#1203 Ben Smith | Famous Journalist Reveals Media Secrets

Ben Smith is the co-founder of Semafor, and the author of a brand new book called, ‘Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, And Delusion In The Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral.’ In this conversation, we talk about the state of the media, what is going right, what is going wrong, what he learned from working at BuzzFeed, Politico, New York Times, and now starting his own media company. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 235,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Ben Smith is the co-founder of Semaphore and also the author of a brand new book called Traffic: Genius Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. In this conversation, we talk about the state of the media. What's going right? What's going wrong?

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  What did he learn from working at BuzzFeed, Politico, New York Times, and now starting his own media company? Ben constantly is thinking about the media industry and what is actually going to happen in the future, so it's always a pleasure to talk with him. His new book is fantastic, which I think that you will enjoy as well. Here is my conversation with Ben Smith.

• 1:09Speaker 01

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• 1:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Ben here with me. Ben, you wrote a brand new book, Traffic Genius Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. It seems like that's the whole name of the game today in the media is just like, go viral, get clicks. At least that is from people outside of the media looking in. How do you think about, you know, how much of media today is actually just trying to go viral

• 2:21Anthony Pompliano?

  and get clicks versus what I think maybe is the nostalgic, like, true journalism? Hey, let's go find truth and say the things that speak, you know, kind of truth to power?

• 2:31Speaker 02

  You know, I think it's changing a lot. And I mean, the book tells the story of these people in downtown Manhattan in the neighborhood I'm in now, you know, in the early 2000s, places like Gawker, BuzzFeed, where they like, I mean, it was, I mean, you remember this, but it was early days. Like, it was the first time you could really see, you had this website, and you could see each visitor, you could see who was reading it. And it changed how people thought about media. I mean, everybody had always wanted to be read, but suddenly it was like you were flying with instruments. You could see exactly what was happening. And everybody wanted to be connected to their audience. And suddenly you were right up in the face of your audience with people talking back to you all the time. And I do think it, like, deeply, deeply changed media. I mean, if you look at then, this sort of explosion of social media, it changed society. But I also think, I mean, it's interesting. I mean,

• 3:14Speaker 02

  I think people got sick of it. I mean, I think the sort of way you talk about chasing clicks and virality, you know, there was a period where that felt fun and exciting, which is a little hard to remember. And I think people now feel that they're, that they're, they're being kind of manipulated by algorithms, that they don't really, there's so much incoming, that they don't know what to trust. And I actually think there's a real shift away from, from that moment, which, you know, I have a sort of a lot of time thinking about and talk about a lot more, into a new moment where people are looking for, like, individual, trusted voices. I mean, podcasts like this are a big part of that, actually. Newsletters like we do are a big part of that. So I think, I think actually the audience is to some degree kind of caught on to that sense

• 3:57Speaker 02

  that media companies are trying to manipulate them, trying to get clicks and are sick of it.

• 4:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So this whole idea of like, attention is the new oil. What I always kind of default to is, people definitely hear that and they think kind of negatively about it because of the number of the things that you're talking about. But they blame media companies. And I've always wondered, like, how much of it is like a media business and the incentives within those types of organizations versus just like, no, everyone's trying to get attention. Like, if you have a Twitter account, you're trying to go viral, right? If you have a Substack, you're trying to go viral. If you're just like a dude on the street with a sign, like, you're kind of trying to go viral, right? Is that like, just a human nature thing? Or is there something inherent about like, a media business and the incentives there that kind of change or may put it on steroids?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Well, I think these big platforms, Twitter and Facebook, first of all, but in other areas, Pinterest was part of that. There used to be something called stumble upon, if you remember, you know, and now there's a number of other smaller ones, you know, Reddit. I mean, I think there's, have, you know, maybe everybody wanted attention, but everybody did not have access to the attention of everyone in the entire world. And I think, you know, in the sort of peak, peak days of Facebook, like, when I was working for BuzzFeed in 2015, we published this, um, this picture of a dress that could either have been white and gold or blue and black, if you recall. And everyone in the world saw it within, you know, an hour. I remember I had a colleague, I was in New York, we, you know, my colleague was like, this is crazy, we should publish it.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  She said, a woman had said, a woman who'd been at this wedding sends it to BuzzFeed and says, "My mom and I are arguing about what color this dress is in this weird, bad photo I took." And then we were arguing about it and we post it. My, another colleague of mine was in Jakarta that day. And an hour later, in Jakarta, everybody's arguing about it. I mean, it was this instant moment of global culture. And actually, it was virality on a scale, like, we used to think and we think things are really going viral. They're not like that anymore. Like, nothing's like that anymore. And in fact, remember, we were so, we thought it was cool. Like, it was just a fun, sweet, silly thing. And Jonah Brady, the CEO of BuzzFeed, and this is sort of one of the things in the book, you know, soon after that, ran into a senior person at Facebook and basically said, "Wasn't that cool?" And they were like, "We're not sure that was so cool." Like, how often do you think we should let that happen?

• 6:09Speaker 02

  And we were like, right, this is something they were letting happen. And B, they're getting a little scared about the scale, about the loss of control of their own platform. The sense that anything can just take it over instantly. And I actually think, you know, one of the things really, I, I think the sort of purest, most sort of viral scale, particularly for kind of news, information, conversation, ideas even, probably like peaked in 2017. And I think a lot of, I mean, a lot of people have left those platforms, Twitter, Facebook for, you know, particularly again, I'm talking about kind of news and information, like TikTok is obviously this huge entertainment space, but for podcasts, for newsletters, for more controlled spaces where they're not just assaulted by a zillion people, all of them trying to go viral with some thread

• 6:54Speaker 02

  and are in a more authentic conversation. And, and, and I think another thing that people found, both individuals and certainly media companies, is that attention turned out not to be like oil. We all thought in like 2005, when we were, you know, when you were getting a $9 CPM and you were like, this is just the beginning, we, you know, we were making $9 on a thousand views in this year and we only had 100,000, but next year we're going to have 200,000, next year 300,000. Like this is going to be a, this is like oil and we just hit a well and this can be a huge business. Turned out the difference between attention and oil is that oil is scarce. Oil is a limited resource, right? I mean, like, you know, like Bitcoin, in fact, the core, the, you know, the thing that makes commodities valuable

• 7:39Speaker 02

  is that they're scarce and attention did not turn out to be scarce. Attention turned out to be nearly infinite. And the scale of platforms like Google and Twitter meant that even a publisher that got an enormous amount of eyeballs and attention like BuzzFeed couldn't support quality journalism on it.

• 7:56Anthony Pompliano?

  You talk at the beginning of the book about Jonah, and I think it's his college roommate, they're kind of always making these $2 bets, right? And, and you perfectly laid out where he, I think accidentally went viral early in the 2000s. And then his buddies like, I bet you can't do that again. And then you're like, for the next 20 years, he tried to figure that out. And so it begs this question of like, the dress, it sounds almost like. It wasn't engineered, right? Like you guys were just like, oh, this is cool. We don't actually have an answer. Like, let's see kind of what the audience does. Like, post it, and it just explodes. Versus maybe the threads, or some of this other, like, what I would consider like viral engineered content, where people very much sit down and say, I am going to create a piece of viral content, and that means it needs, you know, aspect A, or aspect B, or aspect C.

• 8:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm gonna post it at a certain time on this platform. I'm gonna get my friends to retweet it. Like, that feels very different than just like, we posted a picture of a dress, and it exploded. Are those two things changing because of the way the algorithms work? Is it like, people now are caught on to the viral threads, and so the dress thing still works? How do you think about engineered versus not?

• 9:00Speaker 02

  It's funny, because at BuzzFeed, when I was there, and all through media, there are sort of two kinds of people. You know, there are people who think, okay, I have a piece of content, and, and if I adjust these seven elements of it, it will go viral. And then there are people who are just like, whoa, this is so cool. I bet everybody else will think so. And I do think that media, that ultimately the winners are the second kind, because it is this, because, because part of what makes the most interesting, most compelling things interesting and compelling, is there something surprising, something you couldn't have predicted, something weird and human, and like, and the, and the version of it that's micro-engineered, oh, you know, never quite reaches that.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  That said, but, you know, I think you can develop, if you are a person type A, you can also develop a passion for things and get better at the actual substance. And if you were a person type B, at BuzzFeed in particular, was full of people who were just good at the internet. They weren't hyper-analytical about it, but they swam in those waters. It's like, you're really good at English grammar, not because you studied English grammar, but because you're fluent in English. And I think, like, for people who live on the internet and get great, and I think the people who are... The people who are best for better and worse at making viral content like, say, President Donald Trump, it's not because he like made a study of the seven aspects. It's because he just knows it.

• 10:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's like intuition almost to a degree and really gets it. So we've got BuzzFeed on one side and we've got Gawker on the other side, kind of in the book. And there are these two tails, if you will. I think if you went on the street and you ask people who pay attention, but maybe aren't inside the media, there's a generalization that like BuzzFeed is like a positive place that's like cool and they have the listicles. And like, maybe some people think it's like, kind of like dumber content when it was really going viral, right? But it's like very much positive oriented. And I think that they think about it as like, hey, they don't really do harm. Gawker, on the other hand, I think people, again, generalization would be like, oh, those people are constantly tearing people down. And there's like some negativity associated with it, et cetera. I'm not saying whether those are fair.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  I think that's, I think that's true. I think if you ask people who worked at those places, that's how they saw it. BuzzFeed's slogan, when I got there was no haters. Then, yeah, like could be dumb. And Gawker's relieved in what they would call a kind of ruthless honesty. And you know, when they were like, they started, they were like a little blog written by these kind of clever young women in New York, who would like infiltrate the Conde Nast cafeteria and write about how ridiculous it was, which was sort of like genuinely kind of harm, not like harmless fun and, you know, picking on much bigger, more powerful institutions that, that deserve to be poked at.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  And I do think that, but there were these two very different philosophies of like, what is the internet going to be like? Like Jonah, who founded BuzzFeed, really thought as people start to like share things in public on social media, they're going to share positive stuff that makes them look good. I mean, we definitely had a specific theory that there's no way people are going to share divisive political content because it makes you look like a crazy person. Like, who would do that? That did not turn out to be a true theory. And Gawker had this other approach, which was that the thing the internet can really do is say the things that you would never say before to like the, you know, just to like journalists. You talk to a journalist about their story and they're really fun and interesting to talk to. And they give you all this gossip and then you read the story and it's really boring.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  And Gawker was going to be like, no, we're going to say the stuff that we say to each other in bars, but not, but not in person. I mean, it turns out sometimes you don't say that stuff because it's incredibly malicious or mean. And as Gawker grew more powerful and more of a cultural force, suddenly. It's less fun in games and it's more like this big scary culture, you know, publisher is attacking random civilians. And I think they didn't, I mean, I definitely have felt this. I'm sure you felt this. If you start a media thing and it's little and you're a weirdo outsider. And then suddenly you're kind of a powerful player. And it's a weird adjustment to realize like, oh, suddenly I have power and that comes with some responsibility. And I think Gawker accumulated all this power and reach and scale and audience.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  And never quite got it around its head around that that puts you in a different position. And you're no longer the kid throwing spitballs in the back of the class.

• 13:14Anthony Pompliano?

  It's interesting because I didn't understand this kind of phenomenon, if you will, until when I first started writing on the internet. It was very much like, if you're punching, you can only punch up, right? Like there's literally no one below you.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you're on the, you're on the floor. Totally. I remember that too.

• 13:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Like literally, there is no punching down because literally there's no one below you. But as you get bigger audiences, and it's not even necessarily like more power. I actually think just like size of audience, right? Yes, that equates somewhat to power, but like even if people don't even care.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  That is power. Yes.

• 13:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're just, you know, kind of listening or whatever. Somebody once said to me, you know, once an email crosses a certain size of audience, like you'd be the number one article on a CNBC.com. Every single day, if that was listed as just an article, not an email newsletter or, you know, take a tweet and how many impressions it gets or whatever. And so they were like, again, that doesn't mean that like you should go and do that. That doesn't mean that it's a replacement for that stuff. It's just, it's different type of content, but to give you a sense of like comparing audience sizes. Like you very quickly can accumulate a large audience on these other platforms. And so if we go back to this idea of like BuzzFeed and Gawker, when BuzzFeed started to go more into like, I'll call it like the serious journalism. It almost felt like virality was.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's when, that's when I got there. That was sort of my job.

• 14:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Exactly. And it felt like virality was really the way to grow an audience. And then it almost felt like, okay, now we have to get serious and like build a business. We have to actually do real journalism, like all that type of stuff. Is that something that now in hindsight, knowing everything you know about what worked, what didn't work, et cetera? A playbook that you think people will follow? Or do you feel like, um, you know, when you start the company today, it doesn't seem like you're like, oh, let's go viral. Right? It actually seems like you're like, no, let's do like great work from day one and build an audience that has like a different brand promise than maybe what BuzzFeed had in the early days.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, people wanna find sort of like big sweeping generalizations about the media business. And as you know, it's just like a weird, hard business and there are lots of different corners. And I think it's worth understanding with these big viral companies that grew so big, raised so much money, hired so many people. BuzzFeed and Vice, probably the biggest, like, here's what they were, here's what we were thinking. Which was that in the 1980s, some entrepreneurs rolled cable lines out across the country and rolled wires into people's homes. And to get people to adopt them, they needed MTV, they needed CNN. And they knew from the start that they needed to pay a huge share of the money they were taking in to MTV, to CNN, to ESPN, to get people to look at these, you know, to turn on the televisions and plug them in.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  And the core of that cable business model was there's distributors with, who own the wires. There's media companies who own, who, who create the content. And there's gotta be some financial arrangement where everybody gets rich, or the whole thing doesn't work.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  And the, the theory that Vice and BuzzFeed and others were operating under fundamentally was there's this new form of distribution. It's Facebook, it's Snap, it's Twitter, it's Pinterest. And as those guys compete with each other, as they compete with everything else in the world, just like cable, they're gonna start hiring media companies to make the content for them. They're not gonna depend on user-generated content forever. Now, you can argue about whether that was totally delusional, or whether things just didn't break that way. But they did not break that way. And the reason you see these companies going out of business is, there are a lot of reasons, a lot of mismanagement. We did lots of stupid stuff. But the fundamental bet, the fundamental thing that people were putting in hundreds of, the company, investors were putting hundreds of millions of dollars into those companies, was that bet.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  And I think that's just the notion that you're gonna build your company as a supplier of content to a social platform that will somehow pay you, that, that would be insane to try to do today. And so instead, I think what most, what really all cross media people are doing is trying to find an audience who's really interested in what you're doing and building a one-to-one relationship with them that isn't mediated by some platform. Yeah, and so but that's a that's not a business where you can reach a billion people on your first day either.

• 17:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk about the age of disinformation. What's fascinating to me is like, we're talking about virality and the dress is awesome. Like, I remember debating it with people and being like, I don't give a shit about this dress, but like, if you want my opinion and you got opinion, like, you know, let's duke it out and see who's right, who's wrong. But when that all of a sudden becomes something that's much more either serious or could potentially harm people or almost program people's minds. Like, I think a lot about like the algorithms, especially on social media. I recently tweeted and was like, you either train the algorithm to show you the things you want, or it programs you, right? Like, there's only two paths here.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  And I think one thing about young people now, it's so interesting, is that people who use TikTok are hyper aware that they are programming TikTok to feed them what they, you know, and that their behavior is being mirrored. But no, what you said about the dress is really interesting, because the thing about the dress is it was incredibly divisive. That's what made it so fun, was some people, you know, two thirds of people thought it was, I think, white and gold, and one third thought it was blue and black. They were correct, by the way. But, um, the, uh, but it was divisive, and people argued about it. It was divisive in the most harmless and sweet way you can imagine, but it was divisive. And the reason it went so big on Facebook was because Facebook had, you know, when Facebook wasn't trying to elect Donald Trump or elect Joe Biden or whatever, Facebook was trying to, you know, you'd been spending 14 minutes, they wanted you to spend 15 minutes.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  And the way that they could keep get you to stick was quote unquote engaging content. And they were running all these experiments, but what's, you know, how do we find the most engaging stuff? And for a while, it was like, well, if you share this, that's an indication that it engaged you and you'll, somebody else will be engaged with it. But then it turned out there was all this stuff that was like Hillary Clinton has been replaced by a body double.

• 18:46Speaker 01

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• 19:14Speaker 02

  And like you would share that because like LOL kind of and also because you hate Hillary Clinton or whatever, but not because you read it and liked it. And actually, it was garbage content and it was an embarrassment for them. And so they thought, okay, that doesn't quite work. Okay, the way we will really detect engagement is by comments. Like, forget the shares and the likes. The really engaging stuff is the stuff that people comment on. Now, it turned out the thing people would comment on most in the world is like, I post like a super racist meme. And then you write, you're a racist. And then I write, no, you're a racist. And then we have like a really elevated conversation like that for a while. The algorithm says, wow, this is incredibly meaningful engagement. We're going to show this to everyone on the entire platform. And particularly, particularly racially divisive content spread like wildfire on Facebook.

• 20:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you take, again, maybe racially divisive is, I think, many people in society, hopefully, most people would say, hey, that's wrong, right? We don't want that type of stuff being the dominant content that people are being consumed. I don't think the platforms will like, hey, this is the type of content we want to be promoting or any of that type of stuff. So let's just assume everyone's a good actor, right? For the purpose of this conversation.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Well, I would say the platforms had these ideas about, well, we don't, we don't want to look at the details of the content. We just want to measure its performance. And so they were very reluctant to just like, look at a horrible argument, just an obviously terrible, destructive, screaming match about race and say, look, this is bad. Like, they were just reluctant just to say that, which any normal person could say. But anyway, they got there.

• 20:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so if you take that and you now look at, let's take an election, right? I think that's probably the one that at least people in the, you know, modern day, they point to and they're like, okay, regardless of what side you come out on, on political affiliations or whatever, like, there was a whole bunch of stuff that happened in 2016 and in 2020, and likely will happen going into 2024. In terms of the use of these platforms, we saw recently that Ron DeSantis is supposedly going to make his announcement with Elon Musk on Twitter. Some people love that idea, some people hate that. You can already see that the wheels are in motion here. Is it just like, this is the trajectory and there's no going back? Like, is the genie kind of out of the bottle on a lot of this stuff? And whether the platforms actually want to change

• 21:27Anthony Pompliano?

  or not, like, they're addicted, people are addicted, and it is just this game of attention, even if we're going down a path that like, may not be best for society or for individuals, like, mental health type stuff?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  You know, I could be really wrong, but I think actually the platforms are fundamentally in decline. Like, I don't know about you, I've been, I spend very little time on Facebook these days. I mean, I'm on there once in a while to check on somebody's birthday. And when I go on, it's, it's, it's cute animal videos and the reels. That's how they're trying to keep people, and they are cute. Like my, I saw a really cute video of a dog the other day when I was on there. But like, I don't, I mean, I think Facebook was 10 years ago, or seven years ago. Facebook was this like centrally culturally relevant force. And I think it is clearly not anymore. Twitter, I think, you know, Musk is trying, I mean, I think it was already kind of falling apart. And for me, again, like just as a long time power user, love Twitter. It no longer does the job if I open Twitter. I just want to know what's happening today.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  I'm a journalist, like, is there a crisis in the Middle East? Like, what's going on? I still find Twitter pretty fun and interesting because it's like everyone screaming at each other about Twitter. But it no longer does the job of what is happening. Like, I go to The Drudge Report and to The New York Times. And I think Twitter, again, like, not that it's not going to remain a real place and a real business and a real whatever. But it's not a centrally, it's not as culturally central as it was five years ago. I mean, the leading indicator of that, which Musk actually noticed, is that celebrities have all left. Celebrity used to be on Twitter, they're not anymore. Like, it's just, it's not, it's, and I think, you know, there are spaces. I think Reddit is the best example of a network that kind of like stabilized, found a place in society.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Nobody thinks that like America is run on Reddit, but it's actually pretty great and interesting and useful. Um, I think Twitter could easily become that. Facebook could become some version of that. I lost my dog actually recently, and the first thing I did was go to the neighborhood Facebook group. And somebody had found the dog, it was great for that, but they didn't elect the President of the United States. Um, and I know, so I actually think, I think that moment of us all having our brains melted by social media is, is kind of drawn to a close. And I think it's basically because we're all sick of it. Like, I think. That's why.

• 23:34Anthony Pompliano?

  So I have this question for you. You have no clue that I'm going to ask you this, but I felt this would be a great way to take everything that you've learned about virality, platforms, content, human psychology, like just everything in your life, right? And boil it down to if you were running for president of the United States today, where would you go post constantly? Where would your focus go? Would it be online, like to the Twitters, the Facebooks and those platforms? Would it be like dances on Tik Tok? Would it be, you know, hey, forget the online stuff. Like, I'm just going to go do rallies in person. Like, how do you think about running for president? And it appears is all about like, take a message and get it out to as many people in the most convincing way possible. So then on a certain date, they go and they vote for you. Right? And like,

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's funny you mention that. I was actually, I'm honored to announce my presidential campaign on your show. That was, that was the plan. You know, people have been, people often call me and they say, Ben, you ought to run for, um, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the politics is kind of, is the media business. And I mean, I think, and I saw, I mean, and for years has been increasingly.

• 24:41Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean by that?

• 24:41Speaker 02

  I mean, I think, and I think, I mean, just to, you know, that you're putting out images and ideas and videos and audio and you're competing for attention with people like you and me. But I remember I first noticed this covering the Obama campaign for Politico. And we were making these dumb videos where we like interviewed each other about politics and about the Obama campaign was making vastly better, really beautiful and slick videos. And it was like, oh my God, we're competing with the people we're covering and they're beating us. This is terrible. And now that's just sort of the world we live in. But so I think that a lot of that same kind of thinking is going on in these campaigns. I mean, Republicans and Democrats are very different. If you're running for the Democratic nomination, there's a series of sort of establishment gatekeepers, like the New York Times, you want to impress.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  If you're running for the Republican nomination, you want to show particularly this post-Trump era, that you are not part of the establishment. You want to have fights with the establishment. You want to show how independent you are of the establishment. So for Trump, like going on CNN and attacking Caitlyn Collins is like the ideal version of that. For Ron DeSantis, you know, I think going on Twitter is sort of his version of that and doing it with Musk. I mean, I think the big question now, and I could be totally wrong, is

• 25:54Speaker 02

  You know, because it's really, I mean, it's again, it's like for now, right now, it's a question about Republican primary voters. Do Republican primary voters, you know, they watch television, they read Twitter, they see that people are mad about

• 26:06Speaker 02

  transgender rights, they see that people are mad about Bud Light and something, something, they see that people are mad about a bunch of things that have no, zero impact on their daily lives. And I think there is a big question of, do you, you know, do you run a campaign that is about these cultural issues that like, I don't know, like I send my kids to public school in New York City? And this stuff never comes up. And I would assume that if you were in Iowa, it is very unlikely that your school was spending a ton of time talking about race and gender. Like it just, I just think it's, it's a huge part of what you see on Fox News, what you see on Twitter and a very small part of people's lives.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  And I think there is this thing where Ron DeSantis is making a bet that these Twitter, these issues that are really only exist when you look at the internet are really going to compel people and they might. And I think Trump always, I mean, the core issue that he ran on was immigration, which was not a fake issue and wasn't something that was mostly on Twitter. Was something that Republican voters were furious about, had been furious about for years. For, you know, sometimes because they were racist, sometimes because they were mad about the declining incomes of electricians. I mean, a range of reasons, right? Some kind of disturbing and some totally legitimate.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  But I guess, I mean, maybe I am really naive, but I do think that you gotta find at some level, the candidate who's going to win is going to be talking about stuff that matters in people's daily lives, not stuff that only matters when they turn on their screens.

• 27:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I do wonder how much of the world is like a mirror to the internet. Like we talk a lot about like these, you know, Twitter's a mirror of society. You know, will be something to hear people talk about, but like Obama, I think actually was the first one, you know, he had the kind of the button down shirt with the rolled up sleeves and he was trying to, he was still presidential, but he was trying to be a little bit more relatable, I think, and kind of connect with people. And you've seen to some degree. Like across society, people have become like less serious, right? And you kind of see this degradation of seriousness. And I always wonder like, how much of that is driven by the media versus like, the media is just reporting on like what they're seeing? And so it is this like reinforcing thing?

• 28:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And maybe like the most kind of obvious example is like Mark Zuckerberg with the hoodie made it cool. And like, that was like free rein for an entire, you know, industry, basically to like suits? Like, why would we wear suits? Right? And so you kind of get this movement in that direction.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  And it was signal. I mean, for, you know, why, you know, I think, I mean, I think it's all signaling and it's sort of, I mean, you know, Donald Trump wanted to signal that he was going back to like a sort of 1950s idea of America. And part of that was wearing a suit and having a wife who'd been a model in his perfect family staring up adoringly at him or whatever. Like, I think it's all signaling policy. I think Republicans mostly are very buttoned, like look like men, almost mostly men from a while ago with big stuck out jaws and adoring wives who don't necessarily work because that's the sort of, that's the values they're trying to project in a, you know, in a substantive way. I think it's always signaling.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, I remember it's some, and I actually, I covered the Obama campaign and there was a point, and maybe it was the financial crisis, when they decided he had to wear a tie. And it was like a big thing, he didn't really wear ties. I'm sure he never worn ties. And they were like, all right, now you're, you have to look presidential and that involves wearing a tie. And it is funny because people mostly comment on women politicians appearances and everybody gets annoyed at you when you do. But of course, these choices they make are incredibly deliberate and are and do sort of intend to signal what they're up to. I don't know. I mean, there was this kind of crazy moment, I remember this Kamala Harris was on the cover of Vogue. And they put a, this very informal looking picture of her wearing sneakers. And her team freaked out and I think her family got mad and they said it was kind of racist to do that.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  And not in keeping with the dignity of the office, which I thought was insane. It's like, no, no, like you, the person like. The best, the reason that people liked her when they did was that she felt like this relatable, normal person, not in the dignity of the office of the vice president. But I do think these are choices that politicians take incredibly seriously and think about a lot.

• 30:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm. Go back to this idea of the competition because we're talking about like the politicians, right? Is that still true in the business world as well? Like, do you think that the journalists that you all employ, or journalists at the New York Times, or, you know, name your publication, and then like, I don't know, maybe take like the Substack writer who covers a similar, you know, beat, if you want, I'll kind of put that in air quotes, because I don't know if you guys would agree that it's a beat or not for a Substack writer.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Oh, totally, yeah.

• 30:45Anthony Pompliano?

  But, and then also maybe take like the shit poster on Twitter.

• 30:50Speaker 01

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• 31:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, like?

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, or the, or the, or like Autism Capital, right? Like, or the sort of Twitter rando who's incredibly wired in and breaks news. No, I mean, I think it's a, yeah, I mean, I think you have to see yourself as competing with and talking to everybody all the time when you're like a, and I don't think, I mean, I'm not a big fan of the notion that there's like this thing called a capital J journalist that is different from another person who is good at getting information and ideas. Like, there's, I think when journalists pretend that they have some like special set of skills because they went to journalism school, like, that's not true. And eventually, people figure that out. So, and I think the big thing that media companies are wrestling with right now is, you know, if you're the Wall Street Journal, you are used to treating

• 32:01Speaker 02

  hundreds and hundreds of journalists as sort of interchangeable cogs in a machine that produce Wall Street Journal articles. But you have an audience increasingly that does want to connect to individuals. And by the way, like, not all those journalists are as good as each other, and a few of them are huge stars, but you've sort of hidden that, like, you know that, but you're like, not letting the reader in on that. And so, certainly at Semaphore, like, our whole theory of the case is that there's a kind of journalist for whom... Doing your own Substack thing is not natural. It's like, it's kind of just I am. It's like people who do a lot of reporting, who break a lot of news, who get into some of the big legal and political fights over the news they break, do kind of need and want a newsroom, need and want some legal support. It's not, I think Substack has been great for commentators and analysts, but you don't see so many.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  If you need a team, sometimes a story is going to take a couple of weeks and you're going to need to vanish. And if somebody else write your newsletter for a couple of weeks, like it's, it's a kind of journals and it's harder to do is it's not really a solo thing. But those reporters do have voices, do have ideas, do have things they want to say, do covet that direct connection with the audience that you get in contemporary media and you don't get at the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. And so for people like, for me, for Liz Hoffman, who to my mind is like maybe the best reporter at the Wall Street Journal, who we hired to cover finance for us. You know, we're trying to say, come to summer for you can have the best of both worlds. You can have a great newsroom and league in the kind of infrastructure of a newsroom. But we also understand that the way media works now is the audience wants to hear from a human being,

• 33:30Speaker 02

  not from this faceless brand. And so I think we're trying to, to build that system in some sense, build like kind of a platform for that kind of journalist.

• 33:39Anthony Pompliano?

  What I find fascinating about what you all are doing is not only the types of people you're trying to hire, but also even some of the form factors. Like I think it was Liz, actually, I saw she did an interview and it's like, almost like text messages. Right?

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Kind of back, back and forth. Like talk a little bit as to, you know, you could just post it as an interview, right?

• 33:56Speaker 02

  It was, hey, first of all, we are, we are very, we are very authentic. When they're text messages, they are actually text messages. But I think people really feel, I mean, I mean, I feel like there's this weird like opacity to a lot of media. Like you read an article in the New York Times and there's some ideas in it and there's some assertions. And like, which ones are the reporter's opinion? Which ones are their editor's opinion? Which ones are the policies of the New York Times? Which are just indisputable facts? It's not totally clear. And that is, and I think that there's a kind of an uncanny valley there. And so we are obsessed with kind of transparency, which isn't to say kind of old fashioned objectivity. Like I am a robot who has no point of view and I'm just delivering you the facts. No one, no one believes that.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  So if we, but so it does mean like if, I love text messages because. You know, with a video interview or a profile, the reader can wonder like, oh, did you edit it? Like, how, what, what, you know, what was like, what's the real thing? Even with the transcript, with text messages, what I love about text, actually, like, you see exactly what I see. There's no additional hand text. Like, it's kind of cool that way. And then in our articles, we also, in a stylized, kind of deliberate way, label the sections. Like, here's the news and here is Ben's opinion. And like Anthony thinks I'm an idiot and has a different opinion. We're going to stick that in too and, and label it. And so, yeah, I think that's, that's something, you know, people seem to like right now.

• 35:16Anthony Pompliano?

  When you take this kind of unique way of presenting the news, how do you think about distributing it? Obviously, you guys have the newsletters. What's kind of the long game? Is it like, okay, let's get the newsletters up and running and then we can eventually like get people back to, you know, own and operated site? Podcast, like, just talk about like distribution in general.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  I mean, I would love your advice. It's such a weird world right now because it's like the whole social, social media has just massively kind of receded. All the traffic that used to come from a place like Facebook is gone, or a lot of it. But nothing has really replaced it. And so, you know, for us, newsletters are a great way to reach people and a great individualized way to reach people with something that they've signed up for, that they want. If they don't open it, you can take them off the list. Like, it's just very natural. But also emails is technology from the 1990s. Like, I can't believe that the final form of internet journalism will be email. The web is important for us. We get, you know, a lot of readers there, but is not what it once was, isn't the central pillar of an organization. We do a lot of events. It's a huge part of what we do.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  And that's, I do think post-COVID, it feels like there's this huge appetite for it. That's been very, very successful for us. We do, you know, we produce great videos and are, you know, but not at a huge scale. And they're thinking about audio. They haven't, just didn't want to bite off more than we could chew at launch, honestly. But I do think audio fits into that kind of direct, you know, way of reaching an audience directly and talking to people directly. But it, it does feel, I'm sort of like, okay, what's next? Like, you know, like, I think like Substack is like, oh, is it? Can we build this world inside Substack with notes? There's this thing Artifact, Apple News is out there. I mean, there's a, it's a really interesting, strange moment. Part of why I wanted to start a new thing. It feels like a moment when everything is changing again.

• 36:57Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see what is working, what are the things that like, maybe people don't realize have more impact than they do, right? So like the newsletter is to me, just watching what you guys are doing, like, okay, obviously the newsletters are working, right?

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:12Anthony Pompliano?

  But are there other things that you have discovered as you guys have tried different things and kind of launching this that you're saying, hey, you know, this works much better than people maybe would think?

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Totally. I would say I've only been doing this for six months. And so no one should like

• 37:23Anthony Pompliano?

  You're supposed to be an expert.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  My advice.

• 37:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Six, six months.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  I was in New York Times for two years before, kind of throwing stones into everybody else's glass houses, writing about media. I mean, I would say events are the thing that have been surprisingly successful for us.

• 37:38Anthony Pompliano?

  How do those work? You, you, you're getting just like a single person for an interview? Is it like more of the whole schedule?

• 37:43Speaker 02

  No, what we've been doing is getting, you know, a huge lineup of news makers to like when, when the IMF and World Bank met in Washington, we had this world economy summit where Poppy Harlow from CNN came and interviewed Lael Brainard, Biden's top economic advisor. There was a bunch of CEOs and big government officials and made a ton of news. Lots of people came, sponsors wanted to be associated with it because it was this sort of central conversation about these huge issues. So we've done that, that kind of stuff. And that's been, yeah, it's just been, I think, you know, it's all the execution. You have to actually get incredibly interesting people to then, and then push them on stage to say interesting stuff. But that's been really good for us.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  You know, yeah, but, but I guess, I mean, my, the other thing, and this is, and this is a silly thing to say because it's so obvious, but in my part of the journalism business, scoops are the coin of the realm. Like it's called news, you gotta have news. And so, you know, for we've broken a lot of news, we broke, I think maybe the biggest story we broke was that Microsoft was about to invest in chat GPT. And OpenAI, but, but and a lot of stories on AI, a lot of finance, a lot out of Washington. And that's, I mean, ultimately, that's how you break through and just get people like even people who've never heard of you are like, hey, what is that thing? So, so we focus a lot on breaking news. It's not, that's not a

• 39:05Speaker 02

  You know, it's not sort of, nobody's gonna come and come back and back just because you're randomly breaking news, but but is a way to introduce yourself to people.

• 39:12Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you see the relationship with sources changing when, you know, you're at BuzzFeed, Politico, New York Times, now you have your own thing. If you just were like a pseudonymous person on Twitter, had an account, like, how do you think about, are they willing to tell you more or less? Do they care where you are versus it's you?

• 39:30Speaker 02

  It's really different. I mean, it used to be, well, I think the biggest change is that sources always have the the option of just going direct, right? It used to be if you were a political figure and you had a story to tell, you basically had to go to the New York Times or the Washington Post and one of two or three reporters and you and they had all this power and you and you would kiss their ass all the time in the hopes that, you know, when you had something that they would write it in a nice way. And now you can just tweet it. And like, if you want, and why would you take your news to the New York Times? And it and it has changed, it really has have changed that power dynamic. I mean, it also, it was not the highest form of journalism to rewrite people's press releases.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  So who kind of who cares? But, but, but, yeah, I think that the, you know, the gate, I mean, this is one of a million ways in which gatekeepers used to exercise so much power. And it is like, it's, it's sort of dumb. I mean, so obvious that it's almost feels dumb to say, but it used to be, if you wanted to reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people, there were two ways to do that. You could purchase and own a printing press, or you could have the rights to a broadcast tower. Those were the two ways. There wasn't a third. And like, it's, it's sort of, and then the people who controlled those two, if you count Radio 3, like, pieces of infrastructure, were the people who controlled information. And when

• 40:54Speaker 02

  there was like a coup in a country, you know, and the fall of the Soviet Union, where people were killed in the 91, when the Soviet Union's falling apart, were around television towers. Because in places like Latvia and Lithuania, the people, the freedom fighters were defending the television towers against the tanks. Because that was in, it's like, hard to remember now that, that, that, that, that was the case, because now it's wide open. But I still think there's sort of a impulse in some of these legacy media companies that like, we're the gatekeepers, all information runs through us, it doesn't exist if we don't publish it. And that's just so disconnected from the reality we all live in now.

• 41:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk to me about funding of these media businesses. I think that there's kind of two interesting things, right? So you all raised money. Sam Bankman-Fried was a part of that. You guys kind of got into that whole thing. You just announced-

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Today, I would say I'm in a great mood today because we closed the book on Sam Bankman-Fried. We raised a new round. We repurchased his interest.

• 41:49Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So explain kind of maybe like initial fundraising and how you thought about, you know, where do you go find funding for a media organization? Like, who's even interested in funding this type of stuff? And then how you think about like, okay, now I've got to go and raise more capital. And I know Henry Kravitz, Jerry Yang, like a bunch of these kind of, you know, very well-known people are investing.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  So you're asking like, what kind of lunatic would invest in media in this day and age?

• 42:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, not only what kind, but also just like, how do you think about it, right? Because like, although people don't look at it this way, like, it's very much a double opt-in. Like, you want certain people to invest, right? And then you also want to make sure that, or you need to go find people who want to invest. And so like, how do you get the double opt-in there?

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I think I would, one thing is, when we were at BuzzFeed, you know, we had this idea that I talked about earlier on cable, that this could be a huge business that could return massively. And actually, had we sold to Disney for $600 million in 2014, I suppose it would have to those early investors who were venture capitalists. Andreessen Horowitz was an investor. I mean, I go back and I think, you know what, media is certainly not news in particular, is not a business that is going to 10x in three years and give you a sort of venture-like return. It's a thing that's important for the world. And if you are good, experienced operators and work incredibly hard, can be a pretty good business, you know, can be a, you know, a profitable business with a good return.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  But you need people who believe in the mission, who, and believe in the mission to the degree that they're not going to, that they're going to resist the temptation to try to use their investment to meddle with the content. And-

• 43:28Speaker 02

  And then you and ideally, and I think in that context, it's good to have a lot like a diverse group of investors and ideologically diverse group of investors. So you're not, you know, so that they understand that there's sort of an arms length relationship. They have to be, and they have to be patient. And then the other thing, I mean, I think part of, I mean, my own experience, right, was that this sort of crazy ride at BuzzFeed and so coming to Semaphore, it was really, I mean, the part of the reason that I went into business with my partner, Justin Smith, no relation, is he's really like the best news business operator of our generation. He was CEO of Bloomberg. Before that, he would turn the Atlantic around, series of very successful senior roles in the, in the news business. And there's this quirk of the news business that it's been such a bad business for so long, that the ranks of executives

• 44:12Speaker 02

  at news businesses are not always the best and the brightest. Like, would you want to sell ads in a newspaper? Or would you want to sell like used cars? You might prefer to sell used cars just in terms of your comp. And so as the news business has declined and been in kind of this awful death spiral for years, like the quality, like the quality of talent on the business side is very uneven. And so, you know, it's a really hard business and the difference between great execution and, you know, not great execution is huge. And it's a tough enough business that you, it's not a place where you can just kind of come in and like, put your hands out and collect money. Um, I mean, that's probably not true anywhere, but I definitely, you know, wanted to build like a grown up, sustainable business around news.

• 44:57Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about what that looks like, is this something where, you know, Vice, obviously just filed for bankruptcy and like they hired hundreds, if not thousands of people at one point. Is that like the type of business today? Or do you think it's more like 50 people and you kind of punch above your weight in terms of employees versus, you know, reach and monetization?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's some degree goes back to the talent stuff we were talking about, you know, in a world where people want to feel very connected to an individual, you don't want to hire a hundred business reporters. You want to hire one or two really great ones.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  And you know, you can maybe in other verticals and other niches, you can hire one or two people, but you're not looking to, um, yeah, it's, I mean, both of necessity, but also in reality, it doesn't make sense to try to, the goal isn't to grow infinitely.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  But I think a lot of our companies sort of looked at these big industrial age news companies and said, well, that's kind of the model. You want to have hundreds and hundreds of journalists. And I think that's, that's both not how people connect to media now and not, in an incredibly irresponsible way to build a business. You know, you want to race to profitability and then you can start thinking about growth.

• 46:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Last thing that I've got on this is in the book, you talk about Breitbart. And I know you worked at Politico and like, there's like specialization, right? And so there's like political type content, but then there's like political left, political right. There, there's, um, you know, you can go across these sectors, even if you look at, um, inside of some of the financial markets, like you have very specific viewpoints and things like that. It seems like you guys aren't really going after that. Like you're, you're taking a stance maybe on like, what type of media company needs to exist? You know, you talk about like meeting the moment, but it doesn't seem like you're specializing on any one topic or any kind of viewpoint.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're certainly not trying to kind of, I mean, I just think that the, there obviously is a huge business in serving committed right wing partisans or committed left wing partisans. And that's not the business. And it, but also there's a lot of people doing that. And I think that the, the dynamics of the Trump era and of the sort of new subscription businesses pulled a lot of mainstream outlets into a kind of resistance cheerleading posture in the Trump moment that they're kind of trying to dial back from. And I, I mean, I do, I do think that you, you, I think that it's often framed as there's a debate between our, our job is to be totally objective, just the facts, I'm a journalist with no opinions,

• 47:23Speaker 02

  or our job is to stand on the barricades against Donald Trump or for Donald Trump or whatever. And I guess I, I don't think that's actually what anybody's asking. Like I don't, I'm not sure anybody like, I don't think any reader is saying, please lie to me if that's what I want. I mean, I think people are saying like, we want a human being who's with a point of view, who could be wrong, who has the humility, who knows, by the way, they could be wrong. And he's bringing new facts and he's helping to navigate this very chaotic, complicated landscape. And I think there's a big, I just think there's a big demand for that.

• 47:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Your new book, Traffic Genius, Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. When somebody reads this, how much of this did you write for entertainment purposes as to like telling the stories versus like there's a message specifically that you want to get across?

• 48:08Speaker 02

  You know, I'm basically a reporter and I kind of came out of, I got to the New York Times in 2020 and just think, and just thought like, what the hell did I just go through? Like, what was the last 15 years? And mostly, and I did not, I mean, I think there are lessons in that about, about certainly about the business and about the sort of shape of American politics and global politics. But mostly it really is, it tries trying to be the story. Like, it's sort of the crazy origin story of this bizarre moment we're living in.

• 48:36Anthony Pompliano?

  The fact that you say you're basically a reporter is almost like a qualification that you have to-

• 48:41Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm not a deep, I mean, I mean, I'm not, it's not meant to be a sort of like six principles of how to succeed in business.

• 48:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Although you can, it's sort of the opposite.

• 48:51Anthony Pompliano?

  There are many lessons, is I think a good way to put it.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they're not all like positive lessons.

• 48:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, maybe lessons of what not to do.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you.

• 48:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. So Traffic Genius, Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. If you haven't read it yet, I highly suggest you go pick it up. We'll have the link in the description. And then Ben, talk a little bit, maybe just in terms of if people want to check out what you guys are doing now at Semaphore, where should we send them? Are there a specific newsletter, a website?

• 49:18Speaker 02

  I mean, go to, go to semaphore.com and check it out. But I do think for, for your listeners in particular, Liz Hoffman, to my mind, the best business reporter at the Wall Street Journal came over and joined us is just dominating these big stories about, about Wall Street. And we've also just been covering the hell out of AI. Reid Albergati, who is best known in his life for having broken the Lance Armstrong story, but has been, is, you know, digging really deep on sort of the, you know, the partly like the untold backstory of this AI moment. He had this incredible story the other day about how Elon Musk, you know, who had been a huge investor in the first version of OpenAI, had this previously unreported confrontation with Sam Altman where Musk basically said, this company's failing, you're falling behind Google.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  You should, I need to, I Elon Musk and the only man who can save this company and should take over right now. And Altman and the other founders sort of fought him back, fought back, and Musk walked away with a billion dollars and incredibly high stakes, interesting stuff happening right now in that world. And so that's our tech newsletter that I hope, that I think your audience might like.

• 50:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I read multiple things you guys put out and I really enjoy it. So keep up the great work and the book is fantastic as well. I will wait for your next act and then we'll do this again once, once you get something else to talk about.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  Thanks, Anthony. And this was really generous of you to have me on.