Radio Better Offline: Paris Martineau, Jeff Jarvis

Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of iHeartRadio's studio in New York City. Ed Zitron is joined by Paris Martineau of The Information and media critic Jeff Jarvis to talk about Paris' story around the horrible consequences of an anonymous dating app, Meta's slop-filled right-wing future, and what the media industry might look like in ten years' time. Jeff Jarvis: https://jeffjarvis.com/ https://bsky.app/profile/jeffjarvis.bsky.social Paris Martineau: https://bsky.app/profile/paris.nyc Paris' story she talks about: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-a-casual-sex-website-left-the-door-open-to-teens --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:48Ed Zitron?

  Change is coming. Now it's my time to record radio better offline right here in the beautiful iHeart Radio studios on 55th Street.

• 2:07Ed Zitron?

  And my god, we're back from CES. You couldn't stop me. I got off, I did thirteen and a half bloody hours on the radio, on the podcast thing, I'm just, don't know why I keep calling it radio, and then got on the flight, moved to New York, it was nothing. War off a duck's back, and now it's Tuesday and we're already recording again, you'll never get rid of me. And today I have two amazing guests. I have Paris Martineau, reporter at The Information, and the mighty Jeff Jarvis, author of The Gutenberg Parenthesis and journalism professor over at Stony Brook University. Mr. Jarvis is currently, he is fielding a phone call, so I'll go to Paris. How are you doing, Paris?

• 2:41Speaker 04

  I'm doing great. I'm astounded by your energy levels, given the amount of podcasting and radio you've done in the last week, Ed.

• 2:48Ed Zitron?

  I am, I am fired up. I love doing this. I think this is what I was meant to do.

• 2:52Speaker 05

  How are your feet after CES?

• 2:54Ed Zitron?

  Fantastic. I got inserts for my, I, I like came to this show fully prepared. No one realizes how much, like, the amount of like Google Docs I had of things prepared, like the suitcase was packed like two weeks in advance. And then I got to New York and I'd forgotten things like gym shorts and some shoes, and basically I prepared my life for one thing, not both things.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  And it's podcasting. Podcasting and blogging and nothing else. Who needs sleep?

• 3:18Ed Zitron?

  Slave to the content. Now, Mr. Jarvis, how have you been?

• 3:23Speaker 05

  Oh, good, good. It's cold here.

• 3:24Ed Zitron?

  It is cold.

• 3:25Speaker 05

  Do you have any regret coming here right now?

• 3:26Ed Zitron?

  Absolutely not.

• 3:27Speaker 05

  Okay, good.

• 3:27Ed Zitron?

  I'd rather take this real last weather than the nonsense I get back in England.

• 3:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:31Ed Zitron?

  Oh, it's kind of cold. But I usually see you two on This Week in Tech, so it's good to have you here in person.

• 3:37Speaker 04

  Yes, it's lovely to be IRL with you.

• 3:40Ed Zitron?

  IRL.

• 3:40Speaker 04

  It is, some might say it's better offline.

• 3:43Ed Zitron?

  It's better offline, but it is very online. So, all right. Paris, you had a story come out over the weekend?

• 3:49Speaker 04

  I did.

• 3:50Ed Zitron?

  Tell us about it.

• 3:51Speaker 04

  Um, so it is a story about this website called Sniffies. Have you guys ever heard of it?

• 3:56Speaker 05

  Right there, I want to stop and I don't want to know anything more, I think.

• 3:59Speaker 04

  Well...

• 4:00Ed Zitron?

  That's actually kind of where I'm...

• 4:01Speaker 04

  That's, that's probably a fair estimation. It is, um, the up and coming, I guess, competitor to Grindr. It's a website for, um, men seeking men, but it is specifically, unlike, you know, kind of your dating apps of your, it's not really about dating, it's about quick...

• 4:18Ed Zitron?

  It's an actual hookup app.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  It's a hookup app, just for hookups.

• 4:21Ed Zitron?

  So it's not like field for like kink stuff, it's like an actual...

• 4:23Speaker 04

  It is an actual hookup app, and it's supposed to be kind of about, uh... Translating the gay cruising scene into online.

• 4:30Ed Zitron?

  Sure.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  Potentially great idea.

• 4:31Ed Zitron?

  Why not?

• 4:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, people seem to really love it. It started in some kind of infancy form in 2016, but in the last couple of years has really taken off among like gays in big cities and cities, honestly, big and small. However.

• 4:43Ed Zitron?

  So, nothing went wrong then?

• 4:45Speaker 04

  Nothing went wrong. That's the end of the story. I just like writing about when companies do good.

• 4:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  Um, so in this case, part of the thing that made Sniffy's so attractive to its users is it's kind of a no holds barred approach to hookup platforms. You don't even have to make an account to sign in.

• 5:00Ed Zitron?

  Oh, no.

• 5:00Speaker 04

  You could just type in sniffys.com, say, "Yeah, I'm over 18," and then get to like navigating a map full of dick pics and butt pics and messaging people and meeting up.

• 5:11Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  That is a problem because it seems like the site has a bit of a child user issue. And when you have a child user issue when you're a dating and sex platform, you also have a child sexual abuse platform.

• 5:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  So, me and my colleague Cory Weinberg identified over the last kind of year or so, uh, more than a dozen cases where adult men had been charged for sex crimes involving a minor they met.

• 5:36Ed Zitron?

  And all facilitated directly on this platform.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that's a lot, it seems, for a relatively small platform. It's about fifth the size.

• 5:44Ed Zitron?

  The fact it's still around afterwards is the thing that shocks me.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, part of it is because, um, the lea- the question of legal liability in these cases is a bit tricky.

• 5:54Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 5:55Speaker 04

  You have companies like, there's long been an issue of kids getting on to adult dating apps.

• 6:00Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  And meeting adults. Uh, but up until recently, every legal challenge that a company, that a parent or child that has grown up have tried to kind of throw against these companies, saying, "Hey, you're actually not doing your job when it comes to policing underage users." Every legal challenge has been swept away by the company saying, "Ah, section 230."

• 6:18Ed Zitron?

  But even legal challenges aside, would they not want to stop the children getting on the sex app?

• 6:23Speaker 04

  Well.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  It's hard.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  Ostensibly.

• 6:25Speaker 05

  That's the problem. It's not easy.

• 6:27Ed Zitron?

  Okay, but did they try?

• 6:28Speaker 04

  Not really, because all they wanted, they don't want to have to try harder, it seems, because right now the standard operating.

• 6:35Ed Zitron?

  The thing they don't want to try harder on is stopping adults having sex with children.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  Yes, because that would require taking on some responsibility. And in right now, what all they, all these companies do is they just ask you for your birthday and assume that you didn't lie. Because if they were going to do anything more stringent than that, that could open them up to liability.

• 6:55Ed Zitron?

  Explain something to me.

• 6:57Speaker 05

  So Backpage and Craigslist took down their their sex sections.

• 7:03Ed Zitron?

  And also, just for the for the listeners, Backpage, can you just run us through that?

• 7:06Speaker 05

  Backpage was a place where you could um hook up. It was probably more of a singles into sex thing.

• 7:14Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 7:15Speaker 05

  And Craigslist was pretty much singles, but in within that, people would find each other for that purpose.

• 7:21Ed Zitron?

  And then Backpage was shut down.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  Backpage was shut down and Craigslist voluntarily got out of it because the liability was high.

• 7:26Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 7:26Speaker 05

  That was so they were shut down because it was sex trafficking? Or what's the difference between that and what um Snuffy?

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Sniffy's.

• 7:36Speaker 05

  Sniffy's is doing.

• 7:37Speaker 04

  Um, I believe part of the difference is um when it comes to Backpage and Craigslist seeking connections, um, part of what they were originally shut down for involved FOSTA, SESTA, it involved specifically like sexual exploitation and sex trafficking.

• 7:51Ed Zitron?

  And what is FOSTA just for that?

• 7:53Speaker 04

  Um, FOSTA and SESTA were a package of bills that kind of went through some amount of years ago that ended up regulating and making it making it so that um these companies could not use the section two thirty defense as a way to get around uh claims.

• 8:10Ed Zitron?

  By which they mean they were they were made responsible for user generated content.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 8:15Ed Zitron?

  Right, got it.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, um, and so in Sniffy's case, it's a bit different. Well, in some ways, it's not a lot different because part of the issue of what we found in of those a dozen cases, I'd say like over a third of them did involve uh money being exchanged for sex with minors. However, part of it comes to the fact that.

• 8:35Ed Zitron?

  For the love of the game, I guess.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  I guess. Part of it is that up until fairly recently, dating apps hadn't uh really had legal claims like this against them. Whenever they had, they'd been basically laughed at of course saying, oh, of course, Grindr is not responsible for connecting your fourteen year old to a bunch of thirty year olds. Uh, it's a tech platform, it's user generated content. However, due to kind of shifting tides in the way that judges uh are viewing internet companies like defense.

• 9:05Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  That's starting to change. Right now, there is a lawsuit that is going to be heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals involving a case called Dove v. Grinder, where a 15-year-old basically got on Grinder, ended up being connected with four men who raped him.

• 9:20Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  And part of what the attorney, Carrie Goldberg, is claiming in this appeal or arguing is that Grinder shouldn't be able to hide behind Section 230 to say, hey, it's not our fault that we didn't age-verify.

• 9:36Speaker 04

  That Grinder should be held liable for its faulty age verification policies under kind of product liability law, saying that this is a defectively designed product. And that's a specific argument the Ninth Circuit Court has been like amenable to even when it comes to other tech companies like Snapchat, for instance.

• 9:54Ed Zitron?

  So what happened in the rest of the story?

• 9:56Speaker 04

  In the rest of the story, basically, we identified all of these different cases. We talked to Sniffy's. They said that they are working on an ID-based age verification solution. But in reality, the only way that that's currently in practice is just in the dozen or so states that currently have pornography restrictions. To where like, part of the thing is if you open up Sniffy's, it's like a map and all the profile photos are like photos of penises. So if you are in one of those states with...

• 10:24Ed Zitron?

  Sniffys.com.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. Are you, if you're in one of those states that has the...

• 10:26Speaker 05

  There's anybody you recognize. Oh.

• 10:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, you'll be able to see exactly where they are. If you are in one of those states, when you open it up now, you'll see a blurred image. And if you want to see the penis photos, you have to enter in your ID. However, the company says that they're maybe going to expand this in some way. It hasn't happened yet.

• 10:44Ed Zitron?

  That would potentially open up legal liability then.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that's, but part of the thing is users also don't want to do that. So, I mean...

• 10:50Ed Zitron?

  That was kind of what I was thinking that would kind of kill it.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. An app or a platform like that is never going to be successful if it has that sort of barrier to entry.

• 10:59Speaker 05

  And the privacy implications are huge.

• 11:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 11:02Speaker 05

  You're handing over your identification to a company called Sniffy's.

• 11:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  And I mean...

• 11:06Speaker 05

  I don't, I wouldn't feel terribly secure in that.

• 11:08Ed Zitron?

  I mean, I would, of course, but that, that's just me. But no, in also, you're right, though. It's like these... I imagine part of the thing here, other than the thing you're doing on there, is that it is kind of anonymous.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  Yes. That's the whole point.

• 11:22Ed Zitron?

  This completely hidden thing where you can go off and touch all and sundry. The problem being all and sundry there. What the legal ramifications, though, if like... The, what was it, dough versus grinder?

• 11:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, so the thing is, if that case, when it's appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court, if they rule in a similar way to that they have in the past and say, hey, when it comes to product liability cases like this, tech companies don't have a defense, that could have huge ramifications for every company in the dating.

• 11:49Ed Zitron?

  So not just for data, not just for dating even?

• 11:50Speaker 04

  I mean, it could, yeah, be way bigger than dating, but I mean, the immediate impacts, according to the attorneys I spoke to, would be certainly on the dating app scene, which is huge, because all these-

• 12:00Ed Zitron?

  What would change with those then?

• 12:01Speaker 04

  I mean, probably what would change is they'd have to find a way to determine user age beyond just asking you for your, to enter in your birthday. So it could be things like, some of the other dating app companies out there already have stuff in place. For instance, I believe Bumble and one other, maybe Tinder, scan user profile photos when they're uploaded to see like, does this person look like clearly a child? And if so, they might ask you to upload your ID to verify that you're over 18.

• 12:30Ed Zitron?

  I feel like that could also be a big problem. So I've been on the dating apps for a while. Not that I'm not single, it's just that nobody likes me. And I remember when I was on them, it was like months and months, actually no, like last year, like early last year, it's been a while. There was a huge fake profile problem. And I wonder if there's not a secondary problem here where the dominance of these fake profiles on there might get pushed away when they have to stop verifying every user, because that feels like the on it, the thing that could happen here.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I mean, then part of the problem, if you're thinking about it from a corporate perspective, is then your user numbers go down.

• 13:04Ed Zitron?

  You're damn right.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  And probably in those cases, those fake profiles are, like, the person is probably paying for that fake profile, because then it increases their reach if they're running some sort of scam. And then their paying user numbers would go down, which would be bad for most dating app companies that are already doing poorly.

• 13:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  A weird thing I learned during this story is that Grindr is like the most profitable dating app company because gay users don't, I mean, it, this is a bit of a simplification, but from what I heard, it is that gay users just seem to pay for the platform and use it for much longer. In part, researchers think because gay users are more likely to be in non-monogamous relationships.

• 13:46Ed Zitron?

  Interesting.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  So you're not using, you're not signing up for Hinge Premium, using it for a couple of months, then getting in a monogamous relationship and never using it again.

• 13:54Speaker 05

  Right. So, believe it or not, I once was an executive overseeing parts of brides.com.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  Ah, yes. You're so bridal, Jeff.

• 14:01Speaker 05

  Yes, and I used to love to say, "I gotta go to a brides meeting."

• 14:06Speaker 05

  But the interesting thing there was that our audience would come in and leave in nine months. And for their sake, you hope they didn't come back.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 05

  Right? This is the other extreme of that. What happened with the cases that were done against Sniffies? What was the status of those cases?

• 14:20Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, so the cases that we, that I tracked were all kind of like sex crimes again, involving specific like male offenders. In two cases that we kind of follow throughout the story involving this then 14-year-old who made an account in Sniffies and had sex with two adults. Those two adults have since been sentenced to upwards of 15 years in prison.

• 14:41Speaker 05

  So I asked the question wrong. Those weren't cases against Sniffies in any case.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  They were cases against people. That's the thing is Sniffies has had no, no cases against him. I spoke to a parent, the parent of that 14-year-old, and she said like, "Of course Sniffies should be sued. I don't know how to do it. I'm dealing with, you know, three..."

• 14:56Ed Zitron?

  Dealing with a criminal case.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  "I'm dealing with three foster kids that already were fucked up, and now my 14-year-old is super fucked up and has tried to commit suicide because of this whole thing." You know, she's like, "I don't know how to do this." But I do think that if something happens on the Doe versus Grindr front, you might see cases like this increasing, increasingly being filed around the country.

• 15:18Ed Zitron?

  And could this not be extrapolated out to a much wider series of issues as well? Like assaults that happen with, with people of age that still happen as a result of a platform like Tinder or something?

• 15:31Speaker 05

  But that's, but that's, that's why I wanted to ask next is when you go to product liability, it's usually that you're not matching a product promise.

• 15:40Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 15:41Speaker 05

  This is gonna make you thin. This is gonna make you beautiful.

• 15:43Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 05

  Does Sniffy's promise safety? So this is part of it.

• 15:49Ed Zitron?

  Tinder has these features, I believe Tinder has features about like check-ins or maybe like one of the platforms has safety features. So kind of.

• 15:58Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Grinder, one of the things noted in that is that Grinder promotes itself as a quote safe space and all of these apps and platforms say like our users are 18 and up like they say that they check users age.

• 16:12Speaker 05

  So there you go.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  And do promise that in a way. But then I guess the question goes, does asking someone to enter their date of birth in just a form, does that mean you've actually checked their age?

• 16:22Speaker 05

  Well, this is the interesting thing. We've talked about this on our podcast on this week in Google, is where does the liability land? Is it at the platform and technology level? Or is it the intermediary level? Or is it at the user level? And if we try to expect the platforms to solve all the problems of mankind, we know they're gonna fail.

• 16:40Ed Zitron?

  Well, I think specifically with Tinder under their safety and policy center, it says, and I quote, "Our safety tools. We utilize a network of industry-leading automated and manual moderation, review tools, systems and processes and invest significant resources to prevent, monitor and remove inappropriate behavior, impersonation, harassment and more from our app. These tools include automatic scans of profiles, red flag languages and images, manual reviews of specific profiles and it goes on and so forth. And they also have a zero tolerance policy of harassment and encourage their community to report any instance of misconduct."

• 17:11Speaker 05

  Do they have a liability statement there?

• 17:12Ed Zitron?

  Now, let's scroll down.

• 17:15Speaker 05

  The bottom is where the lawyers live.

• 17:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's see.

• 17:18Speaker 04

  It's probably in all caps or something.

• 17:20Ed Zitron?

  Additional policies declaration harassment under it. Bloody hell, they got a lot. Now there's just a lot of like things that then might be under the terms of use. But nevertheless, if this go, if Doe versus Grinder happens, it feels like that won't stop people suing and using this as a promise?

• 17:39Speaker 04

  Certainly.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, but there's a problem with that, too. I've argued, I mean, Facebook is now completely fucked up and going full MAGA. But I've argued strenuously over the years that it should have had a raise on debt, a North Star.

• 17:54Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 17:54Speaker 05

  Uh, right? And it should have said, "We're here to be nice to each other. We're here to build community. We're here to make strangers less strange." They do none of that. And I wish they would have because perhaps then there is a standard to hold them against and also their users. However, in this discussion, if they say, well, you said you're going to be the place where people are nice and now you're filled with harassment, it motivates them not to make any promises.

• 18:18Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:19Speaker 05

  And that's, that's a problem, I think.

• 18:20Ed Zitron?

  It's also an IDC company. So I don't really, that's the company that owns Tinder and Match Group and a bunch of other ones like chemistry.com. And I don't, they're evil. Like this is my statement. You don't have to follow. I think they're deeply evil companies, but this sniffies thing is a level worse.

• 18:36Speaker 04

  And I mean, I just think it's interesting because sniffies, I mean, is kind of like the worst of all these problems because it is completely without any of the safeguards.

• 18:44Ed Zitron?

  And all about a frictionless experience.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. And but it's also gotten so popular in the last couple of years, dating, the big dating apps are taking notice, like Grindr shouted it out basically in one of their most recent earnings calls.

• 18:58Ed Zitron?

  What did they say?

• 18:58Speaker 04

  When an analyst had asked like, oh, are there any competitors in the space that you're looking for, uh, keeping an eye on? And their CFO had said something along, there's like an anonymous, they basically described sniffies in name, but without using their name and said, we're keeping an eye on them. They also then introduced a feature, I believe, called right now that, uh, users on Grindr can turn on if they're looking for sex right that instant. Um, and other, uh, apps in the gay dating space have kind of emerged that are trying to take kind of a similar map-based cruising approach.

• 19:30Ed Zitron?

  It is really funny though, that the Altma thing is they were just like, yeah, what if we didn't follow any rules?

• 19:36Speaker 04

  It is pretty funny.

• 19:37Ed Zitron?

  What if we just turned off the rules part? And I think that kind of leads us to Meta right now, because I think what you're seeing with the destruction of Meta, and I'm sure you two have heard, but for the listeners, uh, Meta has now got rid of all of their content moderation stuff. They've got rid, well, they're claiming.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  Well, they're fact checking.

• 19:56Ed Zitron?

  They're fact checking.

• 19:57Speaker 05

  They're fact checking.

• 19:57Ed Zitron?

  Fact checkers. Sorry, sorry. Fact checking. I just fucked up the fact check, didn't I? And now, and now they're laying off 5%. No, thank God. Someone else. You know what's going on. Now they're laying off 5% of their people for quote underperforming and they're claiming that LLMs will replace like second tier engineers and also they have Casey Newton, actually I've given him a lot of shit, but he's put out some really good things recently about what Meta has said inside and how they're doing allowable things like just straight up homophobia, straight up anti-

• 20:28Speaker 04

  I mean, they just around the same time that these announcements rolled out, that an internal directive went out to remove tampons and pads from any male restrooms on Facebook campuses, which is just a ghoulish thing to do.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  It's MAGA all around.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  It's just like, that is costing you money, you already have those dispensers in there, why not just leave them there?

• 20:47Ed Zitron?

  But I think that it's something above MAGA as well, and I think that people willing to do what I'm about to describe might lean conservative because it's evil. Now, if you're listening, you're conservative, saying, eh, don't be so rude, shut the fuck up, I don't care.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  I'm surprised you've made it this far on the podcast.

• 21:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I don't know how you are there. No, it's all the anti-monopoly people who are like, god damn it.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:09Ed Zitron?

  Who about Matt Stoller? Anyways, so the point I'm making is, I think Meta is going to be the largest scale example of a company just not giving a shit in history. They're just doing all the evil stuff, they're using this as a chance to get rid of these troublesome things such as any kind of diversity, equity and inclusion, harassing trans people by removing them from spaces.

• 21:30Speaker 05

  It's all around American industry now. McDonald's, which depends upon black customers and depends upon black employees and people of color, no DEI, get rid of it, we don't care anymore, we're not going to do that anymore. And Meta, which cared about, you know, society and getting together and all that BS, right? I was very impressed by Mark Limley, who is a Stanford Law Professor and a big deal in West Coast Law, he is deactivating his account, but he's also firing Meta as a customer.

• 21:58Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  As a client.

• 22:00Speaker 04

  Good for you.

• 22:01Speaker 05

  And he said, "I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's descent into toxic masculinity and neo-Nazi madness."

• 22:09Speaker 05

  Yay. And that's a lot of it. It's not just political. It's this toast your donuts.

• 22:16Ed Zitron?

  I actually know. I take back my hell yeah. I recant my hell yeah. So.

• 22:21Speaker 05

  This is you. Thank you. They're waiting for this moment.

• 22:23Ed Zitron?

  No, no, no. But also like hell yeah now, but like daylight dollar short. As you can ask Jeff Horowitz, Wall Street Journal author of Broken Code, Meta has been backing up the MAGA people for years and years and years. They have been, they allowed plandemic to spread, a horrible conspiracy film that I'm not even going to describe. It sounds stupid and it is stupid. It's for morons. Eh, whatever. It's meant to be a big tent. I don't care. Jeff Kaplan, who is now the head of global policy, I believe.

• 22:49Speaker 05

  Joel.

• 22:49Ed Zitron?

  Joel Coeur. Why do I keep mixing those?

• 22:51Speaker 05

  Fact check you again, man.

• 22:52Ed Zitron?

  No, this is why you have guests, because I'm too stupid to remember things. He intervened with the public health group, specifically to allow plandemic to continue to go through. And when Kevin Roos attempted to report on this and report that CrowdTangle, this internal tool, had allowed them to see that these things were spreading and that Dan Bongino and all the conservatives were basically all that was being recommended. Alex Schultz, the CMO of Facebook at the time Meta now, he just shut down CrowdTangle, baby. You can't have that. Can't have people knowing. Alex Schultz also recently suggested on the anti LGBTQ front, and he is a gay man, that seeing homophobia and some such business on there would make people more sympathetic to the cause of LGBTQ people.

• 23:38Speaker 05

  This is perverse.

• 23:38Ed Zitron?

  It is. It's disgusting. But the thing is, it's, I think what's frustrating me, and perhaps I need to stop saying things like, it's not just MAGA. It is MAGA. Of course it is. But it's been here for a while and it's been here egregiously. They've been supporting the conservatives at scale. And I mean, supporting as a media property. And so it's just, I just can't take it so seriously when people go, well, this is Mark Zuckerberg finally giving in. No, that repressed little fuck, he's, oh, going on Joe Rogan, things are not masculine enough. What a, the least masculine thing I've ever heard. Anyway, rant over.

• 24:13Speaker 05

  So on this week in Google last week, I said, you know, is there anybody left? I thought that Jeff Bezos was responsible steward of the Washington Post. He's not. Mark Zuckerberg was always a dork, but I didn't think he was this bad. Jack Dorsey gets weirder by the day and on and on. And I said on the show that Jensen Huang, the CEO and founder of Nvidia, I'd watched his two-hour keynote at CES. I was I'm impressed by him constantly. I thought, well, maybe there's maybe there's a smart guy.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  Jeff, stop believing in the good in people.

• 24:49Speaker 05

  The next day on Mastodon, somebody said, this is your good guy. Jensen Huang is signing a woman's breast.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  I was about to say, Jeff.

• 24:56Ed Zitron?

  Well, first of all, if she asked, if she asked, but also, I will choose the other thing that Jensen Huang did at CES. So during one of the presentations, an audio guy was like hurried on, he goes, I can hear myself. I can hear myself. And the guy's like, no, no, Mr. Mr. Huang, it's reflecting off the sides. He's like, no, no. And he was called Sebastian, I believe. He's like, I'm when I when someone makes a mistake, I'm going to call you the Sebastian going forward.

• 25:23Speaker 05

  Okay, never mind that.

• 25:25Ed Zitron?

  But that's the thing. Yeah, it is a fair thing, though. And I'm not saying I think there are some who want this more than others. It would be nice if one of them wasn't insane. I thought it was Marc Benioff for a while. I thought Marc Benioff was all right. And I actually had coffee with a reporter after I met him and like described him positively. And she said, so he's just another white tech CEO. I'm like, oh, shit, I'm doing the thing that I'm doing the exact thing. But also, Benioff's Benioff's a worm, too.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  May I put together my theory, forward my theory. It's called CEO brain worms.

• 25:54Ed Zitron?

  Please, please.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  It's simply that if you are a CEO of something, especially a large company, you increasingly get brain worms, which is just you are surrounded by people whose job is largely to say yes to you, make you feel good. And that would make anyone insane. If you are surrounded by sycophants for long enough, I think that you are going to become untethered from reality in a way that is distressing to a person that exists in conflict.

• 26:22Ed Zitron?

  Someone on Twitter once said, being a billionaire is like being kicked in the horse in the head by a horse every day. And I think that's fair.

• 26:28Speaker 05

  But there's something different now, I think. They've always been sexist. It's a male structure. That's given. But the permission structure has changed rapidly.

• 26:36Ed Zitron?

  Yes, yes.

• 26:37Speaker 05

  And I don't think necessarily their their essence has changed, but they're all freed.

• 26:40Ed Zitron?

  They're untethered.

• 26:41Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 26:42Ed Zitron?

  And yeah, I fully agree with that. And I think you're really seeing it with Zuckerberg. And it kind of makes so much more, I wish I would have called this one because he is doing exactly what you'd expect. He's just, I'm gonna remove all of the stuff that makes Facebook already a basically unusable platform. I'm gonna make it, I'm just gonna add all the racism back. We need some of that more racism there. And I'm just gonna fire a bunch of people and I'm gonna go on Joe Rogan and talk about my sad little wheelie or whatever he said. I didn't, I didn't watch, I don't care. It's just, what happens with Google now is my question. What is the untethered Sundar Pichai experience?

• 27:18Speaker 05

  I, I, I'm gonna be naive again. I think it's different. Maybe because they're, Sundar is educated and Larry and Sergey are educated and Zuckerberg left sophomore year seminar brain.

• 27:31Ed Zitron?

  Sure. Um, but I'm not sure that, I've met plenty of psychotic people in college.

• 27:38Speaker 05

  True.

• 27:39Ed Zitron?

  And I'm just, I'm just wondering, perhaps I should reframe the question. It's like, what happens to Google now? How, how worried about Google's quality I am. If like, because this is what, what Meta is doing is effectively what Google's been working on. It's the whole thing of degrading the quality of the service by taking off the things that makes it good.

• 27:57Speaker 05

  Well, I argue a little bit differently that the problem for Google isn't just Google. The problem is the web. The web is being ruined as a whole and it's a window onto a worse web.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  And in some ways, Google is accelerating that by, Google has, as it is the portal to the web, entire industries upon industries have emerged to game that portal of the web, which results in kind of a self fulfilling prophecy of slop.

• 28:24Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, the, the quality, the content that they raise becomes the most popular content, which in turn informs what will be popular next.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:31Speaker 05

  Oh, it's an omelet of chicken and egg. Yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:33Ed Zitron?

  I'm hungry. It's, I think that this is really going to hasten the rot economy though. I think this is just gonna begin more rot because before there was this layer, and they obviously all resented it, where it was just like, oh yeah, there's different color people, I guess. Fucking, there's woman now? Jesus Christ. And they've always like grumpily accepted it. And Meta has been weirdly one of the better ones, which. Means that the ones who are not going, what do you think fucking Tesla's gonna be like? Tesla's not gonna have bathroom for woman anymore. That's a guess. It's, it's, it's a joke. I don't know. Who are you worried about, Jet? Like, who, who is the real bastard left? Who's the bastard who hasn't bastard it yet?

• 29:13Speaker 05

  Well, that's, I think that's the, I, I, I hope that Google's not gonna go that far. I, I think for their business, it wouldn't be any, any good. Um, here's the other question, Blue Sky.

• 29:23Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  Do we have any hope for Blue Sky? So I have, I, but I'm, I'm an optimist. I hold out hope. I like Blue Sky.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  I'm a nihilist, but I have hope for Blue Sky selfishly.

• 29:32Speaker 05

  Yes. And then I saw, did you see the thing yesterday? I've got to pull up the, the rundown. There's, there's an effort to raise thirty million dollars.

• 29:39Ed Zitron?

  Is this the Free My App?

• 29:41Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 29:41Ed Zitron?

  Free our feeds?

• 29:43Speaker 05

  Which, which is filled with people like Shoshana Zuboff.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  Can you explain this to me? What are they raising money for?

• 29:49Ed Zitron?

  This was already on my notes. I'm glad you brought this up.

• 29:51Speaker 05

  It's really unclear. And Dave Weiner, who's one of the pioneers of RSS and podcasting and blogging and so on. His response was, there's no, uh, nerds there. There's no technologists there.

• 30:03Ed Zitron?

  I also, it doesn't seem to be saying what they'll do.

• 30:06Speaker 05

  No, it, it doesn't.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  So what are they raising the money to?

• 30:08Ed Zitron?

  They've not even raised the money.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  They, they're declaring their hope to raise money?

• 30:12Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  I'd also like to declare that I'd like to raise thirty million dollars. I'll spend it on a brownstone and give you ten, twenty million back.

• 30:20Ed Zitron?

  I will keep the money and do nothing else.

• 30:22Speaker 05

  What's the name of it again?

• 30:23Ed Zitron?

  Free our feeds.

• 30:25Speaker 05

  Because I want to go down the list of the people who are associated.

• 30:27Ed Zitron?

  No, it's really funny. There's Corey Doctorow and Shoshana Zuboff.

• 30:31Speaker 05

  Right.

• 30:31Ed Zitron?

  Which if, if you've ever talked to Corey about Shoshana Zuboff, let me just say, that's a weird coffee date.

• 30:38Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah. And Mark's a sermon from Mozilla, who I think is a good guy, but Shoshana drives me crazy. Roger back to me, oh, Mark doesn't call me anymore. Drives me nuts.

• 30:50Ed Zitron?

  Poor Roger and Buster.

• 30:52Speaker 05

  Mark Ruffalo, Jimmy Wales, we like. Uh, Brian Eno is everywhere. Carol Catwalder from, well, The Guardian soon.

• 30:59Ed Zitron?

  Mate, Roger.

• 31:00Speaker 05

  Turtle. Um.

• 31:03Ed Zitron?

  It's just a bunch of people who don't build.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  They don't build. They don't build. So, my friend Craig Newmark is now signing on.

• 31:10Ed Zitron?

  Corey's on there.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  Essentially, what they want to use the raised funds for is to launching a public interest foundation to support the project while creating an independently hosted infrastructure, giving Blue Sky users, developers, and researchers access to content and data.

• 31:26Speaker 05

  You don't need $30 million to do that. I need $30 million. Mastodon built up to what it was just when, until the point where Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon had raised an entire deal, $500,000.

• 31:37Ed Zitron?

  And Mastodon literally just did a nonprofit operation like a day or two ago, saying that they're kind of decentralizing it.

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• 32:56Ed Zitron?

  See, I don't enjoy Mastodon at all. I don't think I-

• 33:01Speaker 04

  I think it's a bunch of scolds.

• 33:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it feels like I need to do a content warning because I didn't use a capital letter in the right place.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  That is exactly how it feels.

• 33:09Ed Zitron?

  You're like, "I'm eating lunch. Wow."

• 33:11Speaker 04

  How dare you?

• 33:12Ed Zitron?

  Did you see that guy in The Matrix? He didn't even have a mouth. Now... I think what frustrates me here is like Mastodon did something real, that they've moved stuff around. And this thing, I got reached out to by them and I read a few articles, and I'm pretty stupid. So I was like, "Maybe someone else saw something and sent it to a few friends." They were like, "This looks good, I guess." It isn't anything, is it?

• 33:32Speaker 05

  There's nothing.

• 33:33Ed Zitron?

  It's just-

• 33:33Speaker 05

  There's nothing.

• 33:34Ed Zitron?

  Why is everyone covering it? "Will Aramis call me?" "Will Aramis of the Washington Post? Do I adore?" "Why are you giving them a Q&A?" They, he talked, he talked all about them. It's just, it's frustrating because I think it was they, they've done kind of... I hope I'm wrong. I hope this thing does the thing that they're non-

• 33:51Speaker 05

  But you could do it-

• 33:52Ed Zitron?

  What is, actually, I don't, why am I even saying I hope they do it? I actually cannot tell you what they do.

• 33:57Speaker 05

  And that's concerning to me. The "it" should be to federate Blue Sky. To take the AT protocol and make it federated, like, um, Mastodon is.

• 34:07Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 34:08Speaker 05

  Like Activity Pub, right? That, that requires Jay Graber and Blue Sky to have enough resources to put out what's needed for federation.

• 34:16Ed Zitron?

  And I wonder if that costs 30 million though?

• 34:18Speaker 05

  No, it doesn't.

• 34:18Ed Zitron?

  What they want to do, from what I understand of this vague promise now, is I think they want to be like, "Hey, do you want to fund like the other Blue Sky?" It, it just feels this kind of vagueness, and now that we've listed out all the names, I'm just kind of like, "This is cynical. This is like one of those stand-up to cancer things."

• 34:34Speaker 05

  Would you call it nihilistic?

• 34:35Speaker 04

  No.

• 34:36Speaker 05

  No, it doesn't qualify.

• 34:38Ed Zitron?

  It's cynical. It's cynical, and I like, the thing is, there are people, I like, like Cory's awesome.

• 34:42Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 34:43Ed Zitron?

  And it's like-

• 34:46Ed Zitron?

  All of these promises without really promising anything, what does that sound like? The tech industry? Like, why don't you come to this with some things? And the answer is, they just wanna talk about, we wanna make it billionaire proof. What the fuck does that mean? Billionaires have way more money than thirty million dollars. They've got like a hundred and fifty million more dollars than that. That's how much a billion is.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 35:06Ed Zitron?

  And it's just, everyone's kind of falling for it. And I hope it does something good, but I really cannot say what that might be. And if their answer is, well, you didn't read it well enough, not my fucking problem, mate. You explain this shit when you're talking to all and sundry about this.

• 35:20Speaker 05

  Have you seen anything from Jay Graber at Blue Sky about what she thinks of this?

• 35:24Ed Zitron?

  She gave a canned quote and said it was good. Because I mean, if, in her position, well, it'd be funny if she's like, this bullshit. Fuck these people.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  I mean, I guess, yeah, if someone wants to buy out her startup for thirty million dollars.

• 35:38Ed Zitron?

  Well, it's not even that. She was just like, yeah, it's a pretty good thing, I think. It might have been Jay. I don't know if it was Jay who did the quote, but it was something along the lines of like, this is good.

• 35:45Speaker 05

  You know who I want?

• 35:46Ed Zitron?

  Protocol.

• 35:47Speaker 05

  Mike Basnick is now on the board of Blue Sky. He's the voice I'll trust on this.

• 35:51Ed Zitron?

  Yes, I generally trust Mike. We have some differing opinions, mostly on Section 230, but I think that that's everyone's experience with Mike.

• 35:59Speaker 05

  No, because I agree with Mike on Section 230.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  He's the world's biggest Mike stan.

• 36:03Ed Zitron?

  No, no, I know you, no, I'm a huge Mike. He was a guest on the show. He was one of my favorite episodes, The Streisand Effect.

• 36:09Speaker 04

  I think, I think Mike is lovely.

• 36:10Ed Zitron?

  He's wonderful. Really, really good storyteller and actually a good journalist, which is why this whole thing is something I really would like his opinion on. Because it feels like the kind of thing you'd get like a Carl Bode, Bode?

• 36:22Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 36:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:23Ed Zitron?

  Like an article being like, bunch of tech people shit it up again. I love Carl.

• 36:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:28Speaker 05

  Oh, he's great.

• 36:28Ed Zitron?

  I love, but also, I don't wanna be a wet blanket here, but it's blue. Like, it's just frustrating because you know what we actually need right now? Like Pixel Fed or whatever, the federated Instagram thing that is currently being blocked.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  What is Pixel Fed?

• 36:43Ed Zitron?

  It's just an Instagram that's decentralized, much like Mastodon.

• 36:45Speaker 05

  It's a hub of activity, but.

• 36:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's an actual thing that probably could use thirty million dollars and is an actual story beyond it being blocked. But the thing getting covered is a bunch of people getting together and saying, wouldn't it be nice if something was nicer? When you actually have someone doing the thing, because what we need right now is a Blue Sky for Facebook. Or we need Facebook equivalent and Instagram equivalent. Because once Meta loses their grip on those two things.

• 37:13Ed Zitron?

  They are fucked. They do not have a real business, the whole AI profiles thing, which we'll get to in a minute. And all of this, yeah, we're going to take off the, we're going to take off all the things that allow you to say the 14 words every post. We're going to allow trans people to attack. You don't do that just because you're evil. You, capitalism is generally going to move towards the most profitable direction. You do this because all that stuff just got in the way of more stuff and more growth. You break that machine with an alternative that doesn't suck constantly?

• 37:46Speaker 05

  Let me try a different theory on it.

• 37:47Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 37:48Speaker 05

  Which is that I made fun of Musk buying Twitter, forty, forty-four billion dollars, what a fool you are. And we all know how wrong that was because he's worth 10 times more because he's had access to power around the world around.

• 37:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, he used it.

• 38:00Speaker 05

  Is Zuckerberg simply jealous of Musk's political clout?

• 38:05Ed Zitron?

  Nah, I don't think so.

• 38:06Speaker 05

  He's more, more by money than power.

• 38:08Ed Zitron?

  I think he could just give money. What do you think?

• 38:11Speaker 04

  I mean, I think that that could be something. I think that certainly access to political power is something that he wants, as do all of these people. The fact that, uh, Zuck, Musk, and who is the third person? A bunch of tech CEOs are going to be sitting in Trump's, and Bezos are going to be sitting in Trump's little box at the inauguration, I think, speaks volumes.

• 38:33Ed Zitron?

  Did you cover Facebook? And I feel like you, you've covered them previously.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I covered them, um, earlier on.

• 38:40Ed Zitron?

  Right. Is this, is there anything historic about? Because I was just thinking, has Zuckerberg generally hung out with presidents in any way? Like, has he ever really been social with them?

• 38:50Speaker 04

  My understanding is no, not to this extent, but I could be missing something.

• 38:55Speaker 05

  He's not terribly social, period.

• 38:56Ed Zitron?

  He'd remember.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, he, like, his, I remember his, it was notable in like 2017 or 18, when he did a tour across America, taking his little photos staged to look like he's normal height.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  And everyone was like, oh, wow, he's making a political statement.

• 39:17Ed Zitron?

  He's so tall.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  He could be moving. He looks like he could be five foot nine.

• 39:21Ed Zitron?

  Now looking this up.

• 39:22Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, no, it's, uh, there's definitely him standing on boxes or in photos, standing.

• 39:27Ed Zitron?

  He's five seven.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, standing forward so that he looks taller. However, I remember that being notable because it felt like, yeah, he's actually like entering into the political sphere, maybe, but I think that he is just as his political star has risen, um, for better or worse over the last decade, he is cozied up to power quite a bit.

• 39:48Speaker 05

  I'm about to say something terrible.

• 39:50Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 39:51Speaker 05

  Which is when I was in Davos.

• 39:54Speaker 04

  Oh, Jeff, I'm sorry. You've got to leave. Bye, Jeff. It's lovely having you.

• 39:58Speaker 05

  I was there in a session with Mark Zuckerberg and it was before he was media trained. And, um, and I've watched him in a few conference settings back in the day, 10 years ago. And he obviously hated it then, but he's changed.

• 40:13Ed Zitron?

  I think he has got the brain worms, but also like many of these guys, he's got all of this money, got a reasonable age and then he's like, what do I enjoy? And then he's realized he enjoys nothing. I personally am a barbecue guy. I have never seen a man less interested in cooking in my life. Sweet baby rays.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  He loves to smoke those meats, though.

• 40:35Ed Zitron?

  And there's nothing wrong with a cheap rack of ribs with some sweet baby rays if you're feeling lazy. We've all done it. It took six hours. You're not lazy enough. You're not so lazy you wouldn't cook it. You don't want to go to the store. No, and also he got a big green egg. He got the, there's nothing wrong with the big green egg. But you know what? If you got all this money, you can get yourself a really interesting stick burner. You got like a.

• 40:55Speaker 05

  You could buy Nashville.

• 40:57Ed Zitron?

  You could go and get a pits and spits out of Texas. That's where I get my grill from. Beautiful steel beast. Coy over there put it together. Really don't want to look at the politics there. Just realized as I said that, never looked at it. Please, if it's bad, don't blame me.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  Don't tweet at him.

• 41:10Ed Zitron?

  But also. He doesn't enjoy anything none of these people do. And so, yeah, he's just like, see, like, I've seen clips of the Rogan thing, and he just seems fu- he seems as bad as Elon Mu- he seems just like pissed, like, ooh, oh, oh, another day with my billions, ooh.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  A detail I think is, uh, notable and has been stuck in my head ever since I read it. Uh, it was in Wall- a Wall Street Journal piece kind of tied to this, um, rebuff of fact checking. They had a detail right at the end that I think in maybe like November of last year, Mark Zuckerberg had had gone through some sort of knee surgery because he pulled something relating to MMA and made a Facebook post about it, being like, here's me at my knee surgery. And I guess the post didn't do well. And so he freaked out and messaged his team being like, why isn't my post doing well? Turns out it was because it was being suppressed due to Facebook policies on potential medical misinformation. And I don't know, seems fairly notable that right before Zuck decides to roll back all of these policies

• 42:09Speaker 04

  limiting the reach of certain posts, his own knee, knee Facebook post gets limited.

• 42:15Ed Zitron?

  What I love about that, first of all, other than the lack of poster spirit and this pathetic,

• 42:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, absolutely.

• 42:20Ed Zitron?

  Oh, my post didn't post better. But also-

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Post harder.

• 42:23Ed Zitron?

  He actually ran into a problem of Facebook that people complain about, which is that I don't seem to distribute my post to everyone. I- it seems to get stopped somehow. But instead of being like, maybe that's a problem with the platform. He's like, why aren't people not looking at my knees enough?

• 42:36Speaker 05

  No, he knew. He knew it was his platform.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  He knew it was his own platform.

• 42:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  And they were like, fix it for my thing. And it's a similar thing that Elon Musk has done with Twitter to where he was like, well, people aren't seeing my tweets enough. So we're gonna need to put my tweets in everybody's feed always. And it's intolerable.

• 42:54Ed Zitron?

  I would do this, just to be clear, like, immediately, right now, like, and why? Because I love people looking at me. But it's so much sadder if you have all the money in the world and you could actually make people look at you and you could go and like, see anyone. You have enough money that foreseeably, anyone would meet with you. You might have to pay someone, but you could meet everyone, probably. And I- but I was just shocked, even in the clips I saw, of how like, petulant he seems. Like, he doesn't, like, it's not like he's like, finally, the attention, he's like, oh, he's like, resentful.

• 43:25Speaker 05

  Because, because MAGA is anger.

• 43:27Ed Zitron?

  Sure, sure.

• 43:29Speaker 05

  That's the whole, that's the whole shit.

• 43:31Ed Zitron?

  He didn't feel like he was leaning into it, though. He felt like there was a man-

• 43:36Ed Zitron?

  Pissed off.

• 43:37Speaker 04

  I think it makes sense if you think about it historically because Zuck went on this huge apology tour after the 2016 election and also with Cambridge Analytica stuff that happened. He was for years, just like a political punching bag and he put himself up for it. He, you know, went before Congress, he went and apologized to a bunch of parents recently. He did this whole like-

• 43:57Ed Zitron?

  Oh, very reasonable things to ask of him.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, very, I mean, but like in the mind of someone who is the head of a company, that might seem like you really have gone through the wringer and yet people still continue to be mad at you no matter what you do.

• 44:11Speaker 05

  Actually, the apology demanded in Congress was by Josh Hawley, who's now his BFF. It's, it's all just sick upon sick.

• 44:21Ed Zitron?

  And it's, now I'm thinking about Sundar Pichai, probably not Sundar or Satya Nadella. I think Satya Nadella might, from Microsoft, might adjust and become the nice CEO, or he will find far more specific ways to do it that will allow him to get away with it. But it really is, it's going to be interesting seeing the people who turn their nose up at Facebook now, because right now, I can't delete my Instagram, it's the only way I speak to like 11 people and there are people who only interact on it. But if that's your only business model, that's not great, but that's also most-

• 44:52Speaker 05

  But that goes back to, back to Musk. My presumption, besides it being a bad investment, was he was ruining it and people would leave it, yes, people left it, it doesn't matter to him. It doesn't matter.

• 45:03Ed Zitron?

  I think Facebook matters to Zuck. I actually do. I think, I think he, he is, he's not obsessed with it because that would involve him like looking at it for more than two seconds, but no, actually, maybe I take this back. He might not care. If you look at it now, I guess, no, it's just, it looks like shit and it doesn't really-

• 45:20Speaker 05

  Because what did he care about? The stupid goggles.

• 45:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 05

  Right, and now he cares about, and what, here's one of the funny things about Meta is that I think that there are a leader in AI, Yann Le Cun, who's there-

• 45:30Ed Zitron?

  Oh, God.

• 45:30Speaker 05

  Is one of the, well, he's one of the more, I think, rational people around it. He's not a doomster, he's not full of all that crap.

• 45:36Ed Zitron?

  No, he just argues with Elon Musk and Gary Marcus all day.

• 45:40Speaker 05

  That's God's work.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  Is it?

• 45:44Speaker 04

  Or is it a Sisyphean task?

• 45:45Ed Zitron?

  I want to get him on here just to call him Yan Lacum, but I think he'll kill me. But no, so they're leaders in AI.

• 45:51Speaker 05

  I was saying, they're leaders in AI, he's still

• 45:53Ed Zitron?

  I don't know if I agree, but

• 45:55Speaker 05

  is still doing the, um, uh, the goggle crap.

• 45:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 45:59Speaker 05

  And, you know, AR and VR. Uh, he got bored with Facebook a long time ago.

• 46:03Ed Zitron?

  So with, with that, I agree. I think he might love the financial entity known as Meta, though. I think he's like really attached to just the numbers because they've always been from the very early days of Yann Levan and, um, Naomi Glight and, uh, Alex Schultz. They've always been like growth pigs. They love, they love

• 46:22Speaker 05

  They were written off. Remember, it wasn't that long ago. Oh, Facebook's over. Meta's over. It's just a mess.

• 46:27Ed Zitron?

  Markets never did that.

• 46:28Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Well, they did for a little while. They did for a while and then it's, it's been a hell of a story.

• 46:33Speaker 04

  Now it's Meta. It's the future of the web. We're on to Web 75.

• 46:37Ed Zitron?

  We're on to Web 4.5 and this is when it gets more racist.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, the legs are racist now.

• 46:44Speaker 05

  But don't forget, in the early days of print, Malice Melifacharim came out, which was the guide to burning witches. That killed lots of people and it was print's fault. So maybe this is just a phase.

• 46:56Ed Zitron?

  Oh, for what?

• 46:57Speaker 05

  Until we have institutions that finally bring us quality. Same thing happened on us to God with print. That's a plug for my book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, now out.

• 47:05Ed Zitron?

  You could do it at the end, Jeff.

• 47:06Speaker 05

  Um, where, where I, I write about this, right? And, um, I, I think that we're at a stage where the scale of speech today is not, cannot be handled by the institutions we have. When, with print came, the institutions of editing and publishing were invented for that purpose because nobody knew what was made on this press. It had no provenance. Anybody can make this crap.

• 47:32Ed Zitron?

  So are you suggesting it would be a private market effect rather than a governmental one or a?

• 47:36Speaker 05

  I'm suggesting it's institutional and institutions can be either.

• 47:40Ed Zitron?

  Right. So I think I think it's possible, and I think that I actually think it's very difficult, but not as hard as people think to destroy Meta, in that it would take someone with enough money and enough moments. Like, Blue Sky's growth came from a moment where people went, "Let's check out what's on X. Oh, Groypa42 is threatening to kill me!" And that is somehow my suggested from the algorithm, and he DM'd me as well. I think that person will kill me, though. And then people went, "I don't want to fucking be there. I don't want to be associated with this." I think with Meta, if, depending on how bad the guardrails are pulled off, because we really don't know yet, it's going to take a little time, I think people will just be

• 48:21Ed Zitron?

  like, "This platform already sucks. I won't look at anything." And that's the real question. Do they go nowhere? I'm really curious about the TikTok ban. It might have even, we might find out.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  Well, I think you're right on Meta, perhaps in some US circles, but I think the question when it comes to something like Facebook is what ends up happening to international users?

• 48:40Ed Zitron?

  Oh, the global south.

• 48:41Speaker 04

  Where Facebook is the internet.

• 48:43Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and that's actually, that is actually genuinely worrying, because the destruction of the content, I know content moderation is still there, but the very clearly lax approach they're going to use now is going to hit the global south so much more, and it's going to hit people that are more subject to disinformation and misinformation.

• 49:02Speaker 04

  And I think it's worth noting that while, like, a lot of studies have shown, the jury's a bit out on whether fact-checking works or not. It does in some cases, but for most, like, politically-charged things, it just makes people dig their heels in more. The one thing I think is under-covered, or I guess under-emphasized, is fact-checking's ability to limit reach of misinformation.

• 49:24Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 49:25Speaker 04

  Like, sure, it's not going to...

• 49:27Ed Zitron?

  Car-bolting the horse.

• 49:28Speaker 04

  Saying like, "Yeah, I posted misinformation and saying on my post, 'Your post is misinformation' probably isn't going to change my view," but it will potentially have an impact on the 20 people that might have seen that and fallen into that rabbit hole.

• 49:41Ed Zitron?

  And the thing is, and I think it was someone from 404 made the point that Meta's fact-checking wasn't great.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Certainly.

• 49:48Speaker 05

  I was there at the beginning. I, after 2016, I raised a bunch of money from, from Facebook, gave it away to places like Data and Society and other good folks who are doing lots of work on, on what, as Joe Bernstein has since called, big disinfo. And I was watching as they were trying to build their fact-checking structure.

• 50:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 50:10Speaker 05

  And it was a clusterfuck from the beginning. They had to, well, we can't do this. We can't make judgments. Everybody's frightened of judgment. So they had to go to the fact-checking organization. Imagine their fun conventions. They have them.

• 50:20Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:21Speaker 05

  And, and you've got to verify who's a good fact-checker. And then that group wouldn't verify ABC News. So then Facebook had a fit about that. And so it was ratted around and around as who's allowed to be a fact-checker, right? From the very beginning, that's what it was. And then there's debate too.

• 50:41Ed Zitron?

  How do you scale that to billions of people?

• 50:43Speaker 05

  Exactly. In all kinds of cultures and languages. And so I'm not, I'm not against fact-checking. I'm not against facts, but facts to my mind are not the problem.

• 50:52Ed Zitron?

  And I think the problem, sorry, that Jeff just got sent $5 from the fact organization on his phone. They sent him $5. Thank you for representing facts.

• 51:01Speaker 05

  Oh, grandpa. Let me show you how to do your phone.

• 51:05Ed Zitron?

  And you see, when you said, "I was there at the beginning," I had to stop myself being like, "What with the dinosaurs."

• 51:12Speaker 04

  That's me every week on This Week in Google. I'm like, "Tell me about black and white TV, Jeff."

• 51:18Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's, I think the bigger thing is, I'm more worried about the ramifications of this attitude, because they already were pretty lax. And in the global south, in the rest of the world, there even, there's even, there's less media that understands those language, the languages even, Jesus. But also less people in the Western world, which Meta is arguably more scared about with the media. And I think as well, the other thing I really haven't seen talked about is, Meta is already limiting traffic on, on journalists. And do you think that they're gonna increase the sharing or decrease it?

• 51:52Speaker 04

  Well, I believe that they said they're no longer going to limit the reach of like six. civics related content, which I think I took to mean like political news.

• 52:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, sure.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  I don't know whether that will apply to all journalism.

• 52:04Ed Zitron?

  That is such a euphemism. I'm sorry.

• 52:07Speaker 04

  Civics related.

• 52:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, civics related. So they'll allow the influencers they like.

• 52:12Speaker 05

  But probably not links.

• 52:14Ed Zitron?

  Yes. Well, they'll allow links, but they won't. They'll depress them.

• 52:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They allow them. Well, versus Canada, where of course they're not allowed.

• 52:21Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 52:21Speaker 05

  Uh, and I think, I think Meta was praying that the Canada like bill would have, would have passed in California. Because they said that they would eliminate news in California. And I think that would have been an open door. Ah, screw it. Let's eliminate it in the US. Let's eliminate it everywhere. And that would have been easier for them. Puppies, parties and, uh, pedophiles and, uh, what's another P word for bad people?

• 52:43Ed Zitron?

  Guy Fieri's got to stop making TV shows. It's just, it's frustrating and it's only going to push people towards blue sky, but it's also, I think a real inflection point for legacy media as well. So there was a story in.

• 52:56Speaker 05

  Oh, legacy media is dead.

• 52:58Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I know. So Jeff Jarvis over here, a big fan of The Times and The Post. You actually, I like, he does this thing where it's hashtag, hashtag broken post.

• 53:06Speaker 05

  And broken times.

• 53:07Ed Zitron?

  Broken times, but good times. You've also put a bit as.

• 53:09Speaker 05

  A rare moment when they do well. Yes.

• 53:11Ed Zitron?

  You've got to give it.

• 53:11Speaker 05

  The other day they did.

• 53:12Ed Zitron?

  But that's, I think that those publications are more at threat from this than people realize because, Semaphore had a story saying, I think it was today, it's media, so I assume Mr. Tani.

• 53:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:24Ed Zitron?

  Max Tani. He, um, that story said that The Post went from having like 20 million unique monthly visitors to like 2.5 to three in 2021 to 2.5 to three in 2024. Jeff is astounded. I was too.

• 53:38Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 53:40Ed Zitron?

  And guys, our friend of the show made the good point is.

• 53:43Speaker 04

  Has about 3 million monthly.

• 53:46Ed Zitron?

  I think if The Post helped you get laid.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  That would probably boost the numbers.

• 53:51Speaker 05

  Well, we, we used to have that as a business model. We used to have personals in newspapers.

• 53:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:55Speaker 05

  Before you were born.

• 53:56Ed Zitron?

  And that's what they took from us.

• 53:57Speaker 05

  That's all we had. Feel sorry for, for us old horny people. That's all we had.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  Was submitting a single sentence to The Washington Post.

• 54:06Ed Zitron?

  My new favorite quote of.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  Feel sorry for us old horny people.

• 54:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I, I like last week was already apologizing for the amount of times people talked about horny chicks and stuff. Well, we're back, folks. It's just crazy, but I think it's these large publications have been so used to social traffic and they've not been working out what the hell to do with it.

• 54:28Speaker 05

  No.

• 54:28Ed Zitron?

  For a while.

• 54:30Speaker 04

  Well, a lot of them are betting that getting checks from AI companies could soften the blow, which I don't think is going to change much. I mean,

• 54:40Ed Zitron?

  They only get one of those as well.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  I mean, they're supposed to get one a year or something like that.

• 54:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, from the company that burns $5 billion.

• 54:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, Dot Dash Meredith had, I think their numbers are public and if you do the math, it equals up to like 1% or less than 1% of their yearly revenue they get. And I just don't, I think it's a terrible trade and it's the same sort of mistake these companies make.

• 55:01Speaker 05

  And it screws the rest of all media. Because it's just the big, the moguls got their bags of money, but Ed here gets nothing from OpenAI.

• 55:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:08Ed Zitron?

  I, I would love to sell everything words wise to Sam Altman. You just have to text me back, Sam. I've been texting you. I have not heard back and I'm not sure why. I simply asked you a question. Come on, come on, man. Mr. OpenAI, I need you on my show. I won't hurt you much. Not physically, but emotionally.

• 55:29Speaker 04

  Just six texts unanswered that say, come on, you coward.

• 55:32Ed Zitron?

  We are going to be crying, both of us. I will start crying and you will finish crying, Mr. Altman.

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• 56:57Ed Zitron?

  These deals, I assume that the Washington Post isn't getting, say, $175 million a year, which is what their revenue is. They're probably getting like 20, 30. I just tried to look it up. It could not find it. From this OpenAI deal, I think it was for the AI-powered search. Is that a content deal with them? Or did they not sign one yet?

• 57:12Speaker 04

  I'm not sure. So what I understand is the two big media deals that we have like public numbers on as far as the amount, it equals up to like a single percentage point or less of their overall revenue when you calculate it. Like, they are getting pennies.

• 57:31Speaker 05

  No, they're not good at business. Otherwise, they wouldn't be in such terrible shape right now. They screwed up the internet. They missed the boat. They didn't know what they were doing. They cry and try to get protectionist legislation. And so now they cry and try to get money out of OpenAI, and it's not a business model.

• 57:46Ed Zitron?

  Well, Jeff, this is actually one of the many reasons I wanted you on. Can you kind of explain what you've just said? So what is it that they missed? What is it that they should have done differently?

• 57:55Speaker 05

  So let's not just make that third person. I'll make that first person too, because I worked for Conde Nast and for Advance, and I was there as it was going on. And

• 58:04Ed Zitron?

  What was it in this case?

• 58:05Speaker 05

  The internet. I started at Advance in 94, just a month after the browser came out.

• 58:10Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 58:11Speaker 05

  Right? So the company was debating, okay, now we're going to Uncle Jeff time.

• 58:14Speaker 04

  I'm sad.

• 58:16Ed Zitron?

  That was back when the browser was a room-sized machine that printed the website.

• 58:22Speaker 05

  Yes. So we were debating whether to put our content on to Prodigy or AOL or this new web thing.

• 58:33Ed Zitron?

  On the portals themselves, when it was just like one website.

• 58:36Speaker 05

  So I worked for Steve Newhouse, who's now the chairman of Advance and Conde Nast. And he's really, really smart. And he's the one who taught me about interactivity and community. And he knew that print content was not valuable online. But every other publisher thought their great value was in repurposing their print content to online.

• 58:55Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 58:55Speaker 05

  And trying to license it and get money for it and sell it. And they didn't understand

• 58:59Ed Zitron?

  To the portals.

• 59:01Speaker 05

  To the portals and then eventually in paywalls. They didn't understand that the essence of the internet is conversation and community and collaboration and creativity, that's the last of my alliterations. And so they insisted to just do what they'd always done, subscription money and ad money. And as the ad money went down because the number of avails went way sky high.

• 59:24Ed Zitron?

  Availability of.

• 59:25Speaker 05

  Of advertising, then as happens with when supply goes up, price goes down. So then they tried to put it all behind the paywall and they're not all the New York Times and they can't do that. And they never saw, I think, what the essence of the internet is. And so now, and they're still in mass media mind, they're still in, we have to please everybody while they go piss off everybody.

• 59:46Ed Zitron?

  Right. So what should they have done?

• 59:48Speaker 05

  What should they have done? I think that they should have seen themselves, they could have started Reddit, they could have started AOL, they could have started these things. I was part of this horrible.

• 59:59Ed Zitron?

  But would that have funded journalism?

• 1:00:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:02Speaker 04

  You're talking about something like Kenja, the commenting Reddit-like commenting system under Gawker blogs.

• 1:00:10Speaker 05

  I was there at the beginning of that too.

• 1:00:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, Conversations, the first man.

• 1:00:15Speaker 05

  Nick Denton first hated, I said he had put comments on Gawker, he said, no, I hate comments, they're awful.

• 1:00:20Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 1:00:21Speaker 05

  They are. Actually, they're not.

• 1:00:24Speaker 04

  I know.

• 1:00:25Speaker 05

  But then at one point, he became a believer because he was going to do it Nick's way. And that became Kenja and that became everything else.

• 1:00:31Ed Zitron?

  Sure, I think my big thing is.

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  Sorry, that was.

• 1:00:34Ed Zitron?

  One publication owning Reddit, do you think that that makes, like, how would, like, something like Reddit, because you're saying that they should have seen Conversations as a thing. Does that mean a social network, like, what, because what you're describing is a company that sells journalism. And you're like, the thing we will sell is not journalism.

• 1:00:53Speaker 05

  Well, in fact, my old boss Steve Newhouse is the one who bought Reddit. He wanted to buy.

• 1:00:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but he ran it like shit.

• 1:01:00Speaker 05

  No, he didn't. It's now worth a fortune and it's better and.

• 1:01:03Speaker 04

  Up until recently, he ran it like shit.

• 1:01:05Speaker 05

  Yep. But doing well now.

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  No, he doesn't.

• 1:01:08Speaker 05

  It's worth a fortune now, right? Uh, there was also a horrible clusterfuck in the industry called the New Century Network.

• 1:01:15Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:01:15Speaker 05

  And the newspaper industry got together, the top twelve companies, and we were gonna start a way to sign into all newspapers across the country at once, and subscribe at once, and sell ad works across. And it could have been a real thing, right? This is the same time that Yahoo's putting up news, and AOL's putting up news.

• 1:01:32Ed Zitron?

  I'm surprised you'd be into such a thing.

• 1:01:33Speaker 05

  They could have done this. What stopped them? So, half the company, along came Kleiner Perkins. And they said, "This is a good idea. We wanna invest in this. We wanna make this scale and be big." Half the newspaper publishers said, "How dare you? You can't get a piece of our business?" No, absolutely not. Because we're too valuable. You're just a penny ante little...

• 1:01:52Ed Zitron?

  So it seems like that is the principal problem.

• 1:01:54Speaker 05

  It's male CEOs again.

• 1:01:56Ed Zitron?

  So I don't like Jensen Huang very much, but one of his things he would say is like, "Always act like you're going out of business." I'm surprised more newspapers don't do that for more obvious reasons, but I don't know if I agree with you about the conversation part. I don't actually think that...

• 1:02:09Speaker 05

  What are we doing right now?

• 1:02:10Ed Zitron?

  No, I know, but like, this isn't how you run a newspaper.

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'd agree. I think there needs to be a way to be able to make news and journalism profitable, and that doesn't exist at all scales and for all companies.

• 1:02:24Ed Zitron?

  It doesn't exist at scale, I think, might be the problem.

• 1:02:26Speaker 05

  Scale's the problem.

• 1:02:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:28Speaker 05

  Scale, before the mechanization and industrialization of print, poor Paris has heard me say this a hundred times, in the mid-1850s, the average circulation of a daily newspaper in the United States was 4,000.

• 1:02:41Ed Zitron?

  Interesting.

• 1:02:41Speaker 05

  It was only with the mechanization and industrialization.

• 1:02:43Ed Zitron?

  Were they fairly distributed?

• 1:02:44Speaker 05

  Because you had to pull with a human muscle.

• 1:02:46Ed Zitron?

  Right, so you'd have a local printing press which would print local.

• 1:02:49Speaker 05

  And you could only print so many.

• 1:02:50Ed Zitron?

  And that distribution of 4,000 people at a small town or something.

• 1:02:53Speaker 05

  Exactly, or even in New York. And in New York, in 1900, by this time you had a half-century of the steam-powered press, and you had the Linotype, and you had other things come in. Then you had scale come up. But still, in New York City, including Brooklyn, in 1900, there were 46 daily newspapers.

• 1:03:07Ed Zitron?

  Huh.

• 1:03:08Speaker 05

  That is to say that they spoke at a different and human scale. Broadcast killed all that. Broadcast came along and you had one or maybe two papers in a town. And they thought they could serve everybody. They thought that scale was the only goal, that we are the mass.

• 1:03:25Ed Zitron?

  It's growth.

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  And it was a lie. People realized pretty soon, this doesn't speak to me.

• 1:03:30Ed Zitron?

  So because none of these people, like many businesses in tech as well, are capable of saying, we've grown enough. If the, if there is a, The Athletic was better as an independent from The Times, but I forget who said this earlier. It's like, the reason The Times is picking up this stuff is because The Times' actual brand, maybe in Casey, actually. The Times' brand is like falling apart. And it sucks because the actual lessons recently that I've seen in media are fairly straightforward. It's what if we had interest in people doing unique stuff? What if we then had them cover something that happened, right? And then they write it down, some sort of like analysis, I think I'd call it. And then at the end of it, you'd be like, wow, I know who this person was. I know who this person, I heard them talk and I like their voice.

• 1:04:14Ed Zitron?

  The last week at CES, 20 people interviewed. I'm not just doing a thing about me, don't worry. But the thing I got through it is there are so many reporters who are so much more charming than their bylines. And it's not a failure of their writing. It's a failure of the outlets. It's a failure of the form. It used to be, at least I don't know much about the history of media, but I remember there being a lot more opinion people in tech. You had Eric Benderoff. You hear Arthur Bray, I think, is still around. You had like David Pogan, these people, I'm not saying that they were perfect. In fact, I have some views about some of them specifically. Huh. There was still something to the popularity of having a real voice and having a real person.

• 1:04:54Ed Zitron?

  And that person being why, and you as a news outlet were like, shit, I gotta keep these names and I gotta make sure they can talk. And The Times is like, well, who do we do for that? Who is the most insane person? Do we have a transphobe? Oh, don't worry, we have a whole database for those. You have any insane war hawks? Oh, please, that's the other database that we spent $50 million on. We had to lay off a few people. We needed to know the people who would put the most troops in California.

• 1:05:17Speaker 05

  Paris, let me ask you something. The information is really good. I pay for it.

• 1:05:22Ed Zitron?

  Same.

• 1:05:22Speaker 05

  Uh, discount though, I'm glad to say. And, um.

• 1:05:27Speaker 05

  It works as a business.

• 1:05:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:05:29Speaker 05

  Now, it works because there's reporting like yours that's valuable, that is specialized and covers technology and the society and business around it really well. Why is there not an "the" information in a dozen areas on the same model? Politico, one might say, is that Politico's crap?

• 1:05:51Ed Zitron?

  Politico is just conservative news.

• 1:05:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's awful, right? But theoretically, it should be the information of politics, but it's not. I can't think of any "the information of."

• 1:06:05Speaker 04

  I think it's, I think the answer is a little multifaceted. One, I think when Jessica Lessin, our founder, she used to work at the Wall Street Journal, founded The Information a bit over a decade ago, everyone thought she was crazy. Like, there's a bunch of very funny to read now blogs from Business Insider being like, "This crazy lady wants you to pay a couple hundred dollars for a subscription to a website with news on it. Who would ever do that?" And I think that it took a while for people in the media industry to come around to the idea of a truly hard paywall and creating content that is worth paying for and sticking by that. I also think it's, that's because there are obvious trade-offs.

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  The reach of the information is much smaller than a Politico because you can't get around our paywall.

• 1:06:55Speaker 05

  And it doesn't need to be huge.

• 1:06:56Speaker 04

  And it doesn't need to be huge because it is self-sustaining.

• 1:06:59Ed Zitron?

  I also think there's another detail. She founded this in 2013, the end of 2013. So everyone was still high on the hog as far as ads went. The ads industry had not, it hadn't become as difficult. Also, I say this with no offense to you, Paris. Jessica is also well-known as being well-connected with the Zuckerberg's and also well-known for being, and there are times with The Information where the tone shifts and it is a little more rah rah, I think is the fair thing. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing.

• 1:07:28Speaker 05

  Maybe just charitable.

• 1:07:29Ed Zitron?

  No, the podcast I'm thinking of.

• 1:07:31Speaker 04

  Oh, the podcast is a Jessica Lessin podcast. It's not a reporter's podcast.

• 1:07:36Ed Zitron?

  Some of the way the AI things are framed are not necessarily critical.

• 1:07:40Speaker 04

  Certainly.

• 1:07:42Ed Zitron?

  Every outlet has bias. Also, I cite the information all the time.

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that there is a bit of a difference between some of our newsletters or podcasts or opinion stuff versus reporting, but agree.

• 1:07:52Ed Zitron?

  You've got some of the best, like Anissa Gardizi.

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have fantastic people who do fantastic work. And I think part of what you're getting at here with comments with Jessica is also what made this work is she had the, like, it was self-funded. She didn't need to take on venture capital to start it. And that meant that it could grow at its own pace. Versus, I have worked at a total of three places in my about a decade of a journalism career. The first two I got laid off from, the first one was, well, I guess, other place. The first two staff jobs I had, I got laid off from. One was a place called The Outline that raised venture capital and then quickly ran out of it because it spent too much money on silly things.

• 1:08:35Ed Zitron?

  Mr. Tapposki, his favorite game, found an outlet, lose the money, walk away happy.

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  Listen, you know, it's a, it's a great, we'll see.

• 1:08:43Ed Zitron?

  Hey, they paid me then, probably not anymore.

• 1:08:45Speaker 04

  As long as people get paid.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  The other one was Wired, which is part of Conde Nast, which was going through its own growing pains because it has a bunch of print publications and is largely supported by advertising.

• 1:08:56Ed Zitron?

  Always fucking growth pain. It's just they must be bigger. And the best work, like, one of the things that has made the rise of newsletters happen, in my opinion, and indeed this show, is that people are kind of tired of the standard big box thing. They're tired of these kind of, every major publication really drains the life out of. And I don't, I think even smaller publications do. They standardize the copy. And I realize you can't have everyone be as, being a sloppy blog worm like me. But it feels like the publications really investing in allowing the person behind the thing to talk are doing well. Engadget, we had to tell them on the show, and they've done a really bloody good job in their coverage and in their podcasts, actually bringing the personality out.

• 1:09:37Ed Zitron?

  You've got Sherlyn Lowe, you've got Devin J. Hardaway, you've got Carissa Bell, and these people are fun and varied and different. And I wish that there was more of that in journalism, but I also think it's why people are turning away from legacy media.

• 1:09:49Speaker 05

  Let me ask you another question. Do you yourself, or do you ever hear any colleagues say, "I'm glad I have a salary, but I wish I had a little more fame or a little more impact or a little more presence"?

• 1:10:02Speaker 04

  I mean. I can't think of any examples.

• 1:10:06Ed Zitron?

  Or even like Paris.

• 1:10:07Speaker 04

  When I, I'll give you this. When I was deciding whether or not to go to The Information versus a couple of other places, I called up my mentor at the time and was like, oh, if I go to The Information, will I like fade away into obscurity behind the paywall? It's a terrible career move. And he was like, rightfully, he was like, Paris, there are two groups of people that you care about reading your work, if we're being honest. One is other journalists and the other are people that work in tech. Both of those groups subscribe to The Information. You're gonna be fine. And I think that that is the way that a lot of people at R.

• 1:10:34Ed Zitron?

  I don't know if I love that.

• 1:10:35Speaker 04

  Listen, I, it's a practical way of thinking about it.

• 1:10:40Ed Zitron?

  For careerism, yeah.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:10:41Ed Zitron?

  I also feel like you do, I, I'm actually pushing back. I think you actually give a big shit about your readers.

• 1:10:47Speaker 04

  I do give a huge shit about my readers.

• 1:10:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, like I don't wanna, no, I just wanna make sure that the pigs on Reddit don't come, come and argue with you about, because it doesn't seem like that's your point.

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, my, I care a lot about my readers and things like that. But part of the thing, I guess, if you're talking about larger career moves wise, like, those are the two groups you need to think about, potential sources and potential like colleagues in the industry.

• 1:11:11Ed Zitron?

  And doing good work.

• 1:11:11Speaker 04

  And, yes, good, doing good work is, yeah.

• 1:11:14Ed Zitron?

  So let me go to your other career. I'm sorry, you go, you go ahead.

• 1:11:17Speaker 04

  If, part of my calculation for going to a place like The Information is, despite the limits of being behind a hard paywall, it's one of the few places I think that exist in media still where I get to just do, like, I spent a month on that sniffy story. I spent a month on most of my stories. That is.

• 1:11:35Ed Zitron?

  That is cool.

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  It's awesome.

• 1:11:36Ed Zitron?

  And you also, your readers are very focused, I imagine.

• 1:11:38Speaker 04

  My readers are very focused. They read, we have incredible like read-through rate, and it, I don't know.

• 1:11:44Ed Zitron?

  That's really cool, actually. I didn't know.

• 1:11:46Speaker 04

  Quite nice to be able to be at a place where you can do that sort of focus. But I don't think that that exists, that exists infrequently at scale.

• 1:11:53Ed Zitron?

  I think at scale as well, you have the problem of, you do have those deep readers, but you also have the people who saw the headline, they scrolled down, they see a name, they're like, fuck this.

• 1:12:01Speaker 04

  They just hit retweet, you know.

• 1:12:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Let me ask you, in your other life, PR. Right.

• 1:12:08Speaker 05

  So I talked to an executive at one of the big tech companies. And he said, how do we get our message out at scale? I said, you don't anymore. And then I talked to a guy who worked, just left a big PR company. I'll leave them both nameless for now. And he said, oh, yeah, the PR industry is all about getting on TechMeme. And where do you get the publications?

• 1:12:27Ed Zitron?

  There's a guy who hasn't pitched anyone in fucking ever. I'm sorry, you ever hear a guy be like, you can't be on TechMeme? That's a person who does not talk to journalists. I know it's important for journalists.

• 1:12:37Speaker 05

  No, I don't think it's that important. The clients is what I'm saying.

• 1:12:41Ed Zitron?

  Clients don't give a shit.

• 1:12:42Speaker 05

  That's where I'm going is where's the, so where is, what do they value now?

• 1:12:48Ed Zitron?

  So what it is, is like, I actually got this last week. It's like, what are your clients like? And it's the smart clients, the money I take are the ones that know they have a good story. And also know they don't know how to get to journalists because there's 1,000 PR people per.

• 1:13:02Speaker 05

  Do they need the journalists still?

• 1:13:03Ed Zitron?

  Yes. Absolutely, they do. Because at the moment, right now, there may be a lack of trust in legacy media. But people still trust media in general. I bring up Steve from Gamers Nexus, million plus subscriber, Coffeezilla on YouTube. Now, I'm not saying those would even be PR targets, but Linus Tech Tips absolutely would. And indeed has worked with people I've worked with. People still need to get through, but the thing that has changed is there's a lot less journalists who are just willing to run anything, unless it's for OpenAI. By the way, I'm just going to do this. There is a two tiered system within the media right now. And the reason we have Meta and the reason we have Elon Musk and the reason we have these things is partially to blame for the fact that startups actually really have to prove their worth.

• 1:13:48Ed Zitron?

  It's remarkable. One of the reasons I have a fucking career in PR. And it's frustrating because you'll be like, hey, they do a really good thing. They make money like it's cool. And they're like, yeah, but. Yeah, but like, did they raise like more money though? And like, I don't know if I wanna write about someone who's just a good idea. And then they will post an OpenAI thing that is like a feature that my toaster has. And it's just, and the problem is, is that I understand when you, as these outlets somehow get bigger, but they have less people, you have to do more stuff. So you just have to go, oh shit. What is the public good? What does everyone wanna know about? OpenAI, Anthropic, what have you? And that makes sense. But to your point, startups kinda need PR as much as they used to. Big tech also does too, because right now, all of the big tech companies, they're playing the same game, which is,

• 1:14:34Ed Zitron?

  well, Donald Trump's in the White House and uh, the right is winning, so I don't give a shit about fuck. I'm just gonna say whatever I want. And indeed, the two-tiered system I talked about, the reason that Sam Altman has been able to lie at scale and Elon Musk has been allowed to lie at scale for 10 years is because the system that operates against a series A, I don't say this with any bitterness, by the way, everyone should be held to this standard. Everyone with the media should have to prove themselves. But someone like Meta, someone like Tesla, they come along and say whatever the fuck they want, and it gets printed, even to this day with the Tesla robot event. So you're in this situation where media relations, what I do is get journalists to cover stuff, is very important.

• 1:15:13Ed Zitron?

  And then there's the other problem, which is about 15 years ago, when I got into this job, people started writing articles called Media Relations is Dead. Why? Cause talking to reporters all day and learning everything they do and knowing what you're talking about, what they're talking about, what's happening in the world, and then being able to take that and put it into a smart thought, including the client. That's actually pretty difficult. And PR people are lazy animals. They love to sit around and send emails and write documents. They're about as functional as Sundar Pichai is, they're just meeting goers. If you're a PR person, I've been saying that, I've been saying that you need to change your arse for years, except now I have a microphone. I hope you're upset. Long story short.

• 1:15:46Speaker 04

  Get wrecked.

• 1:15:47Ed Zitron?

  Get absolutely wrecked, bodied, et cetera. You can talk about me on your podcast if anyone would listen. But the point I'm making is. PR is necessary, but it's also killing itself. And the biggest clients are becoming so weird about it that they'll have PR. But they're like, why is the media not saying everything we want them to say? And it's because the media doesn't just copy paste things. They may write down exactly what you say with the bigger companies. But journalists have brains and will hear stuff now and go, wait, what the fuck does that mean? And even with OpenAI, they're finally learning it. It's just that when that happens, you're gonna need the media relations people. Except the PR industry, go on Google, media relations is dead. They've been killing them for 15 years. It's hilarious.

• 1:16:32Ed Zitron?

  It's like the one fun job in this industry.

• 1:16:35Speaker 04

  It's extremely easy to do bad PR and extremely hard to do good PR.

• 1:16:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Speaker 05

  There are times when I get an email offering me an interview. And one time I just want to take it just to say, so that afterwards, the person says, well, what's his audience? He doesn't have any audience.

• 1:16:49Ed Zitron?

  The thing is.

• 1:16:50Speaker 05

  He's got a blog.

• 1:16:50Ed Zitron?

  A 23 year old who works 17 hour days is gonna get fired because of that.

• 1:16:55Speaker 05

  I know that.

• 1:16:55Ed Zitron?

  They're gonna, they're gonna lose their, their sublease on an eight person, one bedroom. It's.

• 1:17:01Speaker 04

  I probably got 10 weird PR pitches that are completely unrelated to me while we've been sitting here.

• 1:17:06Speaker 05

  You still get them even though.

• 1:17:08Ed Zitron?

  I still get them.

• 1:17:08Speaker 04

  All the time.

• 1:17:09Ed Zitron?

  And I love the PR people who pitch me because it's just.

• 1:17:12Speaker 04

  And I block people.

• 1:17:13Ed Zitron?

  I do too. But so, and that's, this is the weird thing as well. There's like this whole PR industry just spams people that I've been making fun of for like my entire career and getting in zero trouble because they're all cowards. And it's just, it's frustrating because we're just describing industries run by people who don't understand the process. Like, how do you run a good news outlet? I don't know, create good news and make sure the people making it.

• 1:17:36Speaker 05

  Make sure it has value in people's lives.

• 1:17:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And it's this drain of personality from everything. The information has, is fairly straightforward, but you have some specifics. You have some, who is it that emails me every day pisses me off?

• 1:17:50Speaker 04

  Martin Pierce.

• 1:17:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:52Speaker 04

  But that's the thing.

• 1:17:53Ed Zitron?

  But I actually.

• 1:17:54Speaker 04

  He's, it's a newsletter and he loves to be a confluence. That's kind of his job to piss you off.

• 1:18:00Ed Zitron?

  I am actually saying this, I get pissed off with it regularly. I read it every time.

• 1:18:04Speaker 04

  Jeff gets pissed off at it regularly.

• 1:18:05Speaker 05

  No, I gotta, I get, I get mad at him once.

• 1:18:07Speaker 04

  And Martin loves it.

• 1:18:09Ed Zitron?

  But that's the thing, at the very least, he fucking stands for something. Why would people go, I don't know. Why would people go to influencers who don't necessarily run their facts very well or at all? And the answer is because they care.

• 1:18:22Speaker 05

  I got a question for you. So you saw Lisa Rubin, not Lisa Rubin, Jen Rubin.

• 1:18:27Ed Zitron?

  It's also my show. I'm kidding today. Jennifer Rubin.

• 1:18:32Speaker 05

  Jennifer Rubin left the Washington Post, right? And she started a new Substack newsletter.

• 1:18:36Ed Zitron?

  The contrarian.

• 1:18:37Speaker 05

  The contrarian.

• 1:18:38Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 1:18:39Speaker 05

  What is it about Substack? How does it, see, now it's tech still, is that we all know the tech is, that the Substack has its own Nazi problems. And why does everybody still go there?

• 1:18:53Ed Zitron?

  I actually think it's the thing we've been talking about. That's just some legacy media shit. They're like, why do people come to the newspaper? Only for Jennifer Rubin and a series of bland, right-wing people that have found a way to pretend they're liberals. And they're like, well, why do people read the paper? For me! They read it. And the thing they hate about the media right now is, it's not contrarian enough? Like, it's just, this is exactly the kind of shit that a legacy media institution would do. It's what happened in 2021 when The Atlantic had like eight different newsletters and then didn't treat them any differently.

• 1:19:27Speaker 05

  Hot take factory.

• 1:19:29Ed Zitron?

  But no, God, it's The Atlantic. It's lukewarm take factory, crybaby shit. And it's, or just like, anti-Palestine shit, which is disgusting. Anyway, we'll get to that on the other show where everyone gets mad at me. But the point is, it's just the same fucking wheel turning. It's people going, shit, what do people do? What are big now? What big newsletter? They send those? What if we all got together and combined our audiences of people that barely read us? And do not look at the facts or really care, but they like sharing it with their other vacuous friends, except Make It DC? It's not gonna work very well.

• 1:20:05Speaker 05

  Who are tired of subscription upon subscription upon subscription.

• 1:20:08Ed Zitron?

  They've got like George Conway in there. They have George Conway. I didn't even know. I didn't even know. I just guessed.

• 1:20:16Ed Zitron?

  The like.

• 1:20:17Speaker 05

  It worse, they have Andy Borowitz.

• 1:20:19Ed Zitron?

  Oh God. Fucking hell, I was not pro censorship before this show, but now I am actually really pro. I don't put any links to anything if it keeps Borowitz out my feed. Oh my God.

• 1:20:33Speaker 05

  That was the perfect reaction.

• 1:20:34Ed Zitron?

  Oh my God, I hate anti Borowitz. But it's, Paris, I'm actually like really glad you were here specifically representing the information, though having your own opinions just being clear for legal disclaimer, because you kind of, I have my issues with how the information does business and some internal ones that I will not read. But it's, it still works. It works and the journalism is like very, very good. Anisa Godey and another person, I can't remember the name of, a link to it in the episode notes. They had this incredible story about Nvidia's like, has people cancelling orders? And Anisa is super young.

• 1:21:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Ed Zitron?

  Like in her twenties and she's just getting this shit all the time. She's had so much of it. The fact that you have this happening is proof that this model works and that.

• 1:21:20Speaker 04

  I mean, it's proof that journalism can still exist.

• 1:21:23Ed Zitron?

  And it sells.

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Ed Zitron?

  And it sells and it matters. And the real people doing it matter. And it's frustrating because I don't think anyone is learning this lesson very well.

• 1:21:35Speaker 04

  I mean, a lot of outlets are now trying to pivot to a more subscription heavy model. The Atlantic is one of them.

• 1:21:39Ed Zitron?

  The Verge.

• 1:21:40Speaker 04

  Uh, The Verge.

• 1:21:41Ed Zitron?

  I wouldn't possibly want to miss Alex Heath.

• 1:21:45Ed Zitron?

  Fucking, I'm such a bitch. Uh, but it's, but The Verge is actually an example, I think, of doing it wrong. Cause The Verge is very much like, we're now going to paywall stuff you weren't paying for. And it's like, okay, well now the reader will be pissed off. And you have great people like Kylie Robinson, one of the best journalists in the field. Incredible. And, uh, Misato as well. Incredible, two incredible journalists. Paywalling them hurts them far more than I think they realize. How about give, make, give them more money and then let them write private stuff? Put the private stuff in the private, make it worthwhile, at least try. But no, it's, we're going to paywall what Tom, Tom Warren, Alex Heath.

• 1:22:22Speaker 04

  Make it so that at least readers feel like if they're paying, they're getting access to something new.

• 1:22:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's a restriction.

• 1:22:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a, you are paying to access something rather than being restricted.

• 1:22:32Ed Zitron?

  And is that money going into more journalism?

• 1:22:34Speaker 04

  I mean, I'd assume it's going into making so that Vox Media doesn't collapse, um, in and of itself.

• 1:22:40Speaker 05

  And it's the last resort business model.

• 1:22:42Ed Zitron?

  And the thing is, you can make it a deal with the customer. You could be like, what if we gave you more? And now it's like, what if we gave you less? And you you put out reporters who have built relationships with readers in a free environment and then say, and no, it's gone. And you'll get cited less. I cite paywall stuff all the time. But like, you will be cited less because people on social media will be like, oh, another paywall. Hmm, gift link for the but no, pig, no, I mean, not everyone can pay pig, pay pig model. It's just frustrating because it could actually be better, but I think the actual answer is everything needs to be smaller.

• 1:23:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I mean, it's just like, how do we get to that? We had a lot of ruin and destruction. I don't really think we can.

• 1:23:25Ed Zitron?

  Defector, four oh four, aftermath. The answer is that. And actually.

• 1:23:29Speaker 04

  And those came out of ruin and destruction. In the case of Defector and four oh four specifically, their, you know, sites were shut down. They were laid off and from the ashes rose a worker supported co-op.

• 1:23:41Ed Zitron?

  So Jeff, final question to wrap us up. Do you think that there could be a future for journalism where it's kind of a return to the, I don't mean literally four thousand readers, but a return to that kind of older thing where it's just, it is more distributed?

• 1:23:58Speaker 05

  I hope so. I want to see media at a human scale. I've spent the last 10 years of my career, I kind of accidentally chronicling what I think is the end of the long century of mass media.

• 1:24:11Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:24:12Speaker 05

  And and.

• 1:24:13Ed Zitron?

  What does that mean?

• 1:24:13Speaker 05

  Well, first, it's a confession because I devoted my career to mass media.

• 1:24:17Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:24:17Speaker 05

  Right? I worked for big publications and I wrote about television and and and I recognize now the bankruptcy of that. And so I think that we've got to return to, as I say, media at human scale. And it's going to be a messy transition.

• 1:24:32Ed Zitron?

  It already is.

• 1:24:33Speaker 05

  It already is. And I don't have the answers to every business model of how to get there. The information is one. There are a few others out there. And I think that we're going to grow new sprouts out of the ashes. For a long time, especially working in a journalism school, I had to be, I think, I presumed I had to be nice to the likes of the New York Times.

• 1:24:53Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:24:53Speaker 05

  Fuck 'em.

• 1:24:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:55Speaker 05

  I mean, and let's be clear, there is still good reporting of the New York Times. I did a Good Times hashtag about vaccinations only yesterday.

• 1:25:02Ed Zitron?

  The institution, though.

• 1:25:04Speaker 05

  But the, but the, well, the, the, the culture right now.

• 1:25:08Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:25:08Speaker 05

  Is trying to piss off the people, the last people who were loyal to them.

• 1:25:11Ed Zitron?

  And who would that be, just to be clear?

• 1:25:13Speaker 05

  Liberals.

• 1:25:14Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:25:14Speaker 05

  Liberals. Jay Rosen in 2018 wrote that, hmm, the New York Times' primary support now has shifted from advertising to subscription. This is gonna change the relationship of the Times newsroom to its public. And he wasn't saying how, but now I think the way it is, is that I think the Times is saying, see, we pissed you off, you don't own us. Even though we depend upon you for money, you don't own us.

• 1:25:37Ed Zitron?

  New York Yankees style.

• 1:25:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. If Steinbrenner were the, were the publisher of the New York Times, might as well be. So, I'm at the point now of giving up on big, old media. The newspaper chains are almost all run by hedge funds. Broadcast is geriatric. Magazines are dying, I wrote a book about that, too. The major national media is getting it from all sides. Costco is gonna stop selling books.

• 1:26:07Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 1:26:08Speaker 05

  Hollywood is a mess. Linear cable televisions are getting sloughed off because they have cooties. That's old, big mass media. It is a disaster all around. So what interests me instead, and my students go to, they don't wanna go to places like that. They wanna go to things that are doing new things, like Documenters, or, or, or City Bureau, or places like that. They're building a new ecosystem out there. It's gonna be messy, a lot of things will fail, but some will succeed, like Paris's The Information.

• 1:26:38Ed Zitron?

  So Paris, where can people find you?

• 1:26:40Speaker 04

  You can find me on Twitter, if you're still using that site, at Paris Martineau, or better, on Blue Sky, at Paris dot NYC. I'm also published at The Information regularly. It's theinformation.com.

• 1:26:53Ed Zitron?

  Had the story about sniffies?

• 1:26:55Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:26:56Ed Zitron?

  I'll link it in the notes. Missed the job. So Professor?

• 1:27:01Speaker 05

  No. Jeff.

• 1:27:02Ed Zitron?

  Jeff. Where can people find you?

• 1:27:04Speaker 05

  I'm at Jeff Jarvis everywhere, too many places, and then at jeffjarvis.com, you can buy my books.

• 1:27:10Ed Zitron?

  Please buy the books. I've been so, this has been so much fun, and like the first real radio Better Offline, it's been so much fun. Thank you both for being here. Thank you to our producer, of course, Daniel Goodman. You've been listening to Better Offline. I'm your chief pig, Mr. Zitron. You'll know where to find me. You're already listening to my words. I just want to repeat to everyone who sat through the CES show, thank you again. We will do it next year. And we're already planning to add a new guest, a stand-up comic that I'm not going to name yet, but she's going to be absolutely incredible. Thank you again for listening, everyone. You know where to find me, and you're going to hear a very old message after this that some of you are going to be very unfair about. Thank you for listening.

• 1:27:57Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com, M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord, and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:28:29Speaker 07

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

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• 1:30:01Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.