York Times has made the adjustment to the new world very well from a business perspective. We had CBS acquire The Free Press, and so there are some acquisitions—strategic acquisitions—for legacy media companies that are trying to innovate. On MTS ourselves, we’re experimenting with players from both worlds. We have new-school podcasters and Twitch streamers. Theo is 21 years old?

Yeah, 20.

Yeah, he’s born to be a Twitch streamer. I mean, 21—over the hill.

Yeah, exactly. [Laughter] Gray hair. Washed.

But we also have Mark Halperin, who has a legacy as a legendary commentator and host. Funny enough, we've talked about how he is the bridge figure: He was successful both in legacy media and in this new-media climate. It's rare for people to do both. Halperin, of course, did a very famous interview with Trump when he was talking about the Bible verses and getting him to mention some specific ones. Trump, of course, didn't want to pick favorites. Anyway, I'm curious how you think about the sort of bridge analysis of Trump as a bridge, or more just how you see legacy players and new-media players playing out, including the styles of what will work in this new format?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't know. Maybe you start with data, right? If you focus on American data, because that's what I'm most familiar with, you basically see a couple of things. One is that trust in centralized institutions of all kinds is collapsing in the U.S. Basically, trust in any kind of legacy or incumbent institution is collapsing fast.

By the way, that collapse in trust didn't start with the internet. It actually started around 1970. It's part of this “WTF Happened in 1971” meme: That's when 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 basically 55 years. Media is included in that.

The business version of it is very clear. We've talked about CNN earlier: Ratings for all the centralized media properties are in full-scale collapse. Cable news is collapsing. Almost every newspaper has collapsed, and almost every magazine has collapsed. Basically, all of the legacy formats have collapsed, with only very, very rare exceptions.

And then, of course, it's just obvious: The rise of podcasts is obvious now. The election of 2024 was the one where podcasts kind of flipped. It went from, “I don't know if this matters,” to all of a sudden everybody saying, “Oh, wow, this matters—a lot.” The rise of podcasts is undeniable at this point. The rise of social media and live streaming—these things are clearly happening.

So the changing of the guard, the reordering of the businesses and of the cultural and social phenomena, are clearly happening and are undeniable. If you extrapolate forward, essentially all of the remaining old-media properties that don't figure out a way to adapt to the new world are going to get basically run by private equity, and that'll be that. That's kind of the story of the newspaper industry these days.

That is almost not even interesting to say anymore, because it's so obvious that it's happening. Social media, of course, continues to grow as a phenomenon and continues to be very important. We're still living in a hybrid world today, right? To some extent, it still matters what's on TV, but not nearly as much as it did; pretty soon, it won't anymore. That world is changing fast.

The main thing is that people will either adapt or they won't. You mentioned Mark Halperin, who's a good friend of both of ours. I think he's doing an amazing job adapting to that, in a way that's shockingly different and better than most of his former colleagues. There are great examples: The New York Times has adapted in an interesting way. The Hasan, a newspaper, has fully committed itself to the future, let's say. Most legacy properties won't adapt. They never do. There are going to be lots and lots of new things that emerge.

Maybe I should say here again, so I don't sound cynical about this: It is really striking. What are the 2 mega-mega-mega trends in video—and, by the way, also in politics—over the course of the last 5 years? It's basically 2 things.

It's short-form video in the form of TikTok, Instagram, and X—short-form Reels or short-form video. You get the full battery of accusations about destroying attention spans and making everything trivial. But on the other side is the rise of the 3-hour podcast.

On the podcast side, you have this incredible phenomenon with 3 hours. Some of these—Joe, Lex, and others—are now pushing this to the point where Lex now has, in some cases, 7-hour podcasts. I think biology did a 10-hour one on Lex.

If you talk to those guys, they get data on completion rates. A very large percentage of their listeners or viewers actually listen to the whole thing. Many Rogan or Lex podcasts are listened to in full—the full 3 hours.

I really reject this idea that everything is going to become just trivial short-form social media. No, not at all. You have a lot of that, but you also have this corresponding thing. It's like a barbell: You also have this massive rise in substance.

On the substance side, I would point to the long-form podcasts. I would point to Substack. By the way, there's a big push on X to have long-form essays. I would point to online courses on every topic, which are available. Even AI—my favorite feature of AI is what they call Deep Research. It's a feature on both ChatGPT and Claude, but you set it loose and it will write you literally 30 pages, a 30-page answer. This is basically like a textbook on any topic.

So I think there is this other side. You also have this growth in practitioner media—practitioner-driven media. People who are actually doing a thing show up and talk about it. Of course, that leads to all sorts of outrage that it's not journalism if you don't have somebody asking super-snippy, critical questions about it or whatever.

But the idea of somebody who is actually doing a thing—I mean, Andre Karpathy in AI, right? He just shows up and explains, “Here is how this all works.” It's just amazing. In old media, when I was younger, Charlie Rose did that.

I grew up listening to Charlie Rose and watching Charlie Rose. But Charlie Rose was literally on at midnight. He was on CBS at midnight, and he would have these hour-long conversations with super-interesting people doing super-interesting things. But he was on at midnight, and you had to stay up at midnight to watch Charlie Rose. It was one of the great things about getting a DVR: You could record Charlie Rose and watch it during normal daylight hours.

We didn't have that for a very long time, and we have it now. I think it's worth noting that there is this clearly incredibly positive, informative, educational, super-helpful, super-constructive thing on the other side, which is, of course, a lot of what we try to do.

And you know, if 2024 was the podcast election, it'll be interesting to see what 2028 brings. People have been concerned, or sort of predicting, deepfakes for a while and how that might influence things, but we haven't really seen anything super material there, it seems. It'll be interesting to see what media formats—or just how the 2028 election—is different from the 2024 one.

In this conversation, we've had deepfakes forever. [Laughter] People have believed all kinds of crazy things. I mean, there was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and it really kicked off the Vietnam War.

I think we now know that that was a fish. It’s actually quite well established. Some people might say Russiagate. It turns out it was quite an elaborate fake. So I find the deepfake thing very funny, because it’s not like we’ve been swimming in truth all this time and all of a sudden now there are going to be deepfakes. But anyway, maybe that’s a separate conversation.

The substantive comment I would make is this: People famously talk about the 1960 election, Kennedy versus Nixon, where television took over from radio. They had their famous debate, and if you listened to the radio, you thought Nixon won, and if you watched it on TV, you thought Kennedy won. So, audio versus audio plus video. People have been talking for a while about how that was considered the first television election, where television was the determining factor in who won or lost, along with maybe some shenanigans in Chicago.

Speaking of deepfakes, people have been talking for a while about when there will be the first internet election. People like to point to 2016, with Trump using social media, or maybe 2024, being the podcast election. I actually think the first internet election hasn’t happened yet. By the way, people even point to 2008, with Obama fundraising online. So, 2008 was Obama fundraising online, 2016 was Trump using social media as a broadcast method, and then 2024 was podcasts.

We’ve had 3 examples of the internet mattering for elections, for sure, but I think we haven’t had the true internet election. As a consequence of that, we therefore haven’t really had the true internet candidate yet. As people talk about Trump as the internet candidate—this is not a pro or con comment on Trump himself for the purpose of this discussion—he really is a hybrid.

He cares enormously about what’s on TV. He’s on TV a lot, and he watches TV all the time, famously, because TV is basically how he gets a read on the pulse of what’s happening and what people think about things. I think Trump’s underlying theory is that the things that are on TV are the things the people running the TV network know their viewers want to see. Therefore, if you watch this on TV, you can get a sense of what people actually think. As TV has been the dominant medium for the last 60 or 70 years, it’s a pretty good theory. Obviously, it’s worked quite well for him.

He also cares a lot about affecting what’s on TV. There’s this famous Trump story that lots of people have told, where he’ll be in a meeting and there’ll be a TV on in the background. He’ll be watching it, and he’ll have the sound off, but he’ll be watching the chyron—the thing at the bottom of the screen, the text that shows what they’re saying. If he doesn’t like what’s on the chyron, he’ll tweet something to change the subject.

So he’ll tweet, and then he’ll literally watch, and the chyron will change, and he’ll be like, “Ah.” He’s able to single-handedly, with the power of his Twitter, turn one current thing into another current thing.

My point is, he’s a hybrid. He’s very social-media fluent, but he’s also very television fluent. Of course, his entire career was made on television. He’s one of the best television programmers in history, and he’s a social-media native.

There will be an internet candidate. There will be an internet president who gets elected, I believe, entirely based on the internet, where they don’t pay any attention at all to what’s on TV because it doesn’t matter to them one bit. 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. They’re going to be 100% a creature of the internet.

I think we haven’t seen that yet. I don’t know when we’re going to see it. I’m pretty sure it’s possible in 20—probably my guess is 2032. For better or for worse, we all have that to look forward to.

Yeah, I think that’s a great note to wrap on. This has been a great discussion on all things media. Marc, thank you for coming on the first day of Monitoring the Situation. I am proud to be part of the monitoring.

Excellent.