Speaker 1: A Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Better Offline, your most punished podcast.
Speaker 2: I am your host ed Zeitron today I'm joined by
Speaker 2: one of the single best people in the tech media,
Speaker 2: Jason Kebler of four h four Media, regularly requested by listeners.
Speaker 2: But I punish you too, Jason. Thank you so much
Speaker 2: for joining me.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me. Wow, I did not know that
Speaker 1: that inflates my ego already always necessary.
Speaker 2: I experienced ego death around episode seven, so I feel
Speaker 2: nothing anymore. But we were just talking before this about
Speaker 2: Facebook effectively Mark Zuckerberg effectively admitting that aislop was good
Speaker 2: for the platform. I think it's good for you to
Speaker 2: just walk me through that story. It's a four oh
Speaker 2: for me story. Won't me through because it's a good
Speaker 2: scene setup.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, as meta does all the time. I still
Speaker 1: hate calling the meta, but yeah, at this point I do,
Speaker 1: because they have so much fucking stuff going around that
Speaker 1: it I want to be clear when I'm talking about
Speaker 1: Facebook and when I'm talking about the other stuff. Had
Speaker 1: its third quarter investor call on Wednesday, and you know,
Speaker 1: people ask questions of Facebook executives, and I feel like
Speaker 1: it's a real mask off moment. Where they sort of
Speaker 1: have to say, like, here are our plans, here's what
Speaker 1: we think is working, what's not, And very often it's
Speaker 1: like full of pie in the sky nonsense. But in
Speaker 1: this case it's like Mark Zuckerberg said straight up that
Speaker 1: the AI slop and spam that has taken over Facebook
Speaker 1: but also Instagram and increasingly Threads is the strategy, like
Speaker 1: that is part of the long term goal of the company.
Speaker 1: He talked about adding like a separate AI generated feed,
Speaker 1: which when Facebook has added separate separate feeds, they call
Speaker 1: them separate feeds, but they always end up just like
Speaker 1: integrating in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, being the dominant fit dominant feed, Like you can
Speaker 2: select a chronological feed on the Threads if you solve
Speaker 2: three riddles, click seven buttons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and fix it every three seconds.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yes, it is so. And I still saying to
Speaker 2: you beforehand, I get people saying I'm a cynic a lot,
Speaker 2: but then I read stuff like this, and I just
Speaker 2: don't understand how people aren't more cynical because it feels
Speaker 2: like this stuff feels actively dystopian, that Facebook is no
Speaker 2: longer the world's biggest social network but just the world's
Speaker 2: shittiest television channel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that we get blamed for being like doomers.
Speaker 1: You always have been. Like I've been a journalist for
Speaker 1: twelve thirteen years at this point, and I used to
Speaker 1: be back at Motherboard over a vice and now at
Speaker 1: four or four Media, and sometimes I would have to
Speaker 1: like look up and just be like, Wow, the last
Speaker 1: ten stories I've written have been incredibly depressing. They've been
Speaker 1: like really like horrible harms from technology. They've been you know,
Speaker 1: I don't even think they're negative. I think they're realistic
Speaker 1: and accurate of like what our future is. But you know,
Speaker 1: our future sucks very often and are are present often
Speaker 1: is bad too, and I think that that is at
Speaker 1: the this is because of centralized power in tech and
Speaker 1: over the internet. And so I also get called a
Speaker 1: cynic all the time, but I feel like I'm actually
Speaker 1: quite an optimistic and realistic person and there's lots of
Speaker 1: things that I'm excited about, just none of it is
Speaker 1: coming from big tech, Like none of it at all.
Speaker 2: And what kind of things you're excited about, Let's balance
Speaker 2: this out.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm very excited with like grassroots type new technology,
Speaker 1: like open source technologies. I think that people sort of
Speaker 1: like gesture at like the fetever and like this sort
Speaker 1: of decentralized Twitter alternatives, if you will. And I think
Speaker 1: that that's been promised for quite some time, yes, and
Speaker 1: I think that it's taking a really long time to
Speaker 1: sort of come together. But I do think that that
Speaker 1: is something that we should be like working toward as
Speaker 1: a society where instead of having your audience, if you
Speaker 1: are a publisher, like we are, having it all tied
Speaker 1: up in you know, the number of Twitter followers you have,
Speaker 1: or the number of like Google ads you can sell,
Speaker 1: like you kind of own your audience. And by that,
Speaker 1: I mean you own the list of people that you
Speaker 1: can kind of like transport that around the Internet. I
Speaker 1: think that's really important. I think that for a while,
Speaker 1: I was very excited about community Internet, like nonprofits where
Speaker 1: cities and towns were building their own fiber lines and
Speaker 1: still are and then sort of doing like getting really
Speaker 1: fast internet to the home sort of divorced from Comcast
Speaker 1: and your spectrums of the world so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: And there's like a lot of kind of like individual
Speaker 1: people building stuff that are very cool, like proofs of concept,
Speaker 1: and the big problem is always like scaling that up
Speaker 1: or getting people to stop using Facebook or Twitter or whatever.
Speaker 1: Amazon is a big one. It's like, stop using Amazon,
Speaker 1: stop using Prime. It's very hard to get people to
Speaker 1: change their behaviors. And yet I feel in some ways
Speaker 1: like we're gonna talk about indie media. But I think
Speaker 1: that the journalism industry, despite the sort of disaster disastrous
Speaker 1: situation that's been going on in the last few years,
Speaker 1: I think it's in a better spot now than it
Speaker 1: was two years ago.
Speaker 2: I kind of agree in the sense that I think
Speaker 2: there are places where it got worse. In the sense though,
Speaker 2: and this is my own opinion you don't have to
Speaker 2: agree with, because it's not going to be a fun
Speaker 2: one to agree with. I think things like Platforma have
Speaker 2: actually been detrimental to the tech industry. I think Casey
Speaker 2: Newton has dressed up Platformer as a kind of independent
Speaker 2: outlet where nothing where it's all just like, oh, we're independent,
Speaker 2: we're not bought off by big corporations, then writes two
Speaker 2: fucking fan fiction pieces about anthropic I think that is damaging.
Speaker 2: I think it's actually just spreading the problem. But even
Speaker 2: when you look at legacy media, the verge, which I have,
Speaker 2: I have tons of criticism for Nil Patel. The Verge
Speaker 2: has actually done some really incredible in depth journalism. They
Speaker 2: had that wonderful piece about underground cables, and it feels
Speaker 2: like even at the Journal they have some of the
Speaker 2: best investigative reporters now Mike Isaac's on open Ai, which
Speaker 2: is terrifying for them. I think that we're seeing more
Speaker 2: a lot more investigative stuff than we ever have before.
Speaker 2: I wish it had happened a few years ago, but hell,
Speaker 2: I'll take it now.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean I think that you know, you can
Speaker 1: name a sort of like newsletter writers and independent outlets
Speaker 1: that are doing really amazing work, and there's always been
Speaker 1: some of that, but I think that what we're seeing
Speaker 1: now is like ten years ago when I got into it,
Speaker 1: there were like five big tech websites, and they were
Speaker 1: all bad, in my opinion, Like they were all doing
Speaker 1: the sort of like, uh, there's a new feature on
Speaker 1: the iPhone, here's the new emojis that dropped, and it
Speaker 1: was just like tons and tons and tons of that.
Speaker 1: You'd dump it on Facebook, you'd hope it went viral,
Speaker 1: and you would have people just writing like four or
Speaker 1: five stories a day, and then you had a bunch
Speaker 1: of sort of like I say this as a descriptor
Speaker 1: not as like a like you had, like your nd gadgets,
Speaker 1: your vices, your buzzfeeds, the sort of like middle tier
Speaker 1: of digital website where they're not the New York Times.
Speaker 1: They're not like this gigantic, gigantic media conglomerate. They're sort
Speaker 1: of like middle sized things, and all of them have
Speaker 1: done great work, but they were all kind of doing
Speaker 1: like the same thing more or less. And I think
Speaker 1: that like the VC business model where we're just going
Speaker 1: to chase traffic and ad revenue has failed terribly. It's
Speaker 1: like not working, and I think it's going to be
Speaker 1: very hard to be in the middle where you are
Speaker 1: like your website with a staff of like fifty. I
Speaker 1: think that it's something where you can have independent, subscriber
Speaker 1: funded publications that are doing increasingly good work because the
Speaker 1: infrastructure needed around journalism is not so much anymore. And
Speaker 1: then you're going to have your like New York Times
Speaker 1: is and your Washington Posts and you're like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: c net or something like just gigantic websites that are
Speaker 1: going to be like, you know, middling. I don't like
Speaker 1: have a ton of love for the gigantic players, but
Speaker 1: I think that they serve a purpose of some sort.
Speaker 2: There is there is a certain purpose for the your phone.
Speaker 2: Now does this media like people read that stuff for
Speaker 2: a reason.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I read that stuff as well, and
Speaker 1: I but I do think that like all the stuff
Speaker 1: in the middle has died and is going to keep dying.
Speaker 1: But I think that the years where those publications were
Speaker 1: propped up by VC but like weren't making money, weren't
Speaker 1: investing in their newsrooms because they were just trying to
Speaker 1: stave off layoffs. Like I think that was the dark period,
Speaker 1: because the vibes were terrible at all of them, because
Speaker 1: there was a hatchet around the corner constantly, like there
Speaker 1: were always gonna be mass layoffs or some the sites
Speaker 1: were going to die at any moment because they were
Speaker 1: these like bloated organizations where executives made tons of money,
Speaker 1: the journalists made almost nothing, and like it just wasn't
Speaker 1: a there was no sustainability there. And I think that
Speaker 1: I know that I'm rambling at this point, but I
Speaker 1: think I think that it's possible for like a bunch
Speaker 1: of small newsrooms like ours to thrive a bunch of
Speaker 1: independence reporters to thrive, a bunch of you know, newsletter
Speaker 1: writers to thrive, and then you know you'll have your
Speaker 1: gigantic news organizations that are going to continue to exist.
Speaker 1: And I think that that that leads to probably some
Speaker 1: fracturing in the media ecosystem where there's not like the
Speaker 1: same people really like this dream that Jeff Bezos is
Speaker 1: pointing out in his recent op ed where it's like
Speaker 1: we're gonna be down the middle and we're gonna be
Speaker 1: everything to everyone. It's like that that's dead. That never works.
Speaker 1: That sharing out before gone, No, it never worked. It
Speaker 1: perhaps worked when there were three television channels, like forty
Speaker 1: years before I was born, but I don't even know
Speaker 1: if it worked then.
Speaker 2: And I think part of the problem is, sure it's
Speaker 2: this sense of doing everything for all things, but it's
Speaker 2: also the need to scale that I don't think has
Speaker 2: ever worked. Like I love. I love the idea of
Speaker 2: tech crunch, and there are right as there I really love.
Speaker 2: But I think as an organization, TechCrunch is just in
Speaker 2: the situation it's tech crunters disrupt while we're recording this.
Speaker 2: I think the pressure and probably the money that comes
Speaker 2: from Disrupt as event as a kind of venue is
Speaker 2: so hard. I think every there's this thing where newsrooms start.
Speaker 2: You've got stories, someone gets a big scoop, it gets
Speaker 2: some traffic, gets some notes, and then they're like, shit,
Speaker 2: what's next, Let's do a conference. And now we're doing
Speaker 2: the conference. We see the conference makes way more money
Speaker 2: than the journalism, So how do we engineer one to
Speaker 2: feed the other? And the actual answer there is to say,
Speaker 2: make them entirely separate. The answer, however, is never the
Speaker 2: one you'd listen to. So you do the thing where
Speaker 2: it's like, how do we change the content to appeal
Speaker 2: to more sponsors for the conference, and how do we
Speaker 2: make it so that we don't piss off people that
Speaker 2: we want to speak at the conference. I'm not even
Speaker 2: saying this is exactly what happened with Disrupt, but you
Speaker 2: see it with like the Information and Venturely and all
Speaker 2: these publications where and this really is inside baseball, but
Speaker 2: now the podcast is free. It's it's frustrating because you
Speaker 2: could have a really good tech conference if you just
Speaker 2: all agreed to not be cowards. Like I respect Devin
Speaker 2: cold Away from tech Crunch so much because he asked
Speaker 2: the perplexity CEO on stage.
Speaker 1: To find that was really good.
Speaker 2: He punted personally. I would have kept asking until he
Speaker 2: hit me. I could take him a reven I'm not
Speaker 2: threatening you come on the show. But it's like it's
Speaker 2: frustrating because there is and this is actually a good
Speaker 2: point as well, and maybe kind of a question. It
Speaker 2: also doesn't feel like there's any solidarity in the tech media.
Speaker 2: There's some it's tenuous, but when it comes down to it,
Speaker 2: it doesn't feel like it's there.
Speaker 1: I think it's a hard thing to build.
Speaker 2: It's like, I also should say, this is not a
Speaker 2: condition created by intention. I don't think people like I
Speaker 2: don't give a shit about others but keep going.
Speaker 1: Sorry, no, I mean I think it's really tough. And
Speaker 1: it's like I don't live in New York anymore, but
Speaker 1: I lived in New York for a long time and
Speaker 1: WECE was in Brooklyn, and then like all of the
Speaker 1: other publications were in Manhattan, like more or less. And
Speaker 1: this is not Illuminati vibes. It's very much like there
Speaker 1: was a generation of journalists who were sort of all
Speaker 1: the same age, all living in the same place, and
Speaker 1: all knew each other from Twitter and they were like
Speaker 1: hanging out all the time because that's I don't know,
Speaker 1: that's how people made friends. And it always felt like
Speaker 1: wece was separate literally because we were on the other
Speaker 1: side of the river, and so like the happy hours,
Speaker 1: you had to go at like out of your way
Speaker 1: to get to them and things like that. And I
Speaker 1: just feel like there's people ask me what I read,
Speaker 1: Like people ask me, like, what other tech publications do
Speaker 1: you read? And it's like, I have a lot of
Speaker 1: respect for a lot of other tech publications, but I
Speaker 1: don't have time to go read all of them all
Speaker 1: day every day because there's so much going on on, right,
Speaker 1: And then I'm not like sharing other people's stories that
Speaker 1: often for that reason, because I just feel like the
Speaker 1: time has passed where you can like consume all of
Speaker 1: the Internet at once, right, And I feel like that
Speaker 1: when you say there's not solidarity, it's like I have
Speaker 1: a lot of respect for other tech journalists and I
Speaker 1: like a lot of their work, but I will sometimes
Speaker 1: go weeks where I'm like, I actually feel like I
Speaker 1: haven't read the Internet because I've been heads down in
Speaker 1: my own stuff, and then you look up and it's like,
Speaker 1: oh cool, Like Ed did a really great piece, like
Speaker 1: Brian Merchant did a really great piece. There were like
Speaker 1: ten great articles in The Verge, and then it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: should I like go tweet their work now two months
Speaker 1: after they published it? Like so, I don't know. I'm
Speaker 1: just speaking from my own perspective on that, but I
Speaker 1: feel like it's very hard to have like cross publication
Speaker 1: good vibe, not even good vibes, but like it's just hard.
Speaker 1: It's just hard to keep up with everything. I feel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think like one happened a week or
Speaker 2: two ago. And this is not a criticism of anyone specifically,
Speaker 2: but Sam Altman he claimed something Kylie Roberson of The
Speaker 2: Verge wrote about the next model coming from Open Ai,
Speaker 2: and he said fake news and she got dog piled
Speaker 2: for it. And see a single fucking journalist in her mentions. Now,
Speaker 2: this is not about you, Jason, not talking about you.
Speaker 2: I didn't see a single one though, and that really
Speaker 2: turned my stomach. I went after the little bastard. Fuck you,
Speaker 2: Sam Moltman, O, huh, I'll keep right what I fucking
Speaker 2: want about you, But it's it's frustrating. But now that
Speaker 2: you said it, it does feel like almost a remote
Speaker 2: work effect, but also the detritus of the New York
Speaker 2: waiting because I remember in like the early twenty tens
Speaker 2: how cliquey it was, yeah, and how the how you
Speaker 2: got I'm not, I like not saying othered in perhaps
Speaker 2: that way, but you were kind of in the in
Speaker 2: group or the outgroup, and you kind of still see
Speaker 2: it within internet culture reporting. Yeah, like New Yorker guys
Speaker 2: that talk to the same people yeah, all the time.
Speaker 2: And it's frustrating because I think four or four has
Speaker 2: proven this. There's so much cool shit you can do
Speaker 2: in tech journalism, especially when you talk to more varied
Speaker 2: people than just the six people in front of you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it really felt. I mean we talk
Speaker 1: about things like Twitter, main character, so on and so forth,
Speaker 1: and it's like that was a real phenomenon where it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: here's the one thing that everyone on the Internet is
Speaker 1: talking about right now. And I feel like this is
Speaker 1: a It probably has to do with Elon Musk fucking
Speaker 1: up Twitter and like the fracturing of social media. But
Speaker 1: if you like ask me what is happening on the
Speaker 1: Internet today, I could name a bunch of different things
Speaker 1: and you might have a totally different list of things
Speaker 1: that you are seeing, and I think that that is
Speaker 1: a big change.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I also think that that's something that leads to
Speaker 2: the failure of internet culture reporting, because if you I
Speaker 2: actually don't think that what there's been articles about this too.
Speaker 2: I don't think the main character was actually a social
Speaker 2: media I think it was a It is a thing
Speaker 2: that happened, But I don't think it tells us anything
Speaker 2: about internet culture, and I think a lot of internet culture.
Speaker 1: I think it tells us something about how internet publications
Speaker 1: were in because there was like a while where Donald
Speaker 1: Trump's Twitter was being called like the assignment editor for
Speaker 1: the front page of the New York Times or whatever
Speaker 1: or whatever, and that, I mean, it's true, and Elon
Speaker 1: Musk was the same way, and to some extent is
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, Elon Musk tweeted that he's going to
Speaker 1: print humans on Mars, and then there would be like
Speaker 1: eighty five articles about it. And I think that that
Speaker 1: was a function of like publications, not all publications, not
Speaker 1: all journalists, and like certainly not all editors. But there
Speaker 1: is like a when you're getting into this industry, there's
Speaker 1: a period of time where you were asked or were
Speaker 1: for a long time to the news just like hit
Speaker 1: five stories a day, whatever it is, and like the
Speaker 1: things that you saw going viral on Twitter, that was
Speaker 1: something that you could go and write about and you would,
Speaker 1: you know, either win a Google or Reddit lottery or
Speaker 1: a Twitter lottery and you would get a lot of traffic.
Speaker 1: And so almost every publication like had five people doing.
Speaker 2: That, like a kind of an ultra normalization.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it sucks because it's I think four or four
Speaker 2: has done. They're just gonna lavish you with praise. Here.
Speaker 2: Four or four had my favorite text story of the
Speaker 2: last year by far, and it was about the Indian
Speaker 2: guys who are just scamming Facebook. And it humanized it
Speaker 2: as well, because I think that there is also a
Speaker 2: degree of xenophobia towards Indian guys online. There definitely is that, like,
Speaker 2: and it doesn't help the fact that a lot of
Speaker 2: Indian guys ran insane mindset Instagram accounts. But nevertheless, I
Speaker 2: loved the way you humanized it because it was like,
Speaker 2: here's the actual way that this is happening. This is
Speaker 2: Internet culture. Internet culture is being changed. But the fact
Speaker 2: that Facebook is incentivizing matching the like playing slop tetris
Speaker 2: where you kind of match the bullshit to the other bullshit,
Speaker 2: so the algorithm puts out and I feel like.
Speaker 1: It's also it's also the thing that I really liked
Speaker 1: about that story was that the like Indian tech bro
Speaker 1: hustle guys were talking amongst themselves about what they perceived
Speaker 1: us internet culture to be, which was like very interesting,
Speaker 1: Like they were sort of talking to each other about like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know what, like Americans and British people fucking love
Speaker 1: their dogs, they love pets, and then they were talking
Speaker 1: about like other things and it's like, yes, like this
Speaker 1: is a stereotype. But it was interesting to see what
Speaker 1: they thought American internet culture was and then how they
Speaker 1: tried to reverse that engineer that into viral content.
Speaker 2: And I think the problem as well is that Internet
Speaker 2: culture is just culture now, and also internet culture is
Speaker 2: the nature of the algorithms fucking with us every day.
Speaker 2: Is not really anything, it's what the algorithm. So you
Speaker 2: wrote that wonderful piece about Mark Zuckerbog's mask off moment,
Speaker 2: I went back to one of my Facebook pieces I wrote,
Speaker 2: and it was a thing I worried about, which is
Speaker 2: what is viral? I don't mean does viral exist. I
Speaker 2: mean what is actually famous? And the answer is we
Speaker 2: as people no longer decide that, in my opinion, and
Speaker 2: I think that that is also what it goes back
Speaker 2: to the tech media. It goes back to everything we're
Speaker 2: talking about, because it's what's the biggest news of the day. Well,
Speaker 2: whatever we think will get a bunch of traffic, what
Speaker 2: gets a bunch of traffic. Whateveryone's writing about what's important, Well,
Speaker 2: it's the thing that will get us traffic. Elon Musk's tweet,
Speaker 2: I actually believe that the media contributed to the rise
Speaker 2: of Elon Musk in a way that's actually more egregious
Speaker 2: than Donald Trump. I think that if we did not
Speaker 2: have a tweet every time Elon Musk farted for a decade,
Speaker 2: and it was not recent, it was a decade putting
Speaker 2: a site, even the pandering to him, we would not
Speaker 2: have him at the scale we did. Like he would
Speaker 2: still be insanely rich, but he would not have the
Speaker 2: power he does because he wouldn't be able to create
Speaker 2: news cycles. But on top of that, pointing a side,
Speaker 2: even the criticism, everyone just did the same thing. They
Speaker 2: kind of still do, but they really really did like it.
Speaker 2: I think that that's one way it's definitely got better
Speaker 2: because it used to be every site did exactly the
Speaker 2: fucking same thing, just crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And you know what, I wrote a lot of
Speaker 1: articles about Elon Musk's tweets, and at the time, I
Speaker 1: was like, this guy is really interesting, like that what
Speaker 1: he is doing is very oh yeah, And it took
Speaker 1: a while for me to be like, oh, but he's
Speaker 1: like this is like very bad, very bad situation. But
Speaker 1: I remember, like Ashley Vance, who's a reporter at Bloomberg,
Speaker 1: wrote the first biography of Elon Musk, and it came
Speaker 1: out like before Elon Musk was a fucking asshole and
Speaker 1: very bad in that book, but he was not. He
Speaker 1: was seen as like someone who cared a lot about
Speaker 1: climate change and was like yeah, like blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: So I got an early copy of that book and
Speaker 1: I read it and I was like, whoa, there's like
Speaker 1: lots of crazy details in here. There was like one
Speaker 1: section for you was this. I think it was like
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen, like it was. It was pre Trump, definitely,
Speaker 1: it might have even been earlier than that, like twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen something like that, and I had Ashley Vance
Speaker 1: on Motherboards podcast, which I was like hosting at the time,
Speaker 1: and we were like, Wow, this is like a super
Speaker 1: interesting guy. He's like in charge of Tesla and SpaceX,
Speaker 1: Like that's nuts. And I remember I wrote a specific
Speaker 1: article where he and I believe his name is Craig Venter,
Speaker 1: who is like a DNA He's like a DNA sequencing guy,
Speaker 1: like from the early We're going to sequence the human
Speaker 1: genome days. And there's this anecdote in the book where
Speaker 1: Elon Musky and Craig Venter had this crazy idea to
Speaker 1: print humans on Mars, like sending a large three D
Speaker 1: price they were joking. I literally was not like that's
Speaker 1: a story that I wrote, And I actually don't think
Speaker 1: that that particular article was bad, but it always like
Speaker 1: sticks out in my mind because I talked to like
Speaker 1: actual scientists being like, is this what is it? What
Speaker 1: are they even talking about here? Because there was a
Speaker 1: big period in like the early twenty tens where three
Speaker 1: D printing like pig organs to transplant them into human
Speaker 1: It was like a huge thing, Like we had millions
Speaker 1: of stories solid decade.
Speaker 2: Before Better Offline existed. There was like, I don't know
Speaker 2: if anyone listening remembers this when three D printing was
Speaker 2: everywhere and there was just the assumption kind of like AI,
Speaker 2: that we would just no longer build things, we would
Speaker 2: print them using a machine that we both.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was like, Oh, you're not even going to
Speaker 1: like use Amazon. You're gonna have like a three D
Speaker 1: printer here in your house and it's going to print
Speaker 1: like hamburgers and also televisions. Like it's really insane. It
Speaker 1: was so cool. Yeah, But anyways, it's like I wrote
Speaker 1: a bunch of stories about that, about Elon Musk saying
Speaker 1: he was going to do crazy stuff because like every
Speaker 1: once in a while he would do something kind of interesting,
Speaker 1: like uh, you know, put self not even like an
Speaker 1: autopilot into cars without it being tested properly and like
Speaker 1: kill a bunch of people and be like WHOA, that's
Speaker 1: that's nuts. But trying to figure out in my head,
Speaker 1: like when do we stop enabling this, Like when do
Speaker 1: we stop letting Elon drive what we are covering as
Speaker 1: a publication. I think that's something that like probably every
Speaker 1: journalist has had to think about at some point, and
Speaker 1: that that's something that people did with Facebook. They did
Speaker 1: it with Apple, they did it with every big company
Speaker 1: when they had.
Speaker 2: Did they have they They still write about every Facebook thing.
Speaker 1: I'm not sorry they have not stopped, but a lot
Speaker 1: of the ones that did it have died. And then
Speaker 1: there's a lot I would say, there's a lot more
Speaker 1: like variety. If yes, look for.
Speaker 2: I love that. I will absolutely give that. And I
Speaker 2: also want to be clear, though I'm critical here, I
Speaker 2: think that there are really fundamental logistical reasons this is
Speaker 2: the case. So first of all, there's no mentorship at
Speaker 2: all in journalism or in the workplace in general. But
Speaker 2: I think that there are so many people, young people
Speaker 2: who start aren't this industry and just go straight into
Speaker 2: it and no one educates them, and they don't educate
Speaker 2: themselves on how any of this shit works, because it's
Speaker 2: quite difficult. I mean, I'm not perfect, but I have
Speaker 2: to pick up shit constantly, both from a PR job
Speaker 2: and for this and learn stuff without getting it wrong.
Speaker 2: Asking people you yourself, what doing your research? I imagine
Speaker 2: you bullshit test you own stuff. It's time consuming, and
Speaker 2: at the same time I'm being told, all right, three blogs,
Speaker 2: shi ahead, I want to see three blogs today. I
Speaker 2: need to know chat GPT as search. Now I need
Speaker 2: you to write eight hundred words about why this is
Speaker 2: going to change everything. And so when you get to
Speaker 2: the point when I think you meant to say, trying
Speaker 2: to think critically about this, when right.
Speaker 1: Or when are you going to like learn the intricacies
Speaker 1: of how this technology even works. And when you can't
Speaker 1: lose the intricacies, then you use company press releases or
Speaker 1: you sort of like use these shorthands where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: this VC said that this is how it's going to work,
Speaker 1: and like, I don't even know how to find someone
Speaker 1: who is an academic who can like criticize this in
Speaker 1: a coherent way, of which I think like millions and
Speaker 1: millions of them. But I'm just saying, like, if you're
Speaker 1: a new reporter, you might not know how to do that.
Speaker 2: I have I mean, do you ask, yeah, seriously, like
Speaker 2: how do you find out?
Speaker 1: Right? So that's this is I'm going to try to
Speaker 1: say this in a the as least of bragging way
Speaker 1: as possible. But that was one of my favorite things
Speaker 1: about being the editor of Motherboard is that we were
Speaker 1: able to bring in people who were new to the
Speaker 1: industry and then and who had like deep interests in
Speaker 1: specific things and kind of teach them how to do
Speaker 1: reporting and how to think about technology technology. And to
Speaker 1: be very clear, it's like every single person who came
Speaker 1: through there or that I've ever worked with has done
Speaker 1: the work. But I think something like very cool is
Speaker 1: like Edward Angueiso, who is amazing, like amazing, amazing, he.
Speaker 2: Is joining us by the way for the bedrough line
Speaker 2: cees coverage.
Speaker 1: Oh that's amazing. Yeah. It's like he came to Motherboard
Speaker 1: and he had he had a huge, huge knowledge about tech,
Speaker 1: labor and tech, and he had written a thesis about
Speaker 1: Uber and how Uber was emmiserating its drivers, but he
Speaker 1: did it or like his college thesis, but he didn't
Speaker 1: really know how to report when he came to Motherboard.
Speaker 1: But because he was so interested in that, it's like,
Speaker 1: did you know everything about Uber? Just work just write
Speaker 1: about Uber for a little while, like use your expertise,
Speaker 1: like get to know it. And it's like he did
Speaker 1: it all of it on his own in terms of
Speaker 1: becoming the amazing reporter and writer that he is today.
Speaker 1: But I think that it like I'm proud that we
Speaker 1: were able to give him the space to do that
Speaker 1: and sort of like the guidance of here's how you, like,
Speaker 1: here's how you go fucking hard on uber without like
Speaker 1: libeling a million people, and like, here's how you stay
Speaker 1: out of lawsuits and things like that, which doesn't mean
Speaker 1: pulling punches. It means making sure all your stuff is
Speaker 1: like very buttoned up and legally defensible and so on
Speaker 1: and so forth. And I think that not just with Edward,
Speaker 1: but like many of the best reporters on the Internet
Speaker 1: these days are like I've worked with them in some way,
Speaker 1: shape or form, and that's something that they've always had
Speaker 1: in common, is having a deep interest in a specific
Speaker 1: topic or beat and like really specializing in that versus
Speaker 1: trying to write everything about every possible topic that there is,
Speaker 1: because when that happens, that's how you get like these
Speaker 1: surface level articles that are all the same.
Speaker 2: I think it's I agree fully, and I think, just
Speaker 2: pondering this as you speak, there is another level that
Speaker 2: I've found with the show, which is to do this
Speaker 2: job right, you also have to be like a business
Speaker 2: and financial like Ed's Eden Guaiser Juni is one of
Speaker 2: the most gifted writers I've ever worked with. I'm so
Speaker 2: fucking happy to have him a CES because he is
Speaker 2: very good on socioeconomics. He is able to look at
Speaker 2: something and go, this will affect real people like this
Speaker 2: that is not just the skill. It's like an actual
Speaker 2: talent that can be fostered. But it's tough because you
Speaker 2: have to start looking at the world in just this
Speaker 2: complete different way. I know a lot of listeners and
Speaker 2: I'm just the scritical of the media as well, have
Speaker 2: this thing where they look and like, how could journalists
Speaker 2: write like this? How could how could they just eat
Speaker 2: up the slob. It's because we'll, what twenty years into
Speaker 2: tech journalists being educated to believe these guys, and we're
Speaker 2: finally breaking that down and saying, oh, could Elon Musk lie?
Speaker 2: Would Sam Olman?
Speaker 3: Lie?
Speaker 2: Would they? And I think that's it's weird because in
Speaker 2: almost every other, every other journalist field, you're kind of
Speaker 2: built like them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I feel like I woke up one day and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, I'm like old now. Then by
Speaker 1: that it's like every day for me. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I and I think that because I was always kind
Speaker 1: of like I always looked at myself like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of new to journalism, like I'm just feeling things out,
Speaker 1: like I'm I'm asking people what experts should I talk to?
Speaker 1: How should I do this? Blah blah blah. And I
Speaker 1: would say around the three D printing bubble that we
Speaker 1: were just talking about is when I realized, I'm like, oh, wait,
Speaker 1: these like hype cycles where every VC, every company, everyone
Speaker 1: does the exact same thing and says it's going to
Speaker 1: be the future of everything, and there's like tons of
Speaker 1: money thrown into it. It doesn't always come true like
Speaker 1: it it. Yeah, And so like you know, there was
Speaker 1: like VR and then there was three D printing, and
Speaker 1: then there was you know, Crypto, and then there was
Speaker 1: the metaverse and there's again and VR again and blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. And like at some point I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: I have been doing this long enough to now understand
Speaker 1: this cycle where the cool new thing is not going
Speaker 1: to change everything. It's gonna be or even happen or
Speaker 1: even happen, and it's it's gonna be full of fucking grifters.
Speaker 1: All of them are full of grifters. And it's under
Speaker 1: like understandable why that is because many, many people have
Speaker 1: made a lot of money by rushing into a technology,
Speaker 1: hyping it up, selling their company or whatever, and you know,
Speaker 1: living in a mansion for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 1: But I think like as a journalist, I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: once I understood that that was the cycle, that that is,
Speaker 1: that was really helpful for my own work, I guess,
Speaker 1: is what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: I think for me it was kind of crypto, But
Speaker 2: I think it was remote work. I think remote work
Speaker 2: was the thing that fully jokefied me because I had
Speaker 2: a few articles. I had an article turned down by Jilopnick,
Speaker 2: like twenty fifteen where I was like, hey, eat Al
Speaker 2: Musky's lying like it was actually kind of president. He
Speaker 2: was like, look, he said this about the model X
Speaker 2: didn't happen, isn't happening? Completely different said this about autoparlor
Speaker 2: hasn't happened. And even then I wrote like a positive
Speaker 2: piece about auto public. What's kind of cool, Like that's
Speaker 2: the thing. If they didn't over promise, they could point
Speaker 2: to things to people be like, shit, this is really cool.
Speaker 2: But I think it was remote work because you just
Speaker 2: got to see this schism between reality and journalism. But
Speaker 2: for real, it was crypto. It was the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: one crypto craze where just people were lying. It wasn't
Speaker 2: even like they were half true. They would just straight
Speaker 2: up like we will do this, and what they were
Speaker 2: saying was not possible, like not even and then they
Speaker 2: never did it, and then the companies were just dumping
Speaker 2: money and all these people were getting rich for nothing.
Speaker 2: And I watched this quite a lot of genalists just
Speaker 2: kind of wrote it up because they were like, well
Speaker 2: money good, yeah, money, money, lodge money, good money real.
Speaker 1: I think also crypto. I've edited many stories about crypto,
Speaker 1: and I've written a handful of them, and it's fucking complicated.
Speaker 1: It's like if you want, and it's because it's so complicated,
Speaker 1: it's a space for tons of grifters. And I guess
Speaker 1: what I mean by that is like when you start
Speaker 1: talking about things like smart contracts and like dows and
Speaker 1: like blah blah blah, all that stuff, it's a really
Speaker 1: hard thing to parachute into and understand the lingo and
Speaker 1: like what people are talking about at all. And then
Speaker 1: you go try to write an article about it because
Speaker 1: your editor says, this company made three billion dollars in
Speaker 1: the last two days, Like what's going on here? Go
Speaker 1: write about it. It's like the amount of brain poison
Speaker 1: that you need to be to understand what they are
Speaker 1: attempting to do here, whether they were attempting to or not,
Speaker 1: but like to explain why it is a fraud was
Speaker 1: like a very difficult thing, and I feel like only
Speaker 1: a few journalists were ever, like very good at doing that.
Speaker 2: But even then, the thing that got me to be
Speaker 2: clearly completely right I was writing about it at the time,
Speaker 2: and writing about it was occasionally exhausting because you'd spend
Speaker 2: the first court of the art being like, okay, this
Speaker 2: means this, this means that, this also means this. Okay,
Speaker 2: now you've learned all of this bullshit, I can get
Speaker 2: to the thing I want to write about, right. I
Speaker 2: think that the other thing is is it was when
Speaker 2: I realized so many journalists assumed that all of these
Speaker 2: people had good intentions. That was when I that was
Speaker 2: what cracked it for me. It was the caven Rue's
Speaker 2: Slatecomers Guide to Crypto, or the article about Helium and
Speaker 2: all of these things where it was just like, oh,
Speaker 2: they said they got this partnership, did you fucking check? No? No,
Speaker 2: why would I They wouldn't lie to the New York time.
Speaker 2: Yes they were. They did. They literally lied, They literally lied,
Speaker 2: and they all lied all the time, and they're still
Speaker 2: kind of doing it. And I think that I definitely
Speaker 2: had the experience of waking up and feeling old as well,
Speaker 2: because I've been doing pr from since two thousand and
Speaker 2: I've been doing prs since twand and eight, since twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: and thus I've been the hype man. I still am
Speaker 2: some extent, but even then, in like mid twenty tens,
Speaker 2: with the indie go Go craze listeners and if you
Speaker 2: don't remember this time, there was a time when Indie
Speaker 2: Go Go and kickstarted started out and it was like
Speaker 2: every single company that on their got press, regardless of
Speaker 2: whether it was real or not.
Speaker 1: That was one of my That was one of my
Speaker 1: favorite types of articles to write, because not like, hey
Speaker 1: there's a new Kickstarter, Hey this kick sorry that raised
Speaker 1: like three million dollars and was written about in like
Speaker 1: eighty publications, didn't make the thing, didn't try to make the.
Speaker 2: Try like or they made it. It was just completely
Speaker 2: fucking broken. But I remember at that time also saying
Speaker 2: to new new business things like how are you making money?
Speaker 2: And they were like oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: we are, and that's never well you don't want to
Speaker 2: hear someone being like yeah, sure a little bit and
Speaker 2: you're like, are you profitable? No, you're going to become profitable.
Speaker 2: But I remember even having clients that were like would
Speaker 2: go to journalists. I'd take into journalis even and I'd
Speaker 2: be like, yeah, they're profitable, and they'd be like who cares,
Speaker 2: like just not necessarily as good, but they'd be like whatever, yeah, whatever,
Speaker 2: everyone's scaling. And then over time, thankfully I've got clients
Speaker 2: that are mostly profitable because suddenly journalists like, huh. If
Speaker 2: a company makes more more money than it spends, that's
Speaker 2: a good thing, and if it loses money, well that's
Speaker 2: a bad thing unless it's open AI. And I think
Speaker 2: that's That's the other thing that's frustrate me as well.
Speaker 2: It's like, maybe you can actually give me an idea
Speaker 2: of this because I have a few thoughts, But why
Speaker 2: do they keep fucking falling for it so many times?
Speaker 2: It's like three hype cycles straight and this AI one
Speaker 2: is insane.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the So we we've been painting with a
Speaker 1: very broad brush. You've added some specifics I've definitely been
Speaker 1: painting with a broad brush, and I'm just like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: like the industry, I apologize, No, it's fine. I'm just
Speaker 1: saying that I think with AI journalists, the ones that
Speaker 1: I read are like more skeptical than any technology that
Speaker 1: we've seen in a long time. However, the question is
Speaker 1: how many people are they like actually reaching and what
Speaker 1: is that reach? And then you sort of have like
Speaker 1: some of these Kevin Roos's articles that we talked about
Speaker 1: in The New York Times where it's like I was
Speaker 1: seduced by an AI or like whatever, yeah, things like this.
Speaker 1: It's like those are really really harmful articles and they
Speaker 1: go out to like a lot of people, and I
Speaker 1: think that it's just like it's really tough because I
Speaker 1: think on balance, journalists have been like really tough on
Speaker 1: AI companies, the ones that I read and the ones
Speaker 1: the ones that I like where I'm like, oh, like,
Speaker 1: Brian Merchant, you're really good on this topic, right at Zittron,
Speaker 1: you're really good on this topic. Kylie Robison, You're really
Speaker 1: good on this topic. So on and so forth, and
Speaker 1: then but then I start thinking, oh, but like the
Speaker 1: New York Times often isn't very good on this topic,
Speaker 1: like the Wall Street Journal often isn't very good on
Speaker 1: this topic. And these are the sort of like mass
Speaker 1: market publications that whose audience sized dwarfs us.
Speaker 2: I have to wonder if there isn't some degree of
Speaker 2: like them wanting to seem positive because they have a
Speaker 2: broad audience. I just don't know why. Yeah, like they
Speaker 2: want to be excited about the tank.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that I have not worked at a
Speaker 1: big publication like that, but I know I know a
Speaker 1: lot of people who have, and I've like seen free
Speaker 1: like people I know of freelance for them and things
Speaker 1: like that. And I think that a lot of these
Speaker 1: publications have many, many, many levels of like bureaucracy and
Speaker 1: legal and like so on and so forth. And I
Speaker 1: feel like a lot of articles get a focus grouped
Speaker 1: to death. Like I don't know what I'm linking on
Speaker 1: the term, but it's where there's like eighty people are
Speaker 1: looking at a thing, and then by the time it
Speaker 1: comes out, it's like, oh, this is like a quote
Speaker 1: unquote this in the middle it's like, yeah, you're just
Speaker 1: giving publicity to whatever, and it's like, oh, okay, this
Speaker 1: is not actually Like I.
Speaker 2: Have to wonder if it's also a solidarity issue again,
Speaker 2: because Swisher, for example, the reason they'll find us a
Speaker 2: loathsome is that she pretends to be what she actually
Speaker 2: should have been, which is if everyone nearly Patel, Johanna Stone,
Speaker 2: who I love in general, Kara Swisher, who I find
Speaker 2: the testable, Casey Newton, who I find almost is the testable.
Speaker 2: The problem isn't that they're not getting these interviews. It's
Speaker 2: that when they have the person in front of them,
Speaker 2: they don't ask them the questions they get. They ask
Speaker 2: them do you train with YouTube data? And they go eh,
Speaker 2: and it's like, okay, that's an answer for me versus
Speaker 2: and the British media has a litany of problems, but
Speaker 2: one of the things they do very well is harass Powell.
Speaker 2: And I think that there could just be this most
Speaker 2: subtle change in the world. When you get Sam Wrtman
Speaker 2: in front of him, don't accept whatever answer gives you immediately.
Speaker 2: Don't be like, well, seems reasonable to me that you
Speaker 2: have no answer. So for revenue or how this stuff
Speaker 2: will become agi, I'm just going to keep going. But
Speaker 2: it's also if everyone started doing that, they would have
Speaker 2: to start answering that simple that if the only option
Speaker 2: they had was to get like Devin Cole, and I'll
Speaker 2: give them credit, Devin coldweight TechCrunch disrupt actually fucking answering
Speaker 2: the question to Aravin, the CEO of Perplexity about plagiarism,
Speaker 2: could have pushed hard or whatever. We can. We can
Speaker 2: quarterback that later, but nevertheless, the fact the question is
Speaker 2: getting asked is so phenomenal, and Devin fucking respect to him.
Speaker 2: If everyone did that, these worms would have to run. Yeah,
Speaker 2: if everyone just fucking and it doesn't even need to
Speaker 2: be rude. You don't have to be a dickhead, you
Speaker 2: don't have to be as I would be very rude. Well, okay,
Speaker 2: I actually I take that back. I will get one
Speaker 2: of these people and you'll be shocked by how not
Speaker 2: rude I am, because that actually doesn't get results. Ask
Speaker 2: them questions, right, what does that mean?
Speaker 1: I think that So I don't like listen to every
Speaker 1: episode of Neli Patel's podcast, but I think this is
Speaker 1: something that he started to do a lot better. He
Speaker 1: like talked to the CEO of into It the other
Speaker 1: day and was like, uh, you know, badgering him on
Speaker 1: into Its lobbying about like why why we still fucking
Speaker 1: have to use turbo tax more or less year they've
Speaker 1: spent millions and millions and millions of dollars doing.
Speaker 2: And then pushed him on lobbying as well.
Speaker 1: And I think that, uh, I mean, I thought that
Speaker 1: that was a good example. I think that I just
Speaker 1: wish he'd have done that with with Sundar. He did
Speaker 1: give him his phone. That was.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 1: I didn't listen to the whole thing.
Speaker 2: The Google CEO is touching my phone, ask him compound
Speaker 2: questions the whole way down. Now, I'm not gonna I'm
Speaker 2: not gonna I'm gonna pull that back a bit, though.
Speaker 2: The intuit thing was the exact example of what everyone
Speaker 2: needs to do. He wasn't rude at all. He just
Speaker 2: kept asking the fucking question, and that's why it rocked.
Speaker 2: That's why it was good.
Speaker 1: Well, So what I I was gonna say is I
Speaker 1: agree with you. I think that what has happened is
Speaker 1: you have fucking like Mark Zuckerberg going on Joe Regan
Speaker 1: and going on Lex Friedman and going on like all
Speaker 1: these other podcasts and pretending like they're like the media
Speaker 1: is a problem. And I agree with what you're saying.
Speaker 1: I also think that tech PR has gotten a lot
Speaker 1: smarter in the last few years in like keeping their
Speaker 1: executives away from anyone who will ask them hard questions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's very calculated.
Speaker 2: And I also I also think that I think you're
Speaker 2: completely right. I don't know if I'll ever say that
Speaker 2: PR people are getting smarter based on any of them,
Speaker 2: but I will say I think that they have just
Speaker 2: learned the lessons from celebrity PR because the tech media
Speaker 2: has allowed these people to be treated like celebrities like
Speaker 2: that is I think I'm very critical of Daylight Patel,
Speaker 2: but really the intuit one was great, but because he
Speaker 2: treated him like a businessman, he treated Sandapashy like a celebrity.
Speaker 2: And I think that the problem is, and this is
Speaker 2: me like genuine empathy. For a while, they were for
Speaker 2: a while we laugh about the twenty fifteen Indiegogo era,
Speaker 2: but it was fun. Things were happening these people. Elon
Speaker 2: Musk wasn't just an inveterate racist. He wasn't post like
Speaker 2: talking about the fourteen words he loved the most. He
Speaker 2: wasn't he wasn't just retweeting active Nazis. He was just
Speaker 2: like posting my lunch rocket go bum cargo fast and
Speaker 2: everyone was like cool, even I was, and I can
Speaker 2: understand why everyone kind of oriented themselves in that way.
Speaker 2: But these people aren't celebrities. They're fucking business people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was something about So I've seen Elon Musk
Speaker 1: speak a couple of times while I was reporting, Like
Speaker 1: I went to the Gigo factories opening and sort of
Speaker 1: covered that when they started making batteries in Nevada and something,
Speaker 1: and I thought I did a good piece. Actually this
Speaker 1: was now many years ago, but I wrote I think
Speaker 1: the article is called like the Cult of Elon, and
Speaker 1: it was about his like very cultish fans who are
Speaker 1: just fucking obsessed with him even then. And he's a
Speaker 1: horrendous public speaker.
Speaker 2: He's really he's not gifted.
Speaker 1: He's not gifted. He's very awkward up there. And for
Speaker 1: a while that that was actually quite alluring is the
Speaker 1: wrong word to me, But I was like, Wow, this
Speaker 1: guy must be really smart, because he's so bad at
Speaker 1: talking that he might he must just and yet he's
Speaker 1: still like the CEO of all these companies and a
Speaker 1: billionaire and blah blah blah. And I was like but
Speaker 1: he can't string two sentences together really on stage, so
Speaker 1: he just must be like engineering behind the scenes all
Speaker 1: the time, like building rockets himself. And I think that
Speaker 1: we really did a very bad job, not just with Elon,
Speaker 1: but with like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and all
Speaker 1: these people, treating them as geniuses who did all of
Speaker 1: this stuff themselves from a garage and not as businessmen
Speaker 1: who had thousands of people working for them, Like building on.
Speaker 2: The backs of any of us would have combined, yeah.
Speaker 1: And building on the backs of like a million other
Speaker 1: inventions by a million other people. And it's like fine,
Speaker 1: Like you built the smartphone, like cool. I use the
Speaker 1: smartphone all the time. That's very cool. But like Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs is not the inventor of the smartphone there there,
Speaker 1: or the iPhone. It was like thousands of people at
Speaker 1: Apple leveraging like thousands of years of you know, not
Speaker 1: thousands of years but many years, yeah, dozens of years
Speaker 1: of you know, like Wi Fi chips and touchscreen stuff
Speaker 1: and blah blah blah. And I think that in treating
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs as a singular inventor of the iPhone, which
Speaker 1: is it's the subject of my friend Brian Merchant's book
Speaker 1: The One Device, like all the sort of stuff that
Speaker 1: went into it. We made these people celebrities. We made
Speaker 1: them celebrities because we're like genius inventor vibes versus likes
Speaker 1: ruthless businessmen and did like made big company in subsidies.
Speaker 2: And I've written about this quite a lot. It's a
Speaker 2: little easier to swallow that way. When you see someone
Speaker 2: who's so otherworldly, rich, who's so powerful, who can do
Speaker 2: all of these things in their normal life that we
Speaker 2: never would, not about them being smart or good, just
Speaker 2: that they have that much money and power. It's much
Speaker 2: easier to look at them and say, damn, they must
Speaker 2: be so much different to me. They must be they
Speaker 2: must know something I don't. And I think what we're
Speaker 2: seeing in the media now, as this kind of cynicism
Speaker 2: feeds in, is people beginning to realize that was never
Speaker 2: fucking true. Wasne The Act was a genius is a
Speaker 2: genius like Jobs was a great marketer and a good operator.
Speaker 1: I mean, whilst the Act also like I don't know
Speaker 1: him personally, but he strikes me as like quite humble
Speaker 1: relatively speaking, and like still like.
Speaker 2: I ran into him once and The thing that he
Speaker 2: talked to me about for half an hour was a
Speaker 2: twenty year old browser called like I Cab I Cab
Speaker 2: think it was yeah, the taxi Fata. It's some like
Speaker 2: low face like it's the only one I use. And
Speaker 2: it was adorable. And he seems to like tech. And
Speaker 2: maybe that's the greater thing that I don't know how
Speaker 2: many people who were popular and in the industry actually
Speaker 2: like technology you talk to yourself about, like you're excited
Speaker 2: about some things, like there is still tech that excites you.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's as common within the industry
Speaker 2: as it should be, both in the executives and some
Speaker 2: members of the media. And I want to be wrong,
Speaker 2: because I think if everyone was actually excited about AI,
Speaker 2: if like that was really driving them, then that would
Speaker 2: be cool. That would be interesting. We would have some
Speaker 2: interesting shit come out of that. I just don't even
Speaker 2: think it's about it. It's like, I'm excited about what
Speaker 2: everyone else is excited about.
Speaker 1: Well, it's very interesting that the crypto to AI, crypto
Speaker 1: to web three to AI pipeline of like, oh, this
Speaker 1: is going to change the world. Wait, no, Metaverse is
Speaker 1: going to change the world. Wait no, AI is going
Speaker 1: to change the world, and it's like, okay, cool, like
Speaker 1: you're into the thing that's going to make you a
Speaker 1: lot of money regardless. Yeah, I don't. It's funny you
Speaker 1: say that I'm not that into tech. And at Motherboard
Speaker 1: we were a website of people who were super skeptical
Speaker 1: of tech and.
Speaker 2: Didn't which I think is fine, by the way.
Speaker 1: I know, I know, I'm just saying that I am not.
Speaker 1: I'm not really excited about tech. I think I'm excited
Speaker 1: about what some people are doing with technology. I'm very
Speaker 1: interesting community, I guess, and diving into those communities of
Speaker 1: people who are excited about things like I recently wrote
Speaker 1: about the people who are taking the red Box DVD
Speaker 1: kiosks home from Waldgreens and I'm like sitting in their
Speaker 1: discord watching figure out how this thing works and like
Speaker 1: flashing new software to it and stuff, and it's like
Speaker 1: that is very exciting to me, not because it's going
Speaker 1: to change the world, but because I like seeing their
Speaker 1: excitement about learning how this like obsolete device works. And
Speaker 1: I don't want to be a part of that community
Speaker 1: myself because frankly, just like I don't know, I feel
Speaker 1: like I'm a busy guy, don't I don't like and
Speaker 1: I have very like short attention span for hobbies. I
Speaker 1: would say like, I don't want to reverse engineer KIOSK,
Speaker 1: but I want to watch you do it from afar
Speaker 1: because you are finding out lots of like weird stuff
Speaker 1: about it, and I like writing about that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And there's many, many, many like micro communities around the
Speaker 1: Internet still that are very exciting to me because they
Speaker 1: are so they found a place on the Internet or
Speaker 1: using technology that is not so fucked up and terrible
Speaker 1: all the time. And I like looking at that. That's
Speaker 1: what makes me optimistic.
Speaker 2: And I still think that that is a I still
Speaker 2: think that that is a perfectly valid thing to be
Speaker 2: excited about, and that is still being excited about tech.
Speaker 2: Some of my favorite moments in tech have been Sidier
Speaker 2: and the original homebrew community and the iPhone. The homebrew
Speaker 2: community around the PlayStation portable was fucking cool. I don't
Speaker 2: even mean the piracy, which may or may not have
Speaker 2: been cool. I wouldn't know even then. Going back to
Speaker 2: like two thousand and six, are their homebrew community with
Speaker 2: the Xbox, the shit, the people that you could like
Speaker 2: just rip games and games you wont to the Xbox
Speaker 2: and they would run faster play Deaf Jam, the fighting game.
Speaker 2: There is still cool shit like that happening, and I
Speaker 2: feel like that does give me hope as well that
Speaker 2: people are still doing this shit, like why are you
Speaker 2: ripping up a red box thing? Because I can.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And I've written a lot about like rights
Speaker 1: for repair and people you know, trying to fix their
Speaker 1: iPhones and so on and so forth. And the thing
Speaker 1: that's been really interesting about following that world is that
Speaker 1: the the like guy at the mall who puts the
Speaker 1: the iPhone screen on when you break it, he knows
Speaker 1: more about how that fucking iPhone works than probably most
Speaker 1: people who work at Apple. And I find that to
Speaker 1: be really interesting. There's been like a couple massive Apple
Speaker 1: scandals that have broken because these like repair people who
Speaker 1: are just looking at a bunch of broken iPhones have
Speaker 1: realized there was like an engineering flaw that Apple mess
Speaker 1: something up on and it's like that's cool, Like this
Speaker 1: is just some dude who works at the mall in
Speaker 1: a kiosk and he has just like discovered a flaw
Speaker 1: in the iPhone that is gonna in a just world
Speaker 1: cost Apple billions of dollars. In the real world that
Speaker 1: we live in, everyone gets like a fifty dollars refund
Speaker 1: maybe lucky, Yeah, for lucky. Or they'll be like a
Speaker 1: class action lawsuit where you get twelve dollars and fourteen years.
Speaker 1: But I like that kind of thing too.
Speaker 2: So as we wrap this up, and this could be
Speaker 2: the final question, what is next for four or four?
Speaker 2: What do you actually get? Are you going to scale
Speaker 2: it much further? Are you going to do a conference
Speaker 2: like is that in the cards? Or are you going
Speaker 2: to keep it small?
Speaker 1: We're going to do conferences, We're going to do whatever,
Speaker 1: We're going to pivot to video, We're gonna speed run. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no for real. So four or four Media has been
Speaker 1: around for a little over a year. It's me, Emmanuel Meiberg,
Speaker 1: Sam Cole, and Joseph Cox. I personally wanted to do
Speaker 1: it because I spent a lot of time editing the
Speaker 1: last few years of my life, and I really wanted
Speaker 1: to get back to writing. And I've really enjoyed doing
Speaker 1: my own reporting and writing again, Like it's been amazing
Speaker 1: for my brain. I feel I would like the company
Speaker 1: to get bigger, Like I think that we probably will
Speaker 1: hire people at some point. But I think that the
Speaker 1: tricky thing for me is if we do that, will
Speaker 1: we have time to continue doing our own work? Like
Speaker 1: how will that work? And so that is, you know,
Speaker 1: that's stuff that we talk about sort of like behind
Speaker 1: the scenes, Like right now we are the four of
Speaker 1: us doing everything in terms of just like we're doing
Speaker 1: our socials, we're doing the business stuff, you know, if
Speaker 1: we're talking to our lawyers and I'm printing merch and
Speaker 1: like mailing it myself, and I really like that hands
Speaker 1: on aspect to it. But I think I'm trying to
Speaker 1: think like if we grow, will that give us more
Speaker 1: time to do the work or will it give us
Speaker 1: less time to do the work because we're then sort
Speaker 1: of like managing other people, which is a blessing in
Speaker 1: many ways because the company is starting to get close
Speaker 1: to a place where I think that we could financially
Speaker 1: justify hiring more people, but it's also does that fundamentally
Speaker 1: like sort of change what we're doing on a day
Speaker 1: to day basis doesn't itself? Does that work and doesn't
Speaker 1: make it better? Is that what our readers even want?
Speaker 1: And I think that like any people that we would
Speaker 1: bring on would have a similar ethos to us and
Speaker 1: would be able to cover like I'm sure they would
Speaker 1: be fantastic at whatever they're reporting on. It would allow
Speaker 1: us to have like more breadth of topics on the site,
Speaker 1: which is something that we want because you know, I've
Speaker 1: written a million articles about Facebook's AI and there's like
Speaker 1: a lot of fuckery going on that we should be
Speaker 1: covering across many topics. But sort of like what does
Speaker 1: that look like? I think is something that we talk
Speaker 1: about a lot. But the good news is it's going well.
Speaker 1: I think that we will grow at some point. We're
Speaker 1: being very careful about it because we worked Advice and
Speaker 1: they hired a bunch of people and it seemed like
Speaker 1: they had money, and then you know, they did something bad,
Speaker 1: Like nothing specifically bad happened. It's just like grow this way,
Speaker 1: grow that way, and then it's like, oh shit, we
Speaker 1: don't have no money and we're bankrupt now. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think it's been very hard to
Speaker 1: plan long term, I would say, because I'm very heads
Speaker 1: down most days, just like interviewing people and writing articles.
Speaker 1: But we want to do more, like we want to grow,
Speaker 1: we want to be bigger, but we want to do it,
Speaker 1: like very very.
Speaker 2: Slowly, and also do you even have to?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that is a big That's another question
Speaker 1: that we ask ourselves because I do think that we've
Speaker 1: been able to do impactful work with just the four
Speaker 1: of us, and there's many people that I would love
Speaker 1: to work with more and again and in addition to
Speaker 1: But at the same time, it's like, is that something
Speaker 1: that I want to bring on ourselves, not because it
Speaker 1: would be bad, but because it would be additional. It's like,
Speaker 1: there's only so many hours ahead.
Speaker 2: It's more shit to manage more personalities. Yeah, where can
Speaker 2: people find you? Jason?
Speaker 1: So we're at four or four media dot Co. We're
Speaker 1: subscriber funded publication.
Speaker 2: Give them money.
Speaker 1: I paid you, give us money. Thank you. We really
Speaker 1: do appreciate it. And then you know, I'm on every
Speaker 1: fucking social media platform. If you search my name, you'll
Speaker 1: find me.
Speaker 2: And then it will be in the episode notes. Jason,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for joining me. You've been listening
Speaker 2: to Better Offline, I'm at Zetron, you know all the
Speaker 2: shit to find me. It will be following this with
Speaker 2: a really nice, non acerbic little speech. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening. To Better Offline.
Speaker 3: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 3: is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 3: and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
Speaker 3: T O S O W s ki dot com. You
Speaker 3: can email me at easy at better offline dot com,
Speaker 3: or visit better offline dot com on more podcast links,
Speaker 3: and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you
Speaker 3: go to chat dot Where's youoead dot am to visit
Speaker 3: the discord, and go to our slash.
Speaker 2: Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so
Speaker 2: much for listening.
Speaker 1: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 1: more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 3: Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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