Can The News Industry Survive The AI Era? — With Ben Smith, Nayeema Raza, and Joe Marchese

Ben Smith and Nayeema Raza host Mixed Signals, a new media podcast from Semafor. And Joe Marchese is the general & build partner at Human Ventures. The three join Big Technology Podcast for a VC + Journalist conversation on whether the news industry can survive its dealings with generative AI tech providers, like OpenAI, after several publications inked multi-million dollar content deals. Tune in for a conversation that explores whether the news industry is setting itself up for a repeat of past mistakes made with Facebook and Google. We also cover whether the news industry can harness AI, what the value of news is to AI companies, and whether AI can be taught to emulate media brands and pay a licensing fee. Plus much more. Tune in for a lively conversation about a core issues facing the AI field today. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's talk about whether the news industry can survive the AI era with a venture capitalist and three journalists. Oh, this is going to be fun. All that and more is coming up right after the break. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience, and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs, and lessons along the

• 0:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for free consultation.

• 1:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today. We are going to talk about AI and news, and also what's going on with the media industry, because there's a lot of big stories there, and it's going to be covered in a new podcast by two of our guests that started on Friday. Ben Smith is here. He's the editor in chief of Semaphore, and he's the co-host of Mix Signals. Ben, welcome back to the show. Always nice to see you, Alex. Likewise, and we're also joined by Nayeema Raza, who is Ben's co-host on Mix Signals. Nayeema, great to meet you, and welcome to the show.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Thank you for having us.

• 1:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we also have Joe Marchese here. He's a partner at Human Ventures, a VC that will actually speak with journalists. Look at that. Joe, welcome back to the show. Hey, how are you? We're speaking, this is Wednesday ahead of the show, and we're speaking on a day when both The Atlantic and Vox Media Inc. deals with OpenAI effectively giving them their content and they can train on it and there's some credit swap potentially. And you know, this has been, this feels a lot like the BuzzFeed days when We Inc. deals with Facebook and Twitter and thought that the news partnering with tech was going to usher in this new era of productivity and financial stability for journalism. And that didn't exactly work. Do you think that there's a chance this time will be different? Or is it the same

• 2:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  problem just being repeated with the new technology?

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Um, you know, I think everything is, you know, it's all, it's always different. I gotta say, whenever you're getting paid in credits, that, that, that should make you a little nervous. Um, that, I don't know if they're counting that in the numbers that they're releasing because what's attractive about these deals to the companies is that they're 100% margin revenue. You know, they're just, these are all companies that either are losing money or kind of like really working to break even. And this is free money. But, but I do think that it's, there's a real danger that comes with that, that it's, I don't think it's exactly like, I mean, I think it's like Facebook in that a lot of the Facebook deals were intended to kind of politically mollify an industry that could

• 3:23Speaker 02

  do them harm and to, and to buy off the journalism, which to some degree worked, to some degree didn't. And what this, this is trying to forestall lawsuits, but I think the risk, and it's something our mutual friend Jessica Lessin wrote about the other day, is that if, if you're sort of entering into an arrangement whose basic kind of like business value exchange is that we pay you and you don't sue us, you aren't going to build a real sustainable business together. Like that's it. It's a different, and you're, and it's too soon in the history of AI to even know what that news business would be. And so in a way, it's sort of foreclosing the idea that there's some valuable business to build. And instead, there's just kind of like some quick extortion.

• 4:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, and this is Jessica speaking, writing in The Atlantic, I have it written down here. "That media companies would rush to do these deals after being so burned by their tech deals of the past is extraordinarily distressing. It's hard to see how any AI product built by a tech company would create meaningful new distribution and revenue for news. These companies are using AI to disrupt internet search, to help users find a single answer faster than browsing a few links. So why would anybody want to read a bunch of news articles when an AI could give them the answer? Maybe with a tiny footnote crediting the publisher that no one, that no user will ever click on. Joe, you're coming in from the tech perspective, so why would a tech, why would a news publisher want to sign this deal with OpenAI?

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Well, I'm somewhere in between, and I do think this is Lucy with the football, with Charlie Brown, that meme is going to live forever on this, which is a platform saying they're going to pay news publishers and they're going to help fund the content. But before, they were helping fund content that then would drive more engagement on their platform and then maybe drive some traffic back to the publisher. Now they're, it's free money, but then if we never send anyone to you, you can't complain about it because we'll just give them the answer on our platform in a business model that is unknown. So, I mean, it is incredibly speculative, and I have no idea, I haven't gone into what's inside these deals, how long are they for, can they train? Because what's going to be most value is new news. Like, training on the historical news, that's, I mean, horses left the barn, that's what

• 5:33Speaker 03

  you're not suing me for. But training on fresh news will be all the value going forward, and I do wonder what those deals look like.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  No, they don't look particularly good. I mean, there's a $250 million deal between News Corp and OpenAI, that's $50 million a year, the revenue of News Corp is $15 billion or so, right? So, it's not nothing, but it's not a huge amount of value, and I think the big question is, you know, how long, what is the value of that training data? You know, are we in the, are we in the, where drivers taking inflated fees for subsidized rides version of Uber only to be replaced by, you know, self-driving vehicles in the future, or are we somewhere else?

• 6:15Speaker 03

  But I think that's the difference between the training data like historic versus news. Like, you know, the before what the platforms did on their own, and by the way, not just Facebook and Twitter, but search, it atomized news. So everything was next to each other. So it took it took a news story and then put it next to everybody else's news story and the engagement occurred on their platform and they could monetize. Now, what they're saying is, okay, trained to talk like news is one thing. Actually having fresh news is something different. And like, I mean, part of part of my my thinking when I when I heard that was, why doesn't one of these platforms just buy the news organizations at this point? Like, they gathering fresh data from the real world is what they're going to need.

• 6:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Or more than that, why don't they just make a deal with one company? Like, couldn't the AP, for instance, suffice? Like, it does really seem like making a deal with all these different companies is basically like, please don't sue us. Whereas like even the News Corp deal alone probably could satisfy all of ChatGPT needs, ChatGPT's needs and more.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  It would make the system be vulnerable to what has been the greatest critique of kind of media in the last, you know, as long as I've been operating. It's like bias, right? Having a single source. So having, there's a value in having multiple sources. It's also a value in kind of understanding how things are done across different media outlets and different formats. I don't know. Ben, what do you think?

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I do think of kind of what Joe is getting at is that I think that we had come come in sort of with these metaphors out of social media, which was, which among other, or these analogies, which among others, that there can be one or two big winners and that they're really special. And then that news is a commodity and we're interchangeable. But I'm not actually, but I'm not sure that's how this landscape shapes out. Like, it looks increasingly like these models are kind of interchangeable and and they're going to be a number that are good enough. And having exclusive facts might be really valuable. And I do think there's this assumption from the, you know, for that's been around for 20 years on the internet, that Early since the social media days, that most of the revenue, most of the value,

• 8:19Speaker 02

  go to the distributor, that YouTube is a big company, that Google's a big company, that Facebook's a big company, and that content creators can kind of eke out pennies and little percentages around the edges. But that's not really particularly consistent in the history of media. There are other models, Spotify is the obvious one, where you build a really cool tech platform and your reward is a tiny, tiny margin and maybe zero. And I think if you're in the content industries, that's the world that you want. They can build their neato distribution system and they should have the right to make fractions of a cent on every dollar.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Once they've trained on the historic data, tone of news, and analysis, that's how the models train. If you're gonna have the value accrue, you need some sort of consortium amongst news to do that. Spotify is the model that would be better for the news world, but it doesn't even have to be an oligopoly, it would just have to be a consortium of agreement at the news layer. And that was what people talked about when search was coming around and Rupert was saying, hey, we shouldn't be letting Google crawl this for free, and then Google won, obviously, by bifurcating everything. And remember the arguments back then? The arguments were, well, hey, why does good content have to come from premium publishers? Isn't this person just as good? And we know that it's not just as good.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  So the question of, will that happen this time? Or will they just pick off enough and then say, oh, well, the open web will provide the rest?

• 9:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can publishers not even do that? Aren't they legally not allowed to band together?

• 9:52Speaker 03

  No, absolutely. No, consortiums are allowed in tons of industries.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  And there was one that was tried, actually, at Semaphore's launch event. Barry Diller spoke about this idea. And then publishers got together and tried to band together to some extent. They've fallen away, right? And Barry Diller's organization was one of the first to ink a deal. And now, like, The New York Times and some of these... Other organizations that are still involved embroiled in lawsuits. The Times has kind of made an argument for billions of dollars of statutory damages for CAPTCHA, right? Which makes the $250 million deal with News Corp. look tiny.

• 10:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, when Sam's going to raise $7 trillion, I mean, what's a couple billion?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  But the other point what Ben's getting at is if the distribution world is going to be, you know, is going to be more competitive than we believe it to be and than it was in the kind of social media era, then in fact, as long as these news companies aren't signing themselves into exclusivity, you know, it makes sense why OpenAI would get into this business, want to pay a premium to get in fast, train faster, be first, and have a relationship. But these news companies can then go ink the same deal with Grok if Elon were interested or, you know, others, as the case were.

• 11:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Elon's not going to do any of those deals, that's for sure.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  I did think that point was interesting. Alex recently had a story where you had used Grok AI, I guess, reached out to Elon and he'd gotten back to you. What I thought was so interesting about that was the citations seemed to be, there is value in the discovery and there's also value, I think, in the citations in a world in which trust has been really diminished and critiqued. And especially with this crowd, right? The early adopter crowd for kind of AI search and this crowd, which has been resistant to media in a big way. So citations have a very, like, are almost advertising for the core news product.

• 11:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, but listen, I did, I did reach out to Elon about the citation thing. He said they're going to add citations to Grok. But this is very interesting, the way that they're training their Grok news summaries on Twitter and I guess elsewhere when they start to develop Grok more broadly is that they're not even going to look at the stories. They're just going to look at the social media chatter and build their summaries from that. So they're not, they're removed from the actual legal liability of training on news stories because they're just simply talking about what people are talking about on social media.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And to get a citation presumably in Elon, I don't know this, but I'm assuming he would need to post on X to get a citation in Grok, is that correct?

• 12:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, even if you're not posting on X, like, somebody else is gonna write about your story. It's out of your hands.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  That's a side

• 12:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so it is interesting. And one of the things that I think we should all think about is like, does the economic system break down? Let's say this is does become the way that people interact with news. It's sort of becomes like, all right, you go to ChatGPT. What's happening today? It tells you all the things. Does it? Does it then remove the incentive for publishers to actually, you know, go out and report the news, which is expensive because you're ultimately like being disintermediated here. You're being presented as a summary. There's a citation. Let's be honest, nobody clicks that. Like, is this what what the AI tech is gonna do to the news industry is just continue to remove the value from actually people going to the sites and ultimately disincentivize the creation, making the AI products worse?

• 13:23Speaker 03

  You guys have all seen the Google generated results where there's a certain amount of rocks you can eat. And there's a certain amount of like non-toxic glow. I know. Well, this is this is the Simpsons, the Simpsons Guide to Diet. But but joking aside, actually, this this is my hope, is that then trust matters again. And I don't want to go to the generalized ChatGPT or Gemini for news. But I will go to the Semaphore AI News App, right? And because there's some object permanence to the brand that I'm trusting. And if that brand lets me down, then I'll move on to another brand. Whereas if Google lets me down, I can't move on to another search. Or if Amazon lets me down, I'm not moving on to another e-commerce platform.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  So the things that matter to us, actually, brand could matter again. And that I do think is the great hope for AI and this. And that is where Ben's point would come in, where the value could accrue to the people who maintain trust at the consumer interface level, the consumer of news interface.

• 14:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ben, is that even feasible? Like, does Semaphore have the budget to go build its own AI that's gonna compete with ChatGPT? Or do you really think that if ChatGPT can summarize, let's say, your stories in the media newsletter or even your podcast, that like, you're gonna get a good deal because you have the trust that, let's say, you know, the eat rocks diet doesn't?

• 14:41Speaker 02

  I'm hoping that Joe has a fund with a couple trillion dollars in it for our for our compute.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  I'm hoping that too.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  No, but I think, I mean, I think that in a way that, you know, in a world full of hallucinating AIs and kind of malicious or just goofy deep fakes everywhere. I mean, there, there's obviously a like, and, and, you know, and of, some consumers who kind of aren't looking for trust and view it all as entertainment don't care and are perfectly happy on X because like it's all kind of a fun sport. But others who want to know what's trusted, I do think there's like some return to a trusted brand who can tell you if that picture of Rihanna at the Met Gala is real or fake. Like, there is some, there is some perhaps somewhat modest space for that. It is though, I mean, all of these things, I think, go to Jessica's point, though, of how little of this has shaken out, how totally unclear it is. I

• 15:35Speaker 02

  mean, among other things, you know, are these, are these, is OpenAI going to be like Facebook, like for, or Google, which is to say, at least for sort of a moment, a kind of quasi-monopoly printing money? Or is it going to be like Uber, which is to say, like a company whose revenue can never quite catch up with what it has to invest because it's ultimately in a business with no moat that's really competitive?

• 15:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can I take the Uber position here?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, one of the things that stuck out to me in the release that at least I read from Vox talking about its partnership with OpenAI, so you know, both companies' eyes have been on this release. They said ChatGPT had 100 million users. I mean, ChatGPT had a million, 100 million users two months after launch in December 2022. You know, by my watch right now, it's May 2024. And I think in these conversations, there's also, there's often a presumption that this is just the way things are going to happen, right? That people are going to want to read news through ChatGPT and that AI overviews from Google mean the end of the web. But the consumer behavior just hasn't caught up to this vision yet. Even Bing, which like has been serving AI answers in search for how long? Like more

• 16:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  than a year? Has 3.6% of the search overall share in the world. So this was actually so much better than actually like listening to shows like this one or make signals or reading stories like, you know, the ones on Semaphore or on Big Technology. Like, maybe we would already- Yeah, I mean, we got to shout out where we're gonna, we're up against a pretty strong force, right? This is human level intelligence we're talking about or close to it.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  I mean, that sentence, just that sentence, even Bing and then being like, like not big enough. It was a sentence I would not think I would have heard in twenty twenty four.

• 17:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  But we're past the like Bing sucks because Bing is good now, like it's actually good.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Do you think Google is making a mistake by sort of racing into this world that like the press and the sort of AI visionaries have decided is the future, this sort of post link, chatbot for front world? I mean, I think that Google claims that they're following consumer behavior.

• 17:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, do you, I don't know. Do you think Google even has free choice in the matter? Because if they weren't doing this, what would the market be saying about them? Like ever since they started to say, hey, we're all about AI, they've hit all time highs in the market. Whereas beforehand, you know, they were, they were getting pummeled.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, irrespective of the quality of their product, the stock price is going up.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and, I mean, I guess your point, Alex, was kind of like they have no choice because everyone else is going to do it. And maybe more people would be searching on Bing if Google doesn't have that. But, but I do think that the question of like, our news has been being served to us by AI for a long time. The TikTok algorithm, the search news feed, the, the Facebook news feed, like AI has been picking our news stories for a while. And kind of famously, that's going to come to a head in the courts pretty soon. But the now it's just that AI is synthesizing news. And I think when consumers don't have to pick through and they actually have to make a selection of what brands AI news do they want? Is, is an opportunity to seize on like, I don't want to ask chat GPT what men's fall fashion are.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  But I would ask GQ's AI what men's fall's fashion are because I know that they'll have inputs from editors and experts.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Well, you might ask chat GPT what GQ suggests, right? If that's the interface. Yeah, that's interesting.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  You'd ask the question better.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  But I mean, I only wear black t shirts. It's going to be really hard for me to figure out like which ones to get next season. But I will say that the, and my hairstyle is not going to really need much. But the, but I will say that the, the idea of if you're going to use a brand name in your search, that will be an ongoing revenue stream, not a training on past history stream.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  That's really interesting.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, the currency matters more, like the, the recency of the information. But then also like how, can you imagine a world in which AI would be doing reporting?

• 19:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's a good question for Ben.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  I mean, I think there are certain kinds of gif hack gathering, you know, there are times when I like I used to, you know, like there are times when you are trying to pretend that you were sending customized emails and you're in fact copying and pasting them into 400 windows and hoping somebody writes back to you. I do think they're like labor-saving hacks and, you know, and actually, my colleague Gina Chua, who's who's done a lot of pretty ambitious playing around with this, try, basically, there's no national database of hate crimes. And like, it's and and what each jurisdiction says the hate crime is kind of different and articles describe them in complicated ways. And she

• 20:04Speaker 02

  basically had chat GPT or OpenAI go through a huge corpus of news articles and say how many hate crimes were there in this period. And it did a pretty good job, like this stuff that is about that is not exactly black and white, but doesn't require that much analysis and involves reading huge amounts. I mean, I would, I would not then trust that and say that's something I can publish. But I think there are kinds of synthesis and of kind of like reporting on just like large amounts of information that that it could be useful for. I think the, you know, the core, the thing of getting somebody to tell you something that they weren't supposed to tell you is probably like, that's, that's probably still, that's defensible.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  One of the biggest trends we've seen in journalism, you know, to date in the last 10, 15 years has been the, the establishment of individual brands, the fact that I trust something because it's by Ben Smith, I trust something because it's by Alex, whatever it is, right? So this, that to me is where AI synthesizing the news, kind of depersonalizing it, has a kind of, and, you know, consumers are frustrated by the reductiveness, the lack of nuance. So I actually feel at that, the idea that this is going to be like the bringing, bringing back brand, I don't know. It's almost like you would ask very specific questions. What is, you know, you know, what does Maggie Haberman say about X? Because

• 21:28Speaker 01

  I trust that or I don't, or whatever it is, right?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are the

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are two, there are two trends sort of happening at the same time, right? And one, right, one is the, the creation of these anonymous giant synthetic models. And the other is this huge flight toward individual brands. And they're obviously kind of going in different directions, although maybe the sort of, the place they land is that, you know, you have one superstar blogger, Alex Kantrowitz, who can use AI tools to produce his television show without much, you know, at pretty low cost and not employ anybody. And yet seem like he's running a giant media company, which is just him.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the institutions, the institutions are the ones that are inking the deals, right? And they are the ones up against both of these trends. The individual journalists are not up.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  The Wall Street Journal is the thing that's getting squeezed there.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  But for now, like, why isn't there talent agents or, or IP deals for individuals? Because, you know, I'm guessing Casey Newton, a platformer, what people like, okay, I like your voice, like the way you cover these things, I want it in that voice. I, I think there's a, I do think that there's a place where the individual brand comes in an IP. It's just the same way talent comes in every other industry.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but a lot of those single use apps failed in the YouTube era, right? Because in the YouTube era, there were, you know, there was companies like Download and every YouTube influencer under the sun, from Kim Kardashian to Alden Rose, was going to have their own app. And very few of those succeeded.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  That is because those platforms, look, this is why I started, the platforms like Lucy with the Football with News. It never is a better business model to pay for content than not pay for content, right? So it's, it's what I'd call the mullet strategy, business in the front, party in the back. So I'll pay for this, but really I make all my margin off zero cost content on the backend. Well, there is no zero cost content on the backend if the consumer is choosing what voice they want to listen to. So every time you went to YouTube, I might come in for a New York Times article, but I end up on 14 UGC ones where YouTube keeps 100%. That doesn't happen in AI. And I can't tell you I know what the business implications are because there is no business model on the other side yet, but that's at least an opportunity.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  I'm thinking often about this Scarlett Johansson thing where she had this feud with OpenAI. They wanted her voice, she said no, they used her voice anyway, but like kind of slightly different, but from a different actress who was like.

• 23:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Be Scarlett Johansson. The actress was like, sure. And here. And then Sam Altman tweets her and Scarlett Johansson is like.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  Allegedly, like anti-trust lawyers.

• 23:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. But this is the thing. We talk about like, we have these discussions, like, can the media survive AI, this AI era? Can news survive this AI era? Is AI gonna, you know, do creators have even a semblance of power against what's coming here? And it just seems to me like, this is, I'm curious what you think, Joe. Doesn't the user always win here? Like, the user will get what the user wants. If the user wants Scarlett Johansson's voice, the technology just will progress without very much of the guardrails or even consideration about what happens. It might take a couple leaps to get there. Like, OpenAI would win a lawsuit against Scarlett Johansson without a doubt, right? They paused it because

• 24:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  they didn't want the PR headache. So, do we, is there, is there actually any slowing to stuff? And I think about it also when it comes to this, like, alignment stuff and super alignment stuff. Like, yeah, it's nice to have a super alignment team within OpenAI or Anthropic, but like, are they actually gonna do anything to slow the progress?

• 24:51Speaker 03

  That attitude is, is only very recent. Before, before Section 230, there was libel, laws and infringement. And there was all sorts of, there was all sorts of issues with, with doing something like just taking Scarlett Johansson's voice. And, and so, this is an attitude that is just of recency, like, for the platforms, because the platforms throw their hands up and say, well, we're just a platform. We can't help it if, like, those other people are frauding Scarlett Johansson's voice. AI is generating the response. So, it's no longer, like, the safe harbor was for hosting content that wasn't yours. You didn't have rights to. Once you're generating it, I don't think that that's the same thing. And, and the reason why you say they would blow it through is because we haven't had

• 25:33Speaker 03

  any, there's been no courts and legislation that has done anything about that for the past, I don't know, decade, 20 years, maybe? And, and so, I think that this is a different time. And like, the opportunity is huge, like, for this to actually be good for copyright law and for trademark law and for personal image rights. And maybe this does that.

• 25:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  But they used a different actress. Like, how do they end up? On the receiving end of a lawsuit and losing.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Well, it's the what they claim is that they use a different or they have said is that they use a different actress even predating. So imagine they created some kind of beta or trial version and then just went to market with something like that that presumably was attracted to them because it sounded like Scarlett Johansson. Now legally Scarlett Johansson can still sue.

• 26:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm not on team copyright theft, by the way. I'm just like looking at the facts and ask. No, I'm just asking. I'm just asking questions here, people.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  I know. You are. You are. But Scarlett Johansson still can sue under the publicity, right? Under whatever it is, copyright publicity.

• 26:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, the her tweet was pretty ill advised.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it didn't doesn't look good. But I think you said the answer in the first, which is they've lost in a court of public opinion. And that and consumers are going to care. This is, I think Ben has made this point, like closer to AI is closer to the culture industries than than most technologies have been. And the way in which we've seen people win against them are either single big brands like Scarlett Johansson, you know, threatening a lawsuit, but also really using her own voice, her own power to kind of shift the spotlight of the conversation, the regulators, et cetera, to pay attention to this issue. And the other side is, you know, in the strikes that we've seen, WGA and particularly the

• 27:12Speaker 01

  SAG strike around AI, it requires massive organization and negotiation, which is probably easier done right now and easier conceived right now, given the technology is nascent and there's one or two or three big players in this space versus when it becomes, if it becomes, Alex, this, you know, the next wave of the internet.

• 27:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is there is there a way here where everybody wins? I mean, the New York Times has built like this. I'm curious if anybody has some thoughts about like what's going on there, but they've built this big AI unit that's being headed by Zach Seward, who's a very well experienced industry insider who knows what he's doing around tech. He has a full team there. They're trying to harness AI for good. Like, is there a way that news industry wins here, which is a question we don't really ask often, but I'm curious what you all think.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  I mean, there's a world where the New York Times wins, right? Like, I think that, you know, they have, they have, they're the ones who have benefited from these sort of. You know, the sort of centralization of these internet businesses and they're, you know, they're the Google of, of original news in a way. And so they're in this dominant position, which they can use to become more dominant. Yes, definitely. Also, in other ways are very torque short AI. They produce a lot of words. They have a huge body of texts. The companies really need them. Like an AI that was missing the New York Times would be lame and would be worse than the one that had it. And they kind of know that. So and the Times is, is going to hold them up for huge amounts of money. I mean, I think the question of like, you know, I mean, you know, I think some of this stuff is sort

• 28:44Speaker 02

  of a little orthogonal to the news business. Like a lot of news is your local community weekly, which wasn't, which was getting killed in the social media and the sort of Google era and will now get killed by this, but needs to, needs a different, needs a different model. And AI is sort of closing the door on some of this, these ideas about just like building massively, rapidly scaled news businesses that we grew, we came up with 10 years ago and we're, you know, and that we all kind of worked inside and that already, you know, that the sort of the kind of divorce with social media and the shifts in search had already kind of put to an end. But it, but AI just means, I mean, if, if, assuming

• 29:24Speaker 02

  these AI platforms are sort of the next wave of platforms, very hard to see. I mean, I think in some ways it's going to help, it's going to entrench the advantages of big incumbents. And the other people it shuts out, Max Tani had a great story on this the other day as partisan media. Like, nobody's calling up the Daily Wire for a licensing deal. Nobody called up HuffPost, actually. Nobody called up Breitbart. And they're all grumbling about it. But, you know, but what this means is if you go looking for, you know, when you went looking for news on Facebook, you often got really, really insane stuff. Google somewhat less. But when you go looking for news in Gemini and in, you know, it's just going to tell you like the earth is round and Biden is president and stuff. Like, you're not going to, like a lot of these people who

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Thrive by saying the most extreme and exotic stuff. We'll find places to do it. Like, it looks like X will be increasingly that because it's so engagement centric. But it's a smaller world.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Does anybody think that the fact that we had news feeds, we had all this other delivery and then email newsletters, like, come on, the boom of email as a delivery mechanism. And it was because the publisher controlled that connection to it to the reader. And the reader could know that that came from the person who published it. And it wasn't being interfered with in any way. And like, and email is, what, 30 years old at this point? And it's still the preferred. So like, what will that be for AI?

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, but email newsletters have also picked up, particularly in a time where there's been more news disengagement, right? Like, emails are coming to you, you're not going to them, to some extent. You sign up for them, but then they continue to come to you. I do think that there is a-

• 30:57Speaker 03

  So did my, so did my Times paper on my doorstep. Actually, oh, I delivered them, but, you know, same, same.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  I do think that there is something to that. Like, there is a nostalgia about the news. People are a little nostalgic about how they get their news. They're a little distrustful. The platforms, the social media companies themselves are, you know, Meta would like to see less news on its platforms, which in fact is a good thing for a competitive advantage, arguably for OpenAI, et cetera. I do think what, you know, it will be curious what Elon does here because with X, I mean, the real value of Twitter is it is the breaking news. When the earthquake happened, there was nowhere to go but Twitter, right? No institution, not even the media.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  I was on Twitter mid-earthquake, being like, oh shit, this is definitely an earthquake.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is a great Twitter moment, right? As irrelevant as you think Twitter is in that moment, that's the only way you're going to find the answer. So that combination of kind of breaking news and the tonality, the conversation, the zeitgeist that- You know, currently Twitter has, no other social media company has it right now.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  But you go there for a bunch of, for hundreds of thousands of voices telling you what's happening in real time, rather than one synthesized voice pulling it all together, right?

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Because.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Authority is lost.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  It's, yeah, exactly. It's, it's, it's homogenous and it's, it's all mushed together and people's brains don't work that way. We need to tell ourselves stories, we need to trust where it's coming from, we need to get like, single person narratives, and that's what Twitter or X really provide.

• 32:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is, this is beautifully setting up like, a question for the group that we talk about on the Friday show every now and again, which is, what's gonna be, what would be a healthier environment for news? Like, news mediated through the screaming, you know, emotion-based social media feeds? Or news mediated by AI that is more even keel, but wrong fairly often? Or not fairly often, but wrong every now and again, because it hallucinates.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  So would you rather your news be like, super polarizing and insane, but correct? Or sort of soothing and wrong? I mean, I think that's why you gotta read Semaphore, where we are soothing and correct. No, yeah, that's amazing.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Well.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Which one do you want to be a part of? The thing is, we don't get to decide. I mean, the thing with all this stuff is like, we don't get to decide. Like, I think consumers are obviously really, really sick of hyper-polarizing, screamy, manipulative news, and you see it in the cable ratings, and you see it in Facebook getting out of the news business, and you see it in Twitter's sort of decline and marginalization. And like, not that there won't always be a market for that, right? Like, there always has been, always will be. And maybe the pendulum will swing really hard back that way at some point, and there'll be another sort of populist wave. But right now, people are obviously retreating from that and looking for something different. And, you know, that's sort of the business that we're in right now, is trying to give a kind of more nuanced view with, with the kind of space for disagreement. I think a lot of podcasting right now, like, the reason it's popular also, is because

• 33:54Speaker 02

  there's this kind of like, non-hysterical, leaned-back, open conversation. And again, that's not gonna be universal, but I do think it's just sort of obviously where people are now.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  I think, I, I agree with Ben on that, and I also think there's a... Wrong answers with skepticism because you have to bring in the consumer is better than, you know, some like than a diversity of opinion without any skepticism about your aunt or your boyfriend's opinion, you know? So I think that the fact that people are going to look at this technology with some skepticism, even when it's serving a single answer, and then ideally go double click. And again, that's where the value of these citations comes to be and where some of these news organizations might find value in discovery and citations. That could be a more productive world. But again, I think the most soothing is for them to go to Semaphore with its very soothing kind of Manila background.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Can I give, can I give a third option to that, Alex, which is what I really want to see? Which is just people know they've seen the same thing, whether it's right or wrong, right? Or polarized or not polarized. I can't talk to somebody else if I don't know if we've all seen the same thing. And I do think that the, the misassumption right now is that, oh, I'll want personalized news, but then how do I talk to Alex about what happened today? And how, you know, how do I talk to Nima? Like, so, so what I would take is like, the reason why we talk about, you know, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey and/or the weather is because it's the only thing that's guaranteed that we've all experienced on any given day. And so the idea for news being like, you know, everyone jokes about the Walter Cronkite days, yes, there were problems with those news days, like there were tons of like top

• 35:30Speaker 03

  down, there's issue, but everyone saw the same thing. And it was like, okay, at least we can discuss that. So is there an offer in the, in the making for that, at least I know we've seen the same thing? I don't know.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the value of the front page is one of the pieces of information it gives you is what everybody else saw.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then I do think you're personally, because in a way, I mean, another word for AI in a way is in this space is personalization. And it will be interesting to see how much, how much of that people actually want.

• 35:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, I, I need to go to break. Why don't we go to break and come back and talk a little bit more about McSignals and pick up this idea about whether hyper partisan media can survive? And is it going to be BuzzFeed when Vivek Ramaswamy runs the publication? All right. Why don't we do that when we come back right after this? This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data. And most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data,

• 36:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without scaling risk. Avpoint, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to avpoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online,

• 37:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  this backlash can lead right to their front door. The team at Ironwell knows this better than anyone. They've protected some of the most targeted executives and individuals on the planet for almost two decades. As a wide-glove enterprise security service, they protect your people with continuous personal data removal, proactive prevention tools, and human-led emergency support. So when someone goes looking for your executives, Ironwell ensures they hit a dead end. So here's what to do. Go to ironwell.com/bigtechnology, fill in the quick form, and request your free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwell.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 38:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast. What a great group we have here today. We have Naima Raza. She's the co-host of Mixed Signals. Ben Smith is also here. He's the editor in chief of Semaphore, also the co-host of Mixed Signals, which is now live. First episode was Friday. You can find it in your podcast app of choice. And Joe Marchese is here. He's a partner at Human Ventures. Ben, let's just talk quickly about the Vivek news. So Vivek Ramaswamy is like, seems like he's pulling an Elon Musk on BuzzFeed. He's acquired like a high, single-digit percentage of shares and is talking about the way the company should be run. What do you think is happening there?

• 38:54Speaker 02

  I mean, I think that much like his presidential campaign, he has sort of found a formula for getting a lot of attention and no votes. You know, ultimately, this is a controlled company that he doesn't, there's no sort of formal way for him to exercise the power of those shares because Jonah Peretti, the CEO, still controls most of the voting shares. And at the same time, his ideas aren't like he, that, that letter, like it reads pretty well the first time you read it and then you'll read harder and you're like, wait, this was, is a pretty cursory reading. Like his base, his core solution to media is to pivot to video, which is obviously something nobody has tried or thought of before. And, and he complains, and somebody went and Googled like complaints about BuzzFeed's news.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  And so he has like the world, there was an expose of the World Wildlife Foundation partnering with local militias in Africa who were murdering people. And so he's like, well, they were too mean to the World Wildlife Foundation, which by the way, his people, conservatives, totally were very into that story, which was true and the organization expressed great sorrow. But he didn't, he absolutely didn't click the link. Like it was just stuff, like it was a bunch of stuff like that. So, so I think that like, I mean, my sort of conclusion here is that the only solution is for him to hire me to come back and be the editor in chief of right wing BuzzFeed and, you know, set things right.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Ben's so thirsty for a job back in.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  I know where all the anti-woke bodies are buried.

• 40:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my God. Please don't publish my drafts, Ben.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's where they are. They're in your drafts. All those places where you would, where you would like, be like, I want to take down Elon Musk. He's so terrible because he's so anti-woke. And then I would go in and, you know, make sure everything was fair.

• 40:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Because that's how news works.

• 40:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thank you for doing that. Yeah, hopefully they don't get those Google Docs.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  All these millennial journalists trying to take out upstanding reactionaries.

• 40:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, so the podcast is, is interesting. I mean, we do need, there, there is room for a podcast about media. And Ben, you like, in, in the announcement.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  I'm gonna put that on like, the label. There is room, dot, dot, dot, for, dot, dot, dot, a podcast. Alex can't ruin it.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  What happened to the good ads in the first half of this episode? We actually discussed it. Well, actually, they can, you can hear more discussion about Ben.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  This is the part where we just roast you, Alex. Sorry.

• 41:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  I was just setting you up to talk about what you're trying to do in your podcast. So.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  No, no, please do. So, I'm gonna take it away. You're the nice one.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Well, no, I was gonna say, we have a, we have a, a conference, we, we get a little bit deeper into, um, you know, Ben's portfolio and resume for his BuzzFeed job lusting, uh, in, in the episode that you can hear on Friday, Friday's episode, we talked about it, uh, at great length and, and something spicy there, actually, to check out. But, um, it, there is room for, I, I think that people, it goes back to brand, it goes back to people just looking at this news environment. And we're seeing simultaneously, people think this is the most election, important election of all time. I'm just giving a thumbs up on Google for no reason. But simultaneously, people think this is the most important election of all time, and they are not tuned in. So it's like, two thirds of people think that

• 41:56Speaker 01

  it's extremely high stakes, you know, democratic moment. And one third of people are paying regular attention to the news. So what's happening here? What's the fatigue? Um, what's the distrust? And that's where, you know, we're, we're building this new show and this environment. I'm so excited because Ben has, has had not one, but two podcasts, I believe, before. Right, Ben?

• 42:17Speaker 02

  They'll be huge hits. Yeah. That's why you don't know about them. Yeah, I produced one myself back in City Hall in 2006. There was a very faint beep buzzing in the background that I was never able to figure out. So I just left it in. I interviewed Elliot Spitzer and Rahm Emanuel, people like that.

• 42:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, Ben, I did come up to you once in the BuzzFeed newsroom and say, I have an idea for a video podcast. And you're like, everybody wants a podcast these days. And now we both have them, so.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  I know. And I gave people a hard time about podcasts. And I'm sure everyone I've ever told I wasn't that into podcasts, or is gonna, you know, come out of the woodwork and mock me now. But I should say that like, now all I do is listen to podcasts. So.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Third time's a charm, Ben, on Next Signals.

• 43:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I was, before I was setting up just this idea that Ben, you said that the media is a huge story. It's really a story of politics, technology, and culture. And then we have less media reporting now than we did previously, and it should be a growing beat. I wonder why you think that is. It seems to me like a lot of media reporting sort of became like critiques of whether some publications were gonna like call things lies and which ones would not. And that's sort of what it, it sort of became almost, I don't want to say partisan, but like, it became small.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think we're at a moment of like, peak media like chatter and criticism, but, but with very, very little reporting. And we're easy to report on. Like, reporters just leak so much, you wouldn't believe it. Like, they're the easiest people to cover. They know the rules. They know how to play the game. And, and there is this really huge gap between this broad sense in all sorts of directions that the media is some kind of conspiracy with like, wheels within wheels, and the reasons you see things you see are because of some thing, you know, involving the Jews. And then the fact that you can then go and find out why things happen in media, and it's not that hard, and you can

• 44:18Speaker 02

  ask people. And it often is like, some kind of bumbling conspiracy, usually a conspiracy to make money, and a not very effective conspiracy to make money. But like, things are happening for reasons which you can find out. And they're often not as, you know, on the nose as the reasons people imagine. But they're often really interesting. And I think like, you know, there was this story we did last week about Alito flying the flag upside down, which the Washington Post figured out and then didn't cover. And there was just enormous speculation, rightly, about what the hell were they doing? But it was not, and then, you know, we were the first ones just to call up the guy who made the decision and say, Why'd you do that? And the answer was like, well, the Supreme Court reporter, who's sort of an institutionalist

• 44:58Speaker 02

  and wasn't that comfortable with the story and like it was sort of very specific things, not a broad conspiracy. Although you can then say, well, that reflects the kind of, you know, change, social moment. But in any case, it's a good story, the media. Recommend covering it.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  You know, I've always thought that the most interesting thing about media is that there's this unmonetizable portion of media, right? Like, I wasn't there, I wasn't there at the moment that Elon decided to buy Twitter, now X, for $44 billion. But I could tell you with absolute certainty, Twitter at the time was worth more than $44 billion. It was just not monetizable for more than $44 billion. Rise and fall of nations, you know, Arab Spring, propaganda, Russian dis- I mean, elections. Like, the unmonetizable portion of media is where the power is. And like, the gap between what is monetizable and what is valuable in culture is massive. And what makes media like, outpunch everything dollar for dollar, just a question of like,

• 45:59Speaker 03

  how you get the public interested in it.

• 46:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, is there a business that can be found to sort of make money off this stuff? If it's that influential? I guess that's been the question forever.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Off of news?

• 46:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Off of, yeah, the non-monetizable news that Joe is talking about. I guess there's like this brand safety push, but I think, aren't you guys doing it in some way with, with events, like bringing people in?

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's, I mean, I think, right, I mean, again, it keeps changing, I think. And there is like, sort of, and right now, I think the people who are most successful, there's a lot of niche media that's very successful. Like, you know, I think there's better coverage, like, there's a company called Industry Dive, in fact, really interesting company, that provides really good coverage of a bunch of basically unglamorous industries that have never been covered that well in history. Like, if you want to know what's happening in the waste management industry, which like, lots of people do, like, they do a great job. And I think, you know, there's analogies to that, like, and some of ours certainly is trying to cover a series of kind of verticals in a very deep way that appeal to the people

• 47:03Speaker 02

  who sit on top of them and who are your sources and your readers and also, you know, the people who are making decisions.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  And if you can reach them, there's an ad market that's not consumer, essentially, advertising, but you can still do news at a very high level that appeals to a lot of people because the nature of news is that if you are breaking news that's interesting to the President of the United States, like a lot of other people want to know too. And so I think there's a generation of companies, of which Axios, Politico is probably the first, that have in different ways found that model, and I think there are elements of that in what we're doing. I think the question of like real, general, mass, consumer news, like in a way what CNN is trying to do, very tricky right now.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  And it's so fragmented, and I think on the demand side, people don't necessarily want all their news from journalists. They want to get their news from, you know, Shannick McMahan or McMahon or Heather Cox Richardson, right? And newsmakers would rather give their interviews often to these individuals as well, which, yeah, which is a real challenge, I think, for mainstream journalism.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  I think it's the metric we're been advertising, and the problem is, like, you're right, B2B advertising is very different. Like, you know, if the president reads your newsletter or executives read it, like, I know Alex has this with the big technology, how do you monetize the fact that, like, there's 10 important people listening? Are you willing to pay a $500,000 CPM? Because the market has become liquid on this, and Facebook, Google, Amazon, like, everyone has convinced the world, if you can't measure it, don't buy it, right? So like, all this immeasurable stuff is just out there in either now. I tend to think that means there's massive inefficiencies in the market, and we should be going, trying to find those and buying them. But it's pretty hard to do at scale

• 48:52Speaker 03

  and again and again, because selling sponsorships is like running on a treadmill, whereas selling media is like being on a bike. The bike keeps gliding, and the treadmill, as soon as you stop running, you're going off the back of it. And I've spent a lot of time in the advertising side of the world, and I think it's, I think it might be the largest market inefficiency we have right now in the world.

• 49:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, I want to ask one conspiracy question, since, you know, there's talk about media conspiracies in your promo, and we can sort of end on this. Do you think that, on average, the media will have a rooting interest in favor of Joe Biden in the 2024 election? And how do you see that playing out in terms of influencing the election and the coverage that we're going to see over the next few months?

• 49:33Speaker 02

  I don't think there's any such thing as the media. And certainly there are outlets that have a rooting interest in both candidates, very open, more openly expressed than ever. I mean, I do think there's this, I mean, I think, and often when people say the media, they literally just mean the New York Times, which is how I take you to have meant that, basically. And like, maybe sort of smaller subsidiary outlets like the Washington Post.

• 49:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  The media on average. So add up all the news coverage, take the average. That's kind of like my perspective on this.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the average has stopped being relevant because consumption is so split. Like, the average is a thing no one consumes, sort of sitting halfway between Fox News and MSNBC. I mean, in fact, that was where CNN was trying to live. I mean, I do think that the kind of establishment media is like wrestling with the fact that this, that it had this sort of years of arguments at whether if you really said that Donald Trump was a bad guy, that that was the moral and ethical and thing to do, and kind of eventually came around to the point like, yes, we should say that Donald Trump is a bad guy in all our stories, and then found that nobody cared at all when they did that. And even the people who I think are sort of their reader base often found it kind of annoying. And so they're now, and I think this is sort of a challenging timing for

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Joe Biden, the places like CNN and the New York Times are sort of in the middle of these internal culture wars that are about pulling away from a sort of more partisan stance and away from sort of more left-wing cultural politics. And that's happening just like simultaneous with the presidential campaign, just slightly by coincidence. And I do think that if you're in the White House, it's like, huh, like, maybe you could have like postponed your purge of the partisans for like four more months. But right now, the priorities inside the Times are very much about re-establishing their independence from, among other things, the Democratic Party.

• 51:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  The show is Mixed Signals. You can find it on your podcast app of choice. This was a super fun conversation. Thanks for coming on, Joe, Ben, and Aima. Hopefully we can do it again soon. I'm looking forward to listening to your show.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  Thank you, Alex. Joe, look forward to talk more about our AI project. Let's do it.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  You think Joe's just Mr. Deep Pockets now?

• 51:41Speaker 02

  He's so...

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Alex, do you have any tips on working with Ben?

• 51:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, Ben's the man and he's got a great intuition. So wherever his intuition is taking you, just run with it.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Alex had the worst hiring process in like the history. It was so terrible. Have we talked about this enough or should I bring it up again?

• 51:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  We have, but no, we can talk about it again. Go ahead.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  He was like, I really wanted to hire him. He was on my list of really good reporters, but also I had like scrambled his name with somebody else's and he was like in the hiring process and I called him out of the blue and was like, hey, do you speak Russian? I needed a Russian speaker at that moment. And he was like, what?

• 52:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right on the Boston bombing town.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  No. And I just hung up on him.

• 52:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then I didn't get the job.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  And then didn't call back for like years. It was terrible.

• 52:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Chaotic, Ben. I mean, yeah, I think about a year and a half later, BuzzFeed ended up hiring me.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And you sub Russian. Ben brought everybody around. I was like, oh, maybe I should have. You learned Russian in the meantime. I know. But Brent brought everybody around in the newsroom on like, it wasn't even my first day. It was like, come and see everybody. And he's like, hey, listen to this story about Alex speaking Russian. But I will say like, you know, it took three times to try to get in. But, um, man, five, five amazing years within BuzzFeed and really taught me how to be a reporter. So. Maybe Vivek is gonna bring both of you back, guys. Maybe you're gonna have a reunion. I am so ready to publish those drafts.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  You gotta talk. Yeah.

• 53:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  He needs some right wing influencers. New movie, just the thing he ordered.

• 53:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. All right. Good seeing everybody. Bye, everyone. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.