Watching the Watchmen with Jason Koebler
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media. Your host this.

Today, i'm joined by one of the single best people in the tech media, Jason cabra of four o four media regularly requested by listeners. But I punish you to Jason and thank you so much for joining me makes having me ow.

I did not know that inflates my ego already .

always this I experience ed ego death around episode seven so I feel nothing anymore. But we were just talking before this about facebook effectively Marks up a bug, effectively admitting that a slope was good for the platform. I think it's good for you to just walk me through.

That story is a four four media story. Walk me through. This is a good scene set up.

Yeah so as matter does all the time, I still hate calling the meta. But yeah, at this point I do because they have so much fuck and stuff going around that IT.

I want to be clear when i'm talking about facebook and i'm talking about the other stuff, uh, had its uh third quarter investor call on wednesday and you know people ask questions of facebook executives and I feel like it's a real mask off moment where they sort of have to say like here are our plans here's what think is working what's not and very often it's like full of pie the sky nonsense um but in this case it's like mark zuker said straight up that the A I slop and spam that is taken over facebook but also instagram ment increasingly threads is the strategy like that is part of the long term goal of the company. Um he talked about adding like a separate A I generated feed which when facebook has added separate separate fees they call for that. They always end up just like integrating .

in yeah being the dominant dominant feed. Like you can select a chon logical feed on threats. If you solve three riddles, click seven buttons .

yeah x IT every three seconds.

Yes yes. So got a nice thank you. Before end, I I get people saying i'm a cinch a lot, but then I read stuff like this. And I just don't understand how people aren't more cynical because IT feels like this stuff feels actively to stop in that facebook is no longer the world's biggest social network, but just the world shit is television channel.

Yeah, I think that we get blamed for being like, do mors yeah, always have been. Like i've been a journalist for twelve, thirteen years at this point. And I used to be back at motherboard over advice and now a four, four media.

And sometimes I would have to like, look up and just be like, wow, the last ten stories ever have been incredibly depressing. They've been like really like horrible harms from technology. They've been, you know I don't even think they're negative.

I think they're realistic and accurate of yeah what are future is. But you know, our future sucks very often and our present often is bad too. And I think that that is at the busy because of centralized power in tech and over the internet.

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

And what kind of things you're excited about, let's baLance this.

Um i'm very excited with like grassroots type um new technology, like open source technologies. Um I think that people are like gesture at like the fete vers and like this sort of decentralized twitter alternatives, if you will. And I think that that's been promised for quite some time. yes. And I think that is taking a really long time to sort of come together.

But I do think that, that is something that we should be like working toward as a society where instead of having your audience, if you are a publisher like we are a having IT all tied up in, you know, the number of twitter followers you have or the number of like google ads you can sell like you kind of own your audience. And by that I mean you own the list of people that you can kind of like transport that around the internet. I think that's really important.

I think that uh for a while I was very excited about community internet um like non profits where cities and towns were building their own fibre lines and still are and sort of doing like getting really fast internet to the home sort of divorce from conchas and uh your spectrum of the world so on and so forth. And there's like a lot of kind of like individual people building stuff that are very cool, like proofs of concept. And the the big problem is always like scaling that up or getting people to stop using facebook or twitter, whatever.

A amazon is a big one. It's like to stop using amazon, stop using prime. It's very hard to get people to change their behaviors. And yet I feel in some ways like we're going to talk about india media, but I think that the journalism industry, despite the sort of dia disastrous situation has been going on the last few years, I think it's in a Better spot now than I was two years ago.

I kind of agree in the sense that I think I think there are a places where I got was in the sense, and this is my own open you don't have to agree with because this can not going to be a fun one to agree with. I think things like platformer have actually been detrimental to the deck industry. I think casey newton has dressed up platformer as a kind of independent out there.

We're nothing where it's all just like h we're independent. We we're not bought off by big corporations. Then writes two fucking fan and fiction pieces about anthropic. I think that is damaging. I did I think it's actually just spreading the problem. But even when you look at legacy media, the verge, which I have, I have tons of criticism for neil patel, the virgin has actually done some really incredible indepth journalists and they had that wonderful peace about, uh, underground cables yeah thousand and peace .

yeah and IT feels .

like even at the journal they have some of the best investigative report is now my kyaks on open a eye, which is terrifying for them. I think that was seeing more a lot more investigative stuff than we ever have before. I wish that happened a few years ago, but how i'll take IT .

now yeah I mean, I think that you know you can name a half dozen uh sort of like news letter writers and independent athletes that are doing really amazing work. And there's always been some of that. But I think that what we're seeing now is like ten years ago when I got into IT, they were like five big tech websites and they were all bad, in my opinion, like they were all doing the sort of like, uh, there's a new feature on the iphone.

Here's the new emotion es that dropped and I was just like tones and tones and tons of that dump IT on facebook. You would hope IT went viral and you would have people disrupting like four, five stories a day and then you had a bunch of sort of like I say this as a description, not as like a like you had like your and gadgets, your voices, your buz feds, the sort of like middle tear of digital website, where they're not the new york times, they're not like this gigantic, gigantic media IT. They sort like middle sized things.

And all of them have done great work, but they were all kind of doing like the same thing more or less. And I think that like the VC business model where word is gonna chase traffic hand, uh, ad revenue has failed terribly. It's not not working. And I think it's going to be very hard to be in the middle where you are like a here are website with the staff of like fifty. I think that it's something where you can have independent subscriber funded publications that are doing increasingly good work because the infrastructure needed around journalism is not so much anymore. And then you're going to have you're like new york times is in your washington post that and you're like, I don't know seen that or something like just gigantic websites that are going to be like, you know, meta, I don't like have a ton of love for the gigantic players, but I think that they serve a .

purpose of some. There is a certain purpose for the your phone. Now, does this maybe like people read that stuff for a reason?

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

Like I think that was the dark period um because the vibes were terrible at all of them because there was a hatched around the corner constantly like they were always going to mass layoffs. Some the sites were gona die at any moment because they were these like bloated organizations where executives made tons of money, the journalists made almost nothing. And like IT just wasn't if there was no sustainability there.

And I think that I know that I am ramblin at this point, but I think I think that it's possible for like a bunch of small news rooms, like hours to thrive, a bunch of independent reporters to thrive, a bunch of um you know newsletter writers to to thrive. And then you know you will have your gigantic a news organizations that are gonna ue to exist. And I think that that that leads to probably some fracturing in the media ecosystem where there's not like the same people read like this dream that jeff basis is pointing out in his recent op ed, where it's like we're going to be down the middle and we're gona be everything to everyone.

It's like that's dead. That never works, that share reality gone. No, he never worked. If IT perhaps worked when there were three television channels, like forty years before I was born. But I love to know if I worked then.

And I think part the problem is, sure, it's this sense of doing everything for all things, but it's also the the need to scale that I don't think has ever worked. Like I I love the idea of tech lunch and there are right as there are really love. But I think as an organization, technical chis, just in the situations, technical is disrupt.

While we're recording this, I think the pressure are probably the money that comes from disrupt as event as a kind of venue is so hard. I think every there's this thing where newser room start, you've got a story, someone gets a big scope, gets in traffic, gets a note and then they like, shit, what's next? Let's do a conference.

And I would do the conference. We see the conference makes way more money than the journalism. So how do we engineer one to feed the other? And the actual answer there is to say make them entirely separate. The answer, however, is never the one you'd listen to.

So you do the thing is like how do we change the content to appeal to more sponsors for the conference? And how do we make IT so that we don't pissed off people that we want to speak at the conference? I'm not even saying this is exactly what happened with disrupt, but you see with like the information eventually at all these publications where and this really is inside facebook of other podcasts is free. Um it's it's frustrated because you could have a really good tech conference if you just all agreed to not be cowards like I respect David cold away from tech ron so much because he asked a perplex o on stage defined later .

that was really good.

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

I think it's a hard thing to build a and I .

also should say this is not a condition created by intention. I don't think people like I don't give a shit about others but he said.

no, I mean, I think it's really tough and it's like I don't live in new york anymore but H I lived in new york for a long time and vice was in berkley. And then, like all of the other publications were in manhattan like more or less. And this is not illuminati vibes.

It's very much like there was a generation of journalists who are sort of all the same age, all living in the same place, and all knew each other from twitter, and they're like hanging out all the time because that's I don't know that's how people made friends. And I always felt like vice was separate, literally, because we are on the other side of the river. And so like the happy hours, you will go out like out of your way to get to that mean things like that end.

Um I just feel like there's people asking what I read, like people asking like what other tech publications to you read. And it's like I have a lot of respect for a lot of other tech publications, but I don't have time to go read all of them all day, every day because they're so much going on, right? And then i'm not like sharing other people's stories that often for that reason because I just feel like the time has passed where you can like consume all of the internet at one.

And I feel like that is when you say there's not a solidarity. It's like I have a lot of respect for other tech journalists and I I like a lot of their work, but I will sometimes go weeks where i'm like I actually feel like I haven't read the internet because I ve been headed down in my own stuff and then you look up and it's like, oh, cool, like ed did a really great piece like brian merchant did a really great piece. They were like ten grade articles in the verge and then it's like I should I like go tweet their work now two months after they published IT. Like um so I don't know I am just speaking for my own perspective on that, but I feel like it's very hard to have like cross publication. Good not not in good wives, but like IT is hard, is just hard to like keep up with everything .

I feel yeah and I think like one happened a week or two ago. And this is not a criticism of anyone specifically, but samut man, a rip. He claimed something tolly roberson of the verge row, about the next model coming from OpenAI.

And he said, fake news. And he got dog pod for her and see a single fuck in journalist and a mentions. Now this is not about you, just not talking about you.

I didn't see a single one though, and that really turned my stack. I went after a little buster fuckyou said, come o okay, right, right. Not what I fuck in one about you, but it's it's frustrating. But now you said IT IT does feel like almost the remote work effect, but also the detritus of the new york waiting because I remember in like the early twenty tens how click y IT was yeah and the out how you got I not I like not saying other than in perhaps that way but you were kind of in the in group of the outgames p and you kind of still see IT with an internet culture reporting .

yeah like .

new york new york guys that talk to the same people yeah all the time and if there it's frustrating because I think four or four is proving this there's so much cool shit you can do in tech journalism, especially when you talk to more varied people than just there's six people in front of you yeah I mean.

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

yeah. I also think that that's something that leads to the failure of internet culture reporting because if you I actually don't think that what there's been articles about this too. I don't think the main character is actually a social media. I think IT wasn't IT is the thing that happened. But I don't think IT tells us anything about internet culture.

I think a lot of internet culture, I I think tells something about how internet publications are in because there was like a while, uh, where Donald trump's twitter was being called like the assignment editor for the front page of the new york times.

What what and I mean, it's true and elon mosque was the same way and to sum extent is it's like, oh, elon must tweet that is gona print humans on mars and then there be like eighty five articles about IT um and I think that that was a function of like publications, not all publications, not all journalists and like certainly not all editors. But there is like a when you're getting into this industry, there is a period of time where you are asked or were for a long time two blog venues, just like hit five stories a day, whatever IT is. And like the things that you saw going viral on twitter, that was something that you could go and right about. And you would, you know, either win a google or read IT lottery or a twittered lottery, and you would get a lot of traffic. And so almost every republican like had by people doing that .

like an kind of an ultra Normalization.

Yeah yeah.

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IT sucks because it's I think four or four has done. You're just gonna law issue with praise here. Four or four had my favourite tech story of last year by far and IT was about the indian guys who are just scamming facebook and IT humanized that as well because I think that there is also a degree of anna hob a towards indian guys online.

They definitely, is that like? And IT isn't help by the fact that a lot of indian guys ran insane mindset instagram accounts. But nevertheless, I love the way you humanize that, because IT was like, here is the actual way that this is happening.

This is internet culture. International cultures is being changed by the fact that facebook is incentivising matching the slot like playing slop tech rice. Yes, you kind of matched the bullshit to the other bullshit to the algorithm puts IT up.

And I feel it's also it's also the thing that I really liked about that story was that the like indian tech bro hostel guys were talking among themselves about what they perceived us internet culture to be, which was like, very interesting, like they were sort of talking to each other about like, h you know what? Like americans and british people fucking love their dogs. They love pets and then they were talking about like other things and it's like, yes, like this is a stereos type. But I was interesting to see um what they thought american internet culture was and then how they try to reverse that, engineer that into viral content.

And I think the problem as well is that internet culture is just culture now yeah and also internet culture is the nature of the algorithm. Sparking with us every day is not really anything is what the alert you so you wrote that wonderful peace about maxara, about small scope moment.

I went back to one of my facebook pieces I row, and IT was a thing I worried about, which is, what is viral? I don't mean, does viral exist? I mean, what is actually famous? And the answer is, we, as people no longer decide, in my opinion.

And I think that, that is also what IT goes back to the take media IT goes back to everything we're talking about because it's what's the biggest news of the day or whatever. We think we will get a bunch of traffic, what gets a bunch of traffic, what everyone's are writing about, what's important? What is the thing that will get a traffic? Elon musk tweet. I actually believe that the media contributed to the rise of elon musk in a way that's actually more agreeable than Donald trump.

I think that if we did not have a tweet every time, elon muk fated for a decade, and IT was not reason, IT was a decade, putting aside even the panda to him, we would not have him at the guy we did like he would still be insane, the rich, but he would not have the power he does because he wouldn't be able to create new cycles. But on top of that, putting out even in the criticism, everyone just did the same thing. They kind of still do, but they really, really did like IT. I think that that's one way. It's definitely got Better because I used to be every site did exactly the fucking same thing .

just crazy yeah and you know why I wrote a lot of articles about elon mosques tweet and at the time I was like, this guy is really interesting like the what what he is doing is very OK and IT took a while for me to be like, oh, but he's like, this is like very bad, very bad situation. But I remember like Ashley van, who's a reporter at bloomberg, wrote the first biography, elon mosque and IT came out like the elon us was a fucking .

assets .

and very bad in that book. But he was not. He was seen as like someone who cared a lot about climate change and was like, like, so I got early copy of that book, and I read IT. And I was like, well, there's like lots of crazy details on here. There was like one section where I think IT .

was like twenty fifteen.

I like I was I was pretty p definitely IT might have even been earlier than that, like twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, something like that. And I had actually events on motherboards podcast, which I I was like hosting at the time. And we're like, well is like a super interesting guy.

He's like in charge of tesla and space acts like that nuts. Um and I remember I wrote a specific article where he and I believe his name is crag venter who is like A D N A good he he is like A D N A sequencing guy like from the early we're going to sequence to human genome days. And there's this anecdote in the book where elon musan craig ventner had this crazy idea to print humans on mars, like sending a large three deport.

joking. I literally was not like that's a story that I wrote. And I actually don't think that the that particular article was bad.

But I always like sticks out in my mind because I talk to like actual scientists being like, is this what is what are they even talking about here? Because there was a big period in, like the early twenty tens were three printing like pig organs to transplant them into humans. Was like a huge thing, like with millions of story.

a solid decade before Better offline existed. That was like, I don't know if anyone listening remembers this, where three d printing was everywhere. And there was just the assumption, kind like A I, that we would just no longer build things.

We would print them using a machine that zon print in your house and it's gna print like hamburgers and also televisions like really insane .

yeah ah but anyway is like I run a .

bunch of stories about that about elon mosque saying he was gona do crazy stuff because like every once in a while he would do something kind of interesting like uh you know put IT itself not even like an autopilot into cars without a being tested properly and like kill a bunch of people in be like world that's not um but trying to figure out my head like when do we stop enabling this? Like when do we stop letting elon drive what we are covering as a publication? I think that something that like probably every journalist has had to think about at some point, and that something that people did with facebook, they did IT with apple, they did with every. Big company when they have me.

I mean this nicely, man, did they have they? They still write about every facebook thing.

I'm not a sorry. They have not stopped, but a lot of the ones that did I have died. And then there's a lot I would say there's a lot more like variety.

If you look, I would absolutely give that. And I also want to be clear, though i'm critical here. I think there are really fundamental logistical reasons this is the case. So first of all, there's no mentorship at all in journalism or in the workplace in general.

But I think that there are so many people, Young people, who start in this industry and just go straight into IT and no one educates them and they don't educate themselves on how any other shit works because it's quite difficult. I mean, i'm not perfect, but I have to pick up should constantly, both from A P, R job and for this and learn stuff without getting IT wrong, asking people you yourself while doing your research. I imagine you bullshit teter and stuff.

It's time consuming and and at the same time, the being told, all right, three blocks SHE ahead. I want to see three blogs today. I need to know ChatGPT as search now. I need you to write eight hundred words about why this is going to change everything. And so when you get to the point when I think you're meant to say, should I think critically about this win.

right? Or when are you onna like learn the intricacies of how this technology even works. And when you can learn, then you can use company press releases or you sort of uh like use the short hands words like well, this VC said that this is how it's going to work and like I don't even know how to find someone who is an academic who can like criticize this in A A coherent way um of which like millions, millions of them but i'm just saying if you are a new reporter you might .

not know how to do that I have I mean you ask yes seriously .

don't like how how do you find out right so that this is um I mean to try to say this in at least of a bragging way as possible. But that was one of the my favourite things about being the editor of motherboard is we were able to bring in people who were new to the industry and then and who had like deep interest in specific things and kind of teach them how to do reporting and how to think about the technology.

And to be very clear, it's like every single person who came through there or that i've ever work with has done the work. But I think something like very cool is like Edward way. So who is amazing? Like amazing, amazing rider.

He is joining us, by the way, for the Better of line C E S coverage.

Oh.

that's main.

David roth, yeah it's like he can the mother board and he had, uh, he had a few huge knowledge about tech, labor and tech. And he had written a thesis about uber and how uber was immiseration its drivers but he did IT for like his college this is um but he didn't really know how to report when he came to motherboard but because he was so that it's like, did you know everything about uber just work just right about uber for a little while. I use your expertise like get to know IT and it's like he did IT all of IT on his own in terms of becoming the amazing reporter and writer that he is today. But I think that like I am proud that we were able to give him the space to do that and sort of like the guidance of here's how you like, here's how you go fuck and hard on uber without like libelling a million people and like here's how you stay out of lawsuits and and things like that, which doesn't mean pulling punches, that means making sure your stuff is like very button up and legally defensible and so on and so forth. And I think that not just with that word, but like many of the best uh reporters on the internet these days are like I i've worked with them in some way, shape or form and that's something that they've always had in common is having a deep interest in a specific topic or beat and like really specializing in that versus trying to uh write everything about every possible topic that there is because when that happens, that's how you get like these surface level articles that are all the same.

I think it's I agree fully and I think just pondering this is you speak there is another level that I found the show, which is to do this job right, you also have to be like a business and financial giant like ed em guys. So genes, one of the most gifted readers of our work with them. So forking, happy city.

Because he is very good on social economics, he is able to look at something and go this will affect real people like this. That is not just the skill, like an actual talent that can be Foster. But it's tough because you have to start looking at the world in just this completely different way. I know a lot of listeners, and i'm just as critical of the media as well, have this thing, what they look and like, how could journalists, right? Like that's how could how could they just up the slop? It's because we what twenty years into tech journalists being educated to believe these guys and we ve finally breaking that down and saying, oh, could he on muscly, good sample and lie day and I think that that is weird because in almost every other, every other journalist field, you kind of built like that.

Yeah, I I feel like I woke up one day and I was like, i'm like old now but it's like everyday made yeah I mean, I and I think that because I was always kind of like I always looked at myself like i'm kind of new to journalism like i'm just feeling things out like i'm asking people what experts should I talk to? How should do this boba blaw.

And I would say .

around the three d printing bubble that we were just talking about is going to realize I like, oh way, these like hype cycles where every VC, every company, everyone does the exact same thing and says it's gonna the future of everything and there's like tons of money thrown into IT. IT doesn't always come true like IT. Yeah like.

And so like, you know there was like V, R, and then there was three printing, and then there was cyp doll, and then there is the metaverse, and this VR again, and V, R again, and ba ba ba. And like, at some point I was like, oh, I ve have been doing this long enough to now understand this cycle where the cool new thing is not going to change everything. It's gonna .

more even happen or .

even happen. And it's it's gonna a be full of fucking in grifters. All of them are full of grifters. And it's like understandable why that is because many, many people made a lot of money by rushing into a technology, helping IT up selling their company or or whatever and know living in a mention for the rest of their lives. Um but I think like as a journalist was like, oh, once I understood that that was the cycle that that is a that was really helpful for my own work I guess is what i'm saying.

I think for me IT was kind of clipped though, but I think that was remote work. I think remote work was the thing that fully joke for me because I if you are, I do not turn down by geo. In twenty fifteen there was like, hey, eat all mosquito line.

IT was actually kind of president. He was like, look, he said this about the model. Lex didn't happen, isn't happening to play different, said this about auto.

Pola hasn't happened. And even then I wrote like a positive piece about auto politic. What's kind of cool? Like, that's the thing.

If they didn't overpromise, they could point of things to be black shit. This is really cool. But I think IT was remote work because you just got to see this schism between reality and journalism.

But for really, IT was cypher. IT was the twenty twenty one cypher. Cris were just, people were lying. IT wasn't even like they were half true.

They were just straight up like we will do this and what they were saying was not possible, like not even. And then they never did IT. And then the companies were just dumping money, and all these people were getting rich for nothing.

And I watched this, quite a lot of genes just kind of rode to up because they were like, well, money good. Yeah, money, money, money, large. Money good. Money real.

I think also crypto, I have edited many stories about cyp tou and I ve written a handful of them and it's fuck and complicated. It's like if you want and because it's because it's so complicated, it's a space for tones of grifters.

And I guess what I mean by that is like when you start talking about things like smart contracts and like dogs and like blab aba, all that stuff, it's a really hard thing to parachute into and understand the lingo and like what people are talking about at all. And then you go try to write article about IT because your editor says this company made three billion dollars in the last two days. Like what's going on here? Go right about IT.

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

But even then, the thing that got me the typically completely right I was writing about at the time and writing about IT was occasionally exhAusting thing, because you'd spend the first court of the occuring line. Okay, this means this. This means that.

This also means this. Okay, now you've learned all of this bull. sure. I can get to the thing I want na write about, right? I think that the other thing is, is IT was when I realized so many journalists assumed that all of these people had good intentions.

That was when I, that was what cranked IT for me was the Kevin roose slate as guide, descript though, or the article bat helium and all of these things. That was just like all they said they got this partners. Did you fucking check? No, no.

Why would I? They wouldn't lie to the new york tight? Yes, they were. They did. They literally lied.

They literally lied.

and they all lied all the time. And they're still kind of doing in. And I think that I definitely had the experience of waking up and feeling old as well.

Have been doing p opens since two thousand. I've been doing p oscans two thousand eight phone twenty twelve. And thus I have been the hype man. I still lam some extent. But even then, in like mid twenty tens with the indie gogo, go cries listeners. If you don't remember this time, there was a time when I D go go and kick started, start out and he was like every single company that on there got press, regardless of whether that was real or not.

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

like made IT was just completely fucking broken. But I remember at that time also saying to new, new business things like, how are you making money? And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We are. And that's never what you don't want to hear someone being like, sure little bit. And you like, are you profitability? No, you GTA become profitable.

But I remember even having clients that would, I would go to journalists, I tightens journalist even. And i'd be like, yeah, they are profitable. And they like, who cares? Like, just not necessarily is good.

but they be like.

whatever you, whatever everyone's scaling. And then over time, thankful. Ly, i've got plans that are mostly profitable because suddenly just less like how if a company makes more, more money than IT spends, that's a good thing. And if IT loses money, well, that's a bad thing unless it's open an eye.

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And I think that that's the other thing that's frustrated me as well. It's like and maybe you can actually give me an idea of this seventy thoughts, but why do I keep fucking in falling for you so many times? It's like three hype cycle straighten this A I one is insane.

Yeah that's the so we we painting with a very broad brush. You've added some specifics. I definitely painting with a broad brush. And i'm just like, oh yeah, like the industry. No, it's fine. I'm just saying that I think with A I journalists, the ones that I read are like more skeptical than any technology that we've seen in a long time. However, the question is how many people are they like actually reaching and what what is that reach? And then you sort of have like some of these Kevin rose articles that we have talked about, the new york times, where it's like I I was reduced by an A I or like whatever .

to leave yeah things like this.

It's like those are really, really harmful. Yes, articles and they go out too, like a lot of people. And I think that it's just like it's really tough because you I think on baLance, journalists have been like really tough on AI companies. The ones that I read and the ones the ones that I like where i'm like a like brain merchant, you're really good on this topic and zitkalasa are really good on this topic. I Robinson and you're really good on this topic, so on and so forth and then but then I started thinking, oh, but like the new york times often isn't very good on this topic like the wall sty journal often very good on this topic. And these are the sort of like mass market publications that whose audience sized us.

Um I have to wonder if there isn't some degree of like them wanting to seem positive because they have a broad audience. I just don't know why yeah like they want to be excited about the .

tech yeah I think that I have not worked a big publication like that, but I know I know a lot of people who have and I like seen free, like people I know freeLance for them and things like that. And I think that a lot of these publications have many, many, many levels of like bureaucracy and legal and like so on and so forth. And I feel like a lot of articles get uh focus group to death like I don't I don't know um what i'm linking on the term, but it's where there's like eighty people are looking anything. And then by the time IT comes out, it's like, oh, this is like a quote and quote down the middle yeah you're just giving publicity to whatever and it's like, okay, this is not actually .

like I I have to wonder if it's also a solidarity issue again because swisher, for example, the reason find us to load some is that he pretends to be what she's actually should have been which is if everyone is like patel to understand who I love in general caris wisher, who I find the text case you, and who I find almost as the testable.

The problem isn't that they're not getting these interviews, is that when they have the person in front of them, they don't ask them the questions they get. They ask them, do you do you train with youtube data? And they go and and it's like, okay, that's an answers for me.

verses. And the british media has a literary of problems, but one of the things they do very well as harassed powful. And I think that there could just be the most subtle change in the world when you get sam lman in front of him.

Don't accept whatever answer he gives you immediately. Don't be like what seems reasonable to me that you have no answer for revenue or how this stuff will become agi. I'm just going to keep going.

But it's also if everyone started doing that, they would have to start answering that simple that if the only option they had was to get like devin cold. And I given credit devin cold way at technical ch disrupt, actually fucking on skin. The question to arvin, the C E.

O of perplexity about plagiarism could have pushed to whatever can we can quote back that later but nevertheless, the fact the question is getting asked is so phenomenal and devil fucking speak to him, if everyone did that, these problems would have to run if everyone just fucking and IT doesn't even need to be rude. You don't have to be a decade. You don't have to be as I would be very rude.

Well, OK, I actually, I take that back. I will get one of these people, and you'll be shocked by how not rude I am because that actually doesn't get results. Awesome .

questions, right? Does that mean I I so I don't like listen to every episode of new life potos podcast, but I think this is something that he started do a lot Better um he like talk to the sea of to IT the other day and was like, uh you know badging him on into its lobbying about like why why we still fucking after use turbo tacks more or last years theyve spent millions and millions and millions of dollars .

doing and then pushed him .

on lobbying as well and I think that I mean, I thought that that was a good example. I think that and .

that with sundar pushy.

with thunder, he did. He one was nice moment. T N L, to you, my phone, ask me compound .

questions to hold way down. Now i'm not going. Yeah i'm not gona i'm gona pull that back a bit though the intuited thing was in the exact example of what everyone needs to do.

He wasn't rude at all. He just kept asking the fucking question. And that's why IT rocked. That's why IT was good. Well.

so what I was going to say is I I agree with you one hundred percent. I think that um what has happened is you have fucking like mark sucker were going on joe rogan and going lex freedmen and going on like all these other podcast and pretending like there like the media is a problem. And I agree with what you're saying. I also think that tech P R has gotten a lot of smarter in the last few years in like keeping their executives away from anyone who ask them hard questions. Yeah and that's very, very calculated.

And I also, I also think that I think you're completely right. I don know if I never say that P R people get smart, but based on any of them, but I will say I think that they have just learned the lessons from celebrity pr, because the tech media has allowed these people to be treated like celebrities like that is, I think, and i'm very critical of the light patel, but the really the into IT one was great because he treated him like a business man. He treated some up to shine like a celebrity.

And I think that the problem is, and this is me, like, genuine empathy. For a while they were, for a while we'd laugh about the twenty fifteen, the goga era. But IT was fun.

Things were happening. These people, elon mask wasn't just an inventor racist. He wasn't posed like talking about the fourteen words he loved the most.

He wasn't. He wasn't just retweet active noses. He was just like the posting my lunch rocket goban cargo fast never was like cool, even I was.

And I can understand why everyone kind of oriented themselves in that way. But these people on celebrities, they're fucking business people. Yeah.

that was something about so i've seen you on mosque speaker a couple times. The ball I was reporting like I went to the give of factory's opening and and sort of covered that a when they started making batteries in the vata and and I thought I did a good piece actually this is not many years ago but I wrote, I think the articles called like the cultivation and I was around his like very cultish fans who are just fucking obsessed with him even then uh, and he's horn ous public speaker.

He's really he's not gifted.

He's not gifted. He's very awkward up there and for a while that was actually quite um a learning is the wrong word to me but I was like, wow, this guy must be really smart because he so bad at talking that he he must just and yet he's still like the C E. O of all these companies in a billion aire in blab a blow and I was like, but he can't string two sentences together really on stage so he just must be like engineering behind the scenes all the time, like building rockets himself and I think that we really did a very bad job uh, not just with the line but with, uh like Steve jobs and mark OK organ all these people treating them as genius who did all of this stuff themselves from a garage and not as business men who had thousands of people working for them like building on the back.

So any of us would have combined yeah and .

building on the backs of like a million other inventions by a million other people. And it's like, fine. Like you built the smart phone.

Like, cool, I use a smart phone all the time. That's very cool. But like Steve jobs is not the inventor of the smart phone or the iphone. IT was like thousands of people at apple leveraging like thousands of years of and not thousands of years, many years yeah dozens of years of like wifi chips and touch screen stuff and boba ba.

And I think that in treating Steve jobs of the singular inventer of the iphone, which is it's the subject of my friend brian merchants book the one device like all the sort of stuff that went into IT. We made these people celebrities. We made them celebrities because we're like genius inventer vibe servers, like ruthless business man did like made big company by taking government subsidies.

And i've written about this quite a lot. It's a little easier to swallow that way when you see someone who's so other worldly rich, who's so powerful, who can do all of these things in their Normal life, that we never would not about them being smart or good, just that they have that much money in power. It's much easy to look at them and say, then they must be so much different to me.

They must be. They must know something I don't. And I think what was seeing in the media now, as this kind of cynical m feeds in, is people beginning to realize that was never fucking true, wasn't the act, was a genius, is a genius. You like jobs was a great marketer .

and a good Operator. Like, I don't know him personally, but he strikes me as like, quite humble, relatively speaking, and like, still, I learn to him once .

and they think that he talked to me about a half an hour was a twenty year old browser called like I cab. I have to think IT was yet the taxi feat. It's some like low phase, like it's the only one I use.

And IT was adorable and he seems to like tech. And maybe that's the great, great thing that I don't know how many people who were popular in in the industry actually like technology. You talk to yourself about like you're excited about some things like there is still take that excites you.

I don't know if that is common within the industry as IT should be both in the executives, in some members of the media. And I I want to be wrong because I think if everyone was actually excited about A I, if like that was really driving them, then that would be cool. That would be interesting. I we would have some interesting should come out of that. I just don't even think it's about it's like i'm excited about what everyone else is exit.

Well, it's very interesting that the cyp to a cyp TOTO web three to AI pipeline of like, oh, this is going to change or weight, no metaverse going to change. The weren't wait, no A I going to change the world. And it's like OK whole like year into the thing that's going to make a lot of money regardless. Yeah, I don't it's funny to say that i've not that in attack and at motherboard, we were a website of people who work super skeptical attack and didn't.

which I think is fine.

by the way, I know, I know. I'm just saying that I am not i'm not really excited about tech. I think i'm excited about what some people are doing with technology and very interesting community, I guess, um which diving into those communities of people who are excited about things like I I recently wrote about the people who are taking the red box DVD key of stones from wall Greens and i'm like sitting in their discord watching them figure out how this thing works and like flashing um software to IT and stuff.

And it's like that is very exciting to me, not because it's going to change the world, but because I like seeing their excitement about learning how this like absolute device works. And I I don't want to be a part of that community myself because Frankly, I just like, I don't know. I feel like i'm a busy guy.

I don't I don't like and I I very like a short attention span for hobby. I would say like I don't want to reverse engineer key OK, but I I want to watch you do IT from a far because you are finding out lots of like weird stuff about IT. And I like writing about that sort of thing.

And there's many, many, many like micro communities around the internet still that are very exciting to me because they are. So they found a place on the internet or using technology that is not so fucked up in terrible all the time. And I like looking at that. That's what makes me optimistic.

And I still think that that is I I still think that, that is a perfectly valid thing to be excited about. And that is still being excited about tech. Some of my favorite ite moments in tech have been CIA and the original homebrew community and the iphone.

The home blue community around the playstation portable was fucking cool. I don't even mean the piracy, which may may not have been cool, I wouldn't know. And even then, going back to like two thousand and six out the home brew community with the x box, the shit, the people that you could like, just rip, came games.

He went to the x box and they would run faster, play def jam, the fighting game. There are still cool shit like that happening. And I feel like that does give me hope as well that people are still doing this shit. Like why you ripping up a red box think because I can yeah yeah.

I've read a lot about like rights to repair and people, you know trying to fix their iphones and so on and so forth. And the thing that's been really interesting about following that world is that the the like guy at the mall who puts the the iphone screen on when you break IT, he knows more about how that fucking and iphone works. Then probably most people who work at at all.

And I find that to be really interesting. There's been like a couple massive apple scandals that have broken because these like repair people who are just looking at a bunch of broken iphones have realized there was like an engineering flaw that I will mess something up on. And it's like, that's cool.

Like this is just some due to works at the mall in the key. And he has just like discovered a flaw in the iphone that is going to in a just world to cost apple billions of dollars. In the real world that we live in, everyone gets like a fifty dollar refund. Maybe lucky, yeah, very lucky to be like our class action loss, you where you get, well, dollars in fourteen years. But I like that kinds thing too.

So as we wrapped this up, and this could be the final question, what is next for I? For what are you actually? Are you going to scale IT much further? Are you gonna a conference? Like, is that in the cards? Or you're .

going to keep IT small? We're going to do conferences. We are going to do what want to pay the video? Yeah no, vero. Ah so four four media has been around for a little over year. It's me a menu myburgh sam cole and elphege x um I personally wanted to do IT because I spent a lot of time editing the last few years of my life and I really wanted to get back to writing and i've really enjoyed doing my own reporting and writing again like it's been amazing for my brain. I feel um I would like the company to get bigger, like I think that we probably will hire people at some point.

But I think that the tRicky thing for me is if we do that, will we have time to continue doing our own work? Like how how will that work? And so that is um you know that soft that we talk about sort of like behind the scenes, like right now we are the four of us doing everything in terms of just like we're doing our socials, we're doing the business stuff.

We were talking to our lawyers and i'm printing merch like mAiling in myself and I really like that hands on a spect to IT. But I think i'm trying to think like if we grow, will that give us more time to do the work? Or will you give us less time to do the work? Because we are then sort of like managing other people, which is uh, blessing in many ways because the company is starting to get close to a place where I think that we could financially justify hiring more people.

But IT also does that fundamentally like sort of change what we're doing on a data day basis and know how does that work and doesn't make a Better what our readers even more want. And I think that like any people that would bring on, would have a similar ethos to us and would be able to cover like i'm sure they would be fantastic at whatever they're reporting on and would allow us to have like more breath of topics on the site, which is something that we want because you know i've read a million articles about facebook S A I and there's like a lot of fucker going on that we should be covering across many topics. But um sort of like what does that look like I think is something that that we talk about a lot.

Um but the good is is is going well. Um I think that we will grow at some point. We're being very careful about IT because we worked advice and they hurt a bunch of people and that seemed like they had money and then know something bad like IT nothing specifically bad happened.

It's just like grow this I grow that away and then it's like a shit. We will have no money in or bankrupt now. Um so yeah I don't know.

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

And also, do you even have .

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

more shit to manage more personalities. Yeah where can people find you, Jason?

So we're a four for media dot C O. We're subscriber funded .

publication.

Thank you. We would really do appreciate IT. Um and then you know i'm on every fucking in social media platform. If you search my name.

you'll find me and then I will be in the episode notes. Jason, thank you so much for joining me. You've been listening to Better off line.

I'm at this on, you know, all the shit to find me. IT will be following this with a really nice nona survie little speech. Thanks for listening.

Thank you for listening to Better roof line the editor um composer of the Better offline theme song is matter sales cape. You can check out more of his music and audio projects. A meta sale 点 com M A T T O S O W S K I dot com， you can you email me, are easy at Better off line dot com or visit Better off line dot com to find more podcast links. And of course, my newsletter, I also really recommend you go to chat that was your ed, or at to visit the discord and go to ask slash betroth lies to check out our ad IT. Thank you so much for listening.

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