Radio Better Offline: Paris Martineau, Jeff Jarvis
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And my God, we're back from CES. You couldn't stop me. I got off. I did 13 and a half bloody hours on the radio, on the podcast thing. I just don't know why I keep calling it radio. And then got on the flight, moved to New York. It was nothing. Wore off a duck's back. And now it's Tuesday. I'm already recording again. You'll never get rid of me. And today I have two amazing guests. I have Paris Martineau, reporter at The Information. And I have a friend,

and the mighty Jeff Jarvis, author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis and journalism professor over at Stony Brook University. Mr. Jarvis is currently fielding a phone call, so I'll go to Paris. How are you doing, Paris? I'm doing great. I'm astounded by your energy levels, given the amount of podcasting and radio you've done in the last week, Ed. I am fired up. I love doing this. I think this is what I was meant to do. How are your feet after CES? Fantastic. I got inserts. I came to this show fully propulsed.

No one realizes how much, like, the amount of, like, Google Docs I had of things prepared. Like, the suitcase was packed, like, two weeks in advance. And then I got to New York and I'd forgotten things like gym shorts and some shoes. And basically, I prepared my life for one thing, not both things. And it's podcasting. Podcasting and blogging and nothing else. Who needs sleep? Slave to the content.

Now, Mr. Jarvis, how have you been? Oh, good, good. It's cold here. It is cold. Do you have any regret coming here right now? Absolutely not. Okay, good. I'd rather take this real last weather than the nonsense I get back in England. Yeah. Oh, it's kind of cold. But I usually see you two on This Week in Tech, so it's good to have you here in person. Yes, it's lovely to be IRL with you. IRL. Some might say it's better offline. It's better offline, but it is very online. So, all right.

Paris, you had a story come out over the weekend. I did. Tell us about it. So it is a story about this website called Sniffies. Have you guys ever heard of it? Right there. I want to stop and I don't want to know anything more, I think. That's actually kind of where I'm – That's probably a fair estimation. It is –

The up-and-coming, I guess, competitor to Grindr. It's a website for men seeking men. But it is specifically unlike, you know, kind of your dating apps of yore. It's not really about dating. It's about quick. It's an actual hookup app. It's a hookup app. So it's not like field for like kinks though. It's like an actual just for going at it. And it's supposed to be kind of about dating.

translating the gay cruising scene into online. Sure. Potentially, great idea. Why not? Yeah, people seem to really love it. It started in some kind of infancy form in 2016, but in the last couple of years has really taken off among, like, gays in big cities. And cities, honestly, big and small. However... So nothing went wrong then? Nothing went wrong. That's the end of the story. I just like writing about when companies do good. Yeah. So in this case...

Part of the thing that made Sniffies so attractive to its users is it's kind of a no-holds-barred approach to hookup platforms. You don't even have to make an account to sign in. You could just type in sniffies.com, say, yeah, I'm over 18, and then get to navigating a map full of dick pics and butt pics and messaging people and meeting up.

That is a problem because it seems like the site has a bit of a child user issue. And when you have a child user issue when you're a dating and sex platform, you also have a child sexual abuse platform. So me and my colleague Corey Weinberg identified over the last kind of year or so more than a dozen cases where adult men had been charged for sexual abuse.

sex crimes involving a minor they met on Snippets. And all facilitated directly on this platform. Yeah, and that's a lot, it seems, for a relatively small platform. It's about the size of... The fact it's still around afterwards is the thing that shocks me. Well, I mean, part of it is because...

The question of legal liability in these cases is a bit tricky. You have companies like – there's long been an issue of kids getting onto adult dating apps and meeting adults. But up until recently, every legal challenge that a parent or –

child that has grown up have tried to kind of throw against these companies saying, hey, you're actually not doing your job when it comes to policing underage users. Every legal challenge has been swept away by the company saying, ah, Section 230. But even legal challenges aside, would they not want to stop the children getting on the sex app? Well...

It's hard. That's the problem. It's not easy. Okay, but did they try? Not really, because all they wanted, they don't want to have to try harder, it seems, because right now the standard operating...

Yes, because that would require taking on some responsibility. And right now, what all these companies do is they just ask you for your birthday and assume that you didn't lie. Because if they were going to do anything more stringent than that, that could open them up to liability. Explain something to me. So Backpage and Craigslist took down their sex business.

And also, just for the listeners, Backpage. Can you just run us through that? Backpage was a place where you could hook up. It was probably more of a singles into sex thing. Right. And Craigslist was pretty much singles, but within that, people would find each other for that purpose. And then Backpage was shut down. Backpage was shut down, and Craigslist voluntarily got out of it because the liability was high. Right. So they were shut down because it was sex trafficking-

Or what's the difference between that and what Sniffies is doing? I believe part of the difference is...

When it comes to Backpage and Craigslist seeking connections, part of what they were originally shut down for involved FOSTA, SESTA. It involved specifically like sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. And what is FOSTA just for that? FOSTA and SESTA were a package of bills that kind of went through some amount of years ago that ended up regulating and making it so that –

These companies could not use the Section 230 defense as a way to get around claims related to legal liability. By which they mean they were made responsible for user-generated content. Yes. Right, got it. Yeah. And so in Sniffy's case, it's a bit different. Well, in some ways, it's not a lot different because part of the issue –

Of what we found of those dozen cases, I'd say like over a third of them did involve money being exchanged for sex with minors. However, part of it comes to the fact that – Just for the love of the game, I guess. I guess. Part of it is that up until fairly recently, dating apps hadn't really had legal claims like this against them. Right.

Whenever they had, they'd been basically laughed at, of course, saying, oh, of course Grindr is not responsible for connecting your 14-year-old to a bunch of 30-year-olds. It's a tech platform. It's user-generated content. However, due to kind of shifting tides in the way that judges are viewing Grindr,

Internet companies like Defense says that's starting to change. Right now there is a lawsuit that is going to be heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals involving a case called Dovey-Grinder where a 15-year-old basically got on Grindr, ended up being connected with four men who raped him. Oh my god. And part of what the attorney, Kerry Goldberg, is claiming in this appeal or arguing is that

Grindr shouldn't be able to hide behind Section 230 to say, hey, it's not our fault that we didn't age verify. That Grindr should be held liable for its faulty age verification policies under kind of product liability law, saying that this is a defectively designed product. And that's a specific argument the Ninth Circuit Court has been like amenable to when it comes to other tech companies like Snapchat, for instance.

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

So if you are in one of those states with – Sniffies.com. Yeah. If you're in one of those states that has the – If there's anybody you recognize. Yeah. I mean, you'll be able to see exactly where they are. If you are in one of those states, when you open it up now, you'll see a blurred image. And if you want to see the penis photos, you have to enter in your ID. However, the company says that they're maybe going to expand this in some way. It hasn't happened yet. That would potentially open up legal liability then. Yeah. And that's –

But part of the thing is users also don't want to do that. So, I mean... That was kind of what I was thinking that would kind of kill it. Yeah. An app or a platform like that is never going to be successful if it has that sort of barrier to entry. And privacy implications are huge. Yeah. You're handing over your identification to a company called Sniffies. Yeah. And I mean... I wouldn't feel terribly secure in that. I mean, I would, of course, but that's just me. But no, you're right, though. It's like these...

I imagine part of the thing here, other than the thing you're doing on there, is that it is kind of anonymous. Yes, that's the whole point. It's this completely hidden thing where you can go off and touch all and sundry, the problem being all and sundry there. What are the legal ramifications, though, of, like,

The, what was it, dough versus grinder? Yeah. I mean, so the thing is, if that case, when it's appealed to the court, if they rule in a similar way that they have in the past and say, hey, when it comes to product liability cases like this, tech companies don't have a defense, that could have huge ramifications for every company in the dating. So not just for data. Not just for dating, even. I mean, it could, yeah. Yeah.

be way bigger than dating but i mean the immediate impacts according to the attorneys i spoke to would be certainly on the dating app scene which is huge because what would change with those i mean probably what would change is they'd have to find a way to determine user age beyond just asking you for your um to enter in your birthday so it could be things like some of the other dating app companies out there already have stuff in place for instance i believe um

Bumble and one other, maybe Tinder, scan user profile photos when they're uploaded to see like, does this person look like clearly a child? And if so, they might ask you to upload your ID to verify that you're over 18. I feel like there could also be a big problem. So I've been on the dating apps for a while. Not that I'm not single, it's just that nobody likes me. And I remember when I was on them, it was like months and months, actually no, like last year.

like early last year, it's been a while, there was a huge fake profile problem. And I wonder if there's not a secondary problem here where the dominance of these fake profiles on there might get pushed away when they have to stop verifying every user. Because that feels like the...

Yeah, but I mean then part of the problem if you're thinking about it from a corporate perspective is then your user numbers go down. Damn right. And probably in those cases, those fake profiles are – like the person is probably paying for that fake profile because then it increases their reach if they're running some sort of scam. And then their paying user numbers would go down, which would be bad for –

Most dating app companies that are already doing poorly. A weird thing I learned during this story is that Grindr is like the most profitable dating app company because gay users don't – I mean this is a bit of a simplification. But from what I heard, it is that gay users just seem to pay for the platform and use it for much longer in part because –

researchers think because gay users are more likely to be in non-monogamous relationships. So you're not using – you're not signing up for Hinge Premium, using it for a couple months, then getting in a monogamous relationship and never using it again. So believe it or not, I once was an executive overseeing parts of Brides.com. Ah, yes. You're so bridal, Jeff. Yes, and I used to love to say, I've got to go to a brides meeting. Right.

But the interesting thing there was that our audience would come in and leave in nine months. And for their sake, you hope they didn't come back. Yeah. Right? This is the other extreme of that. What happened with the cases that were done against sniffies? What was the status of those cases? Well, I mean, so the cases that I tracked were all kind of like sex crimes involving specific male offenders in two cases that we kind of follow throughout the story involving this.

then 14 year old who made an account in sniffies and had sex with two adults those two adults have since been sentenced to upwards of 15 years in prison so I asked the question wrong those weren't cases against sniffies in any case they were cases against people that's the thing sniffies has had no cases against him I spoke to a parent the parent of that 14 year old and she said like of course sniffies should be sued I don't know how to do it I'm dealing with you know three

Dealing with a criminal case. I'm dealing with three foster kids that already were fucked up and now my 14-year-old is super fucked up and has tried to commit suicide because of this whole thing. You know, she's like, I don't know how to do this. But I do think that if

something happens on the dough versus grinder front, you might see cases like this increasingly being filed around the country. And could this not be extrapolated out to a much wider series of issues as well? Like assaults that happen with people of age that still happen as a result of a platform like Tinder or something. But that's what I wanted to ask next is when you go to product liability, it's usually that you're not matching a product

This is going to make you thin. This is going to make you beautiful. Does Sniffy's promise safety? So this is part of it. Tinder has these features, I believe. Tinder has features about like check-ins or maybe like one of the platforms has safety features. So kind of. Grindr, one of the things noted in that is that Grindr promotes itself as a, quote, safe space.

And all of these apps and platforms say, like, our users are 18 and up. Like, they say that they check users' age. So there you go. And do promise that in a way. But then I guess the question goes, does asking someone to enter their date of birth in just a form, does that mean you've actually checked their age? Well, this is the interesting thing. We've talked about this on our podcast on This Week in Google.

is where does the liability land? Is it at the platform technology level or is it the intermediary level or is it at the user level?

And if we try to expect the platforms to solve all the problems of mankind, we know they're going to fail. They will fail. Well, I think specifically with Tinder, under their safety and policy center, it says, and I quote, our safety tools. We utilize a network of industry-leading automated and manual moderation review tools, systems, and processes, and invest significant resources to prevent, monitor, and remove inappropriate behavior, impersonation, harassment, and more from our app. These tools include automatic scans of profiles, red flag languages, and images, manual reviews of specific information.

profiles and it goes on and so forth. And they also have a zero tolerance policy of harassment and encourage their community to report any instance of misconduct. Do they have a liability statement there? Now let's scroll down. The bottom is where the lawyers live. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's see. It's probably in all caps or something. Additional policies, declaration, harassment, underweight. Bloody hell, they've got a lot.

Now there's just a lot of like things that then might be under the terms of use. But nevertheless, if this go, if dough versus grinder happens, it feels like that won't stop people suing and using this as a promise. Certainly. Yeah. But there's a problem with that too. I've argued, I mean, Facebook is now completely fucked up and going full MAGA, but I've argued that,

over the years that it should have had a raison d'etre, a North Star. Right. Right? And it should have said, we're here to be nice to each other. We're here to build community. We're here to make strangers less strange. They do none of that.

And I wish they would have because perhaps then there is a standard to hold them against and also their users. However, in this discussion, if they say, well, you said you're going to be the place where people are nice and now you're filled with harassment, it motivates them not to make any promises. Yes. Yeah. And that's a problem, I think. It's also an IDC company. So I don't really – that's the company that owns Tinder and Match Group and a bunch of other ones like chemistry.com. And I don't – they're evil. Yeah.

This is my statement, you don't have to follow it. I think they're deeply evil companies. But this Sniffies thing is a level worse. And I mean, I just think it's interesting because Sniffies is kind of like the worst of all these problems because it is completely without any of the safeguards. And all about a frictionless experience. Yeah, but...

It's also gotten so popular in the last couple of years. The big dating apps are taking notice. Like Grindr shouted it out basically in one of their most recent earnings calls. What did they say? When an analyst had asked, like, oh, are there any competitors in this space that you're looking for keeping an eye on? And their CFO had said something along those lines. There's like an anonymous – they basically described sniffies in name but without using their name and said we're keeping an eye.

They also then introduced a feature I believe called Right Now that users on Grindr can turn on if they're looking for sex right that instant. And other apps in the gay dating space have kind of emerged that are trying to take kind of a similar map-based cruising approach. It is really funny though that the ultimate thing is they were just like, yeah, what if we didn't follow any rules?

It is pretty funny. What if we just turned off the rules part? And I think that kind of leads us to Meta right now. Because I think what you're seeing with the destruction of Meta, and I'm sure you two have heard, but for the listeners, Meta has now got rid of all of their content moderation stuff. They've got rid, well, they're claiming. Well, they're fact-checking. They're fact-checking. Sorry, sorry, fact-checking. I just fucked up the fact-check, didn't I? Yeah.

And now they're laying off 5% of their people for, quote, underperforming. And they're claiming that LLMs will replace second-tier engineers. And also, Casey Newton, actually, I've given him a lot of shit, but he's put out some really good things recently.

About what Meta has said inside and how they're doing allowable things like just straight up homophobia, straight up anti-Semitism. I mean, they just around the same time that these announcements rolled out, an internal directive went out to remove tampons and pads from any male restrooms on Facebook campuses, which is just a ghoulish thing to do. It's just like that is costing you money. You already have those dispensers in there. Why not just leave them there?

But I think that it's something above MAGA as well. And I think that people willing to do what I'm about to describe might lean conservative because it's evil. Now, if you're listening and you're conservative, it's like, Ed, don't be so rude. Shut the fuck up. I don't care. I'm surprised you've made it this far in the podcast. Yeah, I don't know how you are there. No, it's all the anti-monopoly people who are like, God damn it. Yeah.

Matt Stoller. Anyways, so the point I'm making is I think Meta is going to be the largest scale example of a company just not giving a shit in history. They're just doing all the evil stuff. They're using this as a chance to get rid of these troublesome things such as any kind of diversity, equity, and inclusion, harassing trans people by removing them from spaces. It's all around American industry now. McDonald's, which depends upon black customers and depends upon black employees and people of color,

No DEI. Get rid of it. We don't care anymore. We're not going to do that anymore.

And Meta, which cared about society and getting together and all that BS, right? I was very impressed. Mark Limley, who is a Stanford law professor and a big deal in West Coast law, he is deactivating his account, but he's also firing Meta as a customer. Hell yeah. As a client. Good for you. And he said, I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's descent into toxic masculinity and neo-Nazi madness. Wow.

Yay. And that's a lot of it. It's not just political. It's this toast your donads stuff. I actually, no, I take back my hell yeah. I recant my hell yeah. This is you. Thank you. I've been waiting for this moment. No, no, no. But also like hell yeah now, but like daylight dollar short. As you can ask Jeff Horwitz, Wall Street Journal author of Broken Code, Meta has been backing up the MAGA people for years and years and years. They have been, they allowed Plandemic to

to spread. A horrible conspiracy film that I'm not even going to describe. It sounds stupid and it is stupid. It's for morons. Whatever. It's meant to be a big tent. I don't care. Jeff Kaplan, who is now the head of global policy, I believe. Joel. Joel. Why do I keep mixing those? Fact check you again, man. No, this is why you have guests because I'm too stupid to remember things. He intervened with the public health group

specifically to allow Plandemic to continue to go through. And when Kevin Roos attempted to report on this and report that CrowdTangle, this internal tool, had allowed them to see that these things were spreading and that Dan Bongino and all the conservatives were basically all that was being recommended...

Alex Schultz, the CMO of Facebook at the time, Meta now, he just shut down CrowdTangle, baby. You can't have that. Can't have people knowing. Alex Schultz also recently suggested on the anti-LGBTQ front, and he is a gay man, that seeing homophobia and some such business on there would make people more sympathetic,

to the cause of LGBTQ people. This is perverse. It is. It's disgusting. But the thing is, it's, I think what's frustrating me, and perhaps I need to stop saying things like, it's not just MAGA. It is MAGA. Of course it is.

But it's been here for a while, and it's been here egregiously. They've been supporting the conservatives at scale, and I mean supporting as a media property. And so I just can't take it so seriously when people are going, well, this is Mark Zuckerberg finally giving in. No, that repressed little fuck. He's, oh, going on Joe Rogan. Things are not masculine enough. What are the least masculine thing I've ever heard? Anyway, round over. So...

on, on this week in Google last week, I said, you know, is there anybody left? I thought that Jeff Bezos was responsible steward of the Washington post. He's not, uh,

Mark Zuckerberg was always a dork, but I didn't think he was this bad. Jack Dorsey gets weirder by the day and on and on. And I said on the show that Jensen Wong, the CEO and founder of NVIDIA, I'd watched his two-hour keynote at CES. I'm impressed by him constantly. I thought, well, maybe there's a smart guy. Oh.

Jeff, stop believing the good in people. The next day on Mastodon, somebody said, this is your good guy, Jensen Wong, signing a woman's breast. I was about to say, Jeff. Well, first of all, if she asked...

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

Okay, never mind that. But that's the thing. It is a fair thing, though. And I'm not saying... I think there are some who want this more than others. It would be nice if one of them wasn't insane. I thought it was Mark Benioff for a while. I thought Mark Benioff was all right. And I actually had coffee with a reporter after I met him and described him positively. And she said, so he's just another white tech CEO. I'm like, oh, shit. I'm doing the thing. I'm doing the exact thing. But also, Benioff's a worm, too. May I put together my theory? Forward my theory. It's called...

CEO brain worms. Please, please. It's simply that if you are a CEO of something, especially a large company, you increasingly get brain worms, which is just you are surrounded by people whose job is largely to say yes to you, make you feel good, and that would make anyone insane. If you are surrounded by sycophants for long enough, I think that

you are going to become untethered from reality in a way that is distressing to a person that exists in conflict. And someone on Twitter once said being a billionaire is like being kicked in the head by a horse every day. And I think that's fair. But there's something different now, I think. They've always been sexist. It's a male structure. Right. That's given. But the permission structure has changed radically. Yes, yes. And I don't think necessarily their essence has changed, but they're all freed. They're untethered. Yes, yes.

And yeah, I fully agree with that. And I think you're really seeing it with Zuckerberg.

And it kind of makes so much more – I wish I would have called this one because he is doing exactly what you'd expect. He's just – I'm going to remove all of the stuff that makes Facebook already a basically unusable platform. I'm going to make it – I'm just going to add all the racism back. We need some more racism there. And I'm just going to fire a bunch of people and I'm going to go on Juggerog and talk about my sad little willy or whatever he said. I didn't watch. I don't care.

It's just what happens with Google now is my question. What is the untethered Sundar Pichai experience? I'm going to be naive again. I think it's different. Maybe because Sundar is educated and Larry and Sergey are educated and Zuckerberg left sophomore year seminar brain.

Sure. But I'm not sure that... I've met plenty of psychotic people in college. True. And I'm just wondering, perhaps I should reframe the question. It's like, what happens to Google now? How worried about Google's quality I am? Because this is what Meta is doing is effectively what Google's been working on. It's the whole thing of degrading the quality of the service by taking off the things that makes it good.

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

And in some ways, Google is accelerating that by – Google has – as it is the portal to the web, entire industries upon industries have emerged to game that portal of the web, which results in kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy of slop. Yeah, the content that they raise becomes the most popular content, which in turn informs what will be popular next. Yes. Oh, it's an omelet of chicken and egg. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm hungry. It's... I think that this is really going to hasten the rot economy. I think this is just going to begin more rot because before there was this lair and they obviously all resented it where it was just like...

oh yeah there's different colored people I guess fucking there's women now Jesus Christ and they've always like grumpily accepted it and meta has been weirdly one of the better ones which means that the ones who are not what do you think fucking Tesla's gonna be like Tesla's not gonna have bathroom for women anymore that's a guess it's a joke

I don't know. Who are you worried about, Jeff? Like who's the real bastard left? Who's the bastard who hasn't bastarded yet? Well, I think that's the – I hope that Google is not going to go that far.

I think for their business, it wouldn't be any good. Here's the other question, blue sky. Right. Do we have any hope for blue sky? So I have, but I'm an optimist. I hold out hope. I like blue sky. I'm a nihilist, but I have hope for blue sky selfishly. Yes. And then I saw – did you see the thing yesterday? I've got to pull up the rundown. There's an effort to raise $30 million. Is this the Free My App? Yes, the Free My App. Free Off Aids. Free Off Aids.

Which is filled with people like Shoshana Zuboff. Can you explain this to me? What are they raising money for? This was already on my notes. I'm glad you brought this up. It's really unclear. What is it? And Dave Weiner, who's one of the pioneers of RSS and podcasting and blogging and so on, his response was there's no nerds there. There's no technologists there. It doesn't seem to be saying what they'll do. No, it doesn't. So what are they raising the money to do? They've not even raised the money.

They're declaring their hope to raise money? Yes. I'd also like to declare that I'd like to raise $30 million. I'll spend it on a brownstone and give you $20 million back. I will keep the money and do nothing else. What's the name of it again? Free our feeds. Because I want to go down the list of the people who are associated. Oh, no, it's really funny. There's Corey Doctorow and Shoshana Zuboff. Right. Which if you've ever talked to Corey about Shoshana Zuboff, let me just say that's a weird coffee date thing.

Yeah. It marks a sermon from Mozilla, who I think is a good guy, but Shosanna drives me crazy. Roger McNamee. Oh, Mark doesn't call me anymore. Drives me nuts. Mark Ruffalo, Jimmy Wales. We like Brian Eno is everywhere. Carol Cadwallader from the, well, the guardian soon. Um,

It's just a bunch of people who don't build. They don't build. They don't build. So my friend Craig Newmark is now signing on. He's on that. Ostensibly what they want to use the raised funds for is to launching a public interest foundation to support...

The project while creating an independently hosted infrastructure, giving blue sky users, developers and researchers access to content and data. You don't need $30 million to do that. I need $30 million. Mastodon built up to what it was just when, until the point where Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon had raised an entirety $500,000. And Mastodon literally just did a nonprofit operation like a day or two ago saying that they're kind of decentralizing it.

I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the Really No Really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does

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See, I don't enjoy Mastodon at all. I don't think I... I think it's a bunch of scolds. Yeah, it feels like I need to do a content warning because I didn't use a capital letter in the right place. That is exactly how it feels. You're like, I'm eating lunch. Wow.

How dare you? Did you see that guy in the Matrix? He didn't even have a mouth. Now, I think what frustrates me here is like Mastodon did something real that they moved stuff around. And this thing I got reached out to by them and I read a few articles and I'm pretty stupid. So I was like, maybe someone else saw something I sent to a few friends. They were like, this looks good, I guess. It isn't anything. There's nothing. It's just there's nothing. Why is everyone covered? Will Aramis call me? Will Aramis of the Washington Post, who I adore. Why are you giving them a Q&A?

He talked all about them. It's frustrating because I think it was they've done kind of, I hope I'm wrong. I hope this thing does the thing that they're non-specific. But you could do it. What is actually, I don't, why am I even saying I hope they do it? I actually cannot tell you what they do. And that's concerning to me. It should be to federate Blue Sky, to take the AT protocol and make it federated like, yeah,

Mastodon is. Right. Like Activity Pop, right? That requires Jay Graber and Blue Sky to have enough resources to put out what's needed for Federation. And I wonder if that costs $30 million. No, it doesn't. What they want to do from what I understand of this vague promise now is I think they want to be like, hey, do you want to fund like the other Blue Sky? It just feels this kind of vagueness. And now that we've listed out all the names, I'm just kind of like, this is a cynical – this is like one of those stand up to cancer things. Would you call it nihilistic?

No, it doesn't qualify. It's cynical. It's cynical. And I like the thing is there are people I look like Corey's awesome. Absolutely. And it's like all of these promises without really promising anything. What does that sound like? The tech industry? Like, why don't you come to this with some things? And the answer is they just want to talk about we want to make it billionaire proof. What the fuck does that mean?

Billionaires have way more money than $30 million. They've got like $150 million more than that. That's how much a billionaire is. Exactly. And it's just...

Everyone's kind of fallen for it, and I hope it does something good, but I really cannot say what that might be. And if their answer is, well, you didn't read it well enough, not my fucking problem, mate. You explain this shit when you're talking to all and sundry about this. Have you seen anything from Jay Graber at Blue Sky about what she thinks of this? She gave a canned quote and said it was good. Because, I mean, in her position...

It'd be funny if she's like, this bullshit. Fuck these people. I mean, I guess, yeah, if someone wants to buy out her startup for $30 million. Well, it's not even that. She was just like, yeah, it's a pretty good thing, I think. It might have been Jay. I don't know if it was Jay who did the quote, but it was something along the lines of like, this is good. It's on the app protocol. Mike Basnick is now on the board of Blue Sky. He's the voice I'll trust on this. Yes. I generally trust Mike. We have some differing opinions, mostly on Section 230, but I think that that's everyone's experience with Mike.

It's just frustrating. No, because I agree with Mike on Section 2. He's the world's biggest Mike stan. No, no, I know. No, I'm a huge Mike. He was a guest on the show. He was one of my favorite episodes, The Streisand Effect. I think Mike is lovely. He's wonderful. Really good storyteller and actually a good journalist, which is why this whole thing is something I really would like his opinion on, because it feels like the kind of thing you'd get like a Carl Bode, Bode? Yes. Like an article in being like, bunch of tech people, shit it up again. I love Carl.

Oh, it's great. I love it. But also, I don't want to be a wet blanket here, but sploosh. Like, it's just...

It's frustrating because you know what we actually need right now? Like Pixel Fed or whatever. The federated Instagram thing that is currently being blocked. What is Pixel Fed? It's just an Instagram that's decentralized, much like Mastodon. It's an actual thing that probably could use $30 million and is an actual story beyond it being blocked. But the thing getting covered is a bunch of people getting together and saying, wouldn't it be nice if something was nicer? When you actually have someone doing the thing, because what we need right now

is a blue sky for Facebook, or we need Facebook equivalent and Instagram equivalent. Because once Meta loses their grip on those two things, they are fucked. They do not have a real business. The whole AI profiles thing, which we'll get to in a minute,

And all of this here, we're going to take off the – we're going to take off all the things that don't allow you to say the 14 words every post. We're going to allow trans people to attack. You don't do that just because you're evil. Capitalism is generally going to move towards the most profitable direction. You do this because all that stuff just got in the way of more stuff and more growth. You break that machine with an alternative that doesn't suck constantly. Let me try a different theory on it. Okay.

Which is that I made fun of Musk buying Twitter, $44 billion, what a fool you are. And we all know how wrong that was because he's worth 10 times more because he has access to power around the world around him. Yeah, he used it. Is Zuckerberg simply jealous of Musk's political clout? Nah, I don't think so. He's more by money than power. I think he could just give money. What do you think? I mean, I think that that could be something. It could. I think that certainly –

access to political power is something that he wants, as do all of these people. The fact that...

Zuck, Musk, and who is the third person? A bunch of tech CEOs are going to be sitting in Trump's little box at the inauguration, I think speaks volumes. Did you cover Facebook? I feel like you've covered them previously. Yeah, I covered them earlier on. Right. Is there anything historic about, because I was just thinking, has Zuckerberg generally hung out with presidents in any way? Like, has he ever really been social with them?

My understanding is no, not to this extent, but I could be missing something. He's not terribly social, period. But you'd remember. Yeah, I – he like – his – I remember his – it was notable in like 2017 or 18 when he did a tour across America. I remember. He looks so normal. Taking his little photos staged to look like he's normal height. Yeah.

And everyone was like, oh, wow, he's making a political statement. He's so tall. He could be moving. He looks like he could be 5'9". I'm now looking this up. Yeah, no, it's – there's definitely him standing on boxes or in photos standing – He's 5'7". Yeah, standing forward so that he looks taller. However, I remember that being notable because it felt like, yeah, he's actually entering into the political sphere maybe. But I think that he is just as his –

political star has risen for better or worse over the last decade, he has cozied up to power quite a bit. I'm about to say something terrible. Hell yeah. Which is when I was in Davos. Oh, Jeff, I'm sorry. You've got to leave. Bye, Jeff. It was lovely having you. I was there at a session with Mark Zuckerberg and it was before he was media trained.

And I've watched him in a few conference settings back in the day, 10 years ago. And he obviously hated it then, but he's changed. He's definitely changed. I think he has got the brain worms, but also like many of these guys, he's got all of this money, got a reasonable age. And then he's like, what do I enjoy?

And then he's realized he enjoys nothing. I personally am a barbecue guy. I have never seen a man less interested in cooking in my life. Sweet baby Ray's. He loves to smoke those meats, though. And there's nothing wrong with a cheap rack of ribs with some sweet baby Ray's if you're feeling lazy. We've all done it.

It took six hours. You're not lazy enough. You're not so lazy you wouldn't cook it, but you don't want to go to the store. And also, he got a big green egg. There's nothing wrong with a big green egg, but you know what? If you got all this money, you can get yourself a really interesting stick burner. You can buy Nashville. You could go and get a Pits and Spits out of Texas. That's where I get my grill from. Beautiful steel beast. Coy over there put it together. Really don't want to look at the politics there. Just realized as I said that. Never looked at it. Please, if it's bad, don't blame me. Don't tweet at him.

But also, he doesn't enjoy anything none of these people do. And so, yeah, he's just like, I've seen clips of the Rogan thing and he just seems, he seems as bad as Elon Musk. He seems just like pissed, like, oh, another day with my billions. A detail I think is notable and has been stuck in my head ever since I read it

It was a Wall Street Journal piece kind of tied to this rebuff of fact-checking. They had a detail right at the end that I think in maybe like November of last year, Mark Zuckerberg had gone through some sort of knee surgery because he pulled something relating to MMA and made a Facebook post about it, being like, here's me at my knee surgery. And I guess the post didn't do well. And so he freaked out and messaged his team being like, why isn't my post doing well? Turns out it was because it was being suppressed.

due to Facebook policies on potential medical misinformation. And I don't know, seems fairly notable that right before Zuck decides to roll back all of these policies limiting the reach of certain posts, his own knee Facebook post gets limited. What I love about that, first of all, other than the lack of post disparate in this

pathetic. Yeah, no, it's absolutely. All my posts didn't post better. But also, post harder. He actually ran into a problem of Facebook that people complain about, which is that I don't seem to distribute my posts to everyone. It seems to get stopped somehow. But instead of being like, maybe that's a problem with the platform, he's like, why are people not looking at my knees enough? Good

No, he knew. He knew it was his platform. He knew it was his own platform. And they were like, fix it for my thing. And it's a similar thing that Elon Musk has done with Twitter to where he was like, well, people aren't seeing my tweets enough. So we're going to need to put my tweets in everybody's feed always. And it's intolerable. I would do this, just to be clear, like immediately right now. And why? Because I love people looking at me.

But it's so much sadder if you have all the money in the world and you could actually make people look at you and you could go and like see anyone. You have enough money that foreseeably anyone would meet with you. You might have to pay someone, but you could meet everyone probably. But I was just shocked even in the clips I saw of how like petulant he seems. Like he doesn't like it's not like he's like finally the attention. He's like he's like resentful. Because because Maga is anger.

sure sure that's the whole that's the whole shit he didn't feel like he was leaning into it though he felt like there was a man pissed off i think it makes sense if you think about it historically because zuck went on this huge apology tour after the 2016 election and also with cambridge analytica stuff that happened he was for years just like a political punching bag and he put himself up for it he you know went before congress he went and apologized to a bunch of

recently. He did this whole... Very reasonable things to ask of him. Yeah, very. I mean, but like in the mind of someone who is the head of a company, that might seem like you really have gone through the ringer and yet people still continue to be mad at you no matter what you do. Actually, the apology demanded in Congress was by Josh Hawley, who's now his BFF. It's

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

But if that's your only business model, that's not great, but that's also most of it. But that goes back to Musk. My presumption, besides it being a bad investment, was he was ruining it and people would leave it. Yes, people left it. It doesn't matter to him. It doesn't matter. I think Facebook matters to Zuck. I actually do. I think he is – he's not obsessed with it because that would involve him like looking at it for more than two seconds, but –

No, actually, maybe I take this back. He might not care. If you look at it now, I guess, no, it's just it looks like shit and it doesn't really... Because what did he care about? The stupid goggles. Yeah. And now he cares about... And here's one of the funny things about Meta is that I think that their leader in AI, Jan LeCun, who's there, is one of the... Well, he's one of the more, I think, rational people around it. He's not a doomster. He's not full of all that crap. No AGI. He just argues with Elon Musk and Gary Marcus all day. That's God's work. Is it?

Or is it a Sisyphean cast? I'm going to get him on here just to call him Yann LeCoum, but I think he'll kill me. But no, so they're leaders in AI. I was going to say, they're leaders in AI. He's still doing the goggle crap, you know, AR and VR. He got bored with Facebook a long time ago. So... With...

With that, I agree. I think he might love the financial entity known as Meta, though. I think he's really attached to just the numbers because they've always been from the very early days of Yann Levin and Naomi Gleit and Alex Schultz. They've always been like growth pigs. They were written off. Remember, it wasn't that long ago. Oh, Facebook's over. Meta's over. It's just a mess. Markets never did that. Oh, yeah. Well, they did for a little while. They did for a while. And then it's...

been a hell of a story. Now it's meta. It's the future of the web. We're on to web 75. We're on to web 4.5 and this is when it gets more racist. Yeah. The legs are racist now. The legs are racist. But don't forget in the early days of print Malleus Maleficarum came out which was the guide to burning witches that killed lots of people and it was print's fault. So maybe this is just a phase.

For what? Until we have institutions that finally bring us quality. Same thing happened, honest to God, with print. That's a plug for my book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis. You can do it at the end, Jeff. I write about this, right? And I think that we're at a stage where the scale of speech today cannot be handled by the institutions we have.

When print came, the institutions of editing and publishing were invented for that purpose because nobody knew what was made on this press. It had no provenance. Anybody can make this crap. So are you suggesting it would be a private market effect rather than the governmental one? I'm suggesting it's institutional and institutions can be either. Right. So I think –

I think it's possible. And I actually think it's very difficult, but not as hard as people think, to destroy meta. In that it would take someone with enough money and enough moments. Like Blue Sky's growth came from a moment where people went, let's check out what's on X. Oh, Groipa 42 is threatening to kill me.

And that is somehow my suggestion from the algorithm, and he DM'd me as well. I think that person will kill me though. And then people went, "I don't want to fucking be there. I don't want to be associated with this." I think with meta, if depending on how bad the guardrails are pulled off, because we really don't know yet, it's going to take a little time. I think people will just be like, "This platform already sucks. I won't look at anything."

And that's the real question. Do they go nowhere? I'm really curious about the TikTok ban. We might find out. Well, I think you're right on meta and perhaps in some US circles. But I think the question when it comes to something like Facebook is what ends up happening to international users where Facebook is the internet.

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

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

fact-checking's ability to limit reach of misinformation. Like, sure, it's not going to... It's a cart bolting the horse. Saying like, yeah, I posted misinformation and saying on my post, your post is misinformation probably isn't going to change my view, but it will potentially have an impact on the 20 people that might have seen that and fallen into that rat hole. And the thing is, and I think it was someone from 404 made the point that Meta's fact-checking wasn't great.

I was there at the beginning. After 2016, I raised a bunch of money from Facebook, gave it away to places like Data & Society and other good folks who are doing lots of work on what –

as Joe Bernstein has since called big disinfo. And I was watching as they were trying to build their fact-checking structure. Yeah. And it was a clusterfuck from the beginning. They had to – well, we can't do this. We can't make judgments. Everybody's frightened of judgment. So they had to go to the fact-checking organization. Can you imagine their fun conventions? They have them. Oh, yeah. And you've got to verify who's a good fact-checker. And then that group wouldn't verify ABC News.

So then Facebook had a fit about that. And so it was routed around and around as who's allowed to be a fact checker, right? From the very beginning, that's what it was. And then there's debate too about whether- And how do you scale that to billions of people? Exactly, in all kinds of cultures and languages. And so I'm not, I'm not,

against fact checking I'm not against facts but facts to my mind are not the problem and I think the problem sorry that Jeff just got sent five dollars from the fact organization on his phone they sent him five dollars thank you for representing facts oh grandpa

Let me show you how to do your phone. When you said, I was there at the beginning, I had to stop myself being like... Of time? What, with the dinosaurs? That's me every week on This Week in Google. I'm like, tell me about black and white TV, Jeff. Yeah, it's...

I think the bigger thing is I'm more worried about the ramifications of this attitude because they already were pretty lax. And in the global South, in the rest of the world, there's less media that understands those languages, even, Jesus, but also less people in the Western world would

Which Meta is arguably more scared about with the media. And I think as well, the other thing I really haven't seen talked about is Meta is already limiting traffic on journalists. And do you think that they're going to increase the sharing or decrease it? Well, I believe that they said they're no longer going to limit the reach of like 70%.

Civics-related content, which I think I took to mean like political news. Yeah, sure, mate. I don't know whether that will apply to all journalism. That is such a euphemism. Right? I'm sorry. Civics-related content. Yeah, civics-related. So they'll allow the influencers they like. But probably not links. Yes. Well, they'll allow links, but they won't – they'll depress them. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. They allow them. Well, versus Canada where, of course, they're not allowed. Yes.

And I think Meta was praying that Canada, like Bill, would have passed in California because they said that they would eliminate news in California. And I think that would have been an open door. Ah, screw it. Let's eliminate it in the U.S. Let's eliminate it everywhere. And that would have been easier for them. Puppies, parties, and pedophiles, and what's another P word for bad people? Guy Fieri's got to stop making TV shows. Right.

It's just – it's frustrating and it's only going to push people towards blue sky. But it's also, I think, a real inflection point for legacy media as well. So there was a story in – Oh, legacy media is dead. Oh, I know. So Jeff Jarvis over here, big fan of the Times and the Post. Actually, I like – he does this thing where it's hashtag broken post. And broken times. Broken times, but good times you've also put in a bit as well.

A rare moment when they do well, yes. You've got to give it to them. The other day they did. But that's – I think that those publications are more at threat from this than people realize because Semaphore had a story saying – I think it was today. It's media, so I assume Mr. Tani. Yes. Next, Tani. That story said that the Post went from having like 20 million –

unique monthly visitors to like 2.5 to 3 in 2021 to 2.5 to 3 in 2024 jeff is astounded i was too wow and guys go off for end of the show made the good point is has about 3 million monthly visitors i think if the post helped you get late that would probably boost the numbers we used to have that as a business model we used to have personals and newspapers

before you were born. That's what they took from us. That's all we had. Feel sorry for us old horny people. That's all we had. All we had was submitting a single sentence to the Washington Post. My new favorite quote. Feel sorry for us old horny people. Yeah, I like last week was already apologizing for the amount of times people talked about horny checks and stuff. Well, we're back, folks.

It's just crazy. But I think it's these large publications have been so used to social traffic and they've not been working out what the hell to do with it for a while. Well, a lot of them are betting that getting checks from AI companies could soften the blow, which I don't think is going to change much. They only get one of those as well. I mean they're supposed to get one a year or something like that. Yeah, of course.

from the company that burns $5 billion. Yeah, Dot Dash Meredith had, I think their numbers are public and it

If you do the math, it equals up to like 1% or less than 1% of their yearly revenue they get. I think that's a terrible trade. It's the same sort of mistake these companies made. And it screws the rest of all media. Because it's just the big – the moguls get their bags of money. But Ed here gets nothing from OpenAI. Yeah. I would love to sell everything words-wise to Sam Altman. You just have to text me back, Sam. I've been texting you.

I have not heard back, and I'm not sure why. I simply asked you a question. Come on, man. Mr. OpenAI, I need you on my show. I won't hurt you much, not physically, but emotionally. Just six texts unanswered that say, come on, you coward. We are going to be crying, both of us. I will start crying, and you will finish crying, Mr. Altman. ♪

I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the really no really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor we got the answer will space junk block your cell signal the astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer we talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth plus is

Really? That?

It's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Jon Stewart is back at The Daily Show, and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into Jon's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors.

And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Osvald Ossian, one of the new hosts of the long-running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical, but obsessively intrigued. And I'm Cara Price, the other new host. And I'm ready to adopt early and often.

On Tech Stuff, we travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology. One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians. Like data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality. How is it possible that

the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night. Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the singularity. So join us. Listen to Tech Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

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

No, they're not good at business. Otherwise, they wouldn't be in such terrible shape right now. They screwed up the internet. They missed the boat. They didn't know what they were doing. They cry and try to get protectionist legislation. And so now they cry and try to get money out of open AI. And it's not a business model. Well, Jeff, this is actually one of the many reasons I wanted you on. Can you kind of explain what you just said? So what is it that they missed? What is it that they should have done differently?

So let's not just make that third person. I'll make that first person too because I worked for Conde Nast and for Advance. And I was there as it was going on. What was it in this case? The internet. I started at Advance in 94, just a month after the browser came out. Right. So the company was debating, okay, now we're going to Uncle Jeff time. I'm sad. That was back when the browser was a room-sized machine that printed the website. Yes.

So, we were debating whether to put our content onto Prodigy or AOL or this new web thing. On the portals themselves. Yes, yes. When it was just like one website. So, I worked for Steve Newhouse, who's now the chairman of Advance and Conde Nast, and he's really, really smart. He's the one who taught me about interactivity and community, and he knew that print content was not valuable online. Mm-hmm.

But every other publisher thought their great value was in repurposing their print content to online. Right. And trying to license it and get money for it and sell it. And they didn't understand – So to the portals. To the portals and then eventually in paywalls. They didn't understand that the essence of the internet is conversation and community and collaboration and creativity. That's the last of my alliterations.

And so they insisted to just do what they'd always done, subscription money and ad money. And as the ad money went down because the number of avails went way sky high. Availability of. Of advertising. Then as happens with when supply goes up, price goes down. So then they tried to put it all behind a paywall. And they're not all the New York Times and they can't do that. And they never saw, I think, what the essence of the internet is.

And so now – and they're still in mass media mind. They're still in we have to please everybody while they go piss off everybody. Right. So what should they have done differently? What should they have done? I think that they should have seen themselves. They could have started Reddit. They could have started AOL. They could have started these things. I was part of this whole – But wouldn't that have funded journalism? Yeah. Yeah. You're talking about something like Kinja. Yeah.

The commenting, Reddit-like commenting system under Gawker blogs. I'm not sure it was there at the beginning of that, too. Yeah, conversations. The first man. Well, Nick Denton first hated, I said he had put comments on Gawker. He said, no, I hate comments. They're awful. That's true. They are. Actually, they're not. I know. But then at one point, he became a believer because he was going to do it Nick's way. And that became Kinja and that became everything else that was there. Sure. I think my big thing is,

Sorry, that was one publication owning Reddit. Do you think that that makes like how would like something like Reddit? Because you're saying that they should have seen conversations as thing. Does that mean a social network? Like what? Because what you're describing is a company that sells journalism. And you're like, the thing we will sell is not journalism. Well, in fact, my old boss, Steve Newhouse, is the one who bought Reddit.

He wanted to buy – Yeah, but he ran it like shit. No, he didn't. It's now worth a fortune and it's better. Up until recently, he ran it like shit. Yeah, but doing well now. No, he doesn't. It's worth a fortune now, right? There was also a horrible claustrophobic in the industry called the New Century Network. Okay.

And the newspaper industry got together, the top 12 companies, and we were going to start a way to sign into all newspapers across the country at once and subscribe at once and sell ad works across. And it could have been a real thing, right? This is the same time that Yahoo is putting up news and AOL is putting up news. I'm surprised you'd be into such a thing. They could have done this. What stopped them? So half the company, along came Kleiner Perkins, and they said, this is a good idea. We want to invest in this. We want to make this scale and be big.

half the newspaper publishers said, how dare you? You can't get a piece of our business. No, absolutely not. Because we're too valuable. You're just a penny-ante little... So it seems like that is the principal problem. It's male CEOs again. So I don't like Jensen Huang very much, but one of his things he would say is like, always act like you're going out of business. I'm surprised more newspapers don't do that for more obvious reasons, but...

I don't know if I agree with you about the conversation part. I don't actually think... What are we doing right now? I know, but this isn't how you run a newspaper.

Yeah, I'd agree. I think there needs to be a way to be able to make news and journalism profitable, and that doesn't exist at all scales and for all companies. It doesn't exist at scale, I think, might be the problem. Scale's the problem. Yeah. Before the mechanization and industrialization of print, poor Paris has heard me say this a hundred times, in the mid-1850s, the average circulation of a daily newspaper in the United States was 4,000.

It was only with a mechanization and gesturalization. Were they fairly distributed? Because you had to pull with a human muscle. Right, so you'd have a local printing press which would print local. And you could only print so many. And that distribution of 4,000 people, a small town or something. Or even in New York. In New York in 1900, by this time you had a half century of the steam-powered press and you had the linotype and you had other things come in. Then you had scale come up. But still in New York City, including Brooklyn, in 1900 there were 46 daily newspapers. Huh.

That is to say that they spoke at a different and human scale. Broadcast killed all that. Broadcast came along, and you had one or maybe two papers in a town, and they thought they could serve everybody. They thought that scale was the only goal, that we are the mass. It's growth. And it was a lie. People realized pretty soon this doesn't speak to me. It's because none of these people, like many businesses in tech as well, are capable of saying we've grown enough.

If there is a... The Athletic was better as an independent from the Times, but I forget who said this earlier. It's like the reason the Times is picking up this stuff is because the Times' actual brand, maybe in Casey, actually, the Times' brand is like falling apart. And it sucks because the actual lessons recently that I've seen in media are fairly straightforward. It's what if we had interesting people doing unique stuff? What if we then had them cover something that happened, right? And then they write it down, some sort of like...

analysis, I think I'd call it. And then at the end of it, you'd be like, wow, I know who this person was. I know who this person, and I heard them talk and I like their voice. The last week at CES, 20 people interviewed. I'm not just doing a thing about me. Don't worry. But the thing I got through it is there are so many reporters who are so much more charming than their bylines. And it's not a failure of their writing.

It's a failure of the outlets. It's a failure of the form. It used to be, at least I don't know much about the history of media, but I remember there being a lot more opinion people in tech. You had Eric Bender off. You hear Arthur Bray, I think, is still around. You had like David Pogan. These people, I'm not saying that they were perfect. In fact, I have some views about some of them specifically. Okay.

There was still something to the popularity of having a real voice and having a real person. And that person being white. And you as a news outlet were like, shit, I got to keep these names and I got to make sure they can talk. And the Times is like, well, who do we do for that? Who is the most insane person? Do we have a transphobe? Oh, don't worry. We have a whole database for those. You have any insane war hawks? Oh, please. That's the other database that we spent $50 million on. We had to lay off a few people. We needed to know the people who would put the most troops in California. Paris, let me ask you something.

The information is really good. I pay for it. Same. Discount, though, I'm glad to say. And it works as a business. Yes. Now, it works because there's reporting like yours that's valuable, that is specialized and covers technology and the society and business around it really well. Why is there not the information?

In a dozen areas on the same model. Politico, one might say, is that Politico's crap. Politico is just conservative news. Yeah, it's awful. Right? But theoretically, it should be the information of politics, but it's not. I can't think of any the information of. I think it's – I think the answer is a little multifaceted. One, I think –

When Jessica Lesson, our founder, she used to work at the Wall Street Journal, founded the information a bit over a decade ago, everyone thought she was crazy. Like there's a bunch of very funny to read now blogs from Business Insider being like, this crazy lady wants you to pay a couple hundred dollars for a subscription to a website with news on it. Who would ever do that?

And I think that it took a while for people in the media industry to come around to the idea of a truly hard paywall and creating content that is worth –

paying for and sticking by that. I also think it's that's because there are obvious trade-offs. The reach of the information is much smaller than a Politico because you can't get around our paywall. And it doesn't need to be huge. And it doesn't need to be huge because it is self-sustaining. I also think there's another detail. She founded this in 2013, the end of 2013. So everyone was still high on the hog as far as ads went. The ads industry had not, it hadn't become as difficult.

Also, I say this with no offense to you, Paris. Jessica is also well-known as being well-connected with the Zuckerbergs and also well-known for being – and there are times with the information where the tone shifts and it is a little more rah-rah, I think is the fair thing. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. Maybe just charitable. No, the podcast I'm thinking of. Oh, the podcast is a Jessica Lesson podcast.

It's not a reporter's podcast. Some of the ways that AI things are framed are not necessarily critical. But you know what? Every outlet has bias. Also, I cite the information all the time. Yeah, I think that there's a bit of a difference between some of our...

newsletters or podcasts or opinion stuff versus reporting, but agree. You've got some of the best, like Anissa Gardizi. Yeah, we have fantastic people who do fantastic work. And I think part of what you're getting at here with comments with Jessica is also what made this work is she had, like it was self-funded. She didn't need to take on venture capital to start it. And that meant that it could grow at its own pace versus...

I have worked at a total of three places in my about a decade of a journalism career. The first two I got laid off from – the first one was – well, I guess other places. The first two staff jobs I had I got laid off from. One was a place called The Outline that raised venture capital. Mm-hmm.

And then quickly ran out of it because it spent too much money on silly things. Mr. Topolsky, his favorite game, found an outlet, lose the money, walk away happy. Listen, you know, it's a great, we'll see. Hey, they paid me, then. Listen, hey, as long as people get paid. The other one was Wired, which is part of Conde Nast, which was going through its own growing pains because it has a bunch of

print publications and is largely supported by advertising. And it's also always fucking growth pain. It's just they must be bigger. And the best work, like one of the things that has made the rise of newsletters happen in my opinion and indeed this show, is that people are kind of tired of

the standard big box thing. They're tired of these kind of... Every major publication really drains the life out of... And I think even smaller publications do. They standardize the copy. And I realize you can't have everyone being a sloppy blog worm like me, but it feels like

The publication's really investing in allowing the person behind the thing to talk or doing well. Engadget, we had a ton of them on the show, and they've done a really bloody good job in their coverage and in their podcasts actually bringing the personality out. You've got Sherlyn Lowe, you've got DaVinja Hardewa, you've got Carissa Bell, and these people are fun and varied and different. And I wish that there was more of that in journalism, but I also think it's why people are turning away from legacy media. Let me ask you another question. Do you yourself or do you ever hear any colleagues say –

I'm glad I have a salary, but I wish I had a little more fame or a little more impact or a little more presence. I mean,

I can't think of any examples. Or even like peers. I'll give you this. When I was deciding whether or not to go to the information versus a couple of other places, I called up my mentor at the time and was like, oh, if I go to the information, will I like fade away into obscurity behind the paywall? It's a terrible career move. And he was like, rightfully, he was like, Paris, there are two groups of people that you care about reading your work, if we're being honest. One is other journalists and the other are people that work in tech.

Both of those groups subscribe to the information. You're going to be fine. And I think that that is the way that a lot of people at our – I don't know if I love that. Listen, it's a practical way of thinking about it. For careerism, yeah. Yes, careerism – I also feel like you do – I'm actually pushing back. I think you actually give a big shit about your readers. I do give a huge shit about my readers. I just want to make sure that the pigs on Reddit don't come and argue with you about – because it doesn't seem like that's your point. Yes.

No, my – I care a lot about my readers and things like that. But part of the thing I guess if you're talking about larger career moves wise, like those are the two groups you need to think about, potential sources and potential like colleagues in the industry. And doing good work. Yes. Doing good work. Yeah. So let me go to your other career. I'm sorry. Go ahead. If –

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

Which is cool. It's awesome. And your readers are very focused, I imagine. My readers are very focused. They read. We have an incredible read-through rate. That's really cool. Actually, I didn't know. It's quite nice to be able to be at a place where you can do that sort of focus. But I don't think that that exists infrequently at scale. I think at scale as well you have the problem of you do have those deep readers, but you also have the people who saw the headline. They scroll down. They see a name. They're like, fuck this. They just hit retweet. Yeah. Yeah.

Let me ask you in your other life, PR. Right. So I talked to an executive at one of the big tech companies, and he said, how do we get our message out at scale? I said, you don't anymore. And then I talked to a guy who just left a big PR company – I'll leave them both nameless for now –

And he said, oh, yeah, the PR industry is all about getting on TechMeme and whether you get the publications. There's a guy who hasn't pitched anyone in fucking ever. I'm sorry. You ever hear a guy be like, he can't be on TechMeme. That's a person who does not talk to journalists. I know it's important for journalists. I don't think it's that important. The clients is what I'm saying. The clients don't give a shit. That's where I'm going. So where's the…

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

Absolutely they do, because at the moment, right now, there may be a lack of trust in legacy media, but people still trust media in general. I bring up Steve from Gamers Nexus, million plus subscriber, CoffeeZilla on YouTube. Now I'm not saying those would even be PR targets, but Linus Tech Tips absolutely would, and indeed has worked with people I've worked with. People still need to get through, but

The thing that has changed is there's a lot less journalists who are just willing to run anything unless it's for open AI. By the way, I'm just going to do this. There is a two-tiered system within the media right now. And the reason we have Meta and the reason we have Elon Musk and the reason we have these things is partially to blame for the fact that startups actually really have to prove their worth.

It's remarkable. One of the reasons I have a fucking career in PR. And it's frustrating because you'll be like, hey, they do a really good thing. They make money. It's cool. And they're like, yeah, but...

Yeah, but like did they raise like more money though? And like I don't know if I want to write about someone who's just a good idea. And then they will post an OpenAI thing that is like a feature that my toaster has. And it's just – and the problem is, is that I understand when you – as these outlets somehow get bigger but they have less people, you have to do more stuff. So you just have to go, oh, shit, what is the public good? What does everyone want to know about? OpenAI, Anthropic, what have you. And that makes sense.

But to your point, startups kind of need PR as much as they used to. Big tech also does too, because right now, all of the big tech companies, they're playing the same game, which is

Well, Donald Trump's in the White House and the right is winning, so I don't give a shit about fuck. I'm just going to say whatever I want. And indeed, the two-tiered system I talked about, the reason that Sam Altman has been able to lie at scale and Elon Musk has been allowed to lie at scale for 10 years is because the system that operates against the Series A, and I don't say this with any bitterness, by the way, everyone should be held to this standard. Everyone with the media should have to prove themselves. But

But someone like Meta, someone like Tesla, they come along and say whatever the fuck they want, and it gets printed, even to this day with the Tesla robot of them. So you're in this situation where media relations—well, I don't get journalists to cover stuff—

is very important. And then there's the other problem, which is about 15 years ago when I got into this job, people started writing articles called "Media Relations is Dead." Why? Because talking to reporters all day and learning everything they do and knowing what you're talking about, what they're talking about, what's happening in the world, and then being able to take that and put it into a smart thought, including the client. That's actually pretty difficult, and PR people are lazy animals.

They love to sit around and send emails and write documents. They're about as functional as Sundar Pichai as they're just meeting goers. If you're a PR person, I've been saying that you need to change your ass for years, except now I have a microphone. I hope you're upset. Long story short. Get wrecked. Get absolutely wrecked, bodied, etc. You can talk about me on your podcast if anyone would listen. But the point I'm making is PR is necessary.

But it's also killing itself. And the biggest clients are becoming so weird about it that they'll have PR, but they're like, why is the media not saying everything we want them to say? And it's because the media doesn't just copy-paste things. They may write down exactly what you say with the bigger companies, but...

Journalists have brains and will hear stuff now and go, "Wait, what the fuck does that mean?" And even with OpenAI, they're finally learning it. It's just that when that happens, you're gonna need the media relations people, except the PR industry. Go on Google, "Media relations is dead." They've been killing them for 15 years. It's hilarious. It's like the one fun job in this industry.

It's extremely easy to do bad PR and extremely hard to do good PR. Yeah. There are times when I get an email offering me an interview. And one time I just want to take it just to say – so afterwards, the person says, well, what's his audience? He doesn't have any audience. The thing is – He's got a blog. A 23-year-old who works 17-hour days is going to get fired because of that. I know that. I won't do it. They're going to lose their sublease on an eight-person, one-bedroom. Oh, God.

I probably got 10 weird PR pitches that are completely unrelated to me while we've been sitting here. You still get them? I still get them. All the time. And I love the PR of people who pitch me. And I block people.

I do too. And this is the weird thing as well. There's like this whole PR industry just spams people that I've been making fun of for like my entire career and getting in zero trouble because they're all cowards. And it's just – it's frustrating because we're just describing industries run by people who don't understand the process. Right.

How do you run a good news outlet? I don't know. Create good news and make sure that people make it. Make sure it has value in people's lives. Yeah. And it's this drain of personality from everything. The information is fairly straightforward, but you have some specifics. You have some, who is it that emails me every day? Pisses me off. Martin Pierce. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's the thing.

That's the thing. It's a newsletter and he loves to be a contrarian. That's kind of his job to piss you off. I am actually saying this. I get pissed off with it regularly. I read it every time. Jeff gets pissed off at it regularly. I get mad at it once. And Martin loves it. But that's the thing. At the very least, he fucking stands for something. Why would people go? I don't know. Why would people go to influencers who don't necessarily run their facts very well or at all? And the answer is because they care.

I got a question for you. Sure. You saw Lisa Rubin, not Lisa Rubin, Jen Rubin. It's also my show. I'm kidding. Jennifer Rubin. Jennifer Rubin left the Washington Post, right? And she started a new Substack newsletter. The contrarian. The contrarian. Oh, God. What is it about Substack? How does it – see, now it's tech still. Yeah. Is that we all know that tech is – that Substack has its own Nazi problems. Yes.

And why does everybody still go there? I actually think it's the thing we've been talking about. That's just some legacy media shit. They're like, why do people come to the newspaper? Only for Jennifer Rubin and a series of bland right-wing people that have found a way to pretend they're liberals.

And they're like, well, why do people read the paper? For me! They read it. And the thing they hate about the media right now is it's not contrarian enough. Like, it's just this is exactly the kind of shit that a legacy media institution would do. It's what happened in 2021 when The Atlantic had, like, eight different newsletters and then didn't treat them any differently. Hot take factory. But no, God, it's The Atlantic. It's lukewarm take factory. Crybaby shit.

And it's... Or just like anti-Palestine shit, which is disgusting. Anyway, we'll get to that on the other show where everyone gets mad at me. But...

The point is, it's just the same fucking wheel turning. It's people going, shit, what do people do? What a big now? What a big newsletter. They send those. What if we all got together and combined our audiences of people that barely read us and do not look at the facts or really care, but they like sharing it with their other vacuous friends except Make It DC?

It's not going to work very well. Who are tired of subscription upon subscription upon subscription. They've got like George Conway in there. Yeah. They have George Conway. I didn't even know. I didn't even know. You guessed. I just guessed. Look at the like. At worst, they have Andy Borowitz.

Fucking hell. I was not pro-censorship before this show, but now I am actually really pro. I don't put any links to anything if it keeps Borowitz out of my feed. Oh my God. That was the perfect reaction. Oh my God. I hate Andy Borowitz. But it's Paris. I'm actually like really glad you were here specifically representing the information though having your own opinions just being clear for legal disclaimer because you kind of I have my issues with how the information does business and

and some internal ones that I will not read. But it still works. It works, and the journalism is, like, very, very good. Anissa Gadizzi and another person, I can't remember the name of, I'll link to it in the episode notes, they had this incredible story about NVIDIA's, like, has people cancelling orders. And Anissa is super young. Yeah. Like, in her 20s, and she's just getting this shit all the time. She's had so much of it. The fact that you have this happening is...

proof that this model works and that... I mean, it's proof that journalism can still exist. And it sells. Yeah. And it sells and it matters. And the real people doing it matter. And it's frustrating because I don't think anyone is learning this lesson very well. I mean, a lot of outlets are now trying to pivot to a more subscription heavy model. The Atlantic is one of them. The Verge. The Verge. I mean, everyone... I wouldn't possibly want to miss Alex Heath.

Fucking, I'm such a bitch. But The Verge is actually an example, I think, of doing it wrong. Because The Verge is very much like, we're now going to paywall stuff you weren't paying for. And it's like, okay, well, now the reader will be pissed off. And you have great people, like Kylie Robeson, one of the best journalists in the field. Incredible. And Miyasato as well. Two incredible journalists.

Paywalling them hurts them far more than I think they realize. How about give them more money and then let them write private stuff, put the private stuff in the private, make it worthwhile, at least try. But no, it's we're going to paywall what, Tom Warren, Alex Heath? Make it so that at least readers feel like if they're paying, they're getting access to something

new rather than something that they yeah it's a you are paying to access something rather than being restricted and is that money going into more journalism i mean i'd assume it's going into making so that vox media doesn't collapse um in and of itself it's the last resort business model and the thing is you can make it a deal with the customer you could be like what if we gave you more and now it's like what if we gave you less

And you put out reporters who have built relationships with readers in a free environment and then say, no.

It's gone. And you'll get cited less. I cite paywall stuff all the time. But like you will be cited less because people on social media will be like, oh, another paywall. Oh, gift link for the – no, pig – no, not everyone can – Pay pig. Pay pig model. It's just frustrating because it could actually be better. But I think the actual answer is everything needs to be smaller.

Yeah, and I mean it's just like how do we get to that without a lot of ruin and destruction? I don't really think we can. Defector, 404, Aftermath, the answer is that and actually – And those came out of ruin and destruction. In the case of Defector and 404 specifically, their sites were shut down. They were laid off and from the ashes rose a worker-supported co-op. So Jeff, final question to wrap us up.

Do you think that there could be a future for journalism where it's kind of a return to the – I don't mean literally 4,000 readers. But a return to that kind of old thing where it's just – it is more distributed. I hope so. I want to see media at a human scale.

I've spent the last 10 years of my career, I kind of accidentally, chronicling what I think is the end of the long century of mass media. Okay. What does that mean? Well, first, it's a confession because I devoted my career to mass media. Right. I worked for big publications and I wrote about television and I recognize now the bankruptcy of that.

And so I think that we've got to return to, as I say, media at human scale. And it's going to be a messy transition. It already is. It already is. And I don't have the answers to every business model of how to get there. The information is one. There are a few others out there. And I think that we're going to grow new sprouts out of the ashes. For a long time, especially working in a journalism school, I had to be – I think – I presumed I had to be nice to the likes of the New York Times. Right. Fuck them.

I mean, and let's be clear. There is still good reporting in The New York Times. I did a Good Times hashtag about vaccinations only yesterday. The institution, though.

But the – well, the culture right now is trying to piss off the people – the last people who are loyal to them. And who would that be just to be clear? Liberals. OK. Liberals. Jay Rosen in 2018 wrote that the New York Times primary support now has shifted from advertising to subscription. This is going to change the relationship of the Times newsroom to its public.

And he wasn't saying how, but now I think the way it is is that I think the Times is saying, see, we pissed you off. You don't own us. Even though we depend upon you for money, you don't own us. You go Yankee style. Yeah, yeah. If Steinbrenner were the publisher of the New York Times, might as well be. So I'm at the point now of giving up on big old media. The newspaper chains are almost all run by hedge funds. Broadcast is geriatric.

Magazines are dying. I wrote a book about that too. The major national media is getting it from all sides. Costco was going to stop selling books.

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

So, Paris, where can people find you? You can find me on Twitter, if you're still using that site, at Paris Martineau, or better, on Blue Sky, at Paris.nyc. I'm also published at The Information regularly. It's theinformation.com. Had the story about sniffies? Yes. I'll link it in the notes.

Mr. Jarvis. Professor. No. Jeff. Jeff. Where can people find you? I'm at Jeff Jarvis everywhere, too many places. And then at JeffJarvis.com, you can buy my books.

Please buy the books. I've been so, this has been so much fun. And like the first real radio better offline, it's been so much fun. Thank you both for being here. Thank you to our producer. Of course, Daniel Goodman, you've been listening to better offline. I'm your chief pig, Mr. Zitron. You'll know where to find me. You're already listening to my words. I just want to repeat to everyone who sat through the CES show. Thank you again. We will do it next year. And we're already planning to add a new guest, a standup comic. No,

that I'm not going to name yet, but she's going to be absolutely incredible. Thank you again for listening, everyone. You know where to find me, and you're going to hear a very old message after this that some of you are going to be very unfair about. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.whereisyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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