Better Offline - Watching the Watchmen with Jason Koebler

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by 404 Media's Jason Koebler to talk about the state of both the tech industry and the tech media, and how 404 Media has built a worker-owned outlet that genuinely works. Follow Jason: https://www.404media.co/ https://x.com/jason_koebler https://bsky.app/profile/jasonkoebler.bsky.social --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what you're saying. Yep, that's me. Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media.

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Tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Allzone Media Hello and welcome to better offline Your Most Punished Podcast I am your host Ed Zittron Today I'm joined by one of the single best people in the tech media

Jason Kebler of 404 Media regularly requested by listeners but I punish you too Jason thank you so much for joining me Thanks for having me wow I did not know that that inflates my ego already Always necessary I experienced ego death around episode 7

so I feel nothing anymore. But we were just talking before this about Facebook effectively, well, Mark Zuckerberg effectively admitting that AI slop was good for the platform. I think it's good for you to just walk me through that story. It's a 404 media story. Walk me through it because it's a good scene set up. Yeah, so as meta does all the time, I still hate calling the meta, but at this point I do because they have so much fucking stuff going around

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

Yeah, being the dominant feed. The dominant feed. Like, you can select a chronological feed on threads if you solve three riddles, click seven buttons. Yeah, and then you have to do that every three seconds. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

So, and as I was saying to you beforehand, I get people saying I'm a cynic a lot, but then I read stuff like this and I just don't understand how people aren't more cynical because it feels like this stuff feels actively dystopian. Facebook is no longer the world's biggest social network, but just the world's shittiest television channel. Yeah, I think that we get blamed for being like Dumers and always have been. Like I've been a journalist for 12, 13 years at this point. And I used to be back at motherboard over a vice and now a 404 media. And sometimes I would have to like look up and just be like, wow, the last 10 stories I've written have been incredibly depressing. They've been like really

like horrible harms from technology. They've been, you know, I don't even think they're negative. I think they're realistic and accurate of like what our future is. But, you know, our future sucks very often. And our present often is bad too. And I think that that is at the, is because of centralized power in tech and over the internet. And so I also get called a cynic all the time.

But I feel like I'm actually quite an optimistic. and realistic person, and there's lots of things that I'm excited about. Just none of it is coming from big tech, like none of it at all. And what kind of things you're excited about? Let's balance this out. I'm very excited with like grassroots type new technology, like open source technologies. I think that people sort of like gesture at like the Fedaverse 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 it's taking a really long time to sort of come together. But I do think that that is something that we should be like working toward as a society where instead of having your audience, if you are a publisher like we are, having it all tied up in, you know, the number of Twitter followers you have or the number of like Google ads you can sell. like you kind of own your audience and by that I mean you own the list of people that you can kind of like transport that around the internet

I think that's really important I think that for a while I was very excited about community internet like non-profits where cities and towns were building their own fiber lines and still are and then sort of doing like getting really fast internet to the home sort of divorced from Comcast

and your spectrums of the world so on and so forth. And there's like a lot of kind of like individual people building stuff that are very cool like proofs of concept. And the big problem is always like scaling that up or getting people to stop using Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Amazon is a big one. It's like stop using Amazon, stop using Prime. It's very hard to get people to change their behaviors. And yet I feel in some ways, like we're going to talk about indie media, but I think that the journalism industry, despite the sort of disastrous situation that's been going on in the last few years, I think it's in a better spot now than it was two years ago.

I kind of agree in the sense that I think there are places where it got worse in the sense the, and this is my own opinion you don't have to agree with, because it's not going to be a fun one to agree with. I think things like Platformer have actually been detrimental to the tech industry. I think Casey Newton has dressed up platformer as a kind of independent outlet where nothing, where it's all just like, oh, we're independent, we're not bought off by big corporations, then writes two fucking fan fiction pieces about Anthropic. I think that is damaging. I think it's actually just spreading the problem. But even when you look at legacy media, the verge, which I have, Conso criticism for Nile Patel, the Virges actually done some really incredible in-depth journalism.

They had that wonderful piece about underground cables. Yeah, that was a great piece. Yeah. And it feels like even at the journal, they have some of the best investigative reporters. Now Mike Isaac's on OpenAI, which is terrifying for them. I think that we're seeing a lot more investigative stuff than we ever have before. I wish it had happened a few years ago, but hell, I'll take it now. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, you can name a half dozen sort of like newsletter writers and independent outlets that are doing really amazing work. And there's always been some of that. But I think that what we're seeing now is like 10 years ago when I got into it, there were like five big tech websites and they were all bad in my opinion. Like they were all doing the sort of like there's a new feature on the iPhone. Here's the new emojis that. dropped and it was just like tons and tons and tons of that you'd dump it on facebook you'd hope it went

viral and you would have people just writing like four or five stories a day and then you had a bunch of sort of like i say this as a descriptor not as like a like you had like your end gadgets your vices your buzz feeds the sort of like middle tier of digital website where they're not the new york times they're not like this gigantic, gigantic media conglomerate. They're sort of like middle-sized things. And all of them have done great work. But they were all kind of doing like the same thing more or less. And I think that like the VC business model where we're just going to chase traffic and ad revenue has failed terribly.

It's like not working. And I think it's going to be very hard to be in the middle. where you are like a, you're a website with a staff of like 50. I think that it's something where you can have independent subscriber funded publications that are doing increasingly good work because the infrastructure needed around journalism

is not so much anymore. And then you're going to have your like New York Times is in your Washington Posts and you're like, I don't know, CNET or something, like just gigantic websites that are going to be like, you know, middling. I don't like have a ton of love for the gigantic players, but I think that they serve a purpose of some sort. And there is a certain purpose for the, your phone now does this media. Like,

people read that stuff for a reason. Yeah, I mean, I read that stuff as well. And I, but I do think that like all the stuff in the middle has died and is going to keep dying. But I think that the years where those publications were propped up by VC, but like weren't making money, weren't investing in their newsrooms because they were just trying to stave off layoffs. Like, I think that was the dark period because the vibes were terrible at all of them because there was a hatchet around the corner constantly. Like, there were always going to be mass layoffs or some, the sites were going to die at any moment because they were these like bloated organizations where executives made

tons of money. The journalists made almost nothing. And like, it just wasn't a, there was no sustainability. there. And I think that I know that I'm rambling at this point, but I think that it's possible for like a bunch of small newsrooms like ours to thrive, a bunch of independent reporters to thrive, a bunch of, you know, newsletter writers to thrive.

And then, you know, you'll have your gigantic news organizations that are going to continue to exist. And I think that that leads to probably some fracturing in the media ecosystem where there's not like the same people, like this dream that Jeff Bezos is pointing out in his recent op-ed where it's like, we're going to be down the middle and we're going to be everything to everyone. It's like, that's dead. That never works. That shared reality has been gone. No, it never worked. It perhaps worked when there were three television channels like 40 years before I was born. But I don't even know if I worked then. And I think part of the problem is, sure,

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

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

Like I respect Devin Coldaway from TechCrunch so much because he asked the perplexity CEO on stage. Define plagiarism. That was really good. He punted. Personally, I would have kept asking until he hit me. I could take him. I revend, I'm not threatening you.

Come on the show. But it's like, it's frustrating because there is, and this is actually a good point as well, and maybe kind of a question. It also doesn't feel like there's any solidarity in the tech media. There's some, it's tenuous, but when it comes down to it, it doesn't feel like it's there. I think it's a hard thing to build. 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 keep going, sorry. No, I mean, I think it's really tough. And it's like, I don't live in New York anymore. But I lived in New York for a long time. And Vice was in Brooklyn. And then like all of the other publications were in Manhattan, like more or less. And this is not Illuminati vibes. it's very much like

there was a generation of journalists who were sort of all the same age, all living in the same place, and all knew each other from Twitter, and they were like hanging out all the time because that's, I don't know, that's how people made friends. And it always felt like Vice was separate

literally because we were on the other side of the river. And so like the happy hours, you had to go out of your way to get to them and things like that. And I just feel like there's people ask me what I read like people ask me like what other tech publications do you read and it's like I have a lot of respect for a lot of other tech publications but I don't have time to go read all of them all day every day because there's so much going on 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 all of the internet at once. Right. And I feel like that, when you say there's not solidarity, it's like, I have a lot of respect for other tech journalists and I like a lot of their work, but I will sometimes go weeks where I'm like, I actually feel like I haven't read the internet because I've been heads down in my own stuff. And then you look up and it's like, oh, cool.

Like Ed did a really great piece. Like Brian Merchant did a really great piece. There were like 10 great articles in The Verge. And then it's like, oh, should I like go tweet their work now two months after they published it. Like, um, so I don't know.

I'm just speaking from my own perspective on that, but I feel like it's very hard to have like cross publication, good vibes, but like, um, it's just hard. It's 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 Sam Altman, uh, rip, he claimed something. I think Kylie Robeson of the verge wrote about the next model coming from OpenAI, and he said, fake news. And she got dog piled for her.

I didn't see a single fucking journalist in her mentions. Now, this is not about you, Jason. Not talking about you. I didn't see a single one, though. And that really turned my stomach. I went after the little bastard. Fuck you, Sam Hortman. I'm calm.

I'll keep writing what I fucking want about you. But it's frustrating. But now that you said it, it does feel like almost a remote work effect, but also the detrit. of the New York waiting, because I remember in like the early 2010s how cleaky it was. Yeah. And how the out, how you got, I'm not like not saying other than perhaps that way, but you were kind of in the in group or the out group and you kind of still see it within internet culture reporting.

Yeah. Like New York, New Yorker guys that talk to the same people. Yeah. All the time. And it's, it's frustrating because I think 404 has proven this. There's so much cool shit you can do in tech journalism, especially when you talk to more varied people than just the six people in front of you. Yeah, I mean, it really felt, I mean, we talk about things like Twitter main character, so on and so forth. And it's like, that was a real phenomenon where it's like, oh, here's the one thing that everyone on the internet is talking about right now.

And I feel like it probably has to do with Elon Musk fucking up Twitter and like the fracturing of social media. But if you like ask me what is happening on the internet today, I could name a bunch of different things and you might have a totally different list of things that you are seeing. And I think that that is a big change. Yeah. I also think that that's something that leads to the failure of internet culture reporting. Because if you, I actually don't think that, well, there's been articles about this too. I don't think the main character was actually a social media. I think it was a, it is a thing that happened, but I don't think it tells us anything about

internet culture. I think a lot of internet culture does a bad job. I think it tells us something about how internet publications ran because there was like a while where Donald Trump's Twitter was being called like the assignment editor for the front page of the New York Times or whatever. And I mean, it's true. And Elon Musk was the same way. And to some extent is it's like, oh, Elon Musk tweet.

tweeted that he's going to print humans on Mars and then there would be like 85 articles about it. And I think that that was a function of like publications, not all publications, not all journalists and like certainly not all editors. But there is like when you're getting into this industry, there's a period of time where you were asked or were for a long time to blog the news. just like hit five stories a day, whatever it is. And like the things that you saw going viral on Twitter, that was something that you could go and write about and you would either win a Google or Reddit lottery or a Twitter lottery and you would get a lot of traffic.

And so almost every publication had five people doing that. Like kind of an ultra normalization. Yeah, yeah. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel,

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It sucks because it's, I think 404 has done, just going to lavish you with praise here. 404 had my favorite text story of the last year, by far. And it was about the Indian guys who are just scamming Facebook. And it humanized it as well, because I think that there is, or something. a degree of xenophobia towards Indian guys online. There definitely is. And it isn't helped by the fact that a lot of Indian guys ran insane mindset, Instagram accounts. But nevertheless, I love the way you humanized it because it was like,

here is the actual way that this is happening. This is internet culture. Internet culture is being changed by the fact that Facebook is incentivizing, like playing slop Tetris, where you kind of match the bullshit to the other bullshit so the algorithm puts it up. And I feel like that. It's also, the thing that I really liked about that story was that the, like, Indian tech bro hustle guys were talking amongst themselves about what they perceived U.S. internet culture to be, which was, like, very interesting. Like, they were sort of talking to each other about, like, oh, you know what?

Like, Americans and British people fucking love their dogs. They love pets. And then they were talking about, like, other things. And it's like, yes, like this is a stereotype, but it was interesting to see what they thought American internet culture was and then how they tried to reverse that, engineer that into viral content. And I think the problem as well is that internet culture is just culture now. Yeah. And also internet culture as the nature of the algorithms fucking with us every day is not really anything. It's what the algorithm.

So you wrote that wonderful piece. about Mark Zuckerberg's mask-off moment. I went back to one of my Facebook pieces I wrote, and it was a thing that I worried about, which is, what is viral? I don't mean, does viral exist? I mean, what is actually famous? And the answer is, we as people, no longer decide that, in my opinion. And I think that that is also, it goes back to the tech media. It goes back to everything we're talking about, because it's, what's the biggest news of the day? Well, whatever we think we'll get a bunch of traffic. What gets a bunch of traffic? What's important? Well, it's the thing that we'll get us traffic. Elon Musk's tweet, I actually believe that the media contributed to the

rise of Elon Musk in a way that's actually more egregious than Donald Trump. I think that if we did not have a tweet every time Elon Musk farted for a decade, and it was not recent, it was a decade. putting aside even the pandering to him, we would not have him at the scale we did. Like he would still be insanely rich, but he would not have the power he does because he wouldn't be able to create news cycles. But on top of that, putting aside even the criticism,

everyone just did the same thing. It kind of still do, but they really, really did. I think that that's one way it's definitely got better because it used to be every site did exactly the fucking same thing, which is crazy. Yeah, and you know what? I wrote a lot of articles. about Elon Musk's tweets.

And at the time, I was like, this guy is really interesting. Like, what he is doing is very interesting. And it took a while for me to be like, oh, but he's like, this is like very bad, very bad situation. But I remember, like Ashley Vance, who's a reporter at Bloomberg,

wrote the first biography of Elon Musk. And it came out like before, Elon Musk was a fucking asshole and very bad in that book, but he was seen as like someone who cared a lot about climate change and was like, I'm gonna like blah, blah, blah. So I got an early copy of that book

and I read it and I was like, whoa, there's like lots of crazy details in here. There was like one section where... And what year was this? I think it was like 2015. Got it. Like it was pre-Trump, definitely. It might have even been earlier than that,

like 2014, 2015, something like that. And I had Ashley Vance on Motherboards podcast which I was like hosting at the time. And we were like, wow, this is like a super interesting guy. He's like in charge of Tesla and SpaceX. Like that's nuts. And I remember I wrote a specific article where he, and I believe his name is Craig Venter, who is like a DNA.

He's like a DNA sequencing guy like from the early. We're going to sequence the human genome days. And there's this anecdote in the book where Elon Musk and Craig Venter. Ventor had this crazy idea to print humans on Mars, like sending a large 3D printer there. Oh, I thought you were joking. I literally was not. Like, that's a story that I wrote. And I actually don't think that that particular article was bad, but it always like sticks out in my mind because I talk to like actual scientists being like, is this?

What is it? What are they even talking about here? Because there was a big period in like the early 2010s where 3D printing like pig organs to We translate them into humans was like a huge thing. Like millions of stories. A solid decade before better offline existed. There was like, I don't know if anyone listening remembers this where 3D printing was everywhere.

And there was just the assumption, kind of like AI, that we would just no longer build things. We would print them using a machine that we bought. Yeah, it was like, oh, you're not even going to like use Amazon. You're going to have like a 3D printer in her house and it's going to print like hamburgers and also televisions. Like it was really insane. It was so cool. Yeah.

But anyways, I wrote a bunch of stories about that, about Elon Musk saying he was going to do crazy stuff because like every once in a while he would do something kind of interesting, like, you know, put self, not even like an autopilot into cars without it being tested properly and like kill a bunch of people and be like, whoa, that's nuts. But trying to figure out in my head, like, when do we stop enabling this? Like, when do we stop letting Elon drive what? are covering as a publication, I think that's something that like probably every journalist has had to think about at some point. And that that's something that people did with Facebook. They did it with Apple. They did it with every big company when they had announced in. I mean this nicely, man.

Did they? Have they? They still write about every Facebook thing. I'm not, sorry. They have not stopped. But a lot of the ones that did it have died. And then there's a lot. I would say there's a lot more like variety if you look for it. How about that?

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

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

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

Yeah. Seriously. Like, how do you find out? Right. So that this is, I'm going to try to say this in the as least of bragging way as possible. But that was one of the, my favorite things about being the editor of motherboard is that we were able to bring in people who were new to the industry and then and who had like deep interests in specific things and kind of teach them how to do reporting and how to think about

technology and to be very clear it's like every single person who came through there or that I've ever worked with has done the work but I think something like very cool is like Edward Anguoso who is amazing like amazing amazing writer he is just he is joining us, by the way, for the better offline CES coverage. Oh, that's amazing. Even David Roth. Yeah. It's like he came to motherboard and he had a huge, huge knowledge about tech labor and tech,

and he had written a thesis about Uber and how Uber was emiserating its drivers. But he did it for like his college thesis. But he didn't really know how to report when he came to motherboard. but because he was so interested in that, it's like, did you know everything about Uber? Just write about Uber for a little while. Like, use your expertise, like, get to know it. And it's like, he did all of it on his own

in terms of becoming the amazing reporter and writer that he is today. But I think that it, like, I'm proud that we were able to give him the space to do that and sort of like the guidance of, here's how you like, here's how you go fucking hard on Uber without like libeling a million people. And like, here's how you stay out of lawsuits and things like that, which doesn't mean pulling punches. It means making sure all your stuff is like very buttoned up and legally defensible and so on and so forth.

And I think that not just with Edward, but like many of the best reporters on the internet these days are like I'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 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 as you speak, there is another level that I've found with the show, which is to do this job, right, you also have to be like a business and financial, like Ed's, Ed and Gua So Gwiso Jr. is one of the most gifted writers I've ever worked with. I'm so fucking happy to have him at CES because he is very good

on socioeconomics. He is able to look at something and go, this will affect real people like this. That is not just the skill. It's like an actual talent that can be fostered, but it's tough because you have to start looking at the world in just this completely different way. I know, a lot of listeners, and I'm just as critical of the media as well, have this thing where they look and they're like, how could journalists write like this? How could they just eat up the slop? It's because we're what, 20 years into tech journalists being educated to believe these guys, and we're finally breaking that down and saying, oh, could Elon Musk lie? Would Sam Ommon lie? Would they? And I think that it's weird, because in almost every other

every other journalist field, you're kind of built like that. Yeah, I feel like I woke up one day and I was like, oh, I'm like old now. And by that, it's like, uh, every day for me. Yeah. I mean, I and I think that because I was always kind of like, I always looked at myself like, oh, I'm kind of new to journalism. Like I'm just feeling things out. Like I'm, I'm asking people, what experts should I talk to? How should I do this? Blah, blah, blah. And I was, I would say around the 3D printing bubble that we were just talking about is when I realized, I'm like, oh, wait, these like hype cycles where every VC, every company, everyone does the exact same thing and says it's going to be the future of everything and there's like tons

of money thrown into it, it doesn't always come true. Like it, yeah. And so like, you know, there was like VR and then there was 3D printing and then there was, you know, crypto and then there was the Metaverse and there's V-R again and VR again and blah, blah, blah. And like at some point, I was like, oh, I have been doing this long enough to now understand this cycle where the cool new thing is not going to change everything. It's going to be... Or even happen. Or even happen.

And it's going to be full of fucking grifters. All of them are full of grifters. And it's understandable why that is, because many, many people have made a lot of money by rushing into a technology, hyping it up, selling their company or whatever, and, you know, living in a mansion for the rest of their lives. But I think, like, as a journalist, I was like, oh, once I understood that that was the cycle, that that is, that was really helpful for my own work, I guess is what I'm saying. I think for me, it was kind of crypto, but I think it was remote work. I think remote work was the thing that fully jokified me,

because I had a few articles. I had an article turned down by Jelopnik in like 2015 where I was like, hey, Elon Musk is lying. Like it was actually kind of present. He was like, look, he said this about the Model X didn't happen, isn't happening, completely different. Said this about autopilot, hasn't happened. And even then I wrote like a positive piece about autopilot. It was kind of cool. Like that's the thing.

If they didn't overpromise, they could point to things to people be like, shit, this is really cool. But I think it was remote work because you just got to see this schism between reality and generally. But for real, it was crypto. It was the 2021 crypto craze where just people were lying. It wasn't even like they were half true. They were just straight up like, we will do this. And what they were saying was not possible. Like not even.

And then they never did it. And then the companies were just dumping money and all these people were getting rich for nothing. And I watched us quite a lot of journalists just kind of wrote it up because they were like, well, money good. Yeah. Money large. Money good. Money real.

I think also. crypto I've edited many stories about crypto and I've written a handful of them and it's fucking complicated. It's like if you want and because it's so complicated it's a space for tons of grifters

and I guess what I mean by that is like when you start talking about things like smart contracts and like Dow's and like blah blah blah all that stuff it's a really hard thing to parachute into and understand the lingo and like what people are talking about at all. And then you go try to write an article about it

because your editor says, this company made $3 billion in the last two days. Like, what's going on here? Go write about it. It's like 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 explain why it is a fraud was like a very difficult thing. and I feel like only a few journalists were ever, like, very good at doing that. But even then, the thing that got me, to be clearly, completely right, I was writing about it at the time, and writing about it was occasionally exhausting because you'd spend the first quarter of the article being like, okay, this means this, this means that, this also means this, okay, now you've learned all of this bullshit, I can get to the thing I want to write about. 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 cracked it for me. It was the Kevin Roo Slatecommer's Guide to Crypto or the article about helium. And all of these things where it was just like, oh, they said they got this partnership. Did you fucking check? Oh, no, why would they, they wouldn't lie to the New York Times. Yes, they would. They did. They literally lied. They literally lied. And they, they, all the time and they're still kind of doing it. And I think that I definitely had the experience of waking up and feeling old as well. Because I've been doing a PR firm since 2000. I've been

PR since 2008 firm since 2012. And thus, I've been the hype man. I still am at some extent. But even then in like mid-2010s with the Indiegogo craze, listeners, if you don't remember this time, there was a time when Indie Go-Go and Kickstarter started out. And it was like every single company that on there got press, regardless of whether it was real or not. That was one of my favorite types of articles to write because not like, hey, there's new Kickstarter. Hey, this Kickstarter that raised like $3 million and was written about in like 80 publications. Didn't make the thing.

Didn't try to make the thing. Never tried. Or they made it. It was just completely fucking broken. But I remember at that time also saying to 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, well, you don't want to hear someone being like, yeah, sure, a little bit.

And you're like, are you profitable? No. You're going to become profitable? Yeah. But I remember even having clients that were like, would go to journalists. I'd take into journalists even. And I'd be like, yeah, they're profitable. And they'd be like, who cares?

Like just not necessarily as good, but they'd be just like, whatever. Yeah, yeah. whatever, everyone's scaling. And then over time, thankfully, I've got clients that are mostly profitable. Because suddenly journalists are like, huh, if a company makes more money than it spends, that's a good thing. And if it loses money, well, that's a bad thing, unless it's open AI. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite.

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you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network, on TikTok. And I think that that's the other thing that's frustrating me as well. It's like, and maybe you can actually give me an idea of this, because I have a few thoughts, but why do they keep fucking falling for it so many times? It's like three hype cycles straight, and this AI one is insane. Yeah, that's the, so we've been painting with a very broad brush. You've added some specifics.

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

To leave my wife. Yeah, things like this. It's like, those are really, really harmful. Yes. Articles. And they go out to, 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, oh, like, Brian Merchant, you're really good on this topic. Right. At Zitron, you're really good on this topic. Kylie Robeson, you're really good on this topic, so on and so forth. But then I start thinking, oh, but like the New York Times often isn't very good on this topic. Like the Wall Street Journal often isn't very good on this topic.

And these are the sort of like mass market publications that whose audience size dwarfs us. 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 um i've not worked at a big publication like that but i know i know a lot of people who have and i've like seen free like people i know of 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 focus grouped to death. Like, I don't know what, I'm linking on the term, but it's where there's like 80 people are looking at a thing. And then by the time it comes out, it's like, oh, this is like a quote unquote down the middle. It's like, you're just giving publicity to whatever. And it's like, okay, this is not actually like. I have to wonder if it's also a solidarity issue again, because Swisher,

for example, the reason they'll find her so loathsome is that she pretends to be what she actually should have been, which is if everyone, Nele-A Patel, Joanna Stone, who I love in general, Kara Swisher who I find detestable, Casey Newton who I find almost as detestable, the problem isn't that they're not getting these interviews, it's that when they have the person in front of them, they don't ask them the questions. They ask them, do you train with YouTube data? And they go, and it's like, okay, that's an answer for me, versus, and the British media has a litany of problems. But one of the things they do very well is harass power. And I think that there could just be the most subtle change in the world.

When you get Sam Altman in front of him, don't accept whatever answer he gives you immediately. Don't be like, well, seems reasonable to me that you have no answer for revenue or how this stuff will become AGI. I'm just going to keep going. But it's also, if everyone started doing that, they would have to start answering. That simple. That if the only option they had was to get, like, Devin Colt, and I'll give him credit, Devin Coldway at TechCrunch Disrupt, actually fucking asking the question to Aravind, the CEO of Perplexity about plagiarism, could have pushed harder whatever.

We can quarterback that later. But nevertheless, the fact the question is getting asked is so phenomenal. and Devin fucking respect to him, if everyone did that, these worms would have to run. If everyone just fucking, and it doesn't even need to be rude, you don't have to be a dickhead.

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

Right. What does that mean, for example? I think that, so I don't like listen to every episode of Neel Patel's podcast, but I think this is something that he started to do a lot better. He, like, talked to the CEO of Intuit the other day and was, like, you know, badgering him on Intuit's lobbying about, like, why we still fucking have to use TurboTax more or less. They've spent millions and millions and millions of dollars doing it.

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 with Sundar. I just wish he'd have done that with Sundar Pishai. With Sundar, he did give him his phone. That was a nice moment. That was a nice moment. I liked that moment.

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

That's why it was good. Well, so what I was going to say is, I agree with you. 100%. I think that what has happened is you have fucking like Mark Zuckerberg going on Joe Rogan and going on Lex Friedman and going on like all these other podcasts and pretending like they're like the media is a problem. And I agree with what you're saying. I also think that tech PR has gotten a lot smarter in the last few years in like keeping their executives away from anyone who will ask them hard questions. Yeah. And that's very calculated in my opinion. I also think that I think you're completely right. I don't know if I'll ever say that PR people are getting smarter based on

any of them. But I will say, I think that they have just learned the lessons from celebrity PR because the tech media has allowed these people to be treated like celebrities. Like that is I think, and I'm very critical of Nilay Patel, but really the intuit one was great because he treated him like a businessman. He treated Sundar Pishai like a celebrity. And I think that the problem is, and this is me like genuine empathy. For a while they were. For a while, we laugh about the 2015 Indiegogo era, but it was fun. Things were happening. These people, Elon Musk wasn't just an inveterate racist. He wasn't like talking about the 14 words he loved the most. He wasn't, he wasn't, but he was. He wasn't, he wasn't. He wasn't. He wasn't. He was. He, he, he wasn't. He wasn't. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He. He wasn't just retweeting active Nazis. He was just like, posting my lunch, rocket go boom, cargo fast. And everyone was like, cool. Even I was. And I can understand why everyone kind of oriented themselves in that way. But these people aren't celebrities. They're fucking business people. Yeah, that was something about, so I've seen Elon Musk speak a couple times while I was reporting, like I went to the giga factories opening and sort of covered that when they started making batteries in Nevada.

And I thought I did a good piece actually. This was now many years ago. But I wrote, I think the article was called like the cult of Elon. And it was about his like very cultish fans who are just fucking obsessed with him even then. And he's a horrendous public speaker. He's really bad at it. He's not gifted. He's not gifted.

He's very awkward up there. and for a while that was actually quite alluring is the wrong word to me, but I was like, wow, this guy must be really smart because he's so bad at talking that he must just, and yet he's still like the CEO of all these companies and a billionaire and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, but he can't string two sentences together really on stage. So he just must be like engineering behind the scenes all the time, like building rockets himself. And I think that we really did a very bad job, not just with Elon, but with like Steve Jobs

and Mark Zuckerberg and all these people treating them as geniuses who did all of this stuff themselves from a garage and not as businessmen who had thousands of people working for them, like building on the backs of 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 smartphone, like, cool. I use the smartphone all the time. That's very cool. But like Steve Jobs is not the inventor of the smartphone. Or the iPhone. It was like thousands of people at Apple leveraging like thousands of years of, you know, not thousands of years, but many. Yeah, dozens of years of, uh, of, you know, like Wi-Fi chips and touchscreen stuff and blah, blah, blah. And I think that in treating Steve Jobs

as the singular inventor of the iPhone, which is, it's the subject of. my friend Brian Merchant's book, The One Device, like all the sort of stuff that went into it, we made these people celebrities. We made them celebrities because we're like genius inventor vibes versus like ruthless businessman 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 otherworldly rich, who's so powerful, who can do all of these things in their normal life that we never would, not about them being smart or good, just that they have that much money and power, it's much easier to look at them and say, damn, they must be so much different to me. They must be, they must know something I don't. And I think what we're seeing in the media now, as this kind of cynicism feeds in, is people beginning to,

realized that was never fucking true. Wozniak was a genius, is a genius. Like Jobs was a great marketer and a good operator. I mean, Wozniak also, like, I don't know him personally, but he strikes me as, like, quite humble, relatively speaking, and, like, still, like, I don't know what he's doing now, but he... I ran into him once, and the thing that he talked to me about for half an hour

was a 20-year-old browser called, like, iCab? I think it was. Yeah. No idea. It's some like low face. Like it's the only one I use and it was adorable and he seems to like tech. And maybe that's the greater thing that I don't know how many people who are popular and in the industry actually like technology.

You talk to yourself about like you're excited about some things. Like there is still tech that excites you. I don't know if that's as common within the industry as it should be, both in the executive. and some members of the media. And I want to be wrong because I think if everyone was actually excited about AI, if that was really driving them, then that would be cool. That would be interesting.

We would have some interesting shit come out of that. I just don't even think it's about it. It's like I'm excited about what everyone else is excited about. Well, it's very interesting that the crypto to AI, crypto to Web 3 to AI pipeline of like, oh, this is going to change the world. Wait, no, Metaverse is going to change the world. Wait, no, AI is going to change the world. It's like, okay, cool.

Like, you're into the thing that's going to make you a lot of money, regardless. Yeah, I don't. It's funny you say that I'm not that into tech. And at motherboard, we were a website of people who were super skeptical of tech and didn't. Which I think he's fine, by the way. I know. I know. I'm just saying that I am not really excited about tech.

I think I'm excited about what some people are doing with technology. I'm very interested in community, I guess. And diving into those communities of people who are excited about things. Like, I recently wrote about the people who are taking the Red Box DVD kiosk home from Walgreens. And I'm, like, sitting in their Discord, watching them figure out how this thing works and, like, flashing new software to it and stuff. And it's like, that is very exciting to me, not because it's going to change the world, but because I like seeing their excitement about learning how this like obsolete device works. And I don't want to be a part of that community myself because frankly, just like, I don't know,

I feel like I'm a busy guy. I don't like. And I have very like short attention span for hobbies, I would say. Like I don't want to reverse engineer a kiosk. But I want to watch you. do it from afar because you are finding out lots of like weird stuff about it and I like writing about that sort of thing and there's many many many like micro communities around the internet still that are very exciting to me because they are so they found a place on the internet or using

technology that is not so fucked up and terrible all the time and I like looking at that that's what makes me optimistic and I still think that that is a I still think that that is a perfectly valid thing to be excited about, and that is still being excited about tech. Some of my favorite moments in tech have been Cidia and the original homebrew community in the iPhone, the homebrew community around the PlayStation portable, was fucking cool. I don't even mean the piracy, which may or may not have been cool. I wouldn't know. Even then going back to 2006, the homebrew community with the Xbox, the shit that you could like just rip games and games you owned to the Xbox and they would run faster, play Def Jam, the fighting game. There is still

cool shit like that happening and I feel like that does give me hope as well that people are still doing this shit. Like why are you ripping up a Red Box thing? Because I can. Yeah. Yeah. And I've written a lot about like right 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 guy at the mall who puts the iPhone screen on when you break it, he knows more about how that fucking iPhone works than probably most people who work at Apple. And I find that to be really interesting. There's been like a couple massive Apple scandals that have broken because these like repair

people who are just looking at a bunch of broken iPhones have realized there was like an engineering flaw that Apple messed something up on. And it's like, that's cool. Like, this is just some dude who works at the mall in a kiosk. And he has just, like, discovered a flaw in the iPhone that is going to, in a just world, cost Apple billions of dollars. In the real world that we live in, everyone gets like a $50 refund maybe. We're lucky.

Yeah, for lucky. Or there'll be like a class action lawsuit where you get $12 in 14 years. But I like that kind of thing, too. So as we wrap this up, and this could be the final question, what is next for 404? What are you actually, are you going to scale it much further? Are you going to do a conference? Like, is that in the cards? Or are you going to keep it small? We're going to do conferences. We're going to do, what is that? We're going to pivot to video. Perfect.

Yeah, no, for real. So 404 Media has been around for a little over a year. It's me, Emmanuel Myberg. Sam Cole and Joseph Cox. I personally wanted to do it because I spent a lot of time editing the last few years of my life and I really wanted to get back to writing. And I've really enjoyed doing my own reporting and writing again. Like it's been amazing for my brain, I feel. I would like the company to get bigger. 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 will that work? And so that is, you know, that's stuff that we talk about sort of like behind the scenes. Like right now, we are the four of us doing everything in terms of just like we're doing our socials. We're doing the business stuff. You know, if we're talking to our lawyers and I'm printing merch and like mailing it myself. And I really like that hands-on aspect to it. But I think I'm trying to think like if we grow, will that give us more time to do the work? Or will it give us less time to do the work because we're then sort of like managing other people, which is a blessing in many ways because the company is starting to get close to a place

where I think that we could financially justify hiring more people. But it's also, does that fundamentally, like, sort of change what we're doing on a day-to-day basis? And it doesn't make it better. Is that what our readers even want? And I think that, like, any people that we'd bring on would have a similar ethos to us and would be able to cover, like, I'm sure they would be fantastic at whatever they're reporting on and would allow us to have, like, more breadth of topics on site, which is something that we want because, you know, I've written a million articles about Facebook's AI and there's like a lot of fuckery going on that we should be covering across many topics. But sort of like, what does that look like? I think is something that we talk

about a lot. But the good news is it's going well. I think that we will grow at some point. we're being very careful about it because we worked at Vice and they hired a bunch of people and it seemed like they had money and then, you know, they did know something bad, like nothing specifically bad happened. It's just like grow this way, grow that way. And then it's like, oh, shit, we don't have no money and we're bankrupt now. So yeah, I don't know. I think it's been very hard to plan long term, I'd say, because I'm very heads down most

days just like interviewing people and writing articles, but we we want to do more. Like we want to grow. We want to be bigger, but we want to do it like very, very slowly. 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 impactful work with just the four of us. And there's many people that I would love to work with more and again in addition to. But at the same time, it's like, is that something that I want to bring on ourselves? Not because it would be bad, but because it would be additional. It's like there's only so many hours in the day. More shit to manage more personalities. Yeah. Where can people find you, Jason? So we're at 404media.com. We're a subscriber-funded

publication. Give them money. I pay them. Give us money. Thank you. We really do appreciate it. And then, you know, I'm on every fucking social media platform. If you search my name, you'll find me. And it will be in the episode notes. Jason, thank you so much for joining me. You've been listening to Better Offline. I'm Ed Zittron. You know all the shit to find me. It will be following this with a really nice, non-asuric little speech. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski.

You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ed. dot at to visit the Discord and go to our 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 podcast. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy,

not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band

with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles.

So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale,

being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. A win is a win.

A win is a win. I don't care what you're saying. Yep, that's me. Clifford Taylor, the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfilled conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it.

Listen to The Clifford Show on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on, a Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman. Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud. But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me?

Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the Aihar Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds.

I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.