Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Change is coming. Now it's my time to record radio
Speaker 2: better offline right here in the beautiful iHeartRadio studios on
Speaker 2: fifty fifth Street, and my god, we're back from CS.
Speaker 2: You couldn't stop me. I got off. I did thirteen
Speaker 2: and a half bloody hours on the radio on the
Speaker 2: podcast thing. I'm just don't know why I keep calling
Speaker 2: it radio, and then got on the flight, moved to
Speaker 2: New York. It was nothing, wore off a ducks back
Speaker 2: and now it's Tuesday and we're already recording again. You'll
Speaker 2: never get rid of me. And today I have two
Speaker 2: amazing guests. I have Paris Martineau, reporter at the Information
Speaker 2: and the Mighty Jeff Jarvis, author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis
Speaker 2: and journalisman professor over at Stonybrook University. Mister Jarvis is
Speaker 2: currently he is fielding a phone call, so I'll go
Speaker 2: to Paris. Hey doing Paris.
Speaker 1: I'm doing great. I'm astounded by energy levels given the
Speaker 1: amount of podcasting and radio you've done the last week.
Speaker 2: I am. I am fired up. I love doing this.
Speaker 2: I think this is what I was meant to do.
Speaker 3: How are your feet after cees?
Speaker 2: Fantastic? I got inserts from my I like came to
Speaker 2: this show fully prepared. No one realizes how much like
Speaker 2: the amount of like Google docs, I had of things prepared,
Speaker 2: like the suitcases packed like two weeks in advance, and
Speaker 2: then I got to New York and I'd forgotten things
Speaker 2: like gym shorts and some shoes. And basically I prepared
Speaker 2: my life for one thing, not both things.
Speaker 1: And it's podcasting, podcasting and blogging and nothing else.
Speaker 2: Sleep slave to the content. Now, mister Jarvis, how have
Speaker 2: you been?
Speaker 3: Oh? Good, good, it's cold here.
Speaker 2: It is good.
Speaker 3: Do you have any regret coming here right now?
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. Okay, I'd rather take this real last weather
Speaker 2: than the nonsense I get back in England. Oh it's
Speaker 2: kind of cold, but I usually see you two on
Speaker 2: this week in Tech, so it's good to have you
Speaker 2: here in person.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's lovely to be irl with you. Some might
Speaker 1: say it's better offline.
Speaker 2: It's better offline, but it is very online. So all right, Paris,
Speaker 2: you had a story come out of the weekend. I
Speaker 2: did tell us about it.
Speaker 1: So it is a story about this website called Sniffy's.
Speaker 1: Have you guys ever heard of it?
Speaker 3: Right there, I want to stop and I don't want
Speaker 3: to know anything, Moore.
Speaker 1: I think, well, it's actually where I'm that's probably a
Speaker 1: fair station. It is the up and coming, I guess,
Speaker 1: competitor to Grinder. It's a website for men seeking men.
Speaker 1: But it is specifically unlike you know, kind of your
Speaker 1: dating apps of your it's not really about dating, it's.
Speaker 2: About it's actual hook up.
Speaker 1: It's a hookup app, just for field. It is an
Speaker 1: actual app, and it's supposed to be kind of about
Speaker 1: translating the gay cruising scene into online.
Speaker 2: Potentially, right idea? Why not?
Speaker 1: Yeah, people seem to really love it. It started in
Speaker 1: some kind of infancy form in twenty sixteen, but in
Speaker 1: the last couple of years has really taken off among
Speaker 1: like gays in big cities and cities honestly big and small.
Speaker 2: However, so nothing went wrong.
Speaker 1: Nothing went wrong, that's the end of the story. I
Speaker 1: just like writing about when companies do good. So in
Speaker 1: this case, part of the thing that made Sniffy's so
Speaker 1: attractive to its users is it's kind of a no
Speaker 1: holds barred approach to hook up platforms. You don't even
Speaker 1: have to make an account to sign in. You can
Speaker 1: just type in Sniffy's dot com say yeah, I'm over eighteen,
Speaker 1: and then get to like navigating a map ful of
Speaker 1: dick picks and butt picks and messaging people and meeting up. Okay,
Speaker 1: that is a problem because it seems like the site
Speaker 1: has a bit of a child user issue. And when
Speaker 1: you have a child user issue, when you're a dating
Speaker 1: and sex platform, you also have a child sexual abuse platform.
Speaker 1: So me and my colleague Marie Weinberg identified over the
Speaker 1: last kind of a year or so more than a
Speaker 1: dozen cases where adult men had been charged for sex
Speaker 1: crimes involving a minor.
Speaker 2: They meant all facilitated directly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's a lot, it seems for a relatively
Speaker 1: small platform. It's about decide.
Speaker 2: Still around afterwards? Is the thing that shocks me.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean part of it is because the question
Speaker 1: of legal liability in these cases is a bit tricky.
Speaker 1: You have companies like there's long been an issue of
Speaker 1: kids getting onto adult dating apps and meeting adults, but
Speaker 1: up until recently, every legal challenge that a company that
Speaker 1: a parent or child that has grown up have tried
Speaker 1: to kind of throw against these companies saying, hey, you're
Speaker 1: actually not doing your job when it comes to policing
Speaker 1: underage do there's every legal challenge has been swept away
Speaker 1: by the company saying ah Section two.
Speaker 2: Thirty, even legal challenges aside. Would they not want to
Speaker 2: stop the children getting on the sex app? Well, it's
Speaker 2: hard sensibly, Okay? Did they try? Not?
Speaker 1: Really? Because all they wanted They don't want to have
Speaker 1: to try harder, it seems because right.
Speaker 2: Now the standard thing they don't want to try harder
Speaker 2: on is stopping adults having sex with children.
Speaker 1: Yes, because that would require taking on some responsible ability.
Speaker 1: And right now, what all they all these companies do
Speaker 1: is they just ask you for your birthday and assume
Speaker 1: that you didn't lie, because if they were going to
Speaker 1: do anything more stringent than that, that could open them
Speaker 1: up to liability.
Speaker 3: Explain something to me. So back Page and Craigslist took
Speaker 3: down their their sex sections.
Speaker 2: And also just for the for the listeners, Backpage, can
Speaker 2: you just run us through that.
Speaker 3: Backpage was a place where you could hook up. It
Speaker 3: was probably more of a singles into sex thing, right
Speaker 3: and Craigslist was pretty much singles but in within that
Speaker 3: people would find each other for that purpose.
Speaker 2: And then back Page was shut down.
Speaker 3: But the back Page shut down and Craigslist voluntarily got
Speaker 3: out of it because the liability was high, right, that
Speaker 3: was so they were shut down because it was sex
Speaker 3: trafficking or between that and what Snuffy.
Speaker 1: I believe part of the difference is when it comes
Speaker 1: to Backpage and Craigslist seeking connecttions, part of what they
Speaker 1: were originally shut down for involved fast assessed it involved
Speaker 1: specifically like sexual exploitation and sex traffic. FOSTA and SESTA
Speaker 1: were a package of bills that kind of went through
Speaker 1: some amounts of years ago that ended up regulating and
Speaker 1: making it making it so that these companies could not
Speaker 1: use the Section two thirty defense as a way to
Speaker 1: get around claims.
Speaker 2: They were made responsible for us to generated content. Yes, right,
Speaker 2: got it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so in Sniffy's case, it's a bit different. Well,
Speaker 1: in some ways it's not a lot different, because part
Speaker 1: of the issue of what we found of those a
Speaker 1: dozen cases, i'd say like over a third of them
Speaker 1: did involve money being exchanged for sex with minors. However,
Speaker 1: part of it comes.
Speaker 2: To the fact love of the game, I guess.
Speaker 1: I guess part of it is that up until fairly recently,
Speaker 1: dating apps hadn't really badly claims like this against them.
Speaker 1: Whenever they had, they'd been basically laughed at of corpse, saying, Oh,
Speaker 1: of course, Grinder is not responsible for connecting your fourteen
Speaker 1: year old to a bunch of thirty year olds. It's
Speaker 1: a tech platform, it's user generated content. However, due to
Speaker 1: kind of shifting tides in the way that judges are
Speaker 1: viewing Internet companies, like defense says that's starting to change
Speaker 1: right now. There is a lawsuit that is going to
Speaker 1: be heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals involving
Speaker 1: a case called Dovee Grinder where a fifteen year old
Speaker 1: basically got on Grinder ended up being connected with four
Speaker 1: men who raped him. And part of what the attorney
Speaker 1: carry Goldberg is claiming in this appeal or arguing is
Speaker 1: that Grinder shouldn't be able to hide behind Section two
Speaker 1: thirty to say, hey, it's not our fault that we
Speaker 1: didn't age verify, that Grinder should be held liable for
Speaker 1: its faulty age verification policies under kind of product liability law,
Speaker 1: saying that this is a defectively designed product. And that's
Speaker 1: a specific argument the Ninth Circuit Court has been like
Speaker 1: amenable to when it comes to other tech companies like Snapchat,
Speaker 1: for instance.
Speaker 2: So what happened in the rest of the story.
Speaker 1: In the rest of the story, basically we identified all
Speaker 1: these different cases. We talked to Sniffy's. They said that
Speaker 1: they are working on an ID based age verification solution,
Speaker 1: but in reality, the only way that that's currently in
Speaker 1: practice is just in the dozen or so states that
Speaker 1: currently have pornography restrictions to where like part of the
Speaker 1: thing is if you open up Sniffe's, it's like a
Speaker 1: map and all the profile photos are like photos of penises.
Speaker 1: So if you are in one of those states with yeah,
Speaker 1: you're in one of those states, recognize yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: you'll we'll see exactly where they are. If you are
Speaker 1: in one of those states. When you open it up now,
Speaker 1: you'll see a blurred image and if you want to
Speaker 1: see the penis photos, you have to enter in your ID. However,
Speaker 1: the company says that there may be going to expand
Speaker 1: this in some way it hasn't happened yet.
Speaker 2: That would potentially open up legal liability.
Speaker 1: Then yeah, and that's but part of the thing is
Speaker 1: users also don't want to do that.
Speaker 2: So I mean that was kind of what I was
Speaker 2: thinking that would kind of kill it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or a platform like that is never going to
Speaker 1: be successful if it has that sort of barrier to
Speaker 1: entry and certiplications are huge.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're handing over your identification to a company called Sniffies. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I meant I wouldn't feel terribly secure in that.
Speaker 2: I mean I would, of course, but that's just me.
Speaker 2: But no, you also, you're right though, it's like these
Speaker 2: I imagine part of the thing here, other than the
Speaker 2: thing you're doing on there, is that it is kind
Speaker 2: of anonymous. Yes, that is that's the whole point, completely hidden,
Speaker 2: the thing where you can go off and touch all
Speaker 2: and sundry the problem being all in sundry there. What
Speaker 2: the legal ramifications though, if like the what was it
Speaker 2: do versus Grinder?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, so the thing is if that case,
Speaker 1: when it's appealed nines to the court, if they rule
Speaker 1: in a similar way that they have in the past
Speaker 1: and say, hey, when it comes to product liability cases
Speaker 1: like this, tech companies don't have a defense, that could
Speaker 1: have huge ramifications for every.
Speaker 2: Company in the dating app, not just for dating even I.
Speaker 1: Mean, it could yeah, be way bigger than dating. But
Speaker 1: I mean the immediate impacts, according to the attorneys I
Speaker 1: spoke to, would be certainly on the dating app scene,
Speaker 1: which is huge because.
Speaker 2: We'll all change with those things.
Speaker 1: I mean probably what would change is they'd have to
Speaker 1: find a way to determine user age beyond just asking
Speaker 1: you for your to enter in your birthday, So it
Speaker 1: could be things like some of the other dating app
Speaker 1: companies out there already have stuff in place. For instance,
Speaker 1: I believe Bumble and one other maybe Tender, scan user
Speaker 1: profile photos when they're uploaded to see like, does this
Speaker 1: person look like clearly a child and if so, they
Speaker 1: might ask you to upload your idea to verify that
Speaker 1: you're over eighteen.
Speaker 2: I feel like there could also be a big problem.
Speaker 2: So I've been on the dating apps for a while,
Speaker 2: not that I'm not single, it just nobody likes me.
Speaker 2: And I remember when I was on them it was
Speaker 2: like months and months. Actually, no like last year, like
Speaker 2: early last year. It's been a while. There was a
Speaker 2: huge fake profile problem, and I wonder if there's not
Speaker 2: a secondary problem here where the dominance of these fake
Speaker 2: profiles on there might get pushed away when they have
Speaker 2: to stop verifying every us because that feels like the
Speaker 2: on the s.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I mean then part of the problem, if
Speaker 1: you're thinking about it from a corporate perspective, is then
Speaker 1: your user numbers go down, and probably in those cases,
Speaker 1: those fake profiles are like, the person is probably paying
Speaker 1: for that fake proflex that increases their reach. If they're
Speaker 1: running some sort of scam and then they're paying, user
Speaker 1: numbers would go down, which would be bad for most
Speaker 1: dating app companies that are already doing poorly. A weird
Speaker 1: thing I learned during this story is that Grinder is
Speaker 1: like the most profitable dating app company because gay users don't.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a bit of a simplication, but
Speaker 1: from what I heard, it is that gay users just
Speaker 1: seem to pay for the platform and use it for
Speaker 1: much longer. In part, researchers think because gay users are
Speaker 1: more likely to be in non monogamous relationships. So you're
Speaker 1: not You're not signing up for Hinge premium, using it
Speaker 1: for cons, then getting in a monogamous relationship, and never
Speaker 1: using it again.
Speaker 3: So believe it or not, I once was an executive
Speaker 3: overseeing parts of brides dot com.
Speaker 1: Ah, yes, you're so bridled.
Speaker 3: Yes, And I used to love to say I've got
Speaker 3: to go to a bridees meeting. But the interest thing
Speaker 3: there was that our audience would come in and leave
Speaker 3: in nine months, and for their sake, you hope they
Speaker 3: didn't come back.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right, This is the other extreme of that. What happened
Speaker 3: with the cases that were done against Sniffy's. What was
Speaker 3: the status of those cases?
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, so the cases that we that I
Speaker 1: tracked were all kind of like sex crimes against involving
Speaker 1: specific like male offenders. In two cases that we kind
Speaker 1: of follow throughout the story involving this then fourteen year
Speaker 1: old who made an accountant Sniffy's and had sex to adults.
Speaker 1: Those two adults have since been sentenced to upwards of
Speaker 1: as the question.
Speaker 3: Those work cases against Sniffy's in any.
Speaker 1: Case against people, that's the thing that Sniffy is no
Speaker 1: cases against him. I spoke to a parent, the parent
Speaker 1: of that fourteen year old, and she said, like, of
Speaker 1: course Sniffy should be sued. I don't know how to
Speaker 1: do it. I'm dealing with, you.
Speaker 2: Know, three dealing with a criminal case.
Speaker 1: I'm dealing with three foster kids that already were fucked up,
Speaker 1: and now my fourteen year old is super fucked up
Speaker 1: and has tried to commit suicide because of this whole thing.
Speaker 1: You know, She's like, I don't know how to do this,
Speaker 1: but I do think that if something happens on the
Speaker 1: doversus Grinder front, you might see cases like this increasing
Speaker 1: increasingly being fut in the country.
Speaker 2: And could this not be extrap laid out to a
Speaker 2: much wider series of issues as well, like assaults that
Speaker 2: happen with people of age that still happen as a
Speaker 2: result of a platform. But but.
Speaker 3: That's why I wanted to ask next, is when you
Speaker 3: go to product liability, it's usually that you're not matching
Speaker 3: a product promise. This is going to make you thin,
Speaker 3: this is going to make you beautiful? Yeah, does does
Speaker 3: Sniffy's promise safety?
Speaker 2: This is maybe Tinda has these feeches. I believe Tinda
Speaker 2: has feeches about like check in, So maybe like one
Speaker 2: of the platforms has safety feaches, so kind of okay, Grinder.
Speaker 1: One of the things noted in that is that Grinder
Speaker 1: promotes itself as a quote safe space, and all of
Speaker 1: these platforms say like our users are eighteen and up,
Speaker 1: Like they say that they check users age, so they're
Speaker 1: two promise that in a way but then I guess
Speaker 1: the question goes, does asking someone to enter their date
Speaker 1: of birth in just a form? Does that mean you've
Speaker 1: actually checked their age?
Speaker 3: Well, this is the interesting thing. We've talked about this
Speaker 3: on our podcast on the Speak of Google is where
Speaker 3: does a liability land. Is it at at the platform
Speaker 3: technology level or is it the intermediary level, or is
Speaker 3: it at the user level? And if we try to
Speaker 3: expect the platforms to solve all the problems of mankind,
Speaker 3: we know they're going to fail. Well, I think will fail.
Speaker 2: Specifically with TINDA. Under the Safety Policy Center, it says,
Speaker 2: and I quote our safety tools, we utilize a network
Speaker 2: of industry leading automated and manual moderation review tools, systems,
Speaker 2: and processes, and invest significant resources to prevent, monitor and
Speaker 2: remove inappropriate behavior, impersonation, harassment, and more from our app.
Speaker 2: These tools include automatic scans of profiles, red flag languages
Speaker 2: and images, manual reviews of profiles, and it goes on
Speaker 2: and so forth. And they also have a zero tolerance
Speaker 2: policy of harassment and encourage their community to report any
Speaker 2: instance of misconduct.
Speaker 3: They have a liability statement there.
Speaker 2: Now, yeah, see it's probably an additional policies decoration, harassment
Speaker 2: under it. Bloody hell, they got a lot now, there's
Speaker 2: just a lot of like things that they might be
Speaker 2: under the terms of use. But nevertheless, if this goes,
Speaker 2: if those versus Grinder happens, it feels like that won't
Speaker 2: stop people suing and using this as a promise.
Speaker 3: Certainly, Yeah, but there's a problem with that too. I've argued.
Speaker 3: I mean, Facebook is now completely fucked up and going
Speaker 3: full Maga, but I've argued strenuously over the years that
Speaker 3: it should have had a raisal on debt, a north
Speaker 3: star right right, and it should have said we're here
Speaker 3: to be nice to each other, We're here to build community,
Speaker 3: we're here to make strangers less strange. They do none
Speaker 3: of that, and I wish they would have because perhaps
Speaker 3: then there is a standard to hold them against and
Speaker 3: also their users. However, in this discussion, if they say, well,
Speaker 3: you said you're going to be the place where people
Speaker 3: are nice, and now you're filled with harris but it
Speaker 3: motivates them not to make any promises. Yes, yeah, that's
Speaker 3: a problem. I think.
Speaker 2: Also an IDC company, so I don't really that's the
Speaker 2: company that owns Tinder and match Group and a bunch
Speaker 2: of other ones like Chemistry dot Com and I don't
Speaker 2: they're evil, Like, this is my statement, you don't have
Speaker 2: to follow. I think they're deeply evil companies. But this
Speaker 2: Sniffy's thing is a level worse.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I just think it's interesting because sniffy
Speaker 1: is I mean, is kind of like the worst of
Speaker 1: all these problems because it is completely without any of
Speaker 1: the safe.
Speaker 2: A frictionless experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's also gotten so popular in the last
Speaker 1: couple of years dating app the big dating apps are
Speaker 1: taking notice. Like Grinder shouted it out basically in one
Speaker 1: of their most recent earnings called said when an analyst
Speaker 1: had asked, like, oh, are there any competitors in the
Speaker 1: space that you're looking for keeping an eye on, and
Speaker 1: their CFO had said something along as there's like an
Speaker 1: anonymous they basically described Sniffy's in name but without using
Speaker 1: their name, and said we're keeping an eye on them.
Speaker 1: They also then introduced a feature I believe called right
Speaker 1: now that users on Grinder can turn on if they're
Speaker 1: looking for sex right that instant and other apps in
Speaker 1: the gay dating space have kind of emerged that are
Speaker 1: trying to take kind of a similar map based cruising approach.
Speaker 2: It is really funny though that the aultmeth thing is
Speaker 2: they were just like, yeah, why if we didn't follow
Speaker 2: any rules?
Speaker 1: It is pretty funny.
Speaker 2: What if we just turned off the rules pot? And
Speaker 2: I think that kind of leads us to Meta right now,
Speaker 2: because I think what you're seeing with the destruction of Meta,
Speaker 2: and I'm sure you two have heard, but for the listeners,
Speaker 2: Meta has now got rid of all of their content
Speaker 2: moderation stuff. They've got ridly well. They're claiming that well
Speaker 2: their fact check the fact check a sorry sorry fact check,
Speaker 2: and I just fucked up the fact check, didn't I.
Speaker 2: And now and now they're laying off five percent No,
Speaker 2: thank god, someone else you know what's going on now.
Speaker 2: They're laying off five percent of their people for quote
Speaker 2: underperforming and they're gonna They're claiming the lms will replace
Speaker 2: like second tier engineers. And also they have cas in
Speaker 2: you and actually I've given them a lot of shit,
Speaker 2: but he's put out some really good things recently about
Speaker 2: what Meta has said inside and how they're doing allowable
Speaker 2: things like just straight up homophobia, straight up.
Speaker 1: I mean, they just around the same time that these
Speaker 1: announcements rolled out that an internal directive went out to
Speaker 1: remove tampons and pads from any male restrooms on Facebook campuses, which.
Speaker 2: Is just a foolish thing.
Speaker 1: It's just that that is costing you money. You already
Speaker 1: have those dispensers in there, why not just leave them there.
Speaker 2: But I think that it's something above MAGA as well,
Speaker 2: and I think that people willing to do what I'm
Speaker 2: about to describe might lean conservative because it's evil. Now,
Speaker 2: if you're listening to your conservativecy it, don't be so rude,
Speaker 2: shout the fuck up. I don't care now.
Speaker 1: I'm surprised you've made it this far.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I don't know how you are that. No,
Speaker 2: it's all the anti monopoly people who are like, God,
Speaker 2: damn it, yeah, Matt Stola. Anyways, So the point I'm
Speaker 2: making is I think Meta is going to be the
Speaker 2: largest scale example of a company just not giving a
Speaker 2: shit in history. They're just doing all the evil stuff.
Speaker 2: They're using this as a chance to get rid of
Speaker 2: these troublesome things such as any kind of diversity, ecity
Speaker 2: and inclusion, harassing trans people by removing them from spaces.
Speaker 3: It's all around American and industry now, McDonald's, which depends
Speaker 3: upon black customers and depends upon black employees and people
Speaker 3: of color. No, DEI get rid of it. We don't
Speaker 3: care anymore. We're not going to do that anymore. And Meta,
Speaker 3: which cared about you know, and getting together and all
Speaker 3: that bs right. I was very impressed by Mark Limley,
Speaker 3: who is a Stanford law professor and a big deal
Speaker 3: in West Coast law. He is deactivating his account, but
Speaker 3: he's also firing Meta as a customer. Hell yeah, as
Speaker 3: a client, And he said, I have struggled with how
Speaker 3: to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's dissent into toxic
Speaker 3: masculinity and neo Nazi madness. Yeay, And that's a lot
Speaker 3: of it is. It's not just political. It's this toast
Speaker 3: your I don't ads.
Speaker 2: I actually know. I take back my hell yeah, overcount
Speaker 2: my hell yeah.
Speaker 3: So this is you, thank you. They're waiting for this moment.
Speaker 3: But also like.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah now, but like Daylight Dollar show. As you
Speaker 2: can ask Jeff Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street journalists have
Speaker 2: broken code. Meta has been backing up the Mega people
Speaker 2: for years and years and years. They have benefit. They
Speaker 2: allowed plandemic to spread a horrible conspiracy film. Then I'm
Speaker 2: not even going to describe it sounds stupid and it
Speaker 2: is stupid. It's for moron whatever it's meant to be
Speaker 2: a big ten. I don't care. Jeff Kaplan, who is
Speaker 2: now the head of Global policy, I believe right, Joel Coot,
Speaker 2: Why do I keep mixing those back? Check you again, man, Now,
Speaker 2: this is why you have guests because I'm too stupid
Speaker 2: to remember things. He intervened with the Public Health Group
Speaker 2: specifically to allow plandemic to continue to go through. And
Speaker 2: when Kevin Russ attempted to report on this and report
Speaker 2: that crowd Tangle, this internal tool had allowed them to
Speaker 2: see that these things were spreading and that Dan Bongino
Speaker 2: and all the conservatives were basically all that was being recommended.
Speaker 2: Alex Schultz, the CMO of Facebook at the time. Meta,
Speaker 2: Now he just shut down crowd Tangle.
Speaker 3: Baby.
Speaker 2: You can't have that, can't have people knowing. Alex Schultz
Speaker 2: also recently suggested on the anti LGBTQ front, and he
Speaker 2: is a gay man, that seeing homophobia and some such
Speaker 2: business on there would make people more sympathetic to the
Speaker 2: cause of LGBTQP.
Speaker 3: This is perverse it is.
Speaker 2: It's disgusting. But the thing is, it's I think what's
Speaker 2: frustrating me, and perhaps I need to stop things like
Speaker 2: it's not just maga is maga, of course it is,
Speaker 2: but it's been here for a while, and it's been
Speaker 2: here egregiously. They've been supporting the Conservatives at scale, and
Speaker 2: I mean supporting as a media property. And so it's
Speaker 2: just I just can't take it so seriously when people
Speaker 2: are going, well, this is Monk Zika finally giving in. No,
Speaker 2: that repressed little fuck he's oh going on, Joe Rogan Woo,
Speaker 2: things are not masculine enough. What the least masculine thing
Speaker 2: I've ever heard? Anyway? Right?
Speaker 3: No, So on this Week of Google last week, I said,
Speaker 3: you know, is there anybody left? I thought that Jeff
Speaker 3: Bezos was a responsible steward of the Washington Post. He's not.
Speaker 3: Mark Zuckerberg was always a dork, but I didn't think
Speaker 3: he was as bad. Jack Dorsey gets weirder by the
Speaker 3: day and or not. And I said on the show
Speaker 3: that Jensen Wong, the CEO and founder of Nvidia, I'd
Speaker 3: watched his two hour keynote at the CS I was
Speaker 3: I'm impressed by it by him Costley, So well, maybe
Speaker 3: there's maybe there's a smart guy next.
Speaker 1: Day believing the good people.
Speaker 3: The next day on MASTERD and somebody said, this is
Speaker 3: your good guy. Jensen Wong was signing a woman's breast.
Speaker 2: To say, Jeff, well, first of all, if she asked,
Speaker 2: if she asked, But also I would choose the other
Speaker 2: thing that Jensen Huang did. At ces So during one
Speaker 2: of the presentations, an audio guy was like, hurried on,
Speaker 2: he goes, I can hear myself, I can hear myself.
Speaker 2: And the guy's like, no, no, mister, mister Houang. It's
Speaker 2: reflecting off the size. He's like, no, no, And he
Speaker 2: was called Sebastian. I believe he's like I'm when I
Speaker 2: when someone makes a mistake, I'm gonna call it a
Speaker 2: Sebastian going forward, Okay, that's the thing. It is a
Speaker 2: fair thing, though, and I'm not saying I think there
Speaker 2: are some who want this more than others. It would
Speaker 2: be nice if one of them wasn't insane. I thought
Speaker 2: it was Mark Benioff for a while, I thought I
Speaker 2: thought Mark Benioff was all right. And I actually had
Speaker 2: coffee with the report after I met him and like
Speaker 2: described him positively, and she said, so he's just another
Speaker 2: white TEXTI I'm like, oh shit, I'm doing the thing
Speaker 2: that I'm doing the exact thing, but also be too.
Speaker 1: So may I put together my theory forward? My theory
Speaker 1: it's called CEO.
Speaker 2: Brainworms, Please Please.
Speaker 1: It's simply that if you are a CEO of something,
Speaker 1: especially a large company, you increasingly get brainworms, which is
Speaker 1: just you are surrounded by people whose job is largely
Speaker 1: to say yes to you, make you feel good, and
Speaker 1: that would make anyone insane. If you are surrounded by
Speaker 1: sick evans for long enough, I think that you are
Speaker 1: going to become untethered from reality in a way that
Speaker 1: is distressing to a person that exists in conflats.
Speaker 2: Someone on Twitter once said, being a billionaire is like
Speaker 2: being kicked in the horse and the head by horse
Speaker 2: every day. And I think that's fair.
Speaker 3: But there's something different now. I think they've always been sexists.
Speaker 3: It's a male structure that's given, but the permission structure
Speaker 3: has changed, rightly, yes, and I don't think it necessarily.
Speaker 3: Their essence has changed, But they're all freed.
Speaker 2: They're untethered, yes, and yeah, I I fully agree with that.
Speaker 2: And I think you're really seeing it with Zuckerberg, and
Speaker 2: it kind of makes so much more. I wish I
Speaker 2: would have called this one, because he is doing exactly
Speaker 2: what you'd expect. He's just I'm gonna remove all of
Speaker 2: the stuff that makes Facebook already a basically unusable platform.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna make it. I'm just gonna add all the
Speaker 2: racism back. We need some more racism there. And I'm
Speaker 2: just gonna fire a bunch of people, and I'm gonna
Speaker 2: go on Joe Rogan and talk about my sad little
Speaker 2: Willy or whatever he said. I didn't watch. I don't care.
Speaker 2: It's just what happens with Google now? Is my question?
Speaker 2: What is the untethered Sundar Peshai experience.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna be naive again. I think it's different, maybe
Speaker 3: because Sundar is educated and Luri and Sergei are educated,
Speaker 3: and Zuckerberg left sophomore year seminar brain.
Speaker 2: Sure, but I'm not sure that I've met plenty of
Speaker 2: psychotic people in college. True, and I'm just true. I'm
Speaker 2: just wondering, perhaps I should reframe the question. It's like,
Speaker 2: what happens the Google now? How how worried about Google's quality.
Speaker 2: I am if like, because this is what's what Meta
Speaker 2: is doing is effectively what Google's been working on. It's
Speaker 2: the whole thing of degrading the quality of the service
Speaker 2: by taking off the things that makes it good.
Speaker 3: Well, I argue that different industry that the problem for
Speaker 3: Google isn't just Google. The problem is the web. The
Speaker 3: Web is being ruined as a whole, and it's a
Speaker 3: window on to a worse web, and.
Speaker 1: In some ways Google is accelerating that. But yeah, Google has,
Speaker 1: as it is the portal to the Web, entire industries
Speaker 1: upon industries have emerged to a game that portal of
Speaker 1: the web, which results in kind of a self fulfilling
Speaker 1: prophecy of the quality.
Speaker 2: The content that they raise becomes the most popular content,
Speaker 2: which in turn informs what will be popular next.
Speaker 3: Yes, or it's an armload of a chicken today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I'm angry. It's I think that this is
Speaker 2: really going to hasten the row economy. I think this
Speaker 2: is just going to begin more rot because before there
Speaker 2: was this lair and they obviously all resented it where
Speaker 2: it was just like god, oh yeah, there's different colored people.
Speaker 2: I guess fucking because woman now Jesus Christ, and they've
Speaker 2: always like grumpily accepted it. And Meta has been weirdly
Speaker 2: one of the better ones, which means that the ones
Speaker 2: who are not going, what do you think fucking Tesla's
Speaker 2: gonna be? Like Tesla's not going to have bathroom for
Speaker 2: woman anymore? That's a guess, it's it's it's a joke.
Speaker 2: I don't know who are you worried about jet Like
Speaker 2: who who's the real bastard left? Who's the bustard who
Speaker 2: hasn't basted it yet?
Speaker 3: Well, that's I think that's the I hope the Google
Speaker 3: is not going to go that far, I think for
Speaker 3: their business, and it would be any any good. Here's
Speaker 3: the other question blue Sky?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Do we have any hope for Blue Sky?
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 3: I have, but I'm an optimist. I hold out hope.
Speaker 3: I like Blue Sky.
Speaker 1: I'm a nihilist, but I have hope for Blue Sky.
Speaker 3: Selfishly yes, And then I saw did you see the
Speaker 3: thing yesterday? I've got to pull up the rundown. There's
Speaker 3: an effort to raise thirty million dollars.
Speaker 2: Is this the free my appads, which which is filled
Speaker 2: with people like Shoshana Zuboff. This to me what I
Speaker 2: was already on my notes. I'm glad you brought this up.
Speaker 2: It's really what is it?
Speaker 3: And Dave Winer, who's one of the pioneers of RSS
Speaker 3: and podcasting and blogging and so on, his response was,
Speaker 3: there's no nerds there, there's no technologists there.
Speaker 2: I also, it doesn't seem to be saying what they'll do.
Speaker 3: No, it did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so what have they raised the money too?
Speaker 2: They've not even raised the money.
Speaker 1: They're declaring their hope to raise money. I'd also like
Speaker 1: to declare that.
Speaker 2: I also raise dollars.
Speaker 1: I'll spend it on a Brownstone and give you ten
Speaker 1: twenty millions.
Speaker 2: I will keep the money and do nothing else.
Speaker 3: What's the name of it again?
Speaker 2: Free off feeds because I.
Speaker 3: Want to go to the list of the people who
Speaker 3: are associated.
Speaker 2: No, it's really funny. There's Cory doctor wrote and Shoshana
Speaker 2: zoo Buff right, which if if you've ever talked to
Speaker 2: Corey about Shoshana Zoo Buff, let me just say that's
Speaker 2: a weird coffee date.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it marks a sermon from Mozilla, who I think
Speaker 3: is a good guy, but Shoshana drives me crazy. Roger
Speaker 3: mct to me, Oh, doesn't call me anymore, drives me nuts,
Speaker 3: Mark Ruffalo, Jimmy Wales, We like Brian eno Is everywhere,
Speaker 3: Carol Cadwallader from Well the Guardians Soon, Roger Turtle.
Speaker 2: It's just a bunch of people who don't build.
Speaker 3: They don't build, they don't build. So uh, my friend
Speaker 3: Craig new Mark.
Speaker 1: Costically, what they want to use the raised funds for
Speaker 1: is to launching a public interest foundation to support the
Speaker 1: project while creating independently hosted infrastructure giving Blue Sky users, developers,
Speaker 1: and researchers access to content.
Speaker 3: And then you don't need thirty million dollars to do that.
Speaker 3: Mastodon built up to what it was just when went
Speaker 3: after until the point where Musk bought Twitter Masterdon has
Speaker 3: had raised an entirety.
Speaker 2: Thousand Maston literally just did a nonprofit operation like a
Speaker 2: day or two ago, saying that they're kind of decentralizing it. See.
Speaker 2: I don't enjoy Mastodon at all. I don't think.
Speaker 1: I think it's a bunch of scolds.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it feels like I need to do a content
Speaker 2: warning because I didn't use a capital letter in the
Speaker 2: right place exactly like I'm eating lunch. Wow, how dare
Speaker 2: did you see that guy in the matrix. He didn't
Speaker 2: even have a mouth. Now, I think what frustrates me
Speaker 2: here is like Mastodon did something real that they moved
Speaker 2: stuff around and this thing I got reached out to
Speaker 2: by them, and I read a few articles and I'm
Speaker 2: pretty stupid. So I was like, maybe someone else saw song.
Speaker 2: I sent to a few friends. Everyone was like, this
Speaker 2: looks good. I guess it isn't anything.
Speaker 3: There's nothing.
Speaker 2: It's just there's nothing. Why is everyone covered? Will Aramis
Speaker 2: call me? Will it Aramis of the Washington boast to
Speaker 2: I adore? Why are you giving them a Q and
Speaker 2: a they he talked all about them. It's just it's
Speaker 2: frustrating because I think it was the they've done kind
Speaker 2: of I hope I'm wrong. I hope this thing does
Speaker 2: the thing that they're non spit, but you could do it?
Speaker 2: What is actually? I don't why am I even saying
Speaker 2: I hope they do it. I actually cannot tell you
Speaker 2: what they do.
Speaker 3: So the eighth conception, to me, it should be to
Speaker 3: federate Blue Sky, to take the at protocol and make
Speaker 3: it federated like masterodot is like activity put right that
Speaker 3: that requires Jay Graber and Blue Sky to have enough
Speaker 3: resources to put out what's needed for federation.
Speaker 2: And I wonder if that costs thirty million.
Speaker 3: No, it doesn't.
Speaker 2: What they want to do from what I understand of
Speaker 2: this vague promise now is I think they want to
Speaker 2: be like, hey, do you want to fund like the
Speaker 2: other Blue Sky. It just feels this kind of vagueness
Speaker 2: and now that we've listed out all the names and
Speaker 2: just kind of like, this is a cynical This is
Speaker 2: like one of those stand up to cancer thing.
Speaker 3: No, No, it doesn't qualify.
Speaker 2: It's cynical. It's cynical. And I like the thing is
Speaker 2: there of people I look like, Corey's awesome.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, And it's like.
Speaker 2: All of these promises without really promising anything. What does
Speaker 2: that sound like? The tech industry like, why don't you
Speaker 2: come to this with some things? And the answer is
Speaker 2: they just want to talk about we want to make
Speaker 2: it billionaire proof. What the fuck does that mean? Really
Speaker 2: does have way more money than thirty million dollars. They've
Speaker 2: got like one hundred and fifty million more dollars than that.
Speaker 2: That's how much a billion is exactly, And it's just
Speaker 2: everyone's kind of fallen for it. And I hope it
Speaker 2: does something good, but I really cannot say what that
Speaker 2: might be. And if their answer is well you didn't
Speaker 2: read it well enough, not my fucking problem. Mate, You
Speaker 2: explain the shit when you're talking to all and Sundry
Speaker 2: about this.
Speaker 3: Have you seen anything from Jay Graber or Eplusky about
Speaker 3: what she thinks of this.
Speaker 2: She gave a canned quote and said it was good
Speaker 2: because I mean, if in her position, well, it'd be
Speaker 2: funny if it's just like this bullshit fuck these people.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess, yeah, if someone wants to buy
Speaker 1: out her startup for thirty million dollars.
Speaker 2: Well, it's not even that. She was just like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a pretty good thing. I think it might have
Speaker 2: been Ja. I don't know if it was Jay who
Speaker 2: did the quote, but it was something along the lines
Speaker 2: of like this is cut good. You know that protol.
Speaker 3: Mike Basnik is now on the board a Blue Sky.
Speaker 3: He's the voice I'll trust on this.
Speaker 2: Yes, I generally trust Mike. We have some differing opinions,
Speaker 2: mostly on section two thirty, but I think that that's
Speaker 2: everyone's experience with Mike.
Speaker 3: It's just because I agree with Mike on section Yes.
Speaker 2: No, no, I know you know, I'm a huge man.
Speaker 2: He was a guest on the show. He was one
Speaker 2: of my favorite episodes, The streisand Effects.
Speaker 1: I think. I think Mike is lovely.
Speaker 2: He's wonderful, really really good storyteller and actually a good journalist,
Speaker 2: which is why this whole thing is something I really
Speaker 2: would like his opinion on, because it feels like the
Speaker 2: kind of thing you get like a call bowe bode yes,
Speaker 2: like an article and being like a bunch of tech people.
Speaker 2: Ship it up again, Carl, I love it, but also
Speaker 2: I don't want to be a wet blanket here but bloosh,
Speaker 2: Like it's just frustrating because you know what we actually
Speaker 2: need right now, like pixel fed or whatever, the federated
Speaker 2: Instagram thing that is currently being blocked. What is pixel
Speaker 2: It's just an Instagram that's decentralized, much like massif activity. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's an actual thing that probably could use thirty million
Speaker 2: dollars and is an actual story beyond it being blocked.
Speaker 2: But the thing getting covered is a bunch of people
Speaker 2: getting together and saying wouldn't it be nice if something
Speaker 2: was nicer when you actually have someone doing the thing.
Speaker 2: Because what we need right now is a blue sky
Speaker 2: for Facebook, or we need Facebook equivalent and Instagram equivalent,
Speaker 2: because once Meta loses their grip on those two things,
Speaker 2: they are fucked. They do not have a real business.
Speaker 2: The whole AI profiles thing, which we'll get to in
Speaker 2: a minute, and all of this here, we're going to
Speaker 2: take off the We're going to take off all the
Speaker 2: things that I don't allow you to say, the fourteen
Speaker 2: words every post. We're going to allow trans people to protect.
Speaker 3: You.
Speaker 2: Don't do that just because you're evil. Capitalism is generally
Speaker 2: gonna move towards the most profitable direction. You do this
Speaker 2: because all that stuff just got in the way of
Speaker 2: more stuff and more growth. You break that machine with
Speaker 2: an alternative that doesn't suck constantly.
Speaker 3: Let we tried different theory on okay, which is that
Speaker 3: I made fun of Musk buying Twitter forty four billion dollars.
Speaker 3: What a fool you are, And we all know how
Speaker 3: wrong that was, because he's worth ten times more because
Speaker 3: he sees access to power around the world around Yeah,
Speaker 3: he used it. Is Zuckerberg simply jealous of Musk's political cloud?
Speaker 2: Nah? I don't think so.
Speaker 3: He's more more by money than power.
Speaker 2: I think he could just given what do you.
Speaker 1: Think, I mean, I think that that could be could thing.
Speaker 1: I think that certainly access to political power is something
Speaker 1: that he wants, as do all of these people. The
Speaker 1: fact that Zuck Musk and who is the third person,
Speaker 1: A bunch of text CEOs are going to be sitting
Speaker 1: in Trump and Besis are going to be sitting in
Speaker 1: Trump's little box of the inauguration, I think speaks volumes.
Speaker 2: Did you cover a Facebook and I feel like you've
Speaker 2: covered them previously?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I covered them earlier on right?
Speaker 2: Is this is there anything historic about? Because I was
Speaker 2: just thinking, has Zuck about generally hung out with presidents
Speaker 2: in any way? Like has he ever really been social
Speaker 2: with them?
Speaker 1: Maderstanding is no, not to this extent.
Speaker 2: But I could be He's period. Remember he like his
Speaker 2: I remember his.
Speaker 1: It was notable in like twenty seventeen or eighteen when
Speaker 1: he did a tour across America taking his little photos
Speaker 1: stage to look like his normal height, and everyone was like,
Speaker 1: oh wow, he's making a political statement. He could be moving.
Speaker 1: He looks like he could be five foot nine. Yeah, yeah, No,
Speaker 1: it's a there's definitely him standing on boxes or in
Speaker 1: photos standing. He's five seven standing forward so that he
Speaker 1: looks taller. However, I remember that being notable because it
Speaker 1: felt like, yeah, he's actually like entering into the political sphere. Maybe,
Speaker 1: but I think that he is, just as his political
Speaker 1: star has risen, for better or worse over the last decade,
Speaker 1: is cozied up to power quite a bit.
Speaker 3: I'm about to say something terrible. Hell yeah, which is
Speaker 3: when I was in Davos, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: By Jeff.
Speaker 3: I was there in a session with Mark Zuckerberg, and
Speaker 3: it was before he was media trained, And I've watched
Speaker 3: him in a few conference settings back in the day
Speaker 3: ten years ago, and he obviously hated it then. But
Speaker 3: he's changed.
Speaker 2: I think he has got the brainworms. But also, like
Speaker 2: many of these guys, he's got all of this money
Speaker 2: and got a reasonable age, and then he's like, what
Speaker 2: do I enjoy? And then he's realized he enjoys nothing.
Speaker 2: I personally am a barbecue guy. I have never seen
Speaker 2: a man less interested in cooking in my life. Sweet
Speaker 2: baby raised sweet.
Speaker 1: He loves to smoke those meats, though, And there's nothing.
Speaker 2: Wrong with a cheap record with some sweet baby rays.
Speaker 2: If you're feeling lazy, we've all done it. It took
Speaker 2: six hours. You're not lazy enough, not so lazy you
Speaker 2: wouldn't You don't want to go to the store. And
Speaker 2: also he got a big green egg he got there's
Speaker 2: nothing wrong with the big green egg. But you know what,
Speaker 2: if you got all this money, you can get yourself
Speaker 2: a really interesting stick burner. You gotta look up pit.
Speaker 3: You could buy Nashville.
Speaker 2: You could go and get a Bits and Spits out
Speaker 2: of Texas. That's where I get my girl from beautiful
Speaker 2: Steel Beast coy over there put it together. Really don't
Speaker 2: want to look at the politics there. Just realized as
Speaker 2: they said that never looked at it. Please if it's bad,
Speaker 2: don't tweet it him. But also he doesn't enjoy anything.
Speaker 2: None of these people do. And so yeah, he's just
Speaker 2: like I've seen clips of the Rogan thing, and he
Speaker 2: just seems he seems as bad as Elon Muy. He
Speaker 2: seems just like his like another day with my billions.
Speaker 1: A detail I think is notable has been stuck in
Speaker 1: my head ever since I read it. It was a
Speaker 1: Wall Street journal piece kind of tied to this rebuff
Speaker 1: of fact checking. They had a detail right at the
Speaker 1: end that I think in maybe like November of last year,
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg had had gone through some sort of knee
Speaker 1: surgery because he pulled something relating to MMA and made
Speaker 1: a Facebook post about it, being like, here's me at
Speaker 1: my knee surgery. And I guess the post didn't do well,
Speaker 1: and so he freaked out and messaged his team being like,
Speaker 1: why isn't my post doing well? Turns out it was
Speaker 1: because it was being suppressed due to Facebook policies on
Speaker 1: potential medical misinformation, And I don't know, seems fairly notable.
Speaker 1: But right before Zuck decides to roll back all of
Speaker 1: these policies limiting the reach of certain posts, his own
Speaker 1: knee Facebook post gets limited.
Speaker 2: Well. I love about that first of all, other than
Speaker 2: the lack of post is sparit and this pathetic yeah
Speaker 2: post better, but also post harder. He actually ran into
Speaker 2: a problem of Facebook that people complain about, which is
Speaker 2: that I don't seem to distribute my post to everyone.
Speaker 2: It seems to get stopped somehow. But instead of being
Speaker 2: like maybe that's a problem with the platform's like why
Speaker 2: are people not looking up my knees enough?
Speaker 3: And he knew he knew it was his platform.
Speaker 1: He knew it was his own platforms, and they were like,
Speaker 1: fix it for my thing. And it's a similar thing
Speaker 1: that Elon Musk has done with Twitter to where he
Speaker 1: was like, well, people aren't seeing my tweets enough, so
Speaker 1: we're gonna need to put my tweets in everybody's feed always.
Speaker 2: And it's itald I would do this. I mean it
Speaker 2: just to be clear, like immediately right now, like and
Speaker 2: why because I love people looking at me. But it's
Speaker 2: so much sadder if you have all the money in
Speaker 2: the world and you could actually make people look at you,
Speaker 2: and you could go and like see anyone. You have
Speaker 2: enough money that foreseeably anyone would meet with you. You
Speaker 2: might have to pay someone, but you could meet everyone probably.
Speaker 2: But I was just shocked, even in the clips I
Speaker 2: saw of how like petulant, he seems like he doesn't
Speaker 2: like it's not like he's like finally the attention's like ah,
Speaker 2: he's like.
Speaker 3: Resent because because Baga is anger. Sure, sure, that's the
Speaker 3: whole that's the whole stait.
Speaker 2: He didn't feel like he was leaning into it, though
Speaker 2: he felt like there was a man pissed off.
Speaker 1: I think it makes sense if you think about it historically,
Speaker 1: because Zuck went on this huge apology tour after the
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen election and also with Cambridge Analytica. Stuff happened.
Speaker 1: He was for years just like a political punching bag,
Speaker 1: and he put himself up for it. He went before Congress,
Speaker 1: he went and apologized to a bunch of parents.
Speaker 2: Recently, he did this whole like very reasonable him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very I mean, but like in the mind of
Speaker 1: someone who is the head of a company, that might
Speaker 1: seem like you really have gone through the ringer, and
Speaker 1: yet people still continue to be mad at you no
Speaker 1: matter what you do.
Speaker 3: Actually, the apology demanded in Congress was by Josh Holly,
Speaker 3: who's now his bff. It's it's all just sicko pon sick.
Speaker 2: And it's now I'm thinking about sund up Ashy, Probably
Speaker 2: not Sundar or Satch in the Della. I think Saching
Speaker 2: the Della might from Microsoft, might adjust and become the
Speaker 2: nice CEO, or he will find far more specific ways
Speaker 2: to do it that will allow him to get away
Speaker 2: with them. But it really is. It's going to be
Speaker 2: interesting seeing the people who turn their nose up at
Speaker 2: Facebook now because right now I can't delete my Instagram.
Speaker 2: It's the only way I speak to like eleven people,
Speaker 2: and there are people only interact on it. But if
Speaker 2: that's your only business model, that's not great.
Speaker 3: But but that goes back to Musk. My presumption, besides
Speaker 3: it being a bad investment, was he was ruining in
Speaker 3: it and people would leave it. He has, people have
Speaker 3: left it. It doesn't matter to him. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: I think Facebook masters uk, I actually do. I think
Speaker 2: I think he is. He's not obsessed with it because
Speaker 2: that would involve him like looking at it for more
Speaker 2: than two seconds. But no, actually, maybe i'd take this back.
Speaker 2: He might not care if you look at it now.
Speaker 2: I guess no, It's just it looks like shit and
Speaker 2: it doesn't really.
Speaker 3: Because what did he care about the stupid goggles? Yeah? Right,
Speaker 3: and now he cares about it? And what Here's one
Speaker 3: of the funny things about Meta is that I think
Speaker 3: that they're a leader in ai. Jon Lacun, who's there
Speaker 3: is one of the well, he's one of the more
Speaker 3: I think rational people around it. He's not a doomster,
Speaker 3: he's not full of all that crap.
Speaker 2: NOI argues with Elon Musk and Gary Malcus all day.
Speaker 3: That's God's work?
Speaker 2: Is it?
Speaker 3: Where is it.
Speaker 2: I'm going to get him on here just to call
Speaker 2: him Yan Lacum, but I think he'll kill me. But no,
Speaker 2: so then leaders same leaders.
Speaker 3: A AI, he's still but he is still doing the
Speaker 3: the goggle crap. Yeah, you know ar and VR. He
Speaker 3: got bored with Facebook a long time ago, So.
Speaker 2: With with that, I agree. I think he might love
Speaker 2: the financial entity known as Meta, though I think he's
Speaker 2: like really attached to just the numbers because they've always
Speaker 2: been from the very early days of jan Olivan and
Speaker 2: Naomi gLite and Alex Schultz, they've always been like growth pigs.
Speaker 2: They love they were written off.
Speaker 3: Remember it wasn't that long ago. All Facebook's over. Meta
Speaker 3: is over.
Speaker 2: It's just a maskets never did that.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well they did for a little while. They
Speaker 3: did for a while, and then it's it's been a
Speaker 3: hell of a story.
Speaker 1: Now it's meta. It's the future of the web. We're
Speaker 1: onto webs seventy five.
Speaker 2: We're onto web four point five. And this is when
Speaker 2: it gets more racist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the legs are racist legs, but I don't forget.
Speaker 3: In the early day, as a print Malius Maleficarum came out,
Speaker 3: which was the guide to burning witches that killed lots
Speaker 3: of people, and it was Print's fault. So maybe this
Speaker 3: is just a phase for want until we have institutions
Speaker 3: that finally bring us quality. Same thing happened, honest to God,
Speaker 3: with print. That's a plug from my book, the Gutenberg
Speaker 3: parentheses now out, you could do it. I write about
Speaker 3: this right, and I think that we're at a stage
Speaker 3: where the scale of speech today is not cannot be
Speaker 3: handled by the institutions we have. When with print came,
Speaker 3: the institutions of editing and publishing were invented for that
Speaker 3: purpose because nobody knew what was made on this press.
Speaker 3: It had no providence. Anybody can make this credit.
Speaker 2: So are you suggesting it would be a private market
Speaker 2: effect rather than the governmental one.
Speaker 3: I'm suggesting it's institutional, and institutions.
Speaker 2: Can be either, right, So I think I think it's possible,
Speaker 2: and I think that I actually think it's very difficult,
Speaker 2: but not as hard as people think to destroy Meta
Speaker 2: in that it would take someone with enough money and
Speaker 2: enough moments like Blue Sky's growth came from a moment
Speaker 2: where people went, let's check out what's on x Ohdroy
Speaker 2: per forty two is threatening to kill me? And that
Speaker 2: is somehow my suggested from the algorithm, and he DM
Speaker 2: me as well. I think that person will kill me though,
Speaker 2: And then people went, I don't want to fucking be there.
Speaker 2: I don't want to be associated with this. I think
Speaker 2: with meta if depending on how bad the guardrails are
Speaker 2: pulled off, because we really don't know yet, it's going
Speaker 2: to take a little time, I think people will just
Speaker 2: be like, this platform already sucks. I won't look at anything.
Speaker 2: And that's the real question. Do they go nowhere? I'm
Speaker 2: really curious about the TikTok ban. It might we might
Speaker 2: find out.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 1: I think you're right on Meta, perhaps in some US circles,
Speaker 1: But I think the question when it comes to something
Speaker 1: like Facebook is what ends up happening to internationally using
Speaker 1: the growth Facebook is the Internet?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's actually that is actually genuinely worrying because
Speaker 2: the destruction of the content. I know content moderation is
Speaker 2: still there, but the very clearly lacks approach they're going
Speaker 2: to use now is going to hit the global South
Speaker 2: so much more, and it's going to hit people that
Speaker 2: are more subject to disinformation and misinformation.
Speaker 1: And I think it's worth noting that while like a
Speaker 1: lot of studies have shown the jury's a bit out
Speaker 1: on whether fact checking works or not. It does in
Speaker 1: some cases, but for most, like politically charged things, it
Speaker 1: just makes people dig their heels and more. The one
Speaker 1: thing I think is undercovered, or I guess underemphasized, is
Speaker 1: fact checking's ability to limit reach of misformation. Like, sure,
Speaker 1: it's not going to saying like, yeah, I posted misinformation
Speaker 1: and saying on my post your post is misinformation probably
Speaker 1: isn't going to change my view, but it will potentially
Speaker 1: have an impact on the twenty people that might have
Speaker 1: seen that and fallen into that.
Speaker 2: Rat And the thing is, and I think it was
Speaker 2: someone from foreig formte the point that metis fact checking
Speaker 2: wasn't great. Certainly, I was.
Speaker 3: There at the beginning. After the twenty sixteen I raised
Speaker 3: a bunch of money from Facebook, gave it away to
Speaker 3: places like Data in Society and another good folks for
Speaker 3: doing lots of work on what as Joe Burnstein has
Speaker 3: since called big disinfo. And I was watching as they
Speaker 3: were trying to build their fact checking structure, and it
Speaker 3: was a clusterfuck from the beginning. They had to well,
Speaker 3: we can't do this. We can't make judgments. Everybody's a
Speaker 3: frightened of judgment. So they had to go to the
Speaker 3: fact checking organization. Imagine their fun conventions they have, and
Speaker 3: you've got to verify who's a good fact checker. And
Speaker 3: then that group wouldn't verify ABC News. So then Facebook
Speaker 3: had a fit about that, And so it was routing
Speaker 3: around and around is who's allowed to be a fact checker?
Speaker 3: Right from the very beginning, that's what it was. And
Speaker 3: then there's debate to how to.
Speaker 2: Other scale that to billions of people.
Speaker 3: Exactly in all kinds of cultures and languge. And so
Speaker 3: I'm not I'm not against fact checking. I'm not against facts,
Speaker 3: but facts, to my mind, are not the problem.
Speaker 2: And I think the problem soory that Jeff just got
Speaker 2: sent five dollars from the fact organization on his phone
Speaker 2: that they sent figure. And you see when you said
Speaker 2: I was there at the beginning, I had to stop
Speaker 2: myself being like.
Speaker 1: Of time, that's me every week on this week in
Speaker 1: Google I'm black and white TV.
Speaker 2: But yeah, it's I think the bigger thing is I'm
Speaker 2: more worried about the ramifications of this attitude, because they
Speaker 2: already were pretty lax and in the global self in
Speaker 2: the rest of the world that even there's even there's
Speaker 2: less media that understands those language, the languages even Jesus,
Speaker 2: but also less people in the Western world, which matter
Speaker 2: is arguably more scared about with the media, and I
Speaker 2: think as well. The other thing I really haven't seen
Speaker 2: talked about is META already limiting traffic on on journalism.
Speaker 2: Do you think that they're gonna increase the sharing decrease it?
Speaker 1: Well, I believe that they said they're no longer going
Speaker 1: to limit the reach of like civix related content, which
Speaker 1: I think I took to mean the political news. I
Speaker 1: don't know whether that will apply to all journalism.
Speaker 2: That is such a youth miss or civics related, civic related.
Speaker 2: So they will allow the influences they.
Speaker 3: Like, but probably not links.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, they will allow links, but they won't they'll
Speaker 2: depress them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh yeah, allowed them, well versus Canada, where of
Speaker 3: course they're not allowed. Yes, uh. And I think I
Speaker 3: think Meta was praying that the Canada like bill would
Speaker 3: have would have passed in California because they said that
Speaker 3: they would eliminate news in California, and I think that
Speaker 3: would have been an open door screw it. Let's eliminate
Speaker 3: it in the US. Let's eliminate it everywhere. And that
Speaker 3: would have been easier for them puppies, parties and uh,
Speaker 3: pedophiles and uh, what's another p word for bad people.
Speaker 2: Fiery is going to stop making TV shows. It's just
Speaker 2: it's frustrating and it's only going to push people towards
Speaker 2: blue sky. But it's also I think a real inflection
Speaker 2: point for legacy media as well.
Speaker 3: So there was a story in legacy media is dead.
Speaker 2: Oh, I know. So Jeff Jarvis over here a big
Speaker 2: fan of the Times in the Post. You actually, I
Speaker 2: like he does this thing where it's hashtag hashtag broken
Speaker 2: posts and broken times, broken times, but good times. You've
Speaker 2: also put in a bit.
Speaker 3: A rare moment when they do well.
Speaker 2: Yes, he's got to give it the other day they did,
Speaker 2: But that's I think that those publications are more threat
Speaker 2: from this than people realize. Because Sevenpore had a story saying,
Speaker 2: I think it's today for its media. So I assume
Speaker 2: mister Tani next Zani. He that story said that the
Speaker 2: Post went from having like twenty million unique monthly visitors
Speaker 2: to like two point five to three in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: one to two point five to three and twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: Jeff is astounded. I was too wow, and Scar, a
Speaker 2: friend of the show, made the good.
Speaker 1: Point eight has about three million months.
Speaker 2: I think if the Post hoped you get late, that
Speaker 2: would probably be We used.
Speaker 3: To have that as a business bottel. We used to
Speaker 3: have personals and newspapers before you were born.
Speaker 2: And that's what they took from us.
Speaker 3: That's all we had. Feel sorry for us old horny people.
Speaker 1: Was submitting a single sentence to the Washington Post.
Speaker 2: My new favorite quote of.
Speaker 1: Feel sorry for us old horny people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I like last week was already apologizing for the
Speaker 2: amount of times people talked about horny checks and stuff.
Speaker 2: Well we're back, folks. It's just crazy. But I think
Speaker 2: it's these large publications have been so used to social
Speaker 2: traffic and they've not been working out what the hell
Speaker 2: to do with it for a while.
Speaker 1: Well, a lot of them are betting that getting checks
Speaker 1: from AI companies could soften the blow, which I don't
Speaker 1: think is going to change much.
Speaker 2: I mean, you only get one of those as well.
Speaker 1: I mean they're supposed to get one a year or
Speaker 1: something like that.
Speaker 2: I think it burns five billions.
Speaker 1: Dash Meredith had. I think their numbers are public, and
Speaker 1: if you do the math, it equals up to like
Speaker 1: one percent or less than one percent of their yearly revenue.
Speaker 1: Take it and then I just don't. I think it's
Speaker 1: a terrible trade and it's the same sort of mistake
Speaker 1: these companies made.
Speaker 3: It screws the rest of all media, and it's just
Speaker 3: the moguls get their bags of money, but ed here
Speaker 3: it gets nothing from open Ai.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would love to sell everything words wise to
Speaker 2: Sam Olman. You just have to text me back. Sam.
Speaker 2: I've been texting you. I have not heard back, and
Speaker 2: I'm not sure why. I simply asked you a question.
Speaker 2: Come on, come on man, mister open Aye, I need
Speaker 2: you on my show. I won't hurt you much, not
Speaker 2: physically but emotionally.
Speaker 1: Just six texts unanswered. We come on, you coward.
Speaker 2: We are going to be crying, both of us. I
Speaker 2: will start crying and you will finish crying. Mister Altman,
Speaker 2: these deals, I assume that the Washington Post isn't getting
Speaker 2: say one hundred and seventy five million dollars a year,
Speaker 2: which is what their revenue is. They probably getting like
Speaker 2: twenty thirty. I just tried to look it up. I
Speaker 2: could not find it from this open aideal. I think
Speaker 2: it was for the AI powered search. Is that a
Speaker 2: content deal with them or did they out sign one.
Speaker 1: Yet I'm not sure. So what I understand is the
Speaker 1: two big media deals that we have like public numbers
Speaker 1: on as far as the amount it equals up to,
Speaker 1: like a single percentage point or less of their overall
Speaker 1: revenue when you calculate it like they are getting they
Speaker 1: are getting pennies.
Speaker 3: Oh, they're not good at business, otherwise they wouldn't be
Speaker 3: in such terrible shape right now. They screwed up the Internet,
Speaker 3: they missed the boat. They didn't know what they were doing.
Speaker 3: They cry and try to get protectionist legislation, and so
Speaker 3: now they cry and try to get money out of
Speaker 3: open AI and it's not a business model.
Speaker 2: Well, Jeff, this is actually one of the many reasons
Speaker 2: of what did you want? Can you kind of explain
Speaker 2: what you just said? So what is it that they missed?
Speaker 2: What is it that they should have done differently?
Speaker 3: So let's not just make that third person. I'll make
Speaker 3: that first person too, because I worked for the Conte
Speaker 3: and ast in one advance and I was there as
Speaker 3: it was going on, and.
Speaker 2: What was it in this case the Internet.
Speaker 3: I started at Advance in ninety four, just a month
Speaker 3: after the browser came out, right right, So the company
Speaker 3: was debating, Okay, now we're going to uncle Jeff time.
Speaker 1: I'm sad.
Speaker 2: That was the fact when the browser was a room
Speaker 2: sized machine that the website.
Speaker 3: Yes, so we were debating whether to put our content
Speaker 3: onto Prodigy or AOL or this new.
Speaker 2: Web point on the portals themselves when it was just
Speaker 2: like one website.
Speaker 3: So I worked for Steve newhous Is now the chairman
Speaker 3: of Advance and conte and asked, and he's really, really smart,
Speaker 3: and he's the one who taught me about interactivity and community,
Speaker 3: and he knew that print content was not valuable online.
Speaker 3: But every other publisher thought their great value was in
Speaker 3: repurposing their print content to online and trying to license
Speaker 3: it and get money for it and sell it. And
Speaker 3: they didn't understand to the portals, to the portals and
Speaker 3: then eventually and pay walls. They didn't understand that the
Speaker 3: essence of the Internet is conversation and community and collaboration
Speaker 3: and creativity. That's the last of my literations and so
Speaker 3: they can insisted to just do what they'd always done,
Speaker 3: subscription money and add money. And as they add money
Speaker 3: went down because the number of a veils went way
Speaker 3: sky high of advertising. Then, as happens when supply goes up,
Speaker 3: price goes down. So then they tried to put it
Speaker 3: all behind the pay wall and they're not all the
Speaker 3: New York Times, and they can't do that. And they
Speaker 3: never saw I think, what the essence of the Internet is.
Speaker 3: And so now they're still in mass media mind. They're
Speaker 3: still in we have to please everybody while they go
Speaker 3: piss off everybody that they have done what they have done.
Speaker 3: I think that they should have seen themselves that they
Speaker 3: could have started Reddit, they could have started AOL, they
Speaker 3: could have started these things.
Speaker 2: I was part of this funded journalism, like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: You're talking about something like Kinja, the commenting uh reddit
Speaker 1: like commenting system.
Speaker 3: Und I was there at the beginning of that too.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Conversations the first.
Speaker 3: Well, Nick Detton first hated. I said he had put
Speaker 3: comments on on Gawker. So no, I hate comments. They're awful,
Speaker 3: that's true, they are, actually they're not. But but at
Speaker 3: one point he became a believer because he was going
Speaker 3: to do it nixt way, and that became Kinja, that
Speaker 3: became everything else.
Speaker 2: I think my big thing is that one publication owning Reddit.
Speaker 2: Do you think that that makes like, how would like
Speaker 2: something like Reddit? Because you're saying that they should have
Speaker 2: seen conversations?
Speaker 3: Is the thing?
Speaker 2: Does that mean a social network? Like what? Because what
Speaker 2: you're just describing is a company that sells journalism, and
Speaker 2: you're like, the thing we will sell is not journalism.
Speaker 3: Well, in fact, by old boss Steve Newhouse is the
Speaker 3: one who bought red it.
Speaker 2: He wanted to buy yeah, but he ran it like shit,
Speaker 2: no he didn't.
Speaker 3: It's now worth a fortune and up.
Speaker 1: Until recently he ran election yep, but well it did it.
Speaker 2: Well, now it doesn't.
Speaker 3: It's worth a fortune now right.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: There was also a horrible clusterfuck in the industry called
Speaker 3: the New Century Network, and the newspaper industry got together
Speaker 3: the top twelve companies and we were going to start
Speaker 3: a way to sign into all newspapers across the country
Speaker 3: at once and subscribe at once and sell adworks across
Speaker 3: and it could have been a real thing.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: This is the same time that Yahoo's pretty up news
Speaker 3: and AOL's pretty up. They could have done this. What
Speaker 3: stopped them? So half the company along came Kleiner Perkins
Speaker 3: and they said, this is a good idea. We want
Speaker 3: to invest in this. We want to make this scale
Speaker 3: and be big. Half the newspaper publishers said, how dare
Speaker 3: you you can get a piece of our business? No,
Speaker 3: absolutely not, because we're too valuable. You're just a PENMANI line.
Speaker 2: So it seems like that is the shit problem.
Speaker 3: None of it's male CEOs again, so I don't like Jensen.
Speaker 2: Huang very much, but one of his things he would
Speaker 2: say is like, always act like you're going out of business.
Speaker 2: I'm surprised more newspapers don't do that for more obvious reasons.
Speaker 2: But I don't know if I agree with you about
Speaker 2: the conversation pop. I don't actually think doing right now.
Speaker 2: I know, but like this isn't how you run a newspaper.
Speaker 1: Yeah, i'd agree, And I think there needs to be
Speaker 1: a way to be able to make news and journalism profitable,
Speaker 1: and that doesn't exist at all scales and for all companies.
Speaker 2: Doesn't exist at scale. I think might be the problem.
Speaker 3: Scales the problem. Yeah, scale before the mechanization and industrialization
Speaker 3: to print poor. Paris has heard me say this one
Speaker 3: hundred times. In the mid eighteen fifties, the average circulation
Speaker 3: of a daily newspaper in the United States was four thousand. Interesting,
Speaker 3: it was only with a mechanization distributed because you had
Speaker 3: to pull with the human muscle.
Speaker 2: So you have a local printing press right to print local,
Speaker 2: and you can only print so many and that distribution
Speaker 2: of four thousand people a small town or something, or even.
Speaker 3: In New York and New York in nineteen hundred. By
Speaker 3: this time you had a half century of the steam
Speaker 3: powered press, and you had the linotype, and you had
Speaker 3: other things come in. Then you had scale come up.
Speaker 3: But still in New York City, including Brooklyn, in nineteen hundred,
Speaker 3: there were forty six daily newspapers hu That is to
Speaker 3: say that they spoke at a different and human scale.
Speaker 3: Broadcast killed all that. Broadcast came along, and you had
Speaker 3: one or maybe two papers in a town, and they
Speaker 3: thought they could serve everybody. They thought that scale was
Speaker 3: the only goal. That we are the mass. It's growth,
Speaker 3: and it was a lie. People realize pretty soon this
Speaker 3: doesn't speak to me.
Speaker 2: It's because none of these people, like many businesses in
Speaker 2: tech as well are capable of saying we've grown enough
Speaker 2: if there is a The Athletic was better as an
Speaker 2: independent from the Times. But I forget you said this, Eliot.
Speaker 2: It's like, the reason The Times is picking up this
Speaker 2: stuff is because of The Times is actual brand. Maybe
Speaker 2: in case it the Times, this brand is like falling apart,
Speaker 2: and it sucks because the actual lessons recently that I've
Speaker 2: seen in media are fairly straightforward. It's what if we
Speaker 2: had interesting people doing unique stuff. What if we then
Speaker 2: had them cover something that happened right, and then they'd
Speaker 2: write it down some sort of like analysis I think
Speaker 2: I'd call it, and then at the end of it
Speaker 2: you'd be like, Wow, I know who this person was.
Speaker 2: I know who this person and I heard them talk
Speaker 2: and I like their voice. The last week at CES
Speaker 2: twenty people interviewed I'm not just doing a thing about me,
Speaker 2: don't worry. But the thing I got through it is
Speaker 2: there are so many reporters who are so much more
Speaker 2: charming than their bylines. And it's not a failure of
Speaker 2: their writing. It's a failure of the outlets. It's a
Speaker 2: failure of the form it used to be. At least.
Speaker 2: I don't know much about the history of media, but
Speaker 2: I remember there being a lot more opinion people in
Speaker 2: tech yet Eric Bendroff here, Arthur Brayer think is still around.
Speaker 2: But you had, like David Pogan, these people. I'm not
Speaker 2: saying that they were perfect. In fact, I have some
Speaker 2: views about some of the specifically m there was still
Speaker 2: something to the popularity of having a real voice and
Speaker 2: having a real person and that person being white, and you,
Speaker 2: as a news out there were like shit, I got
Speaker 2: to keep these names and I got to make sure
Speaker 2: they can talk. And the times it's like, well, who
Speaker 2: do we do for that? Who is the most insane person?
Speaker 2: Do we have a transphob Oh, don't worry, we have
Speaker 2: a whole day based those You have any insane warhawks?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Please? That's the other database that we spent fifty million
Speaker 2: dollars on. We had to lay off a few people.
Speaker 2: We needed to know the people who would put the
Speaker 2: most troops in California Paris.
Speaker 3: Let me ask you something. The information is really good.
Speaker 3: I pay for it same discount, though, I'm we had
Speaker 3: to say, and it works as a business, Yes, now
Speaker 3: it works because there's reporting like yours that's valuable, that
Speaker 3: is specialized and covers technology and the society and business
Speaker 3: around it. Really, well, why is there not an the
Speaker 3: information in areas on the same model? Political one might say,
Speaker 3: is that political's crap.
Speaker 2: Politico is just conservative news.
Speaker 3: Yeah it's awful, right, but heretically it should be the
Speaker 3: information of politics, but it's not. I can't think of
Speaker 3: any the information of.
Speaker 1: I think it's I think the answer is a little
Speaker 1: multifaceted one. I think when Jessica Lesson, our founder, she
Speaker 1: used to work at the Wall Street Journal, founded The
Speaker 1: Information a bit over a decade ago, everyone thought she
Speaker 1: was crazy, like there's a bunch of very funny to
Speaker 1: read now blogs from Business Insider being like this crazy
Speaker 1: lady wants you to pay a couple hundred dollars for
Speaker 1: a subscription to a website with news on it. Who
Speaker 1: would ever do that? And I think that it took
Speaker 1: a while for people in the media industry to come
Speaker 1: around the idea of a truly hard paywall and creating
Speaker 1: content that is worth paying for and sticking by that.
Speaker 1: I also think it's that's because there are obvious trade offs.
Speaker 1: The reach of the information is much smaller than a
Speaker 1: Politico because you can't get around our paywalls, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't need to be huge, and it doesn't need to
Speaker 1: be huge because it is self sustaining.
Speaker 2: I also think there's another detail. She founded this in
Speaker 2: twenty thirteen. At the end of twenty thirteen, so everyone
Speaker 2: was still high on the hog as far as ads,
Speaker 2: when the ads industry had not, it hadn't become as difficult. Also,
Speaker 2: I say this with no offense to your Paris. Jessica
Speaker 2: is also well known as being well connected with the
Speaker 2: Zuckerbergs and also well known for being and there are
Speaker 2: times with the information where the tone shifts and it
Speaker 2: is a little more rah rah. I think is the
Speaker 2: fair thing. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing.
Speaker 3: Maybe just charitable.
Speaker 2: No, the podcast I'm thinking of it.
Speaker 1: Oh, the podcast is a Jessica Lesson podcast.
Speaker 2: Also, it's not a report. Some of the ways that
Speaker 2: AI things are framed are not necessarily critical. Not certainly
Speaker 2: every outlet has biased. I'm also I cite the information
Speaker 2: all the time.
Speaker 1: I think that there's a bit of a difference between
Speaker 1: some of our newsletters or podcasts or opinion stuff versus reporting.
Speaker 2: But agreed, you've got some of the best, like Anissa Goez.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have fantastic people to do fantastic work. And
Speaker 1: I think part of what you're getting at here with
Speaker 1: comments with Jeska is also what made this work is
Speaker 1: she had like it was self funded. She didn't need
Speaker 1: to take on venture capital to start it, and that
Speaker 1: meant that it could grow at its own pace versus
Speaker 1: I have worked at a total of three places in
Speaker 1: my about a decade of a journalism career. The first
Speaker 1: two I got laid off from. The first one was well,
Speaker 1: I guess other places. The first two staff jobs I
Speaker 1: had I got laid off from. One was a place
Speaker 1: called The Outline that raised venture capital and then quickly
Speaker 1: ran out of it because it spent too much money
Speaker 1: on silly things.
Speaker 2: Favorite game found an outlet, lose the money, walke away.
Speaker 1: You know it's a great Uh, we'll see listen as
Speaker 1: long as people get paid. And the other one was Wired,
Speaker 1: which is part of Conde Nast, which was going through
Speaker 1: its own growing pains because it has a bunch of
Speaker 1: print publications and is largely supported by sabridizing always fucking
Speaker 1: growth pain.
Speaker 2: It's just they must be bigger and the best work
Speaker 2: like one of the things that has made the rise
Speaker 2: of newsletters happen, in my opinion, and indeed this show,
Speaker 2: is that people are kind of tired of the standard
Speaker 2: big box thing. They're tired of these kind of every
Speaker 2: major publication really drains the life out of and I
Speaker 2: don't I think even smaller publications do. They standardize the copy.
Speaker 2: And I realize you can't have everyone beer as being
Speaker 2: a sloppy blog worm like me, but it feels like
Speaker 2: the publications really investing in allowing the person behind the
Speaker 2: thing to talk are doing well. And gadget we had
Speaker 2: a tounnel them on the show and they've done a
Speaker 2: really bloody good job in their coverage and in their
Speaker 2: podcast actually bringing the personality out. You got Sherlin Low,
Speaker 2: You've got the Bingja Hardawa, You've got Carrissa Bell, and
Speaker 2: these people are fun and varied, indifferent, and I wish
Speaker 2: that there was more of that in journalism. But I
Speaker 2: also think it's why people turning away from legacy media.
Speaker 3: Let me ask you another question, do you yourself or
Speaker 3: do you ever hear any colleagues say I'm glad I
Speaker 3: have a salary, but I wish I had a little
Speaker 3: more fame or a little more impact or a little
Speaker 3: more presence.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can't think of any examples, but I.
Speaker 2: Or even like Piz when I.
Speaker 1: I'll give you this when I was deciding whether or
Speaker 1: not to go to the Information versus a couple of
Speaker 1: other places. I called it my mentor at the time,
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh, if I go to the information, well,
Speaker 1: I like fade away into obscurity behind the paywall. It's
Speaker 1: a terrible career move. And he was like, rightfully, he
Speaker 1: was like, Paris, there are two groups of people that
Speaker 1: you care about reading your work, if we're being honest,
Speaker 1: one is other journalists and the other people that work
Speaker 1: in tech. Both of those groups subscribed to the information,
Speaker 1: You're going to be fine. And I think that that
Speaker 1: is the way that a lot of people at our.
Speaker 2: I don't know if I love that. Listen.
Speaker 1: It's a practical way of thinking about it.
Speaker 2: A careerism. Yeah, yes, careers feel like you do. I
Speaker 2: am actually pushing back. I think you actually give a
Speaker 2: big shit about your readers.
Speaker 1: I do give a huge ship about my readers.
Speaker 2: Just want to make sure that the pigs on ready
Speaker 2: don't come and argue with you about because it doesn't
Speaker 2: seem like that's your point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, my I care a lot about my readers
Speaker 1: and things like that. But part of the thing, I guess,
Speaker 1: if you're talking about larger career moves wise like those
Speaker 1: are the two groups you need to think about. Potential
Speaker 1: sources and potential like colleagues and the work. Yes, good doing,
Speaker 1: good work. If part of my calculation for going to
Speaker 1: a place like the Information is despite the limits of
Speaker 1: being behind a hard paywall, it's one of the few
Speaker 1: places I think that exist in media still where I
Speaker 1: get to just do like I spent a month on
Speaker 1: that sniffy story. I spent a month on most of
Speaker 1: my stories.
Speaker 2: That is cool and read is a very focused My.
Speaker 1: Readers are very focused.
Speaker 2: They read.
Speaker 1: We have an incredible like read through rate, and it
Speaker 1: I don't know, that's really cool, actually quite nice to
Speaker 1: be able to to be at a place where you
Speaker 1: can do that sort of focus. But I don't think
Speaker 1: that that exists. That exists infrequently at scale.
Speaker 2: I think at scale as well, you have the problem
Speaker 2: of you do have those deep readers, but you also
Speaker 2: have the people who saw the headline, they scroll down,
Speaker 2: they see a name, they're like they just hit retweet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let me ask you in your other life PR.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So I talked to an executive at one of the
Speaker 3: big tech companies and he said, how do we get
Speaker 3: our message out at scale? I said, you don'te anymore?
Speaker 3: And then I talked to a guy who worked just
Speaker 3: left a big PR company. I'll leave them most nameless
Speaker 3: for now, and he said, oh, yeah, the PR industry
Speaker 3: is all about getting on tech meme and and where
Speaker 3: you get the publications.
Speaker 2: That's a guy. That's a guy who hasn't pitched anyone
Speaker 2: and fucking ever. So you ever hear a guy be
Speaker 2: like you canna be on tech? Mean, that's a person
Speaker 2: who does not talk to journalists. I know it's important
Speaker 2: for jendalists. I don't think it's that important.
Speaker 3: Are the clients is what I'm saying, Kinds don't give
Speaker 3: a ship. That's what's That's where I'm going is is
Speaker 3: where's the so? Where is what are they value? Now?
Speaker 2: So what it is is like I actually got this
Speaker 2: last week. It's like, what are your clients like? And
Speaker 2: it's the smart clients. The money I take are the
Speaker 2: ones that know they have a good story and also
Speaker 2: know they don't know how to get to journalists because
Speaker 2: there's one thousand PR people per Do they need the
Speaker 2: journalists still, Yes, absolutely they do because at the moment,
Speaker 2: right now, there may be a lack of trust in
Speaker 2: legacy media, but people still trust media in general. I
Speaker 2: bring up Steve from Gamers Nexus, million plus subscriber coffee
Speaker 2: Zilla on YouTube. Now, I'm not saying those that even
Speaker 2: be PR targets, but Linus tech Tips absolutely would and
Speaker 2: indeed has worked with people I've worked with. People still
Speaker 2: need to get through, but the thing that has changed
Speaker 2: is there's a lot less journalists who are just willing
Speaker 2: to run anything unless it's for open AI. By the way,
Speaker 2: I'm just going to do this. There is a two
Speaker 2: tiered system within the media right now. And the reason
Speaker 2: we have Meta and the reason we have Elon Musk,
Speaker 2: and the reason we have these things is partially to
Speaker 2: blame for the fact that startups actually really have to
Speaker 2: p if they're worth. It's remarkable one of the reasons
Speaker 2: I have a fucking career in PR. And it's frustrating
Speaker 2: because you'll be like, hey, I got a they do
Speaker 2: a really good thing, they make money like school, and
Speaker 2: they're like, yeah, but yeah, but like did they raise
Speaker 2: like more money though, and like I don't know if
Speaker 2: I want to write it, but someone is just a
Speaker 2: good idea and then they will post an open AI
Speaker 2: thing that is like a feature that my toaster has,
Speaker 2: and it's just And the problem is is that I
Speaker 2: understand when you're as these outlets somehow get bigger, but
Speaker 2: they have less people. You have to do more stuff,
Speaker 2: so you just have to go, oh shit, what is
Speaker 2: the public good? What does everyone want to know about?
Speaker 2: Open eye, anthropic what have you? And that makes sense.
Speaker 2: But to your point, startups kind of need PR as
Speaker 2: much as they used to. Big tech also does too,
Speaker 2: because right now all of the big tech companies they're
Speaker 2: playing the same game, which is well, Donald Trump's in
Speaker 2: the White House, and uh, the writer's winning. So I
Speaker 2: don't give a shit about fuck. I'm just gonna say
Speaker 2: whatever I want. And indeed, the two tid system I
Speaker 2: talked about the reason that Sam Altman has been able
Speaker 2: to lie at scale and Elon Musk has been allowed
Speaker 2: like a scale for ten years is because the system
Speaker 2: that operates against these series A and I don't say
Speaker 2: this with any bitterness, by the way, everyone should be
Speaker 2: held to this standard. Everyone with the media should have
Speaker 2: to prove themselves. But someone like Meta, someone like Tesla,
Speaker 2: they come along and say whatever the fuck they want
Speaker 2: and it gets printed even to this day with the
Speaker 2: test the robot of them. So you're in this situation
Speaker 2: where media relations, why don't skim journalous to cover stuff?
Speaker 2: Is very important? And then there's the other problem, which
Speaker 2: is about fifteen years ago when I got into this job,
Speaker 2: people started writing articles called media relations is dead. Why
Speaker 2: because talking to reporters all day and learning everything they do,
Speaker 2: and know what you're talking about, what they're talking about,
Speaker 2: what's happened in the world, and then being able to
Speaker 2: take that and put it into a smart thought including
Speaker 2: the client. That's actually pretty difficult. And PR people are
Speaker 2: lazy animals. They love to sit around and send emails
Speaker 2: and write documents. They're about as functional as sandapieshay as.
Speaker 2: They're just meeting goers. If you're a PR person, I've
Speaker 2: been saying that. I've been saying that you need to
Speaker 2: change your ass for years, except now I have a microphone.
Speaker 2: I hope you're upset, long story, shrecked, get absolutely ragged, bodied, etc.
Speaker 2: You can talk about me on your podcast if anyone
Speaker 2: would listen. But the point I'm making is PR is necessary,
Speaker 2: but it's also killing itself and the biggest clients are
Speaker 2: becoming so weird about it that they'll have PR. But
Speaker 2: then like, why is the media not saying everything we
Speaker 2: want them to say? And it's because the media doesn't
Speaker 2: just copy paste things. They may write down exactly what
Speaker 2: you say with the bigger companies, but journalists have brains
Speaker 2: and we'll hear stuff now and go wait, what the
Speaker 2: fuck does that mean? And even with open AI they're
Speaker 2: finally learning it. It's just that when that happens, you're
Speaker 2: going to need the media relations people. Except the PR
Speaker 2: industry Go on Google, media relations is dead. They've been
Speaker 2: killing them for fifteen years. It's hilarious. It's like the
Speaker 2: one fun job in this industry.
Speaker 1: It's extremely easy to do bad PR and extremely hard
Speaker 1: to do good PR.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there are times when I get an email offering
Speaker 3: me an interview and one time I just want to
Speaker 3: take it, just to say so that afterwards the person says, well,
Speaker 3: what's this audience? So he doesn't have any audience.
Speaker 2: The thing is that a twenty three year old who
Speaker 2: works seventeen hour days is going to get fired because
Speaker 2: they're going to lose their sub lease on an eight person,
Speaker 2: one bedroom.
Speaker 1: It's I probably got ten weird PR pitches that are
Speaker 1: completely unrelated to me while we've been sitting here.
Speaker 3: You still get them, even though I still get all
Speaker 3: the time.
Speaker 2: And I love the PR people who pitch me because
Speaker 2: it's block people I do too, but so and that's
Speaker 2: this is the weird things. While there's like this whole
Speaker 2: PR industry just spams people that'd be making fun of
Speaker 2: for like my entire career and getting in zero trouble
Speaker 2: because they're all cowards. And it's just it's frustrating because
Speaker 2: we're just describing industries run by people who don't understand
Speaker 2: the process, Like how do you run a good news
Speaker 2: out there? I don't know good news and make sure
Speaker 2: that people making.
Speaker 3: Sure it has value in people's lives.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's this drain of personality from everything. The
Speaker 2: information is fairly straightforward, but you have some specifics. You
Speaker 2: have some who is it that emails me every day?
Speaker 2: Pisses me off? Martin Piers, Yeah, yeah, but that's the thing.
Speaker 1: It's a newsletter and.
Speaker 2: He loves that's.
Speaker 1: Kind of his job to piss you off.
Speaker 2: I am actually saying this. I get pissed off with
Speaker 2: it regularly. I read it every time.
Speaker 1: Jeff gets pissed off.
Speaker 3: I get mad at once.
Speaker 2: But that's the thing. At the very least, he fucking
Speaker 2: stands for something. Why would people go I don't know.
Speaker 2: Why would people go to influencers who don't necessarily run
Speaker 2: their facts very well or at all? And the answer
Speaker 2: is because they can't.
Speaker 3: I got a question for you. So you saw Lisa
Speaker 3: uh Ruben, not Lisa Ribbon, jenn Ribbon.
Speaker 2: It's also my show. I'm kidding thing Jennifer Ruben.
Speaker 3: Jennifer Rubin left the Washington Post right and she started
Speaker 3: a new substack newsletter.
Speaker 2: The Contrarian.
Speaker 3: The Contrarian? Oh god, what is it about Substack? How
Speaker 3: does it that now it's textile? Is that we all
Speaker 3: know that tech is but the Substack has its own
Speaker 3: Nazi yeah problems And why does everybody still go there?
Speaker 2: I actually think it's the thing we've been talking about
Speaker 2: that's just some legacy media shit. They're like, why do
Speaker 2: people come to the newspaper only for Jennifer Ruben and
Speaker 2: the series of bland right wing people that have found
Speaker 2: a way to pretend they're liberals, and they're like, well,
Speaker 2: why do people read the paper for me? Why they
Speaker 2: read it? And the thing they hate about the media
Speaker 2: right now is it's not contrarian enough, Like it's just
Speaker 2: this is exactly the kind of shit that the legacy
Speaker 2: media institution would do. It's what happened in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: one when The Atlantic had like eight different newsletters and
Speaker 2: then didn't treat them any differently. Heart take Factory, but no, god,
Speaker 2: it's the Atlantic. It's luke warm take factory, cry baby shit.
Speaker 2: And it's or just like anti Palestine shit, which is
Speaker 2: disgusting anyway. Get we'll get to that on the other
Speaker 2: show where everyone gets mad at me. But the point
Speaker 2: is it's just the same fucking wheel turning. It's people
Speaker 2: going shit, what do people do? What are big now?
Speaker 2: What big newsletter they send those? What if we all
Speaker 2: got together and combined our audiences of people that barely
Speaker 2: read us and do not look at the facts or
Speaker 2: really care, but they like sharing it with their other
Speaker 2: vacuous friends. Except make it DC, it's not going to
Speaker 2: work very much.
Speaker 3: You are tired of subscription upon subscription upon subscription.
Speaker 2: They've got like George Conway in there. They have George Conway.
Speaker 2: I didn't even know. I didn't even know. I just
Speaker 2: guessed the like it worse.
Speaker 3: They have Andy Burrowitz. Oh fucking know.
Speaker 2: I was not pro censorship before this show, but now
Speaker 2: I am actually really bro I don't put any links
Speaker 2: to anything if it keeps borrow Its out in my feed.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, that's the proper reaction. Oh my god,
Speaker 2: I hate Andy Burrows but it's paris. I'm actually like,
Speaker 2: really glad you were here specifically representing the information though
Speaker 2: having your own opinions, just being cliff legal disclaimer because
Speaker 2: you kind of I have my issues with how the
Speaker 2: Information does business and some internal ones that I will
Speaker 2: not read, but it's it still works. It works, and
Speaker 2: the journalism is like very very good. And Lisa god,
Speaker 2: he's in another person I can't remember the name of
Speaker 2: a link to it. In the episode No, it's they
Speaker 2: had this incredible story about nvideos like has people canceling orders,
Speaker 2: and Anissa is super young, yeah, like in her twenties,
Speaker 2: and she's just getting this shit all the time. She's
Speaker 2: had so much of it. The fact that you have
Speaker 2: this happening is proof that this model works.
Speaker 1: And that I mean, it's proof that journalism can still
Speaker 1: exist and it sells.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and and it sells and it matters, and the
Speaker 2: real people doing it matter. And it's frustrating because I
Speaker 2: don't think anyone is learning this lesson very well.
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of outlets are now trying to
Speaker 1: pivot to a more subscription heavy modeled. The Atlantic is
Speaker 1: one of them.
Speaker 4: Live the Verge, I mean, possibly want to miss Alex Heath,
Speaker 4: fucking I'm such a bitch, But it's but the Verge
Speaker 4: is actually the example I think of doing it wrong,
Speaker 4: because the Verge is very much like, we're now going
Speaker 4: to pay wall stuff you weren't paying for, and it's like, okay,
Speaker 4: well now.
Speaker 2: The reader will be pissed off. And you have great
Speaker 2: people like Kylie Robson, one of the best journalists in
Speaker 2: the field, incredible and Misato as well too, incredible journalists.
Speaker 2: Paywalling them hurts them far more than I think they realized.
Speaker 2: How about give make give them more money and then
Speaker 2: let them write private stuff. Put the private stuff in
Speaker 2: the private make it worthwhile at least try. But no,
Speaker 2: it's we're going to pay war what Tom, Tom Moore
Speaker 2: and annx Heath.
Speaker 1: Make it so that at least readers feel like if
Speaker 1: they're paying, they're getting access to something new. Yeah, something
Speaker 1: that they Yeah, it's a you are paying to access
Speaker 1: something rather than being restricted.
Speaker 2: And is that money going into more journalism?
Speaker 1: I mean, I'd assume it's going into making so that
Speaker 1: vox media doesn't collapse in and of itself.
Speaker 3: It's the last resort business model.
Speaker 2: And the thing is you can make it a deal
Speaker 2: with the customer. You could be like, if we gave
Speaker 2: you more, and now it's like, what if we gave
Speaker 2: you less and you you put out reporters who have
Speaker 2: built relationships with readers in a free environment and then
Speaker 2: say and no, it's gone, and you'll get cited less.
Speaker 2: I cite paywalled stuff all the time, but like you
Speaker 2: will be cited less because people on social media will
Speaker 2: be like, oh, I never pay gave link for the
Speaker 2: no pig No not everything pay pig model. It's just
Speaker 2: frustrating because it could actually be better. But I think
Speaker 2: the actual answer is everything needs to be smaller.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I mean it's just like, how do we
Speaker 1: get to that. We a lot of ruin and destruction.
Speaker 1: I don't really think we.
Speaker 2: Can Defector four or four after math. The answer is
Speaker 2: that and actually.
Speaker 1: And those came out of ruin and destruction in the
Speaker 1: case of Defector and four O four specifically there you know,
Speaker 1: sites were shut down, they were laid off, and from
Speaker 1: the ashes, rows of worker supported go up.
Speaker 2: So Jeff final question to wrap us up. Do you
Speaker 2: think that there could be a future for journalism where
Speaker 2: it's kind of a return to the I don't mean
Speaker 2: literally four thousand readers, but a return to that kind
Speaker 2: of old thing where it's just it is more distributed.
Speaker 3: I hope. So I want to see media at a
Speaker 3: human scale. I've spent the last ten years of my
Speaker 3: career I kind of accidentally chronically in what I think
Speaker 3: is the end of the long century of mass media.
Speaker 3: And what does that mean? Well, first, it's a confession,
Speaker 3: because I devoted my career to mass media, right I
Speaker 3: worked for being Publications and I wrote about television, and
Speaker 3: I recognize now the bankruptcy of that. And so I
Speaker 3: think that we've got to return to, as I say,
Speaker 3: media human scale. And it's going to be a messy transition.
Speaker 2: It already is.
Speaker 3: It already is, And I don't have the answers to
Speaker 3: every business model of how to get there. The information
Speaker 3: is one. There are a few others out there, and
Speaker 3: I think that we're going to grow new sprouts out
Speaker 3: of the ashes. For a long time, especially working in
Speaker 3: a journalism school, I had to be I think I
Speaker 3: presumed I had to be nice to the likes of
Speaker 3: the New York Times. Right, fuck them, I mean. And
Speaker 3: let's be clear, there is still good report of the
Speaker 3: New York Times. I did a good Times hashtag about
Speaker 3: vaccinations only yesterday. Their institution though, the but the well,
Speaker 3: the culture right now is trying to piss off the people,
Speaker 3: the last people who are loyal to them.
Speaker 2: And who would that be? Just to be clear that liberals, okay, liberals.
Speaker 3: Jay Rosen in twenty eighteen wrote that, hmm, the New
Speaker 3: York Times primary support now has shifted from advertising to subscription.
Speaker 3: This is going to change the relationship of the Times
Speaker 3: newsroom to its public. And he wasn't saying how, But
Speaker 3: now I think the way it is is that I
Speaker 3: think the Times is saying, see, we pissed you off.
Speaker 3: You don't own us, even though we depend upon you
Speaker 3: for money, You don't own us.
Speaker 2: Kankey style yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: If Steinberger where the publisher of The New York Times
Speaker 3: might as well be. So I'm at the point now
Speaker 3: giving up on big old media. The newspaper chains are
Speaker 3: almost all run by hedge funds. Broadcast as geriatric magazines
Speaker 3: are dying. I wrote a book about that too. The
Speaker 3: major national media is getting it from all sides. Costco
Speaker 3: is going to stop selling books. Hollywood is a mess.
Speaker 3: Linear cable televisions are getting left off because they have cooties.
Speaker 3: That's old big mass media. It is a disaster all around.
Speaker 3: So what interests me? Instead? My students go to They
Speaker 3: don't want to go to places like that. They want
Speaker 3: to go to things that are doing new things like
Speaker 3: documentars or City Bureau or places like that. They're building
Speaker 3: a new ecosystem out there. It's going to be Bessie.
Speaker 3: A lot of things will fail, but some will succeed.
Speaker 3: Like Paris's the Information So.
Speaker 2: Paris, where can people find you?
Speaker 1: You can find me on Twitter if you're still using
Speaker 1: that site at Paris Martina, or better on Blue Sky
Speaker 1: at NYC. I'm also published at the Information regularly. It's
Speaker 1: the Information dot Com.
Speaker 2: Had the story about sniffies. Yes, I'll link it in
Speaker 2: the notes. Mister Jeff Dope, Professor Jeff Jeff. Where can
Speaker 2: people find you?
Speaker 3: I'm at Jeff Jervis everywhere, too many places, and then
Speaker 3: at Jeffjervis dot com. You can buy my books.
Speaker 2: Please buy the books. I've been so this has been
Speaker 2: so much fun and like the first real radio Better Offline,
Speaker 2: it's been so much fun. Thank you both for being here.
Speaker 2: Thank you to our producer of course, Daniel Goodman. You've
Speaker 2: been listening to Better Offline. I'm your chief pig. Mister Zitron.
Speaker 2: You'll know where to find me. You're already listening to
Speaker 2: my words. I just want to repeat to everyone who
Speaker 2: sat through the Cees show, thank you again. We will
Speaker 2: do it next year and we're already planning to add
Speaker 2: a new guest, a stand up comic, and then I'm
Speaker 2: not gonna name yet, but she's going to be absolutely incredible.
Speaker 2: Thank you again for listening. Everyone. You know where to
Speaker 2: find me, and you're going to hear a very old
Speaker 2: message after this, some of you're going to be very
Speaker 2: fair about. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening
Speaker 2: to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better
Speaker 2: Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more
Speaker 2: of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com,
Speaker 2: M A T T O S O W s Ki
Speaker 2: dot com. You can email me at easy at better
Speaker 2: offline dot com or visit better offline dot com to
Speaker 2: find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I
Speaker 2: also really recommend you go to chat dot Where's youreed
Speaker 2: dot at to visit the discord, and go to our
Speaker 2: slash Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you
Speaker 2: so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of
Speaker 2: cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit
Speaker 2: our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out
Speaker 2: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 2: your podcasts.