Today's going to be a fun one. We're going to dive into all things new media. What is new media? What the new media team is doing here at 816Z, what we're focused on, and where we're going in 2026. Really stoked to be making this happen.
Ben, you had this quote which I think summarizes some of the main principles of new media. I just want to read a small part of it and then have you elaborate. Old media is defense-oriented. In new media, offense is always better than defense. We've spent many years fretting about our results being leaked. Old media tries to please every audience. Old media is terrified of upsetting people. And new media only cares about being interesting. When in doubt, flood the zone.
Yeah. Yep. That sounds like something I said.
Why don't you share some of the tenants behind that idea and how you came to it?
Yeah. So actually it's interesting. It's a really weird adjustment going from, you know, I mean I spent my whole career in old media or dealing with old media and now we're in new media. You know, kind of in the history of the firm, we've been the one thing that we really, really, really, really defended against was basically leaked results. And the reason, and it goes back to in the pretty early days of the firm, the New York Times got a leak of our results and they were very early. I mean we were like a young firm so most of the funds were like a year old. And you know, venture capital firms don't have high returns in the first year because like nothing happens in the first year. It's not like a stock market type thing. And so, you know, they misinterpreted the results. You know, so they kind of said, well, the early funds were good because those had enough years to get kind of returns in them, but like fund three was terrible and so forth. And there was no, you know, because old media was still powerful, it was very hard to combat it. You know, we put out statements and this and that and the other and blog posts but explaining like why they were wrong. But it didn't land and it was such a, like inside the firm it was such a big crisis that actually I'm pretty sure Bology quit because he thought we were dead because the New York Times had just like ruined the whole firm with that article. So it was like that kind of existential threat. And so, you know, we were very oriented around like, okay, don't let anything out that could be misinterpreted or this or that because you can never correct it. It goes out there and you're never going to kind of come back from it.
And say more about the flood the zone concept in terms of why it works or why and why it's so different than what would happen in the past.
Yeah. Well, so in the past, traditionally it didn't count if it wasn't in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or like the Economist or CNN or like there were maybe eight channels that could say something and then whatever they said was permanent in that like once it was out there it was very hard to deal with and it would be top of Google results like the whole thing. But now, you know, look we can go on, Mark and I if we really had a problem could go on 30 podcasts, all of which get a much bigger audience than any of the publications I talked about, and just basically, and we wouldn't have to talk about that. We could go talk about something else more interesting and erase that from everybody's memory very quickly. So it's just, you know, without commenting on what's a better world, like the laws of physics are completely different in this world than the other world and I think to be effective as an organization in marketing and media you have to embrace the new world because you can't be half and half because the whole motion of the old world will kill you in the new world and vice versa. And so you have to kind of commit to we're going to really care about what goes down through the old channels or we're not going to give them a, sorry to use language, and we're just going to, you know, say interesting things and flood the zone and we're doing the latter by the way.
There's a whole history to this, but basically like the whole idea that there's like a quote-unquote corporate brand, like the whole idea that there's like a corporate trademark and then the whole idea that you like as a business you basically load everything into that thing and that thing, you know, whether it's General Electric or International Business Machines or whatever, that you know, the idea that that thing is somehow abstracted away from the people involved and then that the people involved, you know, their main job is to try to kind of buff that thing which kind of, you know, led to this, you know, one way to look at it is like it led to this like 80-year kind of reign of like everything being synthetic and plastic and boring, right? Where like, you know, we, Ben and I have had this experience for many, many decades at this point, is just like, you know, the job of a corporate CEO for a very long time was to get up on stage and just say absolutely nothing in any sort of public event. I actually was on a board of a CEO who very firmly believed this. And he literally would come off stage having very deliberately said absolutely nothing and would have been thrilled. Because like he had made no news and like mission accomplished, right? And anyway, so Eric to your question like basically I think the retrospective view on this what happened was basically in the past communication channels were just like super narrow, right? And so how could you get a message through to the mass market or to your audience to your customer base? You could only do it by kind of sending in a message that was encoded into as few bits as possible, right? Because that was kind of your only shot because it was always limited by, you know, TV broadcast air time or it was limited by newspaper column inches or whatever. And so you just had to kind of crystallize everything down to this kind of minimal and sort of least offensive, you know, kind of possible position. But it's always been unnatural because as human beings like that it never felt right, you know, it always felt like weird because it's like this corporation is like this weird other kind of alien thing. You know, it always felt weird and uncomfortable and we just kind of got used to it and it just, you know, it turns out as our friend Mitt Romney famously said, corporations are people too. And right and like...
Right? Yeah. He was using it in a different context. He was not calling the change in PR but, you know, for our purposes, you know, like this is, it's all about people, like it's all about the decisions that people make, like you know, when a big company or a government agency or a nonprofit or a venture firm or a startup is like making decisions and acting in the world that's people, like there's some set of people who are sitting around making that decision and I just think like, and then it's kind of, you know, it's kind of this almost I don't know like shock therapy or thing where it's just like if the people who are actually making the calls actually like show up and talk on their own behalf and explain themselves and actually say what they think, it like blows everybody's minds, right? It's just, you know, it's the response people have to, you know, Elon. It's a response people have to, you know, certain other, you know, people who are now, you know, kind of very notable in environment who are running large things who are very public and vocal. It's just kind of this thing of like, and it's just almost like this thing where it's like, well, you know, they can't say that. And it's like, well, wait a minute. Number one, they can say that like, you know, they're allowed to, they're like an adult in the United States of America. Like they're allowed to say, you know, whatever they want. Number one. Number two, like how about they actually tell us what they think? Like how about we hear directly from them so that we can actually understand what they're thinking and who they are, you know, and how they're processing reality and what their assumptions are. And of course the technological cause for this is just that, you know, that narrow media funnel just got like completely blown to smithereens, right? In large part as a consequence of all the work that, you know, all of us have done on this call over the last 30 years. And so like it's just, you know, and you could kind of maybe say, you know, love it or hate it, like the days of kind of this narrow channel, narrow casting, and then what I would argue is just this like inherently deceptive practice of abstracting things away from people, that world is just clearly fading. And in the new world, we're just going to hear direct from people. And I, you know, and look, I'm not a utopian and it's not going to be like 100% better, but I think there's no question it's a big net improvement.
Yeah. And by the way, you know, the other thing that's really interesting in retrospect is the things that people got in trouble for, cancelled for, fired for, etc. in the past that they said in the press were all just misinterpretations. So they, you know, was somebody saying something and because it was so narrow and because you could never erase it and because you could never come back and defend it because the audience would be, you know, a thousandth of the size on the defense, you know, people just, it wasn't I said what I thought and people thought I was a horrible person. It was I said something, it got misinterpreted and people thought I was a horrible person. So now in this world where like, you know, people say much more aggressive things I would just say in terms of, you know, not being mainstream thinking but have room to explain it, that rarely happens anymore. So like I mean everything from like Howard Dean to, you know, you name it like in today's world that would be nothing. But in that world because there was no chance to say well like this is what happened, you know, like there were just thousands of times when people got into incredible trouble for things that they said that were misinterpreted that they could not correct.
Yeah. And Eric, you know, Ben gave me good advice, you know, actually before you came on board, which I am trying my best to stick to, although I will tell you it is a significant personal challenge.
Yeah. Akin with not eating an entire box of Oreos and drink an entire bottle of scotch every night, both of which I'm also trying not to do.
So because we live in a healthy world now, so less self-destructive world. So, you know, Ben pointed out that like this what Ben just said basically applies into the new world actually just as much as the old world in the sense of like when every time I've gotten myself into like serious trouble like in public over the last decade, it's because I tweeted something. And I mean, you know, everybody on here probably knows how much I love Twitter and like it's great to be able to rip off the 100, you know, and I was really good at like compressing something super controversial in 140 characters and then really letting it rip at 280 characters, but Ben pointed out like, look, every time somebody gets mad at you, you know, every just gets like completely ripped at you over that. Basically, what's happened is it's out of context. And so what Ben said is look, just say everything that you think, but say it on a podcast, right? Say it in the context of an hour and a half discussion so that you can whatever it is, you've surrounded it with the full explanation or say it in the form of an essay where you've like fully articulated your argument and it's fully in context. And just observationally like, and not just applying to myself, but just more broadly. It's actually interesting if you watch this to this day when public figures get blown to smithereens, it's almost always because of something that's basically too short. When people actually do the full long form explanation of what they think even if it's on a highly controversial, you know, even if it's imputed to be highly controversial or whatever if it's the full explanation it is actually harder to blow people up and again you could kind of, it's actually really funny, you know, when I was a kid like, you know, the moral panic was around television right kind of pre the internet and the moral panic in television always was around the concept of sound bites which is you only ever get to hear like 5 seconds of what anybody's thoughts are right and somehow television is now the gold standard, you know, for information transmission the internet's evil like somehow it flipped. But anyway, the point being is like the internet gives us the chance to not only express ourselves like in short form, the internet specifically gives us the chance to express ourselves in long form, right? And fully explain things. And that's just so different. Like the hour, hour and a half, two hour discussion with somebody who's like deeply into something and is really involved in something like I mean we all experience this as consumers. Like it's just so much better than the 30 second bit that, you know, might have been on the NBC Nightly News 30 years ago. And by the way, you know, the long form of almost anything that's interesting, complex, a systems problem, which is most everything in politics and in technology, you need the long form. There is no sound bite that gives you any information. And so you have to have a long conversation.
So it is actually much better that Oreos are vegan as far as... there's always that thing with sugar, you know, using bones or whatever to be whiter, that kind of thing.
I'm going to eat a gigantic package of Oreos tonight in Deborah's honor. I really appreciate...
Well, yeah. It's interesting. We've also talked about, you know, media training of the past used to be around sort of, you know, how to stay out of trouble, this kind of thing. And now if you're a CEO you want to be, you know, something, Jordy from TVPN has this concept of a Joe Rogan CEO, someone interesting enough to go on Joe Rogan for three hours, you know, someone like an Alex Karp, someone like a Palmer Luckey, right? And because, and the flip side of that is that, you know, if you're interesting, you know, if you're powerful it's because you're interesting, because that's what people want to work for, that's, you know, people want to be customers of, it's people want to invest in. And if you're powerful and interesting you're going to be controversial and that's something that you guys have also helped me get more accustomed to is like hey, you know, this is the big leagues, you know, and there are people who are going to be mad at what we're doing and that is, in some ways that's a good thing, that's evidence of our power and our interestingness.
Yeah, no, I think that's right and I think that, you know, it's hard, this is another kind of crossover between the old world and the new world because if you're a corporate brand then, you know, you try and keep all the dust off the brand and try and be something that nobody hates, I guess for lack of a better word. And then, you know, I think in today's world to be good at marketing you've got to be interesting. To be interesting, if you're interesting and powerful there are going to be a lot of people who don't like you and that's, look, that's a good thing. And I was very happy to see by the way the infrared piece because we can get like a nice piece on like a subsection of the firm, but nobody's ever going to write like a really nice thing about the whole firm. I think that, you know, also it's a, this whole new world is much better for founder CEOs because to be a founder, you have to have an original idea and original ideas are interesting by nature. I think that professional CEOs often get to that position through very careful politicking which kind of is the opposite where you want to be uncontroversial like nobody can ding you right as you get to the thing. And you know, Mark and I have been on, you know, Mark much more than me, but been on large boards where in the large boards, you know, when it comes to picking the professional CEO they're all about what's not wrong with him not what's right with or let's write with her. And so you get these very vanilla characters who definitely could not go on Joe Rogan. And that, you know, is all to our advantage because we basically deal almost entirely with founder CEOs.
I want to transition to one more structural mechanic because it's a segue into how we've built our team a little bit and it's this Mark, it's this McLuhan quote. You know, if it's on TV, it's a TV show. And just talking about how the different formats yield different types of content. Do you want to talk about...
Okay. You want me to do it? You want me to do it?
Okay. All right. Okay. This is the thing. Okay. So, yeah, Marshall McLuhan was the great media theorist of the TV era and actually his work has actually held up really well and it's worth reading. But he had this thing Eric just said. He said if it's on TV, it's a television show. In other words, like basically, as he said, the medium is the message. Basically what he said is like look, TV is a specific kind of technology. It's a specific kind of media technology. And basically like all of the questions around TV are like, you know, it's all basically just like the only real parameter is length. Like is it a three-minute news segment? Is it a 20-minute sitcom? Is it a 40-minute drama? Like there's very little kind of variation in like what you can do because it's just a linear, you know, it's just a straight, you know, just mass broadcast video. And so he said, you know, basically the medium in its first, you know, 10 or 20 years evolved, you know, basically the concept of what we now know to be a television show, which is basically either a comedy or a drama or a combination of the both. And it's basically a little story and it's a little story that plays over 20 to 40 minutes. And it kind of has to be a self-contained story because you don't know when people are going to watch it. And, you know, now they're doing, you know, with streaming they're doing serial stories, but, you know, television shows properly generally were, you know, where everything was a one-off. You can watch episodes out of order. And so there's like these very self-contained little basically, you know, plays, little stage plays broadcast on video. And then there are these self-contained little stories and then they need to kind of appeal to emotion because it's like an emotional medium, right? It's not like an information dense medium. It's a medium that literally puts somebody in your living room. And so basically it's like these little morality plays, right? Where and there's got to be like good guys and bad guys and kind of a very simplistic story and there's like a few plot twists and then everything kind of wraps up at the end. And what he says sort of the consequence of that is like everything on television has to be a television show and that includes everything in the real world that gets talked about on television has to be turned into a television show, right? And this is kind of, you know, the running joke of like following, you know, I don't know whatever current events or politics on TV right now which is kind of a running joke which is, you know, on either party which but it's just kind of like oh, you know, it's time for the next season, oh, you know, this is the new main plot that's happening and then this is the new secondary plot that's happening and if you watch CNN every night, you know, they're just kind of playing with these stories, you know, kind of over time the way that a soap opera might or that a drama might or occasionally, you know, how a comedy might. And so basically, we've just like lived in a world where it just seems like everything's a TV show. And it's a world where like all the edges are sanded off and everything is kind of very smooth and professional and everything is kind of within this very narrow band of what can be put into these kind of little morality plays.
Okay. So Marshall McLuhan unfortunately is long dead, but I assert that if he were alive today, he would say if it's on the internet, it's a viral internet post, right? So like what's the native medium of the internet? Like what's the thing that, what's the form of media on the internet that like rips and dominates? And it's clearly the viral post, right? It's the viral, you know, tweet. It's the viral TikTok. It's the viral Instagram, right? It's the viral Facebook post. It's the viral Substack. It's the viral YouTube video. Like it's very clearly the post. Specifically it's the viral post like it's the one that really rips and so basically you're right, right? So my theory is if it's on the internet, everything is a viral post and then you just ask yourself two questions which is like okay what's the characteristic of a viral post and like nine times out of 10 it's something that like really gets people cranked up right like on whatever topic right it might be on whatever your favorite pop star said yesterday or it might be on whatever, you know, a politician said or it might be on whatever, you know, a business leader said or whatever but like it's something that like causes people to like flip out, right? You know, and maybe some people flip out positively, some people flip out negatively or something caused people to flip out. And then the other thing with viral posts that's really interesting is you can actually observe this in the data. They have this really rapid rise. Like they tend to, if they're going to take off, they tend to take off within like 12 hours and then they spike like crazy as everybody retweets or reposts and, you know, emails it around and talks about it and then there's basically this like half-life falloff where like within 24, it's like 12 hours up and then it's like 20, 24 hours down and then 36 hours later it's like gone from our collective memory. And the reason is because another one has popped up and has taken off instead. And if you kind of take a step back and kind of chart the media landscape that we've all been living in for the last whatever, you know, for sure 5 years, but, you know, you could even say probably 10 years. What we've lived through is just literally just like thousands of cycles of viral posts. Okay. Is, you know, is this good or bad or something in the middle? You could have a big debate about that. It, you know, I would argue it's its own form of emotionality, right? It's basically things that spike the cortisol and so that, you know, it's sort of things that are controversial and so it leans into that but, you know, the other side is it's things that are interesting, right? And then the other part is, you know, the people get a vote of what goes viral, right? It's not just up to a news producer what shows up on TV so there's that aspect to it. Another aspect to it by the way is that stories come and go much more quickly now, right? And so there will be some thing that pops and it's like the world's biggest crisis in whatever sector it's talking about and it's just like everybody in the world has an opinion, this is where I was using you a while back the name of the current thing, like it's the current thing. Everybody has to have an opinion on the current thing. It's the most important thing in the world. And then 24 hours later, it's like it never happened because something else has become the current thing. And then that leads to, you know, the new version of the old time-honored strategy of getting through media crisis, which is like just basically make sure something else becomes the new viral post. Get something else elevated into that thing. So that, you know, there's this way to kind of deal with these things. But anyway, I just think like as long as the internet is the medium of choice, we're going to live in a world in which this is the cycle now. It's like a 24, 36-hour cycle. By the way, the traditional media in the form of newspapers and television like at least the way I read them is they're basically covering whatever was the viral post like yesterday or a week ago, right? And so they're being driven by the internet viral post, which is why I think that, you know, the internet viral post is the high order thing. And I also think like that's not going to change. Like the whole long thing I could do on that, but like they literally if you're a television producer or if you're a news editor or whatever, like you can't possibly move your organization fast enough to stay ahead of these cycles. And so what you end up doing is you end up chasing them and that's basically the role of mainstream media for the rest of our life is just going to be to follow the internet viral post.
Yeah. There was a funny joke on the Daily Show years ago where they were talking to a newspaper guy and he said, 'Why do you call it news? You should call it olds.'
He was, it was at the time the managing editor of the New York Times and he was in his office and the New York Times, you know, was expecting to get this glowing coverage on the Daily Show and whoever it was shows up in the office and says what Ben just said and the editor is just like completely confused. Like he clearly has no idea what the Daily Show guy is talking about and he's like, 'Well, like what do you mean?' And he points, there's like a pile of literally physical newspapers in the guy's desk and he says like, 'Look, it's all old news.' And he's like, 'No, no, it's today's paper.' And he's like, 'No, no, it's yesterday's paper. Like I already know everything that's in...
