It's about ethics in journalism, with Ben Smith

Today I’m talking to Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor. Ben ran BuzzFeed News at the height of the Facebook traffic boom, and even wrote a book about it, called Traffic, which he discussed with me on Decoder back in 2023. Semafor, which is only four years old, is now a fast-growing and profitable media company, which makes about half of its revenue from events. So I wanted to talk to Ben about how that all works, and what it feels like to navigate the ethical conflicts that seem to be everywhere in media right now. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: Jonah Peretti explains why he sold BuzzFeed | Decoder What’s after the social media era in news? | Decoder (2023) Semafor raises $30 Million after first profitable year | The Wrap Semafor’s new AI tool helped boil down its flagship conference | Nieman Lab Semafor launches Silicon Valley & The World | Semafor Semafor takes aim at Davos as events surpass half Its revenue | Adweek Semafor Is Betting Big on 'Anti-Scale' Video | Adweek Semafor wants to be ‘business outlet of record in the Gulf” | Press Gazette Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder’s producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our Supervising Producer is Greg Ott and our Editorial Director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Companies shouldn't have to choose between speed and control. Amex Corporate connects cards with flexible spending controls and real time visibility to help teams adapt faster. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is Amex Corporate. Get started at go.amex slash Amex Corporate. Terms apply.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Interrupted sleep, headaches, constant fatigue. For a lot of women, these aren't three separate issues. In perimenopause and menopause, they're often the same hormonal story. And you don't have to quietly push through. Midi can help because your symptoms have answers. Visit joinmidi.com with code VOX right now to book your first visit today. That's joinmidi.com code VOX to book your first visit. Joinmidi.com code VOX. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  What if managing company spend took less managing? Introducing Amex Corporate, one intelligent platform connecting cards, expenses and payments so you can keep work moving. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is Amex Corporate. Get started at go.amex slash Amex Corporate. Terms apply.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking to Ben Smith, the editor in chief of Semaphore. Everywhere you go, people say they don't trust the media. And yet, they've never consumed more of it. Audiences have moved on from legacy names in favor of Substacks and podcasts and TikTok news influencers that seem to be everywhere in our feeds. Why would anyone want to start a new global news organization in the middle of all that, when even once storied brands like CBS News can't seem to figure it out? Well, that's what Ben did four years ago. He's the guy who ran BuzzFeed News at the height of the Facebook traffic boom. He even wrote a book about it called Traffic, which he discussed with me here on Decoder back in 2023. That was around the time he'd co-founded Semaphore,

• 2:12Speaker 02

  which launched with the stated goal of reaching 200 million college educated readers. You're going to hear Ben say that since then, Semaphore has evolved into what he calls an anti-scale company. It still doesn't have a website paywall, but it makes about half its money in the convening business. That's what media types have taken to calling events lately. And Semaphore throws some big events. They actually have a new one called Silicon Valley in the World, which will feature some of the biggest names in tech and AI. That's part of the events business, having the people on that you cover. So I wanted to know how that all works and what it feels like to navigate the ethical conflicts that seem to be everywhere in media right now. How Semaphore's newsroom is approaching AI? The ethics and the optics of putting the people you cover on your conference advisory boards? And whether independence is something an audience still even wants to pay for?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Ben and I talk about these things a lot, usually over beers. And I think you'll be able to tell, we really enjoy getting into the weeds of all this together. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel to get new episodes every Monday and Thursday. All right, Ben Smith, editor in chief of Semaphore. Here we go.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Ben Smith, you're the co-founder and editor in chief of Semaphore. Welcome back to Decoder.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  It is really nice to be back.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  I'm excited to talk to you. You were on the show three years ago, just as Semaphore was launching. It was right as BuzzFeed News, which you founded and ran for a long time, was shutting down. I keep talking to media CEOs about what is going to happen. It feels like you have figured something out at Semaphore. How are things going over there?

• 3:46Speaker 03

  You know, things are going incredibly well. And I like knock on wood as I say that. But I do think that, I don't know if we, I mean, I think we figured something out. I think there are a lot of different things to figure out. And we're in this unbelievably strange and unstable moment in media. But I do think we figured out a model that is, you know, quality journalism built around great journalists paired with really large scale convening that, you know, is building both great journalism and a really good business, a profitable business, which is something that is, to me, as a former BuzzFeed executive, novel.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, a profitable digital media business is in short supply these days. It's funny, I was looking over our conversation from two years ago. You had just published your book Traffic, which was basically about what I would call the millennial digital media moment.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  And everyone chasing massive scale, right? The platforms are going to deliver tons of traffic to us. And then we'll collect pennies and we'll all get rich. This was a pretty common thesis. It feels like you're saying you've turned away from that. You've learned the lesson of that.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, our chief revenue officer, Rachel Oppenheim, likes to joke that my next book will be called No Traffic. But yeah, I mean, I think we are really building kind of an anti-scale business. I think in a way, the luxury of starting in that moment, in the rubble of the traffic apocalypse, was that that was obviously not the path to success. And we had to think a lot about like targeting a very specific audience. I also, I think the thing that I have kind of come to realize as when, in all these conversations, I listen to your show, we have a show about media that we yap about this on. You know, what's the future of media? Is it live? We were just talking about it. Who knows? But I think in journalism, I have a lot of conviction that great stories aren't going anywhere, the need for kind of really high quality insight isn't going anywhere, great reporters aren't going anywhere.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  What surface this all lives on? Up for grabs. And you can't be too ideological about that.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  You say surface, I always say distribution.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  And the theme on Decoder that we come back to over and over again is your distribution shapes what you make. It's just inevitable. The medium is the message, and to borrow that framing. If surfaces of distribution are for grabs, what are you holding on to?

• 5:49Speaker 03

  So I think I actually don't buy that thesis. Or at least I'm resisting that thesis because I think the audience shapes should. The pull of distribution is incredibly powerful. The core thesis of BuzzFeed was we cracked the distribution and built for the distribution. And maybe, so maybe I'm overreacting a little to that. But I mean, we definitely think all the time about we want to reach political leaders. We want to reach business leaders. We want to reach nonprofit leaders. We want to reach people making decisions. We want to reach them in person. We reach them a lot in email. We reach them on the web. We reach them in video. But like, we're thinking about that same audience across media. And in fact, I think video is particularly interesting because the pull of video is, videos replace the web in terms of the place you can get massive scale. And then conversely, where there's a pull of massive scale.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  To create, you know, to basically, the biggest pull is just to be hyperpolarizing and find ways to create polarizing confrontation. That's how you go viral, or one of the best ways. And I guess we're really trying hard to build the discipline to resist that pull of distribution.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  We're already deep into the weeds. I hope the listeners can tell. Ben and I like talking to each other about these things.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Please visit semaphore.com.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  I'm excited to play some clips for you. So I'm glad that you said you were reacting to BuzzFeed.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Few months ago, we had Jonah Preddy on the show.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Right after he had sold BuzzFeed to Byron Allen and the Weather Channel. A lot going on there. In full disclosure to the audience, I literally had a beer with you just before.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  I remember.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  I sat down with Jonah. I did not ask the questions you told me to ask. But he said.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  Were they about running?

• 7:17Speaker 02

  It was about running. You asked me.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  That's another show.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  I didn't do it. And we, I was quickly in the weeds with Jonah as well. And I put to him what I think of as the original sin of digital media, which is that I think Jonah thought he could go so viral so consistently that he could crack distribution that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook would pay him money. And I'm going to play you what he said to me in response to that. And I just want to get your reaction to it.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I mean, first, just as a factual matter, we did get paid millions of dollars by Mark Zuckerberg. So the prediction that they would pay for content was accurate. It just was short-lived. So we got paid for that exploding watermelon.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Okay, so he said that to me and I was like, yeah.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  That was a good day in the office.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  It was a great day in the office, I'm guessing. But everyone knew that he wasn't going to pay forever.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  So I think that there is a, I agree with Jonah on this. I think that looking back, we all say the social platforms were obviously going to always be dependent on UGC and never pay for anything. And these media companies building on social platforms never made any sense. And these investors who, and these investors, it's worth remembering, their experience had been shaped by cable, which was a different distribution platform in which companies like Viacom, ESPN, CNN, MTV, whatever, had built huge businesses on the back of this new distribution. So they were like, oh, here's another new distribution. We're going to build big businesses on the back of it.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  I think, I think we now look back and say, it was inevitable that Facebook would never pay for content. But I guess, but I think it wasn't. I think it was choices made by Facebook executives at various times. They experimented with different things. I don't think that if you look at, if you are the person in charge of the success of the blue Facebook app, do you think, oh, it was a great decision to continually rely on low quality user generated content? Like, no, that thing is dying, obviously. They should have found a different path. It was a mistake.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  So Jonah made this argument to me as well. And this is the other.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  I mean, obviously, I'm brainwashed by Jonah. I worked with him a long time.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  No, I'm just curious. Like, you got, your paths have diverged.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  And you are building a very different business.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  And I'm just curious. This is the other clip from Jonah that I want to play for you. It is an argument that Facebook made a mistake. Here's that clip.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  I actually believe that it was a mistake for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and, and, you know, to not continue with the news tab, to not continue to pay professional content creators. You know, these, these platforms have way, you know, have tons of resources and could have, you know, spent a couple billion dollars a year on that. Sustained a vibrant media ecosystem, really owned media in a way that, you know, was, would have been incredibly powerful for them and given them charisma and relevance and authority that they just don't have today.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  I miss Jonah charisma.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  The claim there is if Mark Zuckerberg had continued to fund BuzzFeed, he would have more charisma.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  That the Facebook blue app would be more successful? Had they done different things? Like, that's pretty obvious. I mean, you could argue which things. But I think, yeah, I basically think that's true. And if you look at like, would you rather, would you rather be Netflix? Or would you rather be the blue Facebook app? You'd rather be Netflix, right?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Netflix famously doesn't invest in news either.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Netflix pays a lot for content.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  They pay a lot for content, but they don't invest in news.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  Oh, news is, news, I agree. News is a complicated, complicated business. We're a separate, separate question. But they pay for a lot of professional content. I mean, I think YouTube is obviously the big and most interesting story here because I think YouTube really has found a way for individuals to build businesses on top of it at a really, in a really impressive way. Occasional news creators like Johnny Harris, but almost the exception that proves the rule. But a lot of, you know, we just had Kareem Rama on our show, like, building real businesses, real careers on top of YouTube, paying producers, increasingly kind of moving up market. I guess the thing that I give Neil Mohan, the YouTube CEO, a hard time about is, I do think YouTube, almost with the idea of the creator and the development of the word creator. Built a system in which media companies, middlemen, can't really survive.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  There was a company called Maker Studios that Disney bought for half a billion dollars. It was supposed to be a kind of middleman between YouTube and creators, kind of to give, and that's one way to give a group of media people leverage against the platform. And YouTube has designed a system in which it is, it's sort of like Uber. It deals with atomized individuals, not with collectives who have any kind of power. And that could be, there are all sorts of different collectives. A media company is one kind, and I think YouTube has, probably to their own benefit, just certainly to the detriment of the media industry, built a system where it's built for individuals, not for, and no one has any leverage except for YouTube.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  This is the kind of big question I'm getting at. You're building a new kind of business, you're profitable, you're saying you're anti-scale, no more chasing traffic.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm still personally, obviously, looking at the traffic, but.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Who doesn't?

• 12:09Speaker 03

  It's just a personality flaw.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  If you were raised in the swamp, you will always be a creature of the swamp. But I look at some of the other big success stories of our time. TBPN is a big success story of our time. These are not huge numbers they're driving. They're driving massive influence and they're charging high rates to advertisers that are integrated into their content. And they, now they're owned by OpenAI, who they cover on their show. You look at big YouTubers, Kareem Rama is a great example. I saw him speak in and around Cannes, and he was very much like, yeah, I make advertising for my partners, I make videos. The advertising is the thing that I make, it's the revenue. Somewhere in there is a big tension for the news, for media companies, where we can't go, we shouldn't probably make the advertising for the companies we cover, but that is actually

• 12:56Speaker 02

  how you monetize all these platforms at scale. And I just, I haven't found anyone who saw that. I'm curious if you've taken runs at it.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I think in the entertainment business, which Kareem is in, that's always how it's been. You know, James Bond is wearing whatever kind of watch he's wearing, although, God, the fact that I don't remember is a real fail of marketing. But, um, but, you know, and that's, and so I think there's not, there's not that inherent tension in the entertainment business, like that you're going to sell out by doing a product placement or cutting or appearing in an advertisement, where news, it really is and you need to be careful. I mean, again, I think the answer to that is actually audience. Like, the traditional advertising business is that you are reaching an audience who the advertiser values. I think for, for the scaled advertising business, Google and Meta just built the best, and TikTok increasingly have built the best mousetraps, and it's impossible for publishers to compete on scale. I think if you're reaching people in a very focused way, in various particular environments,

• 13:47Speaker 03

  in person, in email, in video, that's a case you can really credibly make to advertisers. And so we build a really big advertising and, and a very, and a related convening business that way. And I think that's, that's one answer. It's not, you know, it's not the only answer, but it is one.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Is it, when you say convening business, that's your events business? And when I come to the.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Max Tani always gives me a hard time about the word convening.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Everyone loves the word convening. It's good. You've gotten pilled by the, by the revenue people, because they love to say it. Everyone else is like, it's parties? We're going to come to it because there's a relationship between needing to get everyone in the room and then covering them.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Which I personally find fascinating.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, it's booking.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  You had to not insult me for weeks to get me here.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Or did I nag you every single day until you showed up? Tell me about the revenue split between those things. Are you mostly making money on journalism, or are you mostly making money in events? Which is higher?

• 14:37Speaker 03

  It's just about 50/50.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And is there a pull in either direction? Are you trying to grow in both the same rate?

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Um, I mean, I think, you know, we're a startup, we're opportunistic. We're, I think, I think the convening business grew a lot faster. Like, we, my partner, Justin Smith, has been building businesses like that. He was CEO of The Atlantic and of Bloomberg when they, and so it's much more his experience than mine, but he came in with this thesis, which I, you know, bought into, that, that basically convening was the business that you could, sorry, that you could, that you could stand up fastest and make profitable fastest in, in, that was a journalism business. And so we launched really hard into that space. Because it takes longer to build a digital advertising business, because you've got to build that digital audience. And so we launched with that, and then it's just taken off in a way we didn't really, at least I didn't see, I didn't imagine that it would be, you know, that we'd be really like competing with Davos this soon.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. And when I come back to that, too. When you launched, I remember, part of the plan was to go to subscriptions, right? You were going to build this elite audience, you were going to charge them lots of money. It was, it was in there in the very beginning.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Was that part of the plan?

• 15:40Speaker 02

  It was, early on, it was part of the plan.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Startup CEO.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  You also were like, no, we don't, we barely need a website, it's all going to be newsletters.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  We did talk about that. You were one of those website people.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  I'm, to this day.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  The last.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  The last website on earth, that's theverge.com. That all changed, for reasons that things change with startups, but the media industry and distribution changed around it. Was there a moment where you said, oh, we can keep it free? Because you are one of the last three websites.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think in my memory, we always thought, at some point, we'll do subscriptions. But I, I think my experience is you just cannot be ideological about what, about revenue. Like, it's hard enough to build a business in news without getting all hung up on the sort of values of the different revenue streams. Because, you know, ad-free publisher, I mean, advertising-based publishers will tell you that democracy can only survive in a world where there aren't paywalls. Subscription publishers will tell you that advertising is corrupting. I mean, like, and at some point, you just realize everyone's just talking their book. And that sometimes they're, you know, they're already in a tough business and they're talking themselves out of incremental opportunities. And really successful media companies, if you look at Disney or the New York Times, like, what business are they in? Well, they're actually a bunch of different businesses, they're managing them all really carefully.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  And our view is that if at some point it makes sense to do subscriptions, we'll totally do them, but we don't really see it as sort of an ideological choice. And just when you're starting a company, you just can't do that many things at the same time. And I got mocked for this at some point, but we are insanely ambitious about our long-term growth. And we really are trying to build over decades, a huge global company. And subscriptions, you know, are a trade-off that, that caps your growth in some ways. And so that's something we think about, too. But, but that said, we're really trying to build a good business. And if subscriptions are a part of that, I think at some point, it will certainly be a part of that.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  You launched with a lot of ambition. I mean, you're the first news organization of your kind, really, to say, we're going to cover Africa a lot.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Right? We're going to, we're going to cover the Gulf a lot in various ways. That ambition was, these are undercover, right? We're going to provide new information that you're not necessarily getting from other places, we'll build up that audience, and then we'll monetize them in some specific way. Has that thesis proved out?

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Yes, and I would say this was, you know, in some of, I think when we launched, this was the thing that I think was most confusing to people, that Justin and I had worked in global news and had these real ambitions for it, but also were very careful about sequencing. So when we launched, we were in the US, Brooklyn, Washington, on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Africa. And I remember it would be like me, Justin, and our great Africa editor, Yinka Adagoke, doing an interview, and it'd be like, oh, yeah, like, we're America and he's Africa. And people are like, what are you talking about? Like, it doesn't make any sense. But I think we saw there was an opportunity, you know, to be very, very competitive very quickly in Sub-Saharan Africa, you know, particularly Kenya and Nigeria, South Africa, with great journalists led by Yinka and his colleague Alexis.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  And, and to sort of figure out that model, we're now in the Gulf, we're going to launch in Europe and Asia, and those are really growing businesses and they're part of a network. We definitely see it less as a kind of colonial model, hub and spoke, like, they're not reporting back to New York for what people in New York care about. We're trying to build a kind of network of audiences in each of these places.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Is that pulling you in different directions in terms of resourcing? If your audience in Africa grows faster than the audience in the United States, you're going to put more resources there?

• 18:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, we're definitely very attentive to, to, yeah, to what's working. I would say, like, it's just a truth that the US is the biggest media market in the world by far. And I think, you know, some, it depends how you count, but I think like more than half of all revenue associated with media in the world is in the US.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was the pull.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  So actually, the pull is mostly always here. And I think we fight against it a bit, because we think this is a really good long-term investment.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  This is ancient history, but when I worked at AOL, of all places, there was a lot of pull to like.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Oh, and Gadget.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  We ran Gadget China, right? We, we wanted to be in all these other countries. And how we would resource and run those operations against much cheaper advertising revenue.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Pennies to dollars in some cases.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  But the audience was there.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  The audience was there.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, we had this experience at BuzzFeed. This is part of why I was so excited to do some of it with Justin, because Justin had successfully built businesses in these other markets. And at BuzzFeed, we'd gone in, built big audiences, seen like in Brazil, in the UK, in Japan, these very intense, engaging people wanting independent journalism of this, you know, new digital and independent journalism. And then I remember in the first meeting, we were talking to this, Eric Hippo, this very, you know, smart, longtime digital investor, was like, do not do this. You will never make any money, and you'll have to shut it all down. And we're like, ah, forget it, old timer. You know, and then he was totally correct. We just never figured out how to reliably monetize them. And then even when you could, you'd be like, oh, the Brazilian edition was profitable this year, but bad news, they have currency controls, so you can't, the money stays in Brazil. And it was like, oh, nobody told us that.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  So how have you solved for now?

• 20:19Speaker 03

  We're pretty careful about keeping the costs low and building, growing the, growing the verticals with, with local revenue. There's also a lot of value in these huge gatherings that we're building, that they are fundamentally global, whether it's in Silicon Valley or in Washington. So building these global networks of CEOs, of political leaders, kind of feeds that network. So that's been valuable. But we're, I don't know, you know, we're, we're careful as part of it. I mean, that's, that's one thing I learned from BuzzFeed.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, the high-flying VC era has produced a generation of very conservative media operators.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  We have to take a short break here. We'll be back in just a minute.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Interrupted sleep, headaches, constant fatigue. For a lot of women, these aren't three separate issues. In perimenopause and menopause, they're often the same hormonal story. And you don't have to quietly push through. Midi can help. Because your symptoms have answers. Visit joinmidi.com with code VOX right now to book your first visit today. That's joinmidi.com, code VOX to book your first visit. Joinmidi.com, code VOX. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.

• 21:42Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 22:10Speaker 06

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  We're back with Semaphore editor in chief Ben Smith, talking about what he thinks makes Semaphore different. The other big innovation I want to talk to you about the beginning of Semaphore, and then I want to start talking about what you're doing now, is the Semaphore.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  You launched with this way of writing an article. You still use it to this day. I see it all the time. And the thesis was that it would just sort of make it simpler to understand what all the different pieces are. And I always thought that was funny because you were chasing the most elite audience possible. And presumably, they could already understand what was going on.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  Well, that's the problem. They could understand what was going on. And what is going on in a newspaper article is we have like a who, what, when, where, why sentence?

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  And then you have another sentence that says the same thing. And then you have a quote that is from an expert, but just reflects whatever the reporter thinks. And they've picked the expert with their bias to repeat. And then you have like an unsupported paragraph of random theories called the nut graph.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  And then everything else is just reverse chronological order. Like, and I think particularly the, well, you know, an expert in disinformation says this, or an expert in democracy says this. I think like any reader sees, oh, this is what the publication thinks. This is what the journalist thinks. Why don't they just say it? Rather than do this weird move of filtering your biases through an expert? And particularly sophisticated audience, like they're in on the joke a bit. And there are two sides to it. Because one is that the journalist is required to smuggle their opinion or their analysis in in other people's voices. The other is that really good beat reporters are real experts.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  And a sophisticated reader actually wants to know what Maggie Haberman thinks to a really high degree. They don't want her to, because the other deal in the newspaper is that you conceal your own analysis and opinion. And I think on both sides of that, the reader is sort of losing out. Like, you're both treating them like an idiot because you're smuggling kind of bias and opinion in. And then also, you're particularly, this is true of really senior experienced beat reporters. People read Albergatti or Burgess Everett. Like, the reader wants to know what they think. Like, tell me what you actually think. And so the Semaphore was an attempt to separate, like, here are the facts of the story we can all agree on. Here's the journalist's analysis. By the way, for an analysis to be interesting, there's got to be some chance it can be wrong.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Otherwise, it's totally banal. And so then we'd go out of our way to try to find somebody who disagrees with us to include that, too. And I think people like that. It's a bit of humility also.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Back in my day, we just called this blogging.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  Blog, yeah.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  I would just write down what I thought all the time.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  I would say this was influenced by blogging. We're, I know, we're all old bloggers now. It's so embarrassing to explain to people that you used to have a blog.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  I mean, what do I run to this day? It's still fundamentally, the reporters say what they think. The reason I ask about this is the idea that-

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Someday, you'll be explaining to people you had a podcast.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. It'll be, it's just be my VR avatar talking to your VR avatar, no legs. It'll be great. The reason I ask about the format in particular, right, is, again, my thesis is that distribution and formats shape each other. Semaphore was a new format.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  It was a way to go reach an audience and say, okay, we know you're not stupid. We're just, we're going to show you the structure of the story way out loud. Has it been successful? Has it actually succeeded in attracting an audience? Or is it just the trademark of how you do things now?

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we hear a lot about it from our audience. I think people really like it. And, you know, we also do a lot of shorter form stuff. And so that's not always broken out that way. But so, but that kind of value of, we're going to be really humble. We're going to be really kind of assertive about what we think, but also very, very open to disagreement. Very clear about the difference between a fact and analysis. That's really like core to our DNA and everything we do, including in the events.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Let me ask you the decoder questions. And I want to just talk about what's going on in this industry now. Because I think you've learned a lot in, it's like four years Semaphore has been going.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  And those are all the big early bets. And I just want to check in on them. How big is Semaphore now?

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Got about 60 journalists, more than 100 employees.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  And then, so 60 journalists, 100 employees. How is all that structured?

• 26:30Speaker 03

  I'd say more than 100. Probably about half journalists, half a commercial team that, you know, ranges from, you know, a revenue team, includes revenue, includes a great events production team. We do all that stuff in-house. But I think part of the luxury of a startup and part of the challenging news, you're inside at the moment, one or two companies that have cracked this. But there's not a lot of talent on the business side of news for obvious reasons. Like, it's a terrible business. You go to Harvard Business School, like, you know, 30% of those people go into like enterprise sales and 0.01% go into media, just for the obvious reason that they like to make money. They look around for where the money is, and it's not in media. And I think we have been incredibly aggressive about trying to recruit really, really great commercial operators and people on our revenue side.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  And it's fun to be in a place where, you know, where the wattage on the business side is really, really high. And that's been a real luxury for us. We, but yeah, but we have a more, and then, and then events is a, you know, it's a real, we have bookers. We have, you know, we have producers. We have people thinking about the vibes and the music. You know, I think we take all that stuff really seriously.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Do you have a house DJ?

• 27:37Speaker 03

  Would I call Brigida in-house DJ? I think that would be a reasonable thing to say. I think I don't think she would object.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  When we did the code conference-

• 27:43Speaker 03

  She does a lot of other stuff.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  I spent a lot of time thinking about the Spotify playlist.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, you got to think about that stuff.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Actually, that brings me to the other decoder question I ask everybody. You have a lot of decisions to make. You've grown up a lot over the past four years at Semaphore. How do you make decisions? What's your framework?

• 27:57Speaker 03

  I think I make decisions personally. Personally? Like, not as a Semaphore rule, but personally is the question?

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Either, either are.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  I mean, I personally make decisions very, very, very fast, at very high volume, but am very attentive to the people around me when they think it's a mistake and quick to reverse them. And I think like, you know, I care a lot about hiring great journalists and having people who I really trust and rarely jam a decision down anybody's throat. I think like, I like to, I want to be surrounded by people who are really deep experts in what they're doing, whether it's managing or building AI tools or reporting. But I think I'm very happy to lose fights.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  So this is a new kind of business you're describing. You want to make a lot of decisions fast. You're growing in a lot of different areas. Every time I see you in person, I bring you a new journalism ethics problem. This is a real recurring theme in our relationship. Because I'm always struggling to be pure of heart.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  And, well, you come from the most corrupt corner of journalism, which is gadget reviews. And so I think you've appropriately kind of figured out that in that dark cave, like, you know, ethics is this incredible distinctive thing for the, incredible way for the verge to distinguish itself.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  It's literally what we say to our audience. We are selling you this policy that can't be bought. And maybe that's the right thing. I look at some of the creators and I look at some of their Lamborghinis and I think, maybe that's the wrong thing. But that's the way it goes. I'm curious, you know, I started by playing you that clip of Jonah Peretti saying, if they'd only paid for news, they would have retained relevance and charisma. Maybe the blue app would be better. I'm looking at a media ecosystem where it feels like actually there's elite capture of traditional media, right? David Ellison has bought CBS News to whatever success or failure that is going to be. He's, depending on your point of view, either trying to get out of his Warner Brothers deal or he's dead set on owning CNN and changing it however he wants to change it.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Through his family, there's ownership of TikTok. Brendan Carr is fulminating at the FCC about what happens on the broadcast stations. He wrote an entire chapter of Project 2025 about regulating content moderation on platforms. I see more influence on the media from that side of the house than ever before. You're in it, right? That's the audience that you aggressively try to go out and attract and monetize in different ways. How do you view all of that right now?

• 30:20Speaker 03

  I mean, I think these are really different things. I mean, I think we're in this moment of like politicized, you know, wealthy individuals buying media companies and using them to curry favor with the White House. I mean, that's such a very specific thing I have never, I mean, that is incredible. And-

• 30:40Speaker 03

  I think, you know, I think in some sense, like if, I mean, my view in media has always been like, if, if you actually are delivering something your audience wants, that, that, that gives you independence. They want, you know, they want, they want you to be asking tough questions. They want you to be delivering them true facts and insight and, and that's, you know, that's the path. And, and the, I do think there's always a attempt, I think there's a temptation particularly for places that don't have strong business models to start making ethical compromises. And you see it all over the place. I mean, in a way, I do think that because you're in the gadget review space, like you see it so clearly. I think it's true in every space that like the, I mean, the, the core thing of journalism and that what makes

• 31:19Speaker 03

  it interesting is the adversarial quality, the independence and the independence and the independence of the people you're asking questions of, the people you're covering and you, you know, and, and businesses like advertising obviously complicate that, but, but if you don't hold on to that independence, you're, you're giving away the whole story. And so we think like obsessively about that. And I do think that for businesses that like innovating, it's just so important that you actually do not want to innovate in the field of ethics. That's like the one space where nobody should be innovating or you should be very, very careful. Because, I mean, if you think about like, why are marketing conferences so boring? It's because they aren't doing tough independent interviews with the people. And I think our events are interesting because we're doing tough independent interviews and giving that away is like enormous, it would be an enormous mistake.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Can I, can I ask you a really direct question on that?

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  You, you're doing Silicon Valley in the world.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Which is the big new conference. This is you saying you're going to compete with Dava. So you're, you're going to put on a bunch of conferences like this that compete on the biggest stage. You're, you're convening people, as I've been told.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  And I looked at your announcement, you were kind enough to invite me to it. And on the board is Jensen Huang and Sachin Adella. And they're advisors, but we're going to do challenging journalism. How does that work?

• 32:30Speaker 03

  You know, it's a good, it's a reasonable question and, and it's a feature of the convening business that is somewhat new business to me too. But first of all, like, we're thrilled that, that Jensen and Andy Jassy are going to be there and we're going to be doing Newsy onstage interviews with them. It is a feature of that business. And if you look at the way the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and, and our other competitors, Bloomberg do it, part of building a community around these events and getting excitement around them is pulling the people who, who you're, the newsmakers you're going to be interviewing into the event in some way. The New York Times calls them task forces.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  The Wall Street Journal calls them a council. The Bloomberg actually also calls them an advisory board. But, but the journalism is totally independent of them.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  But how does that work? If, if, so I did a code conference.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  I remember thinking, I really need to get so and so CEO to show up on stage.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  And if the day before they get on the, the jet to show up in California, we're like, so and so CEO is deeply corrupt. Here's our eight month investigation.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  They're probably going to cancel on you.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  They're probably going to cancel. And I was like, well, that's going to be fine.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  That'd be great, actually.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Because I'll get on stage and be like, they canceled because they can't take it. But at the same time, I knew that the people buying the tickets probably were buying the tickets to see so and so appear on stage. And this never actually came to a head. This was never actually a problem. It was just always in my mind.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  Maybe you weren't doing enough exposes.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  That I hadn't, yeah, I was like, should I be causing this problem more? How do you think about that? I mean, you cover these companies at a really high level.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think we just, you know, we do obviously write stories that they don't like all, you know, all the time. And, I mean, I think we try really, really hard to be fair. We don't, you know, we're trying to sandbag people. But I also think, I mean, they're two different things. One is, one is, right, did you write a story that upset them and they canceled on you? I mean, I think that's just, that's that you just got to be willing. That's just the cost of doing business and journalism. And that'll happen and not, and you just can't think about it. I do think that there's, I mean, I do think that we are trying to be grown up and fair. And one of the things that I've noticed is there's a sense, particularly if you go to these conferences that are like, like not that, that are not run by journalists, that you don't want to ask the hard question. Like you're like a little nervous of like, oh, there's this core question in the CEO's business

• 34:39Speaker 03

  or in this politician's, you know, leadership that is sort of awkward to ask. But of course, that's the question that the CEO spends all his time or her time thinking about. And then not only are they ready for it, like they've thought about it more than anybody else. They're eager to engage on it. And so I think there's like a, it's like a weird illusion that senior leaders don't want to be asked hard questions. Like, that's crazy. All they do, like, the reason they're in those gigs is because they find it really interesting. They're much either like for relaxing jobs, right? And so, you know, if you're asking, so if you're interviewing Ford and you're not asking him, like, how are you not, you know, about, about this like crisis of China just swallowing their business? What are you doing? But I think there is an impulse, which I think is totally wrong, to tiptoe around the hard questions. I actually think like for CEOs, for political leaders, it's boring for them to go onstage and ask

• 35:22Speaker 03

  a bunch of boring, answer a bunch of, tell the same canned anecdotes about their personal biographies they've told a thousand times. Like, they're there to, I mean, it's their job is to answer hard questions.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is my, I'm always asking various comms people, why do the CEOs come on the show? Like, in our YouTube comments, like, why would they show up? And I'm like, the answer I've most commonly gotten is, this is the only way their own employees will listen to them.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  They, they want to see the challenge and the stakes and the conflict of you, as you've described, are present in this format, whereas no one's listening to the all hands.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's important that you be respectful. I do think there's like a slice of tech journalism that really like concluded that the people they cover are monsters. And I think it's probably hard to get those folks to talk to you then. And then, and then, and then conversely, there's a slice of the tech industry that has concluded all journalists are in a sort of deep conspiracy to destroy them. And, and like, and I think, I think that both of those slices of media culture have kind of run their course and are both kind of toxic and boring at this point and everybody should stop. But, um, and just cover these people like important decision makers in the middle of great stories. But, um, but yeah, but I think, I mean, I think that's just the news business. And, and, yeah, and so, yeah, so this, we, we care a lot about our independence and about our journalists'

• 36:36Speaker 03

  independence and build it deeply into the events.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  I think it's more than a slice on either side, right? Like, our own audience is like the, all of these people are monsters and they're reading a tech website. I look at most of the politicians in America have, they've come around to like, maybe we should stop the data centers.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Or we should at least talk about it because people will like us and we talk about it. After a decade of talking about regulating social media and knocking down big tech and doing nothing, we've never passed a privacy law in this country. You see, there's a lot of heat around, these guys are monsters. We can just throw sticks and stones at them. And then on the other side, they own the distribution channels, right? They're, they're just on X doing whatever they, they want to do. And there's a sense that they don't need the accountability. Mark Zuckerberg just published, what, a 6,500 word manifesto that in my estimation is like freshman year political science thinking. And he's just going to get away with it because there's literally no one around him to be like, try being smarter than this. Do you, do you see that connection at your events where you, the thing you need to challenge

• 37:38Speaker 02

  on these executives on is people think you have bad values, not your business decision?

• 37:43Speaker 03

  I think, I think when you are interviewing somebody where there's like a core critique of the thing they're doing that is that the values, like, you should definitely ask, yeah, we all, you always ask them. And that's the, you know, that's the question they've been thinking about too. I actually kind of disagree with you on the AI CEOs though. I think we're moving out of an era where you had kind of business leaders, I say like Mark Andreessen, sort of patient zero of this, like very, very smart guy, very influential and influenced a lot of people to think this way, who had this sort of deep paranoia about the media and also then this sense that it wasn't relevant. I think if you look at the really great business figures of this era, of the new ones, I would say, Dario Amadai, Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, these are classic showmen who love the media. Or no matter if they love the media, they hate the media, but they, like Steve Jobs, understand and like Donald Trump.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  They're selling something.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're salesmen who see the media as a very important sales channel, which is basically how business leaders have always been. And I think they're running circles around the guys and the women who are sort of sitting paranoid, you know, wow, I don't know if we can talk to this reporter. Like, they just pick up the phone, right? And they're on the cover and they, and they wear the leather jacket and they do whatever the sort of slightly corny, but incredibly effective Time Magazine cover style thing is. And obviously the legacy media is diminished and there are new outlets, but fundamentally they're showmen who aren't operating out of some kind of deep theoretical relationship with media that they plan to change. I mean, Elon, obviously the big exception to this rule, as, as of many. But I think the rest of that, of this new generation of, of business leaders have a much

• 39:12Speaker 03

  more normal relationship with the media.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  One of the things that I think is really interesting in that context is the rise of the news creator, the news influencer, where they aren't of the machine, the way that you are of the machine. They don't have a Justin Smith being like, I've built a global news operation. You just do the great reporting, I'll find new business. By the way, all the big print newspapers have task forces. We will have a global conference and solve independence, right? The influencers and creators I talk to, this is all a first impression for them. And the idea that they can be applied with gifts or access or made to seem more important.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  They feel it.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  They, they struggle with it at a deep level. A lot of Our industrialists now, a lot of our politicians, understand that that is a faster route to a bigger audience and that there's more influence to be had there over the content, over the editorial. How do you compete with that?

• 40:03Speaker 03

  I mean, I just think you have to have sort of courage in your conviction that people want journalism.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Like that people actually would like true facts rather than lies and independent voices rather than ones that are corrupt. And I think that's broadly, in the most very optimistic view, but I think that's broadly true. And I think you're seeing that the most interesting and most successful creators are also finding that. Like, I think like the great Silicon Valley podcast host, Rakesh Patel, like, his questions have gotten tougher and tougher because I think his audience is, because he's very sophisticated and I think he realizes his audience, if you're interviewing Jensen about kind of how he thinks about chips and China, you should ask him the hard questions, not the easy ones, and that that's more interesting. And it's such a, I mean, it's so obvious. And I think like journalists who sort of admire or worry about creators, there's some lacking

• 40:49Speaker 03

  the courage of your own convictions that, no, no, it's more interesting to ask hard questions than easy ones.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Don't you need the person to show up to be asked the questions? I think this is the dynamic that I see so many places. That with the podcasters and the creators, I think what they're learning is that their audiences are durable. So you don't need the famous person. You don't need the Apple access to get your audience. If you have the big audience, you could do whatever you want. Right? And my formulation of that is the less access you need, the more you get. That's a hard lesson to learn at the beginning.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And there's an old saying that access is a curse.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Oh, access is poison.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  And I think you, I think one of the, you know, the one, I think there you see in Washington, I follow politics very closely, and you see this in Washington, if you remember, but in the beginning of the Trump administration, there were all these influencers in the White House press conferences, you know, asking Carolyn Levitt, like, how she does her hair. And the thing is, like, I think they found and their audiences found that that was extremely boring. And they kind of wandered off to, you know, talk instead about paranoid fights with Candace Owens or whatever. And similarly, the Pentagon in particular, you know, brought in all these, what they saw as allied, pliable, right wing influencers to replace the hated mainstream media. And then when the Iran war started, like Gateway Pundit is grilling Pete Hegseth about, you know, about the war, and he doesn't have answers. Because I think,

• 42:06Speaker 03

  I mean, there are a lot of toxic things about audience capture, and you can be pulled all sorts of crazy places by your audience. But also, you can be pulled toward journalism by your audience. And I think actually what you saw in that Pentagon press room was that their audiences were nervous about the war and did not like it. And so suddenly, Pete Hegseth is being grilled by these pet outlets that he'd put in there to avoid dealing with real questions. And there was some sense of like, oh, like, journalism isn't a trade that you learned at journalism school. It is actually serviced to your audience that anybody can figure out if you are paying attention.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  We're going to pause here for another quick break. We'll be right back.

• 42:50Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 43:19Speaker 06

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 43:50Speaker 07

  When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  We're back with Semaphore editor in chief, Ben Smith, discussing the responsibility journalists have to ask people in power uncomfortable questions. One of the really interesting things to me about that dynamic in particular at the Pentagon is so many of the journalists they put in there were video first. They were making clips.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  I could see them in those press conferences, try to get a clip, right? And they knew the video would play and then the platforms reward conflict and the comments of like, why did you ask this question?

• 44:52Speaker 03

  What do you think Sam Donaldson was doing in the White House press room in the 1980s? This is not the, these are stages for performance.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. Who was, it was Newt Gingrich figured out C-SPAN was the stage for him. Yeah, I understand. But the clip economy in particular.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Right? They're, they're going to manufacture a clip and maybe it's the audience pulling you towards journalism, or maybe it's just the algorithm pulling you towards conflict.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, there are good pulls and there are bad pulls.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  It's hard, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. You're doing more video now.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  And that's right next to, the Semaphore is there to expose the structure of the journalism because our audience is really smart and they're CEOs. And then you're going to go make video on video platforms and you're going to experience that other pull. How do you think about managing that? Or are you not chasing scale around?

• 45:36Speaker 03

  No, we think about it a lot and about not chasing scale on video, but, but trying to have really high level conversations. You know, I think that, you know, there's a big, but not the biggest, audience for really sophisticated conversations with leaders in media or in, or in compound interest on our business show, CEOs on our CEO Signal show, other stuff we're going to be launching. But I do think that video, it just reminds me so much of, of the social web, this, this, the kind of allure of infinite scale. If you just follow it toward this sort of fixed point that everyone else is also going toward, and it's this incredibly like homogenizing force. Like, everybody is doing, you know, everybody on the left is doing like Barry Weiss outrage this week. And everybody, and it's very, very hyper partisan. So, no, I mean, I think we just like have really had

• 46:21Speaker 03

  a lot of internal conversations about resisting that.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  How do you make money if you don't chase scale in video?

• 46:26Speaker 03

  You have to reach a really high quality audience.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  And you're just going to bake the ads in? Are you going to do the ad reads? This is like the other big problem of creator world, right, is

• 46:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  platforms don't pay you any money. They've certainly learned to pay people less money.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, yes, we do integrated campaigns with direct sold advertisers. I don't know. I think you do host reads. I noticed, I think I noticed that, that Ad Lot's my favorite, one of my, my second favorite show is doing host reads these days.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  This is like the biggest toss up in all of media.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. But I think, I don't, I think that like the principle of journalistic independence is incredibly important. The forms change. And when you're in these moments, what I remember is, I remember this, but Google, the ads used to be in yellow.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  And they had a yellow overlay. And at BuzzFeed, we were like, okay, that's the convention. We'll have a yellow overlay on our ads. That's how you know it's an ad. And then Google removed it. And it was like, oh, I guess that's not the convention. I guess ads can be the same color as everything else. I think these things are, you know, signals to the audience and the forms change through time. And again, you just, you don't want to be, again, you don't want to be like innovating in the field of ethics. But you have to realize that the forms are changing.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  So my harshest take about all these platforms is Google made the ads not yellow, and then it made them look like the content. And then it changed the economics of the web such that the only profitable thing to publish on the web is marketing content and listicles about what shoes to buy when you go hiking. And now that's all that shows up in AI.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  And then Meta started charging you to distribute those.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  Rather than letting them go viral on their own.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  So everything became advertising. And the economics of YouTube, actually YouTube just made it harder to make money on YouTube. They changed the rules of their partner program. The only way you can make real money as a creator on YouTube and have your big staff is if you do the integrated, if you become an advertiser or an ad agency. And that is the pull of all these platforms is we're not going to pay you anything. We're going to take the content for free. Maybe we'll even train our AI on it. And you will integrate advertising it somewhere.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  I mean, I think

• 48:17Speaker 02

  And I get what you're saying about not innovating in ethics. But I, you know, as someone who has resisted the many, many, many demands, I do the host reads, and the checks that come along with it.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  You should just

• 48:28Speaker 02

  That's the innovation is we're making the reporters read the ads now.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, in the old days, the hosts read the ads, and the old days of TV and radio, then they stopped. Now they do it again. I guess I don't really see that as like, I don't know, maybe there's some study saying they were more corrupt than they were let, but I don't, I haven't really seen any evidence of that. I just think these are kind of forms, you know, they used to be front page advertising in newspapers was considered like horrifically corrupt. And now they do it all the time. I mean, so I think some of this stuff, you'll get caught up on the forms in a medium that's just changing really, really fast. No, I mean, I think we want to create amazing advertising that our advertisers are really happy with and works for them. I mean, that's just core to the business. And so, and it is another nice thing about starting from scratch is that you can, and I do think you can, there's a difference between when you're building a media company as you have done, thinking about, oh, like, this is a product that our audience is going

• 49:16Speaker 03

  to love and that our advertisers are going to love. And in that kind of like, you know, neonatal state, church and state can talk to each other a lot.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  Once you launch the thing, they've got to be really independent.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is, I think, the, just a core challenge of our time, especially if you want to make something that gets wide distribution. You want to start a newsletter on Substack or Ghost or Beehive.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  And charge a lot of money to a small audience. I think you can do pretty well.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Your ability to have massive impact gets immediately limited, as you've said, right? There's a cap on your audience size. It seems like you want to have the big impact, but retain the elite audience.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that is a way to build a big business without reaching huge scale, is to reach an audience, a very, very valuable audience. I mean, it's not the only, that's not the, again, that's not the only way to build a media company. You wouldn't want to be in a world where that was the only kind of media company. But we are totally, totally focused on that. And it is working and it is allowing us to hire great journalists to break stories.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  One of the things that I consider with our audience all the time, because we were, we were free until about a year ago, we had a huge audience, and they were just very aware of any of our potential biases. And maybe this is just a tech audience.

• 50:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  We have lots of commenters. You love Apple, everything is going to be pro Apple. It's like,

• 50:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  That is just the firmament and what a tech publication stands, I think. But I don't know Comcast was an investor in Vox Media and Vox, and we would have to disclose that Comcast didn't like me, but we would disclose it all the time. There's just some part of, well, we think the audience is smart. They're an elite audience. They understand the structure. They might understand the biases that come with having Jensen on the board of advisors, having a bunch of Saudi royalty on your board of advisors. How do you feel about that?

• 50:54Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't think they, no, I think they understand what we're doing quite clearly. And in fact,

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Do they think that that gets them influence? Cause that that's what the consumer audience definitely believes.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  You know, I don't know what they think, but I, but our kind of promise to them is that it doesn't and that we're covering these people very independently. And in fact, people, a lot of the people on these advisory boards have diametrically opposed interests to one another.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Like there's no, there's nothing, no journalistic kind of follow through from that anymore than I think being on the deal for deal book task force influences what you see in the New York Times.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  I, you know, I do think though, in the biggest sense like this, as you said, just to go back to something you said earlier, like the everything is marketing.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  And everything is corrupt.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  And also that, and I find this, I think that in corners of media, including our corner, I think, I think it's, you know, we've managed to kind of really hold the line on this. But I mean, I think if you look at a lot of social video in particular, and platforms like Tik Tok, I mean, just undis totally undisclosed advertising is everywhere and it really distorts how people see the world. I mean, and just, and in just in terms of just people's judgment about what's working, what's real, what's not real. And this is, you know, I think about this actually a lot in the, in the AI space because there is so much, you see, there's so many sort of anecdotes out there or videos of people doing incredibly cool things with this tool or that tool. And you just never really know, like it's just hard to know what's, what's marketing and what's not, what's, what's just literally

• 52:17Speaker 03

  paid for and what's not. And we were doing a project that I'm very excited about called Semaphore Innovation Atlas. It's like, just literally trying to report out, here are some cool, pretty public sector AI projects that are real.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  Because there's so much out there that's unreal and that, but, but that tells a good story, which is in a way that, you know, the job of marketing.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  I had a partner at a very, very large consulting firm tell me they had done hundreds of AI deployments and less than two dozen had yielded positive ROI. And I thought, well, can you just tell me that on the record? And he's like, absolutely not. We, we want hundreds more.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  And it's, we're in that moment, right? Where everything feels marketing, everything feels corrupt. And the thing I'm just pushing at is the audience, their base assumption, regardless of how elite the audience is, is that everything is corrupt. And I find the higher up we go, the assumption that things can be bought and paid for increases.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  I just think you have to, I mean, I, I think, I think we live in a very populist moment and the, in this sort of widespread belief that everything is corrupt is just suffuses society and it's partly justified. And by the way, it's partly not. Like my favorite example, this is the congressional stock trading thing where there's been a lot of research there. I'm sure our corrupt congresspeople front running stocks. It's never been a big problem. And there's no studies showing that it's widespread. And to try to disabuse people of this, they passed a law several years ago saying that can members of Congress have to disclose their stock trades. And now there are all these accounts finding members of, you know, there's just the 400, whatever members of Congress, some of them are winning, some of them are losing. If you only look at the ones who are doing well, you can tell a story about widespread corruption. And now everyone believes it's incredibly corrupt as a result of a transparency measure that actually showed

• 53:59Speaker 03

  it wasn't. And so I just think there, there's just obviously where the moment where there's this deeply baked in sense that every institution is corrupt. I mean, we try by being really transparent and really direct and by not compromising on this stuff to, yeah, to be, to send a message that, to counter that. But I think that's you, obviously, as you say, you're kind of swimming against a big cultural tide right now.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, we, again, just at the verge.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  No, but I think like the way, but I think we, I also think that for us, like a big part of the marketing of our events and the way we like make them good is that they're going to be, it's going to be a festival of news. We're going to ask real questions. It's going to be exciting. Justin, at some point, I think called, called Semaphore World Economy Davos with follow up questions. But,

• 54:42Speaker 02

  That's pretty good.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  But in any case, the, you know, I think that to me that as, as for you guys saying, we don't, we don't take freebies in reviewing gadgets. I think that's a huge selling point for your, and I think you got to really lean into that, not away from it.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  The thing that gets me now is the reason I think we can market it. If I was 10 years ago, saying The Verge has an ethics policy, all of my competitors would say, certainly. Right? Like I've competitors now, I think Wired is doing great reporting and a lot of the way they market their great reporting is they just say out loud, look at all this reporting.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  We do it.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  By our subscription. I think it's totally effective. I think they've, they've cracked some code there, but just saying out loud.

• 55:25Speaker 03

  Turns out people like journalism.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  They do the reporting, people pay for it. I think that's very smart. What has occurred to me in all that is particularly our youngest audience does not know. They did not come up the same way. The water they've been swimming in their entire lives is social media, is integrated brand campaigns by creators, is a feed that is increasingly fake and bought and paid for. And I, I'm not sure that us showing up and saying, you know, there was an old way of doing this.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  See, I, I kind of disagree. I think people basically don't want to be lied to and don't want to be fed slop. And I think you're, we're headed for some kind of reckoning, like the big payola scandals in the radio industry.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  This is what I really want.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  Like everybody inside the radio industry kind of knew that the only way you got on the, like, it was totally open secret. The way you get your song on the radios, you pay off the DJ. But turned out the audience was not in on the joke. And when Congress held hearings into it, it totally blew up the industry and upended everything. And I think with particularly with influencer marketing, with political influencer marketing, people hate that. And I just, you gotta think Congress is going to come in and crack down on it. I'm actually optimistic about that. I think it's, so Adam Schiff, just Max reported recently, you're interested to bill on it, that probably won't be the one. But like, everybody hates this. The idea that your favorite influencer is being bribed by some politician to lie to you. Like people do not like that. And I think they're going to, I think that disclosure, which is mostly in effect or somewhat in effect, like with big brand marketing, like

• 56:46Speaker 03

  if PepsiCo buys an ad, they're going to disclose it. There's a lot of shady stuff happening around the margins and then politics, because there's this like, this like chasm between the, these, the F E, the Federal Elections Commission, which sort of collapsed, and the FTC, which regulates other advertising. There's all this undisclosed and undisclosed political advertising. I just do not think that is people like that. I think that's going to, going to wind up having to be regulated.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  I'm curious about this. There's a recent story, I think it was Politico, and it was basically saying all of the young staffers on the right have no idea how to do anything because they're all like comms people, like they're all influencers and there's like a talent shortage. I think Madison Cawthon was like the, he was the bellwether. He came into office and he's like, I've got more comms people than policy people. And then it very quickly became clear that wasn't going to be great. But now that's the norm that we're all just tweeting policy into existence. Right? We're going to, we're going to stop the Iran war with tweets is a real thing that happens once a week in this country. And there's something there that's broken, right? Like political influence operations, maybe we hate when they're paid for, but they are politics now and they're part of

• 57:53Speaker 02

  the feed in a very real way.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think in sometimes in really damaging ways, this administration and, and this was the reason incredibly responsive to social media. And so some, so a story goes viral on Twitter and, and, you know, and somebody gets their immigration, the status pulled because I think there's, I just read a piece of, from a woman who's in ice holding because there was a sort of misleading campaign saying her husband had worked for, for, for husband's mother had been a translator for the Iranians in the seventies. And so she's now in an ice holding cell. And this, and it, and the administration acted because this went viral on social media. There's always obviously been a very intense relationship between the media and the politicians. I mean, the New York Times publishes a story and then Chuck Schumer, the next day introduces a piece of legislation is like the oldest

• 58:39Speaker 03

  trick in the book. And so, but there is, I don't, I mean, I actually, there's not been my experience of Republican staffers in Washington that they're incompetent. I think they're like, I'm always, I live in New York and often go to Washington and, and I'm in Washington a lot and people in my, in the sort of my liberal Brooklyn neighborhood will sort of say like, God, it must be so horrible to deal with those Trump people. And the reality is actually they're incredibly polite and responsive. And it was a nightmare often to deal with the Biden people because Democrats as a journalist think that you work for them.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  And, and that writing something independent is an act of betrayal. And I suppose Republicans have either appropriate or lower expectations. And that's sort of always been true. And I guess I think communications has always been a pretty important part of politics. But there's a way in which the, the disorganization of this administration in particular just means that they're totally reactive to random, random pieces of media that somebody plays Donald Trump on an iPad that is really different.

• 59:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. I just see that we're going to tweet policy into reality is a feature of this administration. There's not a lot of rigor under that policy often.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  Often, yeah.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Right. And

• 59:43Speaker 03

  Or often somebody else just tweets something and it goes viral. I mean, this was the story of Doge, as Musk was just seeing tweets and making policy based on it.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Has that, do you think that has come to an end? We're, we're saying people hate these political influence operations that probably they will get regulated in some way because both sides hate the idea that all the influencers will be paid for by politicians.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  No, right now we're like in the worst part of it.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is definitely the,

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Although, I mean, although you're seeing the federal government that had had a lot of momentum and ability to execute things that sort of lost all of that. So the way, I mean, there's much less able to do anything right now. So there's less happening.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is why I wanted to wrap up is it's going to break somehow, right? There is some kind of reckoning coming where people want the truth. People don't trust the tech companies. The antipathy towards AI in particular is high, but the tech companies and a bunch of billionaires own all our distribution in very significant and serious ways. And something is going to happen, right? The audiences are going to change in some way. There will be some reactions somehow. Do you have a view of that?

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think this stuff keeps changing. I think, I mean, I do think there is a temptation to validate the populist impulses of the moment that I actually think journalists should probably resist sometimes. I mean, I heard your interview with Gabby about data center politics in which she pointed out that, you know, like, I loved her anecdote about how the, like, a bunch of, there was a rumor that going around that the data centers were killing cattle. And she tracked it down to one Texas farmer who had lost one cow. And I actually think the role of journalism is not always to amplify the populist reaction, even though it's so easy and social media validates that. So I guess I think it's, I think it's a little more complicated. And I actually would hesitate to predict whether things are getting better or worse.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Silicon Valley in the world is coming up. If I had to make one prediction about the midterms, it would be that surveillance and data centers will cause some sort of left, right realignment. That they scramble the lines in very populist ways.

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  But they also cause alignment, right? They bring together very disparate groups of people. How do you expect that class of billionaires at all wants things to react to what I feel like will be a surprising story of the midterms?

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  I mean, I think that, I think there are different, different strains of this. Like, I think the data center story, which right now is so hot, and maybe, I'm in the minority here, I think most people think this will be a huge political issue for a long time. I think, like, companies trying to build facilities in people's neighborhoods, and then they go in and they sponsor the Little League team, and they pay a bunch of carpenters, and they sponsor the parade. Like, that is actually something corporate America is pretty good at. And it's unbelievable how badly they screwed this up.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's very bad.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  With data centers. But I actually think that is because they aren't actually causing stillborn cattle. Like, that I think fundamentally, with, with the exception, they're going to have to navigate the energy, they're going to have to find a way to not elevate energy prices. But I think, I think some of that probably does fade as companies figure out how to do this without infuriating neighborhoods and doing it in places people want it. I think that maybe becomes less of an issue. And I think the big questions around regulating AI are just fascinating. And you write after, as you said, not regulating social media, and then sort of beginning the Trump administration with this incredibly accelerationist point of view, they are now just doing it. They're just regulating this technology day to day. They're going to have to figure out a framework for it. Every, every political candidate will have to have some point of view on it.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Pretty unpredictable, though, what, you know, what this is going to be. But I do think we're in a new era. And then particularly, the biggest part of the new era is just that the federal government is now this huge participant in the economy and in the economy of tech. And is, you know, and is, you know, owns a big chunk of intel, is trying to shape technological policies, picking winners and losers. Executives are in Washington constantly trying to make their case. I think that whoever the next president is, that probably doesn't change. And that that's a huge, that's a really massive structural shift that we're all going to be covering.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  Do you think that you can run as a populist if you want to take a big stake in our AI companies?

• 1:03:50Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  Or is that a redistributive move that you?

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't think, I don't think populism is necessarily that. I think that there are lots of, I wouldn't get, I wouldn't get too far into the details. Just depends how you talk about it, right?

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  That does seem like the theme of, of the day in Washington.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  But what do they say about simple solutions to complex problems?

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Trump has compared those stakes in companies to sovereign wealth funds.

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's reasonable.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  A lot of Gulf states have. I actually wanted to ask you about this. You cover the Gulf deeply. You've got events in the Gulf. The United States, I would say, is in some kind of free speech crisis that is modeled a lot after the control that Gulf states have over their media and what people are not allowed to say. The Kushner family is all wrapped up into that. How do you think about all of the things we talked about at Independence? When you have that money in your organization, when you have those folks on your various boards at events, when you have journalists on the ground in those places?

• 1:04:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we do, we, we cover Saudi and the Emirates in particular, a lot and pretty aggressively. We hired the great reporters from Bloomberg and The Journal and places like that, that in the region. We don't, we don't have any investment money from the Gulf and from any sovereigns, just to, I'm not sure that's what you meant, but just to be clear about that.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  Well, they're on your board for the.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  They're on these advisors, yeah, there are some executives from that part of the world on advisory boards. But yeah, we, I think we cover them independently, you know, the same as the FT and The Journal and others do in that region, which, and in The Times. And it is like, if you talk to reporters who work in the region, it's very, very hard and complicated. And you do, and you just have to, and there are local laws that you have to be careful about. We, I think we were the only ones to write about very interesting story, the way in which the Emirates, I believe, were preventing photojournalists from distributing images of the, and that's just like, that's just the law. Like, if your photographer goes and takes a picture of a drone that hit a building, they will arrest them. And so I think all, every news organization that operates in that region, that operates in China, you know, you just have to be really, really careful and thoughtful about it. But you can't let it compromise the reporting.

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Do you feel like it compromises reporting here in the United States?

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  No. No, and I think that global news organizations actually, and I think if you think about The New York Times, which has, you know, reporters in Tehran, I mean, they're, this isn't, like, I think a lot of global news organizations have thought really hard about, I think there are stories that you write, that you have your correspondent in Washington write, that you wouldn't have somebody on the ground in Tehran, right? And, and, you know, obviously, we think a lot about the safety of our reporters. But it's, it's a complicated question.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  I ask that question because I see what the Trump administration does to journalists here, right?

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wouldn't, I actually, it's funny, because I think, I wouldn't, I think that, like, we obviously are in this, you know, as you said, kind of a free speech crisis here in all sorts of ways. I don't think it's like a monarchy that doesn't have the First Amendment. Like, I think we're a long way from that. And to me, the, the closer parallel to the Gulf is the kind of personalist rule, the, you know, people talk a lot about corruption, but I think when you think about these relationships, often it's just, it's a totally different style of doing business where you're helping your friends and family. But that's just, it's like a totally different, like, modality that obviously in the American tradition is incredibly corrupt. But you go to other parts of the world, and that's just the nature of business. And I think that's, parts of the Trump administration just sort of operate that way.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think the Trump family in particular, like, sees that as a model. That was the comparison I was making. You can, you can see them enriching themselves, particularly in that part of the world.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  I do think that, like, elements of the style of doing business is more like other parts of the world. Yeah, I think, I think this, I mean, obviously, a lot of the speech stuff here is terrible, but it is, it's really not like, I mean, just as somebody who operates, it's not, it's not like being in a country without the First Amendment.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, fair enough. Lastly, I just want to talk about AI in your newsroom for one second. We've talked a lot about AI in the industry. You make a lot of stuff. The pull, especially when you go make a bunch of video, is to fire ever more content into these algorithms. We haven't really talked about it. Maybe the only journalistic ethics crisis I've never brought to you is how should we use AI?

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  Because I know that you're such a purist. So I'm like, it's funny, I go back and forth on like, how high impact it will be, but right now, I'm like, all the way forth on this.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  Like, I am, we just, a colleague of mine's built this great internal tool that is too boring to explain, but is going to totally change all of our lives internally. And I'm like, now a huge believer in the SaaS apocalypse.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  Like, it's all going away.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  You're done. You're like, you canceled your travel contract and you're done.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, so, so I think some of these internal tooling is amazing.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  The, we also, we produced this report out of Semper World Economy where we, there were three, it was, we had, it was a five day event with three simultaneous stages, 300 interviews. And I then, on Saturday morning, texted the team and was like, hey, I know you're all tired, but could everybody write a little, like, what I learned at Semper World Economy? And everyone's like, ugh. And then Reid Albergati, who, you know, our great tech editor, was like, give me a couple hours. And dropped all the transcripts into, actually, I'm not sure if it was Codex or Cowork, but, and then, and then produced something that was a kind of synth, it was, here are the most commonly made statements, here are some disagreements, here are some disagreements. And then we spent a week kind of hammering through that and actually went up creating a lot more work for humans. But because the notion of, like, what's the takeaway from these 300 conversations?

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  Like, that's just, that's, that's a job for AI, basically. Like, it's a very hard thing, because no one was in all of them. They were simultaneous. And that was a great product that we then released and are going to, and, and will continue to, to sort of build on. So I obviously am very bullish about AI. But fundamentally, like, the best parts of reporting are gathering new information that isn't on the internet and then communicating it with people. Everything in between is production.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  And is very vulnerable to AI. Those things, I think, are pretty invulnerable, are pretty defensible.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  It's a good argument. I'm going to come around to it. I promise, I'm going to come around to it. This very much was a conversation exactly like the conversation we have over beers all the time.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  Okay, I have an, I have an AI question for you. There's a tool that allows you on a podcast, if you screwed something up, if you've mispronounced somebody's name, just to drop it in with your own voice, so you don't have to go back into the studio and re-record that sentence. Is that okay or not? This is an argument we're having internally.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  I, it depends on exactly how misleading you think you're going to be.

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  No, just like you mispronounced my name in the intro. And your producer is like, hey, can you come back into the studio? Like, it's Saturday morning.

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  So if I mispronounced your name to you.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  On air.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  On air.

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  No, in your intro.

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  In my intro. So no, because that's just not it, I would just pick it up.

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  No, I know, but you have to, like, go into the studio and re-record that. But you're like on a boat, doing whatever it is you do. And your producer can just take your voice and redo it.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  I think that's fun. I honestly think that's fun.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's fun, too.

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  It's, the deception comes is if I mispronounced your name to you here.

• 1:10:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  And then you leave, and then I make it better.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  If I, if I've done something misleading. If I'm just picking up audio that you would have never heard by myself.

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  And we're just going to do an edit, we're editing that anyway.

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  Yep, okay, good. I feel the same way. But that.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  That's, I, to me, the line always comes down to who is being deceived. And if, like, you're literally going to deceive the guest, and you're going to create a moment that never happened, like, probably you're way over the line.

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, although honestly, that's a standard practice in television, to, they'll recut the questions.

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. I've heard this, although now they're all getting in trouble and have to publish the full transcripts. Trump administration suing them. Ben, this is great. Like I said, this is very much like many of the conversations we've had. I, I hope the audience can feel that. This is great, thank you so much.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  Well, I really enjoyed it. I love the show. Thank you for having me on.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  I'd like to thank Ben Smith for taking the time to speak with me, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. We really do read every email. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. It's the same handle on TikTok and Instagram. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Show is produced by Kate Cox-Nickstat. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our supervising producer is Greg Ott. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Interrupted sleep, headaches, constant fatigue. For a lot of women, these aren't three separate issues. In perimenopause and menopause, they're often the same hormonal story. And you don't have to quietly push through. Midi can help. Because your symptoms have answers. Visit joinmidi.com with code VOX right now to book your first visit today. That's joinmidi.com, code VOX to book your first visit. Joinmidi.com, code VOX. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.

• 1:12:22Speaker 08

  This week, it pays extra to be a MyLowe's Rewards member. Through October 14, members get $10 MyLowe's money when you spend $200 or more on an eligible purchase during MyLowe's Money Days. Also, using your MyLowe's Rewards credit card? Even better, that's an additional $20 MyLowe's money. Use it to save on your next Lowe's haul. Exclusions, restrictions, and more terms apply. See Lowe's.com/MyLowe'sMoneyDays for details. MyLowe's money expires 30 days after issuance. Subject to change. Credit offer subject to credit approval.

• 1:12:51Speaker 09

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on an Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.