Watching the Watchmen with Jason Koebler

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by 404 Media's Jason Koebler to talk about the state of both the tech industry and the tech media, and how 404 Media has built a worker-owned outlet that genuinely works. Follow Jason: https://www.404media.co/ https://x.com/jason_koebler https://www.404media.co/%20https://x.com/jason_koebler https://bsky.app/profile/jasonkoebler.bsky.social --- 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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• 1:11Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to Better Offline, your most punished podcast. I am your host, Ed Zitron.

• 1:28Ed Zitron?

  Today, I'm joined by one of the single best people in the tech media, Jason Koebler of 404 Media, regularly requested by listeners, but I punish you too. Jason, thank you so much for joining me.

• 1:39Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me. Wow, I did not know that. That inflates my ego already.

• 1:45Ed Zitron?

  Always necessary. I experienced ego death around episode seven, so I feel nothing anymore. But we were just talking before this about Facebook effectively, well, Mark Zuckerberg effectively admitting that AI slop was good for the platform. I think it's good for you to just walk me through that story. It's a 404 Media story. Walk me through it, because it's a good scene setter.

• 2:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so as Meta does all the time, I still hate calling them Meta, but at this point I do, because they have so much fucking stuff going around that I want to be clear when I'm talking about Facebook and when I'm talking about the other stuff. Had its third quarter investor call on Wednesday, and you know,

• 2:30Speaker 04

  People ask questions of Facebook executives and I feel like it's a real mask off moment where they sort of have to say like, here are our plans, here's what we think is working, what's not. And very often it's like full of pie in the sky nonsense. But in this case, it's like Mark Zuckerberg said, straight up that the AI slop and spam that has taken over Facebook, but also Instagram and increasingly Threads is the strategy. Like that is part of the long-term goal of the company. He talked about adding like a separate AI-generated feed, which when Facebook has added separate feeds, they call them separate feeds, but they always end up just like integrating into-

• 3:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, being the dominant feed.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  The dominant feed, yeah.

• 3:16Ed Zitron?

  Like you can select a chronological feed on Threads. If you solve three riddles, click seven buttons.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, and fix it every three seconds, yeah.

• 3:26Ed Zitron?

  Yes. Yeah. So, and as I was saying to you beforehand, I get people saying I'm a cynic a lot. But then I read stuff like this and I just don't understand how people aren't more cynical. Because it feels like, this stuff feels actively dystopian that Facebook is no longer the world's biggest social network, but just the world's shittiest television channel.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that we get blamed for being like doomers and always have been. Like I've been a journalist for 12, 13 years at this point. And I used to be back at Motherboard over at Vice and now at 404 Media. And sometimes I would have to like look up and just be like, wow, the last 10 stories I've written have been incredibly depressing. They've been like really like horrible harms from technology. They've been, you know, I don't even think they're negative. I think they're realistic and accurate of like what our future is. But, you know, our future sucks very often and our present often is bad too. And I think that that is at the, this is because of centralized power in tech and over the internet. And so-

• 4:37Speaker 04

  I also get called a cynic all the time, but I feel like I'm actually quite an optimistic and realistic person. And there's lots of things that I'm excited about. Just none of it is coming from big tech, like none of it at all.

• 4:50Ed Zitron?

  And what kind of things you're excited about? Let's balance this out.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  I'm very excited with like grassroots type new technology, like open source technologies. I think that people sort of like gesture at like the Fediverse and like the sort of decentralized Twitter alternatives, if you will. And I think that that's been promised for quite some time.

• 5:15Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 5:16Speaker 04

  And I think that it's taking a really long time to sort of come together. But I do think that that is something that we should be like working toward as a society where instead of having your audience, if you are a publisher like we are, having it all tied up in, you know, the number of Twitter followers you have, or the number of like Google ads you can sell, like you kind of own your audience. And by that, I mean, you own the list of people that you can kind of like transport that around the internet. I think that's really important. I think that for a while I was very excited about community internet, like nonprofits where cities and towns were building their own fiber lines and still are.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  And then sort of doing like getting really fast internet to the home, sort of divorced from Comcast and your spectrums of the world, so on and so forth. And there's like a lot of kind of like individual people building stuff that are very cool, like proofs of concept. And the big problem is always like scaling that up or getting people to stop using Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Amazon is a big one. It's like, stop using Amazon, stop using Prime. It's very hard to get people to change their behaviors. And yet,

• 6:38Speaker 04

  I feel in some ways, like we're going to talk about indie media, but I think that the journalism industry, despite the sort of disaster disastrous situation that's been going on the last few years, I think it's in a better spot now than it was two years ago.

• 6:55Ed Zitron?

  I kind of agree in the sense that I think, I think there are places where it got worse.

• 7:03Ed Zitron?

  In the sense that, and this is my own opinion, you don't have to agree with because it's not going to be a fun one to agree with. I think things like Platformer have actually been detrimental to the tech industry. I think Casey Newton has dressed up Platformer as a kind of independent outlet where nothing, where it's all just like, oh, we're independent, we're not bought off by big corporations, then writes two fucking fanfiction pieces about Anthropic. I think that is damaging. I think it's actually just spreading the problem. But even when you look at legacy media, The Verge, which I have, I have tons of criticism for, Neil A. Patel. The Verge has actually done some really incredible in-depth journalism. They had that wonderful piece about underground cables.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was a great piece. Yeah.

• 7:44Ed Zitron?

  And it feels like even at The Journal, they have some of the best investigative reporters. Now Mike Isaac's on OpenAI, which is terrifying for them. I think that we're seeing more, a lot more investigative stuff than we ever have before. I wish it had happened a few years ago, but hell, I'll take it now.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, you can name a half dozen, sort of like newsletter writers and independent outlets that are doing really amazing work. And there's always been some of that, but I think that what we're seeing now is like,

• 8:21Speaker 04

  10 years ago, when I got into it, there were like five big tech websites and they were all bad, in my opinion. Like, they were all doing the sort of like, there's a new feature on the iPhone, here's the new emojis that dropped. And it was just like tons and tons and tons of that. You dump it on Facebook, you'd hope it went viral and you would have people just writing like four or five stories a day. And then you had a bunch of sort of like, I say this as a descriptor, not as like a, like you had like your NGadgets, your Vices, your BuzzFeeds, the sort of like middle tier of digital website where they're not the New York Times. They're not like this gigantic, gigantic media conglomerate.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  They're sort of like middle-sized things and all of them have done great work, but they were all kind of doing like the same thing, more or less. And I think that Like the VC business model where we're just going to chase traffic and ad revenue has failed terribly. It's like not working. And I think it's going to be very hard to be in the middle where you are like a you're a website with a staff of like 50. I think that it's something where you can have independent subscriber funded publications that are doing increasingly good work because the infrastructure needed around journalism is not so much anymore.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  And then you're going to have your like New York Times and your Washington Posts that and you're like, I don't know, CNET or something like just gigantic websites that are going to be like, you know, middling. I don't like have a ton of love for the gigantic players, but I think that they serve a purpose of some sort.

• 10:03Ed Zitron?

  And there is, there is a certain purpose for the your phone now does this media. Like people read that stuff for a reason.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I read that stuff as well. And I, but I do think that like all the stuff in the middle has died and is going to keep dying. But I think that the years where those publications were propped up by VC but like weren't making money, weren't investing in their newsrooms because they were just trying to stave off layoffs. Like, I think that was the dark period.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  Because the vibes were terrible at all of them because there was a hatchet around the corner constantly. Like there were always going to be mass layoffs or some the sites were going to die at any moment because they were these like bloated organizations where executives made tons of money. The journalists made almost nothing. And like, it just wasn't there was no sustainability there. And I think that I know that I'm rambling at this point, but I think, I think that it's possible for like a bunch of small newsrooms like ours to thrive, a bunch of independent reporters to thrive, a bunch of, you know, newsletter writers to thrive. And then, you know, you'll have your gigantic news organizations that are going to continue to exist. And I think that

• 11:18Speaker 04

  That that leads to probably some fracturing in the media ecosystem where there's not like the same people read like this dream that Jeff Bezos is pointing out in his recent op ed where it's like we're gonna be down the middle and we're gonna be everything to everyone. It's like that's dead. That never works. That shared reality has been gone. No, it never worked. It perhaps worked when there were three television channels like 40 years before I was born, but I don't even know if it worked then.

• 11:50Ed Zitron?

  And I think part of the problem is sure, it's this sense of doing everything for all things, but it's also the the need to scale that I don't think has ever worked. Like I love I love the idea of TechCrunch and there are writers there I really love, but I think as an organization, TechCrunch is just in this situation. It's TechCrunch is disrupt while we're recording this. I think the pressure and probably the money that comes from disrupt as a vent as a kind of venue is so hard. I think every there's this thing where newsrooms start, you've got stories, someone gets a big scoop, it gets some traffic, gets some notice, and then they're like, shit, what's next? Let's do a conference. And now we're doing the conference. We see the conference makes way more money than the journalism.

• 12:35Ed Zitron?

  So how do we engineer one to feed the other? And the actual answer there is to say, make them entirely separate. The answer, however, is never the one you'd listen to. So you do the thing where it's like, how do we change the content to appeal to more sponsors for the conference? And how do we make it so that we don't piss off people that we want to speak at the conference? I'm not even saying this is exactly what happened with disrupt, but you see it with like the information and VentureBeat and all these publications where and this really is inside baseball, but now the podcast is free. It's it's frustrating because you could have a really good tech conference if you just all agreed to not be cowards.

• 13:18Ed Zitron?

  Like, I respect Devin Calderway from TechCrunch so much because he asked the perplexity CEO onstage

• 13:24Speaker 04

  That was so good. That was really good.

• 13:26Ed Zitron?

  He punted. Personally, I would have kept asking until he hit me. I could take him. I revenge, I'm not threatening you, come on the show. But it's like, it's frustrating because there is, and this is actually a good point as well, and maybe kind of a question. It also doesn't feel like there's any solidarity in the tech media. There's some, it's tenuous, but when it comes down to it, it doesn't feel like it's there.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  I think it's a hard thing to build.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  It's like-

• 13:56Ed Zitron?

  I also should say, this is not a condition created by intention. I don't think people are like, I don't give a shit about others. But keep going, sorry.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  No, I mean, I think it's really tough and it's like, I don't live in New York anymore, but I lived in New York for a long time. And Vice was in Brooklyn and then like all of the other publications were in Manhattan, like more or less. And this is not Illuminati vibes. It's very much like there was a generation of journalists who were sort of all the same age, all living in the same place and all knew each other from Twitter. And they're like hanging out all the time because that's, I don't know, that's how people made friends. And it always felt like Vice was separate, literally because we were on the other side of the river. And so like the happy hours, you had to go out like out of your way to get to them and things like that.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  And I just feel like there's, people ask me what I read, like people ask me like, what other tech publications do you read? And it's like, I have a lot of respect for a lot of other tech publications, but I don't have time to go read all of them all day, every day, because there's so much going on.

• 15:06Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  And then I'm not like sharing other people's stories that often for that reason, because I just feel like-

• 15:15Speaker 04

  The time has passed where you can like consume all of the internet at once.

• 15:21Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  And I feel like that, when you say there's not solidarity, it's like, I have a lot of respect for other tech journalists and I like a lot of their work, but I will sometimes go weeks where I'm like, I actually feel like I haven't read the internet because I've been heads down in my own stuff. And then you look up and it's like, oh, cool. Like, Ed did a really great piece. Like Brian Merchant did a really great piece. There were like 10 great articles in The Verge. And then it's like, oh, should I like go tweet their work now, two months after they published it? Like, um, so I don't know. I'm just speaking from my own perspective on that. But I feel like it's very hard to have like cross-publication, good, not even good vibes, but like, um, it's just hard. It's just hard to like, keep

• 16:06Speaker 04

  up with everything, I feel.

• 16:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And I think like, one happened a week or two ago. And this is not a criticism of anyone specifically, but Sam Altman ripped, he claimed something Kylie Robertson of The Verge wrote about the next model coming from OpenAI. And he said fake news and she got dog piled for it. I didn't see a single fucking journalist in her mentions. Now, this is not about you, Jason. Not talking about you. I didn't see a single one, though. And that really turned my stomach. I went after the little bastard. Fuck you, Sam Altman. I'm calm. I'll keep writing what I fucking want about you. But it's, it's frustrating. But now that you said it, it does feel like almost a remote work effect, but also the

• 16:49Ed Zitron?

  detritus of the New York waiting. Because I remember in like, the early 2010s, how cliquey it was.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:56Ed Zitron?

  And how the, how you got, I'm not, I'm like, not saying othered in perhaps that way, but you were kind of in the in-group or the out-group and you kind of still see it within internet culture reporting.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:08Ed Zitron?

  Like New Yorker guys that talk to the same people.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:12Ed Zitron?

  All the time. And it's, it's frustrating because I think 404 has proven this. There's so much cool shit you can do in tech journalism, especially when you talk to more varied people than just the six people in front of you.

• 17:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it really felt, I mean, we talk about things like Twitter main character, so on and so forth. And it's like, that was a real phenomenon where it's like, oh, here's the one thing that everyone on the internet is talking about right now. And I feel like this is a, it probably has to do with Elon Musk fucking up Twitter and like the fracturing of social media. But if you like, ask me what is happening on the internet today, I could name a bunch of different things and you might have a totally different list of things that you are seeing. And I think that that is a big change.

• 18:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I also think that that's something that leads to the failure of internet culture reporting. Because if you, I actually don't think that, well, there's been articles about this too. I don't think the main character was actually a social media. I think it was a, it is a thing that happened, but I don't think it tells us anything about internet culture. And I think a lot of internet culture-

• 18:19Speaker 04

  I think it tells us something about how internet publications ran because-

• 18:23Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  There was like a while where Donald Trump's Twitter was being called like the assignment editor for the front page of the New York Times or whatever-

• 18:32Ed Zitron?

  Pretty much.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  Or whatever. And I mean, it's true. And Elon Musk was the same way. And to some extent is, it's like, oh, Elon Musk tweeted that he's gonna print humans on Mars. And then there would be like 85 articles about it. And I think that that was a function of like publications, not all publications, not all journalists, and like certainly not all editors, but there is like, when you're getting into this industry, there's a period of time where you were asked, or were for a long time, to blog the news, just like, hit five stories a day, whatever it is. And like, the things that you saw going viral

• 19:15Speaker 04

  on Twitter, that was something that you could go and write about and you would, you know, either win a Google or Reddit lottery, or a Twitter lottery, and you would get a lot of traffic. And so, almost every publication like had five people doing that.

• 19:28Ed Zitron?

  Like a, and kind of an ultra-normalization.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:40Speaker 02

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• 20:13Speaker 01

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• 21:45Ed Zitron?

  It sucks because it's, I think 404 has done, they're just gonna lavish you with praise here. 404 had my favorite text story of the last year by far, and it was about the Indian guys who are just scamming Facebook. And it humanized it as well because I think that there is also a degree of xenophobia towards Indian guys online. There definitely is that like, and it isn't helped by the fact that a lot of Indian guys ran insane mindset Instagram accounts. But nevertheless, I loved the way you humanized it because it was like, here is the actual way that this is happening. This is internet culture. Internet culture is being changed by the fact that Facebook is incentivizing, matching the slot, like playing slot Tetris, where you kind

• 22:29Ed Zitron?

  of match the bullshit to the other bullshit. So the algorithm puts it up. And I feel like-

• 22:33Speaker 04

  It's also, it's also, the thing that I really liked about that story was that the like Indian tech bro hustle guys were talking amongst themselves about what they perceived US internet culture to be, which was like very interesting. Like they were sort of talking to each other about like, oh, you know what, like Americans and British people fucking love their dogs. They love pets. And then they were talking about like other things. And it's like, yes, like this is a stereotype, but it was interesting to see what they thought American internet culture was and then how they tried to reverse that engineer that into viral content.

• 23:15Ed Zitron?

  And I think the problem as well is that internet culture is just culture now. And also internet culture is the nature of the algorithms fucking with us every day is not really anything. It's what the algorithm, so you wrote that wonderful piece about Mark Zuckerberg's mask off moment. I went back to one of my Facebook pieces I wrote, and it was a thing that I worried about, which is what is viral? I don't mean, does viral exist? I mean, what is actually famous? And the answer is, we as people no longer decide that, in my opinion. And I think that that is also, it goes back to the tech media. It goes back to everything we're talking about because it's, what's the biggest news of the day? Well, whatever we think will get a bunch of traffic.

• 24:00Ed Zitron?

  What gets a bunch of traffic? What everyone's writing about. What's important? Well, it's the thing that will get us traffic. Elon Musk's tweet, I actually believe that the media contributed to the rise of Elon Musk in a way that's actually more egregious than Donald Trump. I think that if we did not have a tweet every time Elon Musk farted for a decade, and it was not recent, it was a decade. Putting aside even the pandering to him, we would not have him at the scale we did, like, he would still be insanely rich, but he would not have the power he does because he wouldn't be able to create news cycles. But on top of that, putting aside even the criticism, everyone just did the same thing. They kind of still do, but they really, really did. Like, I think that that's one way it's definitely got better because

• 24:45Ed Zitron?

  it used to be every site did exactly the fucking same thing, which is crazy.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you know what? I wrote a lot of articles about Elon Musk's tweets. And at the time, I was like, this guy is really interesting. Like, what he is doing is very interesting. And it took a while for me to be like, oh, but he's like, this is like very bad, very bad situation. But I remember, like, Ashley Vance, who's a reporter at Bloomberg, wrote the first biography of Elon Musk. And it came out, like, before, Elon Musk was a fucking asshole and very bad in that book. But he was not, he was seen as like someone who cared a lot about climate change and was like, I'm gonna like blah, blah, blah. So I got an early copy of that book and I read it. And I was like, whoa, there's like lots of crazy details in here.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  There was like one section where-

• 25:36Ed Zitron?

  What year was this?

• 25:38Speaker 04

  I think it was like 2015.

• 25:40Ed Zitron?

  Got it.

• 25:41Speaker 04

  Like, it was, it was pre-Trump, definitely. It might have even been earlier than that, like 2014, 2015, something like that. And I had Ashley Vance on Motherboard's podcast, which I was like hosting at the time. And we were like, wow, this is like a super interesting guy. He's like in charge of Tesla and SpaceX, like, that's nuts.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  And I remember I wrote a specific article where he, and I believe his name is Craig Venter, who is like a DNA, he's like a DNA sequencing guy, like from the early, we're going to sequence the human genome days. And there's this anecdote in the book where Elon Musk and Craig Venter had this crazy idea to print humans on Mars, like sending a large 3D printer there.

• 26:27Ed Zitron?

  I thought you were joking.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  I literally was not, like, that's a story that I wrote. And I actually don't think that the, that particular article was bad, but it always like sticks out in my mind because I talked to like actual scientists being like, is this, what is it, what are they even talking about here? Because there was a big period in like the early 2010s where 3D printing, like pig organs to transplant them into humans was like a huge thing, like with millions of stories.

• 26:55Ed Zitron?

  A solid decade before Better Offline existed. There was like, I don't know if anyone listening remembers this, where 3D printing was everywhere. And there was just the assumption, kind of like AI, that we would just no longer build things, we would print them using a machine that we bought.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was like, oh, you're not even gonna like use Amazon, you're gonna have like a 3D printer in your house and it's gonna print like hamburgers and also televisions. Like, it was really insane.

• 27:19Ed Zitron?

  It was so cool.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. But anyways, like, I wrote a bunch of stories about that, about Elon Musk saying he was gonna do crazy stuff, because like every once in a while, he would do something kind of interesting, like, you know, put self, not even like an autopilot into cars without it being tested properly and like kill a bunch of people and be like, whoa, that's, that's nuts. But trying to figure out in my head, like, when do we stop enabling this? Like, when do we stop letting Elon drive what we are covering as a publication?

• 27:56Speaker 04

  I think that's something that like probably every journalist has had to think about at some point and that that's something that people did with Facebook, they did it with Apple, they did it with every big company when they had announcements.

• 28:06Ed Zitron?

  I mean this nicely, man. Did they? Have they? They still write about every Facebook thing?

• 28:13Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, they have not stopped. But a lot of the ones that did it have died. And then there's a lot, I would say there's a lot more like variety if you look for it.

• 28:24Ed Zitron?

  Yes, I will absolutely, I will absolutely give that. And I also want to be clear, though I'm critical here, I think that there are really fundamental logistical reasons this is the case. So first of all, there's no mentorship at all in journalism or in the workplace in general. But I think that there are so many people, young people who start in this industry and just go straight into it. And no one educates them and they don't educate themselves on how any of this shit works because it's quite difficult. I mean, I'm not perfect, but I have to pick up shit constantly, both from a PR job and for this and learn stuff without getting it wrong, asking people, you yourself while doing your research, I imagine you bullshit tester and stuff, it's time consuming. And and at the

• 29:07Ed Zitron?

  same time, they're being told, all right, three blogs shithead, I want to see three blogs today. I need to know chat GPT has search now, I need you to write 800 words about why this is going to change everything. And so when you get to the point when I think you're meant to say, should I think critically about this? When?

• 29:25Speaker 04

  Right. Or when are you going to like, learn the intricacies of how this technology even works? And when you can't learn the intricacies, then you use company press releases or you sort of like use these shorthands where it's like, well, this VC said that this is how it's going to work. And like, I don't even know how to find someone who is an academic who can like criticize this in a coherent way. Of which there's like millions and millions of them. But I'm just saying, like, if you're a new reporter, you might not know how to do that. I have, I mean,

• 29:59Ed Zitron?

  Who'd you ask?

• 29:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:00Ed Zitron?

  Seriously, like, how do you find out?

• 30:02Speaker 04

  Right. So that this is, I'm going to try to say this in as least of bragging way as possible. But that was one of the my favorite things about being the editor of motherboard is that we were able to bring in people who were new to the industry and then and who had like, deep interests in specific things. And kind of teach them how to do reporting and how to think about techno- technology. And to be very clear, it's like every single person who came through there or that I've ever worked with has done the work. But I think something like very cool is like Edward Anguoso, who is amazing, like amazing, amazing writer.

• 30:46Ed Zitron?

  He is joining us, by the way, for the better offline CES coverage.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Oh, that's amazing.

• 30:50Ed Zitron?

  Him and David Roth.

• 30:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like he came to motherboard and he had, uh, he had a hu- huge knowledge about tech labor and tech. And he had written a thesis about Uber and how Uber was immiserating its drivers. But he did it for like his college thesis. Uh, but he didn't really know how to report when he came to motherboard. But because he was so interested in that, it's like, dude, you know, everything about Uber? Just work, just write about Uber for a little while, like use your expertise, like get to know it. And it's like, he did it all of it on his own in terms of becoming the amazing reporter and writer that he is today.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  But I think that it like, I'm proud that we were able to give him the space to do that. And sort of like the guidance of here's how you like, here's how you go fucking hard on Uber without like libeling a million people. And like, here's how you stay out of lawsuits and things like that, which doesn't mean pulling punches. It means making sure all your stuff is like very buttoned up and legally defensible and so on and so forth. And I think that not just with Edward, but like many of the best reporters on the internet these days are like, I, I've worked with them in some way, shape or form. And that's something that they've always had in common is having a deep interest in a specific topic or beat.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  And like really specializing in that versus trying to, uh, write everything about every possible topic that there is. Because when that happens, that's how you get like these surface level articles that are all the same.

• 32:34Ed Zitron?

  I think it's, I agree fully, and I think just. Pondering this as you speak, there is another level that I found with the show, which is to do this job, right? You also have to be like a business and financial journalist. Like Ed and Guo Sijin is one of the most gifted writers I've ever worked with. I'm so fucking happy to have him at CES because he is very good on socioeconomics. He is able to look at something and go, this will affect real people like this. That is not just the skill, it's like an actual talent that can be fostered, but it's tough because you have to start looking at the world in just this completely different way. I know a lot of listeners, and I'm just as critical of the media as well, have this thing where they look and like, how could journalists write like this? How could, how could they just eat up the slop?

• 33:17Ed Zitron?

  It's because we're what, 20 years into tech journalists being educated to believe these guys? And we're finally breaking that down and saying, oh, could Elon Musk lie? Would Sam Altman lie? Would they? And I think that's, it's weird because in almost every other, every other journalist field, you're kind of built like that.

• 33:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I feel like I woke up one day and I was like, oh, I'm like old now. And by that, it's like, uh,

• 33:48Ed Zitron?

  Every day for me.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I, and I think that because I was always kind of like, I always looked at myself like, oh, I'm kind of new to journalism. Like I'm just feeling things out, like I'm, I'm asking people, what experts should I talk to? How should I do this? Blah, blah, blah. And I would say around the 3D printing bubble that we were just talking about is when I realized, I'm like, oh, wait, these like hype cycles where every VC, every company, everyone does the exact same thing and says it's going to be the future of everything. And there's like tons of money thrown into it. It doesn't always come true, like it, yeah. Like, and so like, you know, there was like VR and then there was 3D printing.

• 34:31Speaker 04

  And then there was, you know, crypto and then there was the metaverse and there's VR again and VR again and blah, blah, blah. And like, at some point I was like, oh, I have been doing this long enough to now understand this cycle where, uh, the cool new thing is not going to change everything. It's going to be,

• 34:52Ed Zitron?

  Or even happen.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  Or even happen and it's it's gonna be full of fucking grifters. All of them are full of grifters. And it's like understandable why that is because many, many people have made a lot of money by rushing into a technology, hyping it up, selling their company or whatever, and you know, living in a mansion for the rest of their lives.

• 35:13Speaker 04

  But I think like as a journalist, I was like, oh, once I understood that that was the cycle that that is, that was really helpful for my own work, I guess is what I'm saying.

• 35:22Ed Zitron?

  I think for me, it was kind of crypto, but I think it was remote work. I think remote work was the thing that fully jokified me because I had a few articles. I had an article turned down by Jalopnik in like 2015 where I was like, hey, Elon Musk is lying. Like it was actually kind of present. He was like, look, he said this about the Model X didn't happen, isn't happening, completely different. Said this about Autopilot, hasn't happened. And even then I wrote like a positive piece about Autopilot because it was kind of cool. Like that's the thing. If they didn't over promise, they could point at things and people be like, shit, this is really cool. But I think it was remote work because you just got to see this schism between reality and journalism.

• 36:02Ed Zitron?

  But for real, it was crypto. It was the 2021 crypto craze where just people were lying. It wasn't even like they were half true. They were just straight up like, we will do this and what they were saying was not possible. Like not even, and then they never did it. And then the companies were just dumping money and all these people were getting rich for nothing. And I watched as quite a lot of journalists just kind of wrote it up because they were like, well, money, good.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:27Ed Zitron?

  Money, money, large, money, good, money, real.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  I think also crypto.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  I've edited many stories about crypto and I've written a handful of them and it's fucking complicated. It's like if you want, and because it's because it's so complicated, it's a space for tons of grifters. And I guess what I mean by that is like, when you start talking about things like smart contracts and like DAOs and like blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. It's a really hard thing to parachute into and understand the lingo and like what people are talking about at all. And then you go try to write an article about it because your editor says, this company made $3 billion in the last two days. Like what's going on here? Go write about it.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  It's like the the amount of brain poison that you need to be to understand what they are attempting to do here, whether they were attempting to or not, but like to to explain why it is a fraud was like a very difficult thing. And I feel like only a few journalists were ever like very good at doing that.

• 37:35Ed Zitron?

  But even then, the thing that got me, like, to be completely right, I was writing about it at the time and writing about it was occasionally exhausting because you'd spend the first quarter of the article being like, okay, this means this, this means that this also means this. Okay, now you've learned all of this bullshit. I can get to the thing I want to write about.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:56Ed Zitron?

  I think that the other thing is, is it was when I realized so many journalists assumed that all of these people had good intentions. That was when I that was what cracked it for me. It was the Kevin Roos Latecomers Guide to Crypto or the article about helium. And all of these things where it was just like, oh, they said they got this partnership. Did you fucking check? Oh, no, why would I? They wouldn't lie to the New York Times. Yes, they would. They did. They literally lied.

• 38:24Speaker 04

  They literally lied.

• 38:25Ed Zitron?

  And they all lied all the time and they're still kind of doing it. And I think that I definitely had the experience of waking up and feeling old as well because I've been doing PR since 2000. I've been doing PR since 2008, firm since 2012. And thus I've been the hype man. I still am to some extent. But even then, in like mid 2010s with the Indiegogo craze, listeners, if you don't remember this time, there was a time when Indiegogo and Kickstarter started out and it was like every single company that on there got press, regardless of whether it was real or not.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  That was one of my that was one of my favorite types of articles to write because not not like, hey, there's new Kickstarter. Hey, this Kickstarter that raised like $3 million and was written about in like 80 publications, didn't make the thing, didn't try to make the thing like.

• 39:18Ed Zitron?

  Or they made it. It was just completely fucking broken. But I remember at that time also saying to new new business things like, how are you making money? And they were like, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we are. And that's never what you you don't want to hear someone being like, yeah, sure. A little bit. And you're like, are you profitable? No. You're going to become profitable? Ah. But I remember even having clients that were like, would go to journalists. I take into journalists even. And I'd be like, yeah, they're profitable. And they'd be like, who cares? Like, just not necessarily as good, but they'd be just like, whatever.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:54Ed Zitron?

  Whatever. Everyone's scaling. And then over time, thankfully, I've got clients that are mostly profitable because suddenly journalists are like, huh, if a company makes more more money than it spends, that's a good thing. And if it loses money, well, that's a bad thing, unless it's OpenAI.

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• 42:27Ed Zitron?

  And I think that that's that's the other thing that's frustrating me as well. It's like, and maybe you could actually give me an idea of this because I have a few thoughts, but why do they keep fucking falling for it so many times? It's like three hype cycles straight and this AI one is insane.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the, so we, we've been painting with a very broad brush. You, you've added some specifics. I've definitely been painting with a broad brush and I'm just like, oh yeah, like the industry.

• 42:51Ed Zitron?

  I apologize.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  No, it's fine. I'm just saying that I think with AI, journalists, the ones that I read are like more skeptical than any technology that we've seen in a long time. However, the question is, how many people are they like actually reaching? And what, what is that reach? And then you sort of have, uh, like some of these Kevin Roos articles that we talked about in the New York Times, where it's like, I, I was seduced by an AI or like whatever it was.

• 43:22Ed Zitron?

  Told me to leave my wife.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, things like this. It's like, those are really, really harmful.

• 43:27Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 43:27Speaker 04

  Articles and they go out to like a lot of people and.

• 43:33Speaker 04

  I think that it's just like, it's really tough because you, I think on balance journalists have been like really tough on AI companies, the ones that I read and the ones, the ones that I like, where I'm like, oh, like Brian Merchant, you're really good on this topic.

• 43:50Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  At Zitron, you're really good on this topic. Kylie Robison, you're really good on this topic, so on and so forth. And then, but then I started thinking, oh, but like the New York Times often isn't very good on this topic. Like the Wall Street Journal often isn't very good on this topic. And these are the sort of like mass market publications that whose audience size dwarfs us.

• 44:10Ed Zitron?

  I have to wonder if there isn't some degree of like them wanting to seem positive because they have a broad audience. I just don't know why.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:23Ed Zitron?

  Like they want to be excited about the tech.

• 44:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that, um, I've not worked at a big publication like that, but I know, I know a lot of people who have, and I've like seen free, like people I know freelance for them and things like that. And I think that a lot of these publications have many, many, many levels of like bureaucracy and legal and like so on and so forth. And I feel like a lot of articles get, uh, focus grouped to death. Like I don't know what, I'm linking on the term, but it's where there's like 80 people are looking at a thing. And then by the time it comes out, it's like, oh, this is like a quote unquote down the middle.

• 45:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 45:06Speaker 04

  It's like, you're just giving publicity to whatever. And it's like, okay, this is not actually like.

• 45:11Ed Zitron?

  I, I have to wonder if it's also a solidarity issue again, because Swisher, for example, the reason I find her so loathsome is that she pretends to be what she actually should have been, which is if everyone, Neelai Patel, Joanna Stone, who I love in general, Kara Swisher, who I find detestable, Casey Newton, who I find almost as detestable. The problem isn't that they're not getting these interviews. It's that when they have the person in front of them, they don't ask them the questions. They get, they ask them, do you, do you train with YouTube data? And they go, eh, and it's like, okay, that's an answer for me versus, and the British media has a litany of problems.

• 45:56Ed Zitron?

  But one of the things they do very well is harass Powell.

• 45:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:59Ed Zitron?

  And I think that there could just be this most subtle change in the world. When you get Sam Altman in front of him, don't accept whatever answer he gives you immediately. Don't be like, well, seems reasonable to me that you have no answer for revenue or how this stuff will become AGI. I'm just going to keep going. But it's also if everyone started doing that, they would have to start answering. That simple. That if the only option they had was to get like Devon Cold, and I'll give him credit. Devon Coldway at TechCrunch Disrupt actually fucking asking the question to Aravind, the CEO of Perplexity about plagiarism. Could have pushed harder, whatever. We can, we can quarterback that later. But nevertheless, the fact the question is getting asked is so phenomenal.

• 46:43Ed Zitron?

  And Devon, fucking respect to him. If everyone did that, these worms would have to run.

• 46:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:50Ed Zitron?

  If everyone just fucking, and it doesn't even need to be rude. You don't have to be a dickhead. You don't have to be, as I would be, very rude. Well, okay, I actually, I take that back. I will get one of these people and you'll be shocked by how not rude I am because that actually doesn't get results. Ask them questions.

• 47:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 47:07Ed Zitron?

  What does that mean?

• 47:08Speaker 04

  I think that, um, I, so I don't like, listen to every episode of Neelai Patel's podcast, but I think this is something that he started to do a lot better. He like talked to the CEO of Intuit the other day and was like, uh, you know, badgering him on Intuit's lobbying about like, why, why we still fucking have to use TurboTax more or less. Which they've spent millions and millions and millions of dollars doing.

• 47:33Ed Zitron?

  And then pushed him on lobbying as well.

• 47:35Speaker 04

  And I think that, uh, I mean, I thought that that was a good example. I think that, uh,

• 47:40Ed Zitron?

  I just wish he'd have done that with Sundar Pichai.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  With Sundar, he did, uh,

• 47:44Ed Zitron?

  Now he did.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  Give him his phone. I, that was a nice moment. That was a nice moment. I liked that moment.

• 47:49Ed Zitron?

  It was.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  I didn't listen to the whole thing though.

• 47:51Ed Zitron?

  The Google CEO is touching my phone. Ask him, compound questions the whole way down. Now I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna pull that back a bit though. The Intuit thing was an exact example of what everyone needs to do. He wasn't rude at all. He just kept asking the fucking question. And that's why it rocked. That's why it was good.

• 48:09Speaker 04

  Well, so what I was gonna say is I, I agree with you 100%. I think that what has happened is you have fucking like Mark Zuckerberg going on Joe Rogan and going on Lex Friedman and going on like all these other podcasts and pretending like they're like, the media is a problem and I agree with what you're saying. I also think that tech PR has gotten a lot smarter in the last few years in like keeping their executives away from anyone who will ask them hard questions. And that's very calculated in my opinion.

• 48:47Ed Zitron?

  I also think that, I think you're completely right. I don't know if I'll ever say that PR people are getting smarter based on meeting any of them. But I will say, I think that they have just learned the lessons from celebrity PR because the tech media has allowed these people to be treated like celebrities. Like that is, I think, and I'm very critical of Nilay Patel, but really the intuit one was great because he treated him like a businessman. He treated Sundar Pichai like a celebrity. And I think that the problem is, and this is me like genuine empathy, for a while they were, for a while, we laugh about the 2015 Indiegogo era, but it was fun. Things were happening. These people, Elon Musk wasn't

• 49:28Ed Zitron?

  just an inveterate racist. He wasn't like talking about the 14 words he loved the most. He wasn't, he wasn't just retweeting active Nazis. He was just like, posting my lunch. Rocket go boom. Car go fast. And everyone was like, cool. Even I was. And I can understand why everyone kind of oriented themselves in that way. But these people aren't celebrities. They're fucking business people.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was something about, so I've seen Elon Musk speak a couple of times while I was reporting, like I went to the Gigafactory's opening and sort of covered that when they started making batteries in Nevada. And I thought I did a good piece, actually, this was now many years ago, but I wrote, I think the article was called like The Cult of Elon. And it was about his like very cultish fans who are just fucking obsessed with him even then. And he's a horrendous public speaker. He's really bad at it.

• 50:26Ed Zitron?

  He's not gifted.

• 50:27Speaker 04

  He's not gifted. He's very awkward up there. And for a while, that was actually quite.

• 50:35Speaker 04

  Alluring is the wrong word to me, but I was like, wow, this guy must be really smart because he's so bad at talking that he must just, and yet he's still like the CEO of all these companies and a billionaire and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, but he can't string two sentences together really on stage. So he just must be like engineering behind the scenes all the time, like building rockets himself. And I think that we really did a very bad job, not just with Elon, but with like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and all these people treating them as geniuses who did all of this stuff themselves from a garage and not as businessmen

• 51:15Speaker 04

  who had thousands of people working for them, like building on the backs of-

• 51:21Ed Zitron?

  More money than any of us would have combined.

• 51:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. And building on the backs of like a million other inventions by a million other people. And it's like, fine, like you built the smartphone, like cool. I use the smartphone all the time. That's very cool. But like Steve Jobs is not the inventor of the smartphone there or the iPhone. It was like thousands of people at Apple leveraging like thousands of years of, you know, not thousands of years, but many, yeah, dozens of years of, of, you know, like Wi-Fi chips and touchscreen stuff and blah, blah, blah. And I think that in treating Steve Jobs as the singular inventor of the iPhone, which is, it's the subject of my friend Brian Merchant's book, The One Device, like all the sort of stuff that went into it. We made these people celebrities. We made them celebrities because

• 52:04Speaker 04

  we're like genius inventor vibes versus like ruthless businessman did like made big company by taking government subsidies.

• 52:15Ed Zitron?

  And I've written about this quite a lot. It's a little easier to swallow that way. When you see someone who's so otherworldly, rich, who's so powerful, who can do all of these things in their normal life that we never would, not about them being smart or good, just that they have that much money and power. It's much easier to look at them and say, damn, they must be so much different to me. They must be, they must know something I don't. And I think what we're seeing in the media now, as this kind of cynicism feeds in, is people beginning to realize that was never fucking true. Wozniak was a genius, is a genius. Like Jobs was a great marketer and a good operator.

• 53:00Speaker 04

  I mean, Wozniak also-

• 53:03Speaker 04

  Like, I don't know him personally, but he strikes me as like quite humble, relatively speaking, and like still, like, I don't know what he's doing now, but he-

• 53:12Ed Zitron?

  I ran into him once, and the thing that he talked to me about for half an hour was a twenty-year-old browser called like iCab?

• 53:22Ed Zitron?

  iCab, I think it was, yeah, the taxi thing. It's some like low-fi, like it's the only one I use. And it was adorable, and he seems to like tech. And maybe that's the greater thing, that I don't know how many people who are popular and in the, in the industry actually like technology. You talk to yourself about, like, you're excited about some things. Like, there is still tech that excites you. I don't know if that's as common within the industry as it should be, both in the executives and some members of the media. And I, I want to be wrong, because I think if everyone was actually excited about AI, if like that was really driving them, then that would be cool. That would be interesting. I, we would have some interesting shit come out of that.

• 54:04Ed Zitron?

  I just don't even think it's about, it's like, I'm excited about what everyone else is excited about.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  Well, it's very interesting that the, the crypto to AI, crypto to Web three to AI pipeline of like, oh, this is gonna change the world. Wait, no, Metaverse is gonna change the world. Wait, no, uh, AI is gonna change the world. And it's like, okay, cool. Like, uh, you're into the thing that's gonna make you a lot of money, regardless. Um. Yeah, I, I don't, it's funny you say that. I'm not that into tech, and at Motherboard, we were a website of people who were super skeptical of tech and didn't-

• 54:37Ed Zitron?

  Which I think is fine, by the way.

• 54:39Speaker 04

  I know, I know. I, I'm just saying that, um, I am not, I'm not really excited about tech. I think I'm excited about what some people are doing with technology. I'm very interested in community, I guess. Um. And diving into those communities of people who are excited about things. Like I recently wrote about the people who are taking the Redbox DVD kiosk home from Walgreens. And I'm like sitting in their Discord, watching them figure out how this thing works and like flashing new software to it and stuff. And it's like, that is very exciting to me, not because it's going

• 55:19Speaker 04

  to change the world, but because I like seeing their excitement about learning how this like obsolete device works. And I don't want to be a part of that community myself, because frankly, just like, I don't know, I feel like I'm a busy guy. I don't, I don't like, and I, I'm very like, uh, short attention span for hobbies, I would say. Like, I don't want to reverse engineer a kiosk, but I, I want to watch you do it from afar, because you are finding out lots of like weird stuff about it. And I like writing about that sort of thing. And there's many, many, many like micro communities around the internet still that are very exciting to me because they are so,

• 55:59Speaker 04

  they found a place on the internet or using technology that is not so fucked up and terrible all the time. And I like looking at that. That's what makes me optimistic.

• 56:09Ed Zitron?

  And I still think that that is a, I still think that that is a perfectly valid thing to be excited about. And that is still being excited about tech. Some of my favorite moments in tech have been Sidia and the original homebrew community and the iPhone, the homebrew community around the PlayStation Portable was fucking cool. I don't even mean the piracy, which may or may not have been cool. I wouldn't know. Even then, going back to like 2006, the homebrew community with the Xbox, the shit, the people that you could like just rip games and games you owned to the Xbox and they would run faster, play Def Jam, the fighting game. There is still cool shit like that happening. And I feel like

• 56:54Ed Zitron?

  That does give me hope as well that people are still doing this shit. Like, why are you ripping up a Redbox thing? Because I can.

• 57:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, and I've written a lot about like rights repair and people, you know, trying to fix their iPhones and so on and so forth. And the thing that's been really interesting about following that world is that the the like guy at the mall who puts the iPhone screen on when you break it, he knows more about how that fucking iPhone works than probably most people who work at Apple. And I find that to be really interesting. There's been like a couple massive Apple scandals that have broken because these like repair people who are just looking at a bunch of broken iPhones have realized there was like an engineering flaw that Apple messed something up on. And it's like, that's cool. Like, this is just some dude who works at the mall in a kiosk,

• 57:45Speaker 04

  and he has just like discovered a flaw in the iPhone that is gonna, in a just world, cost Apple billions of dollars. In the real world that we live in, everyone gets like a $50 refund, maybe.

• 57:59Ed Zitron?

  Lucky.

• 58:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, for lucky. Or there'll be like a class action lawsuit where you get $12 in 14 years. But I like that kind of thing, too.

• 58:09Ed Zitron?

  So, as we wrap this up, and this could be the final question. What is next for 404? What are you actually, are you going to scale it much further? Are you gonna do a conference? Like, is that in the cards? Or are you gonna keep it small?

• 58:24Speaker 04

  We're gonna do conferences. We are going to do, what is it? We're gonna pivot to video. We're gonna speedrun. Yeah, no, for real. So, 404 Media has been around for a little over a year. It's me, Emmanuel Myberg, Sam Cole, and Joseph Cox.

• 58:41Speaker 04

  I personally wanted to do it because I spent a lot of time editing the last few years of my life, and I really wanted to get back to writing. And I've really enjoyed doing my own reporting and writing again. Like, it's been amazing for my brain, I feel. I would like the company to get bigger. Like, I think that we probably will hire people at some point. But I think that the tricky thing for me is if we do that, will we have time to continue doing our own work? Like, how how will that work? And so that is, you know, that's stuff that we talk about sort of like behind the scenes. Like, right now, we are the four of

• 59:24Speaker 04

  us doing everything in terms of just like, we're doing our socials, we're doing the business stuff, you know, if we're talking to our lawyers and I'm printing merch and like mailing it myself. And I really like that hands on aspect to it. But I think I'm trying to think like, if we grow, will that give us more time to do the work? Or will it give us less time to do the work? Because we're then sort of like managing other people, which is a blessing in many ways, because the company is starting to get close to a place where I think that we could financially justify hiring more people. But it's also, does that fundamentally like sort of change what we're doing on a day to day basis?

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  And doesn't make it better? So how does that work? And doesn't make it better? Is that what our readers even were want? And I think that like, any people that we'd bring on would have a similar ethos to us and would be able to cover, like, I'm sure they would be fantastic at whatever they're reporting on and would allow us to have like more breadth of topics on site, which is something that we want, because, you know, I've written a million articles about Facebook's AI and there's like a lot of fuckery going on that we should be covering across many topics. But sort of like, what does that look like? I think is something that we talk about a lot. But the good news is, is it's going well. I think that we will

• 1:00:52Speaker 04

  grow at some point. We're being very careful about it, because we worked at Vice and they hired a bunch of people and it seemed like they had money and then, you know, They did know. Something bad, like, nothing specifically bad happened. It's just like, grow this way, grow that way. And then it's like, oh shit, we don't have no money and we're bankrupt now. So yeah, I don't know. I think.

• 1:01:17Speaker 04

  It's been very hard to plan long term, I'd say, because I'm very heads down most days, just like interviewing people and writing articles. But we, we want to do more, like, we want to grow, we want to be bigger, but we want to do it like very, very slowly.

• 1:01:35Ed Zitron?

  And also, do you even have to?

• 1:01:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that is a big, that's a, that's another question that we ask ourselves, because I do think that we've been able to do impactful work with just the four of us. And there's many people that I would love to work with more and again, and in addition to, but at the same time, it's like, is that something that I want to bring on ourselves? Not because it would be bad, but because it would be additional. It's like, there's only so many hours in the day.

• 1:02:09Ed Zitron?

  More overhead, more shit to manage, more personalities.

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:12Ed Zitron?

  Where can people find you, Jason?

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  So we're at 404media.co. We're a subscriber funded publication.

• 1:02:19Ed Zitron?

  Give them money, I pay them.

• 1:02:20Speaker 04

  Give us money, thank you. We really do appreciate it. And then, you know, I'm on every fucking social media platform. If you search my name, you'll find me.

• 1:02:29Ed Zitron?

  And it will be in the episode notes. Jason, thank you so much for joining me. You've been listening to Better Offline. I'm Ed Zitron. You know all the shit to find me. It will be following this with a really nice, non-acerbic little speech. Thanks for listening.

• 1:02:51Ed 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 app to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:03:23Speaker 06

  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.

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