Offline with Jon Favreau - ICE Killings and the Death of Shared Reality

Episode Date: January 10, 2026

Does misinformation even matter if no one can agree on a shared reality? The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang joins Offline to explain how the ICE shooting in Minnesota exposes Americans’ algorithm silos. Then, he and Jon explore the rise of a 23-year-old YouTuber who ignited the right’s fascination with fraud in Minnesota, and break down five media trends that will reshape the industry in 2026 and beyond.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The only time that there seemed to be a consensus on a video like this that came out was during George Floyd, right, where you had mass consensus about it and then you had what amounted to a very short-lived, like, I don't know, I don't even know what the right term is, but like, at least cultural revolution for at least a couple months, right, where you had like every bank putting out, like, we're going to do social justice now, or the NBA putting jerseys out that's saying, like, we're going to do social justice. And that was the only time that people really agreed upon a video and everything else has been totally polarized in terms of the interpretation of it.

And this one, I think, because of different angles and whatever you want to say, like any shred of doubt that can be cast on this, right? Any interpretation that can be done, it functions in the same way that like an NFL touchdown, whether it's a catch or not does, right, based on the fan base. Like, if you get the one angle that shows your interpretation, then you're going to do it. I'm John Favro, and you just heard from today's guest, author of the New Yorker's fault line column, Jake Hatsby and Kang. I always catch Jay's writing at The New Yorker. He writes a lot about the things we cover on this podcast, media, politics, and how the internet has collided with both in ways

that fracture our society and our sense of reality. Jay's had a series of great pieces recently that I wanted to talk to him about, including a story about Nick Shirley, the YouTuber who ignited the rights fascination with a fraud scandal in Minnesota. I also wanted to talk to him about a piece he wrote on the five big media trends of 2025 that will reshue. shape the industry in 2026 and beyond. It seemed like a great discussion for us to kick off the year with, and it was. Of course, we also start the conversation by talking about the horrific ice shooting in Minnesota and how people's perceptions of what happened there have been mediated by algorithms and the way we consume information now. Really enjoyed this one. Thank you guys

will too. Here's Jay Kasping and Kay. Jay, welcome offline. Hey, thank you. I always look forward to your fault lines column at the New Yorker about media and politics. And I, I want to get into some of the recent stuff you've written. First, I'd just love to get your thoughts on the week we've just had, which ended with Thursday, I think, the vice president in the briefing room, yelling at the media for reporting on videos that show an ice agent shooting and killing an unarmed mother of three. What have you been thinking sort of watching all this unfold over the last few days? it's pretty it's pretty concerning i mean concerning as like a weird journalism like a fudge word that i think we would put in but you know it's scary uh i think that any hope that there would be some sort of

moment of restraint or de-escalation from this point um where people might reflect that maybe what they're doing is not just in many ways illegal but also deeply unpopular with a lot of the population seems to have just been sped right by and, you know, watching Vance in that press conference and watching Christy Nome, for example, say this is a domestic terrorist. No attempt to walk any of that back. The only real moment of humanity that we got was like an excerpt from the New York Times interview with Trump where they showed him the video and he was like, whoa, that's terrible. That's the closest we got, you know, and that's just like, it wasn't like we saw it on video or anything. We just sort of read what he said.

Yeah. What do you make a JD Vance, who to me is a different breed of enraging right-wing politician, maybe partly because he's close to our age and he consumes media and information the way we have? And he just seems – I mean, I saw you tweet about this and say that, you know, most people – most people in the country probably look at that video and look at this and feel horrified. Right. He is clearly just getting all of his information, or at least his media diet, is – quite different and much more similar to, I think, a lot of the right-wing accounts we see that have sort of populated Twitter these days. Yeah, I mean, at the beginning of his term or his sort of time in

office as vice president, the main question that I had was how sincere is he about any of this? And I think that part of that is because people like you and I almost relate to him as one of us, right? We went to fancy schools. He went to Yale Law School. He was a, blogger basically for a while. He wrote a book, right? And he engages in the type of sort of Twitter nonsense that we engage in. I mean, I just remember I live here in the Bay Area, one of my friends in Oakland, like this guy who J.D. Vance was arguing with on Twitter, once he was vice president,

and I had texted him. And it's like, dude, what is going on? Yeah. And because of that, I think that we sort of think that perhaps he is constrained by some of the same things that the Republican and the conservative people that we know are constrained by, right? Which is sort of like somebody like Ross Douthit or something like that where you expect that level of humanity. And so when he doesn't show that and when he speeds right by it and when he just goes back on everything that he said over the past 10 years about Trump and, you know, immigrants

and everything, you expect a level of insincerity about it, right? Or you assume a level of insincerity. But at this point, I don't even know if it's relevant or if he matters if he's being insincere or not, right? Like, we should take him at his word for what he says and what he does. And, you know, like that is completely in line with everything that somebody like Stephen Miller or the administration seems to be saying. Yeah, I don't want to take away his, you know, unquenchable ambition and what he'll is willing to do for power. But I've come to believe that he really does believe these things now, whether he has become radicalized himself or whether for whatever other reason.

But if he's lying, he does it pretty well. Yeah. Because he seems pretty sincere in these pretty scary beliefs. I don't know if I'm allowed to ask you questions, but it's like one of those things that I've always been curious about because I haven't, you know, I'm journalists. I haven't worked inside the White House, and I certainly haven't worked on a campaign or anything like that.

And it's just like, I always wonder about this because you have these very ambitious people, right? I mean, just sort of across the board. It's not like Democrats are not ambitious. Like Zora Mum Downey, for example, he went to the same college that I did. I think we both went to small New England colleges. And people who knew him, he's much younger than me, but people who knew him in college, you know, they classify him as, like, extremely ambitious as you would imagine, right?

So I wonder, like, when is there a point where, like, that ambition becomes, calcifies into, like, an actual ideology or from somebody who in the past might have just been able to say whatever they wanted that thought would be beneficial to them? I think that so much of it is like justifying and rationalizing everything to yourself. And I'm sure J.D. Vance thinks, he probably started by thinking, you know, maybe Donald Trump and these MAGA people, maybe they're getting it. Maybe it's unfair. A few things are unfair. Maybe it's maybe they're getting a bad rap. And then so much of his ideology, if that's what you want to call it, seems based off opposition and anger towards liberals. And I think that whenever he may internally disagree with something that's happening on the right, his first instinct is, well, but the real enemy is on the left. And so if I mean, I think he said that around the whole fucking Haitians eating their cats thing, where he was like, if we have to make up stories to call attention to important issues, then we should do it. And I think that's where that's where sort of the actual belief fits with the, and this is what it takes to get power.

because he'd say, well, getting power is how I then, you know, make sure that this worldview is legislated and in power. And so if that's what I have to do to get power, then I'll do it. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me. And, you know, obviously we've seen a lot of examples of this sort of person who exists in these types of spaces that you and I exist in having a very negative reaction to people they encounter and then deciding that they're going to wage war against You know, I don't know, they're liberal professors from Yale Law School or something. And in the end, it's just kind of all motivated by that, you know? I mean, sometimes I feel that way, you know.

Luckily, I'm not in power. Yeah. No, I used to think that people saying, well, it was the old excuse. Like, it's the left that's made me, you know, conservative. And I was like, that's patently ridiculous. But I do think that for a lot of these folks, that is what gets them going. It is that like they're so angry with some perceived, either real or imagine, slight by the left, or attempt at cancellation or, you know, view that something's too radical, that they then say,

well, this is who I am now. It's just, it's simple polarization where you're like, well, I hate that team, so now I'm going to be on this team, because the only option is to have these two teams. Right. And especially when it's somebody who enters a place that is quite elite and they feel a little bit out of place for some reason or not. And that would make sense for JD. For sure.

I mean, I don't know. When I went to Bowden, that's how I felt, you know, years of rage. One thing I've been thinking about is how much time and effort was spent over the last 10 years fighting misinformation and disinformation, or at least talking about it. Even now, this is a big worry with regard to AI, which, you know, I share. But we have multiple real videos of this incident. and it just hasn't led to any kind of shared reality, I think. That's a basis for even healthy disagreement over, you know, frames of the video that you might legitimately be able to disagree over. So maybe, like, misinformation isn't the big problem here?

I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, I think that going back to, like, that video, those kids from Cincinnati, right? Like, there's that, like, sort of, and that person was chanting. and, you know, there was a big crisis of interpretation at that time, right? Like, who do you stand? I think it's Copeland, right? It was the name of the school.

That these things have been litigated throughout time, or the last, like, 10 years, at least. And the only time that there seemed to be a consensus on a video like this that came out was during George Floyd, right? Where you had mass consensus about it. And then you had what amounted to a very short-lived, like, I don't know, I don't even know what the right term is, but, like, at least cultural revolution for at least a couple of months. where you had like every bank putting out like, we're going to do social justice now or the NBA putting jerseys out that's saying like we're going to do social justice.

And that was the only time that people really agreed upon a video and everything else has been totally polarized in terms of the interpretation of it. And this one, I think, because of differing angles and whatever you want to say, like any shred of doubt that can be cast on this, right? Any interpretation that can be done, it functions in the same way that like an NFL touchdown, whether it's a catch or not does, right, based on the fan base.

Like if you get the one angle that shows your interpretation, then you're going to do it. And I guess I struggle with this myself. I wonder what you think is just like, how serious and how honest are these people being? Because from my perspective, I watch this and I just like, look, there are many times where I think that I'd probably align a little bit more to the right of some of these interpretations. They're like, okay, come on. Like, you know, like, but with this one, it just seems like in the New York Times, Washington posted their own video investigations. And it just seems like there's no reason why this person needs to shoot this person in the face, right?

And it just seems like such a leap to go to the point where like, even if you hate this person and you think, you know, they hate them for whatever reason and you think they're there to obstruct ice, everything like that. Just like, nobody should be shot in the face for that. And I wonder how sincere they are. And again, like with Vance, what I. concluded is that these people really do feel that way, you know, and that I guess in some ways that's like a much bigger problem that we have than people just all lying about it. Yeah, I mean,

I saw Matt Walsh over at the Daily Wire this morning. Basically, you know, he finally kind of admitted it. He said it's totally irrelevant whether she was trying to hit the ice agent or not. Either she wanted to hit him or she wanted to evade arrest and escape and didn't care if she hit him in the process, there is zero moral and legal difference between these two scenarios. In either case, she's 100% to blame and her death is her own fault. And it's like, well, okay, I appreciate the honesty there, that that's how you feel. But I do think that a lot of the people who are saying, oh, you know, definitely hit him. You know, they're looking from that far angle that Trump put out in his video and Megan Kelly and all the rest of them. But it's like, those people aren't saying,

well, if it was slightly different, and if he was out of the way, then I would think this was horrific and blah, blah, blah. There's something else going on, which is they believe she shouldn't have been there. You shouldn't be protesting. You shouldn't be doing anything to try to stop ICE. And if you do, then hopefully you don't get killed. But if you do, then, you know, you shouldn't have been there. Yeah, yeah.

That seems to be what they're converging on, I think, in part because I think that I think maybe they have some realization that when people watch that, even other. law enforcement officials that, you know, I've heard from. I haven't seen much defense of this, and these are not, like, left-leaning liberal people or even people that I know who are in the military who know different forms of engagement. It seems like the officer who did this is also in the military. You know, there's just sort of a sense of horror about it and, like, senselessness about it. And so I think that that's why it's been cast as like, well, there is a left-wing network out there. And, you know, like they are all radicalized and she was taught.

They make it seem like it was, you know, Al-Qaeda or something like that where there's like a manual that they pass around. And you're like, okay, here's what you do. And like, and that she had been recruited by her wife, right? Like that's the narrative that they're going to fixate on and that this is a deep threat to American sovereignty and American safety and everything like that. And it's just like, I think that that's probably easier to sell than. And like, this guy should have shot this woman, right? Like, which I think is harder. Yeah.

And it's easier to sell than these people are protesting or at least alerting other people when ICE is in the neighborhood because they're just scared. They're scared for their neighbors, you know? And like, I've seen this in L.A. with, you know, a bunch of moms will be on a, you know, text chain together. And they're certainly not recruited by anything. And they're not activists. They're not any of this. And they're just like, oh, shit, there's ice in our neighborhood. and we're scared and our nannies with our kids and this and then there's the and they know people and

they're worried and it's more of like just trying to help out neighbors than it is some like dark left wing network but they have to frame it as that because they just don't want any kind of resistance whatsoever which is partly the message for what this says is like don't go out there in protest even peacefully because you might die and then nothing might happen about yeah the phrase that vans use is absolute immunity right i mean that's terrible that is chilling i've been talking to people i know here in the Bay Area, and they're worried about the protest part too. Yeah. Because I think that what will happen is that probably this weekend sometime that there will be

protests around the country and that some of those will be safer than others. But I think everyone will have in the back of their mind, you know, this could go sideways in a way that I don't think they probably felt about no kings, for example, or something like that, right, or the Women's March or some of these other mass protests. And I think that maybe some of the reason why you're not seeing, at least for now, right? I think it might happen this weekend. For now, you're not seeing this great out swelling of protests in Minneapolis, for example, is because people are scared.

And part of it is also the weather. I mean, you know, these things are always dependent on weather. But I think people are also scared. Offline is brought you by Quince, a new year, colder days. This is the moment your winter wardrobe really has to deliver. If you're craving a winter reset, start with pieces truly made to last season after season. Quince brings together premium materials, thoughtful design, and enduring quality, so you stay warm, look sharp, and feel your best all season long. Quince has everything you need.

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That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash offline, free shipping, and 365-day returns, Quince.com slash offline. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. The new year doesn't require a new you, maybe just a less burdened you. Therapy can help more easily identify what weighs you down by offering an unbiased perspective to better understand your relationships, motivations, and emotions. BetterHelp has quality therapists who work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the U.S. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can find out. focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences,

and their 12-plus years of experience and industry-leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored wrecks. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms, having served over 5 million people globally, and it works. With an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with a qualified therapist sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash offline. That's betterhelp.com slash offline. It feels especially dark to me that ICE was in Minneapolis in the first place because of a viral video. I know you wrote about from a 23-year-old YouTuber Nick Shirley on alleged daycare fraud in Minnesota, which was far more popular, especially on the right than any of the reporting on all the other Minnesota fraud cases. that happened a long time ago, months ago, years ago even.

Why do you think that video is what made the fraud story such a big deal and ultimately got the attention to the Trump administration? It's a bit formal. You know, I don't want to be too like whatever, like sort of poor man Susan Sontag here, but like it's, there's part of it that's formal, right, where I think that there's something about watching a guy walk through something and go and not get answers and ask persistently.

that is quite arresting for people. And it reminded me back to like when I was growing up, and I grew up in North Carolina, and there was like a local five news investigative team, right? And they would go around and they would go to local businesses and they would be like, you know, like, I don't know, it seems like you have Shasta instead of Coca-Cola, but you're selling Coca-Cola or something like that, right?

Yeah, right. And then they go in the back and they would barge through and they would like see a case of Shasta. And everybody was like, oh my God, I'm never going back to Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen. Right? So, um, it's like Dateline, you know? It's very, yeah, yeah, yeah, TV news investigations, right? I worked at vice, right? We did that too. Like my job was to like go up to people and, or I went to a lot of protests, but like,

I did one with Jordan Peterson, for example. And like, you know, like you're there and you're supposed to interview people. And if it goes badly, then better for you, right? Like, that's just honest, right? And so TV news investigations seemed like that was what he was working with, right? Like kind of the Chris Hansen to catch predator type of thing. And then it was mixed with this kind of every man thing, right, that is appealing to people too, which remind me a bit of like, you know, I don't want, I do not mean this like, you know,

I love Michael Moore, right? And so, but it reminds me of Roger and me, right, the documentary Roger that where it's really just like a guy in winner with a codon going up to people who work at GM and being like, why did you do this? Why are you ruining my town? Why did you do this? And the persistence of it is what makes people interested in it because it sets up to suspense, like, is this guy going to get his answer or not? And that's how, when I watched Nick Shirley video, I was like, oh, that's what people are responding to. It's because he's being stonewalled, right? And he keeps going and he keeps going.

Hello, we'd like to ask where the money's going. What do you guys think about the fraud that's taking place here in Minnesota? I don't think anybody is enabling fraud to happen. No, we don't have to hold Governor Walls accountable for this. What was this money spent on? Whatever you think about Nick Shirley in that video, he does seem very persistent in it, right? He's like falling around elected. officials demanding answers, and people think that that's real journalism when they watch it,

right? And then they pair it with the right-wing narrative that all of us are captured by the liberals and we're all just lying all the time and that the mainstream media is, which, you know, like, I don't know. We probably are mostly liberal, but that we have been lying to them and the only real truth is from YouTube, right? That's what Elon Musk wants to sell. Yeah, there's a lot of, they've all been lying to you in covering the up and hiding this from you. And it reminded me the guy he's with in the video who just has like a blizzard of facts and numbers and this is how much this is getting and I have the address here.

And it's a little in a different way, RFK Jr. With the way he sounds believable to people and why or at least why you could understand why Mahal is believable to people because it's like, well, look at this study and this study and this study. And they just, they hit you with so many facts and studies that seem legitimate that have a like a sheen of legitimacy that. you think that, well, there's no way they could be making this all up, because that would be too hard to make us make something up this detail. How do you think more objective media outlets and

journalists even compete with that kind of thing? Because, like, what does that even look like? It seems like there's a lot of obstacles in the way for traditional media outlets or even non-traditional media outlets to compete with that for views, the Nick Shirley's of the world for views while still remaining honest. Yeah, it's really hard. I don't think. think that there's a very good solution to it because the second, even if we did that, let's say the New Yorker was like, Jay, your new job is to go out there and you're going to live stream everything and we're going to send you around Washington, D.C., and you're going to have a coat on, and you're going to look, you know, we're going to grow your hair at a little bit and you look

a little scruffier than usual. And you're going to start doorstopping every single politician that comes by and you're going to ask them a bunch of questions and run after them. Right. I would have a good time. Like, it's fun. I've done that before. I was, I did it to, Woodhouse in North Carolina one, so I was just like running after him with the camera crew. And I was like, this is, this is great fun. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. But too, it's great. He stopped and answered all my questions, you know.

But like the second you put like a mainstream media logo on it, it becomes inauthentic to these people, right, to a large part of the population, you can copy every single thing Nick Shirley did. And you're like, I'm doing this for the New Yorker. It's going to like, oh, these are lies, right? And so the part of it that is appealing to people and the part of it that feels like, I don't know, authentic, I guess. or insurrectionary in some sorts of, in an information sense,

is the fact that it is from a random person, right? And, you know, we can argue whether Nick Shirley is an authentic person or not or is just a random person. I don't think it seems like he is, right? The Minnesota GOP came out and basically said that they had been working with him. And it wasn't just this guy, David, right? He was like following him. It was like fear and loathing in Las Vegas almost where he's like,

this is my attorney. And the guy just starts showing up. We can't do it that way, right? And the way that media is going where it's so live streamed and the most famous people for young people are people like neon or sneako or speed, right? Where they just are always on going into new situations and the thrill of it is whether or not they're confronted or not. That's what this guy Nick Shirley is tapping into. And we just can't do that, right? We can't compete with that.

And so I don't know. I don't think there's a good answer to how we do it. You asked one central question in the piece, which is do a million YouTubers, investigating stories make for a free or more empowered information ecosystem? What do you think? Oh, man.

I, well, I think that I asked that question because I wanted to make a point about propaganda. First of all, I think maybe, you know, but I also think that this past, two months at least has shown the reason why we kind of need institutional media. I think one of the things that I try and do is I, even though I work for, I don't know, I've worked for like all these big media companies and I understand what the deficits are, but what now seems to be happening is that the government or even people like Elon Musk were very popular have an endless menu of media

people and content that they can point to as being like the truth, right? And when you can do that and when you can show, hey, this is just a 23-year-old dude and he's just wearing a hoodie and he's just walking around with a camera guy, you know, how he's not bought off, he's not part of the state media. You can just make a very effective free state media that way. You just have to retweet them as long as they're saying what you're saying. And they will feel authentic to a lot of people. Like that's the thing that everyone says about Nick Shirley. Like he's real. You know, the mainstream media is fake. Like people like you and me are like bought off by the Democratic Party or we will. work for cabal, like, you know, like all sorts of like whatever conspiracy they want to say. And that, to me, is quite interesting because it just means that the government doesn't have to produce its own propaganda. And the propaganda stuff that the Trump administration puts out is just basically like torture porn, you know, like it's like these DHS videos. It's just like,

I genuinely think because I don't think they appeal to that many people. I just think they appeal to like freaks on Twitter, right? Yeah. And there's not that many of them. There are a lot of people who will see Nick Shirley and be like, oh, that's just like a nice boy asking questions about this fraud. And they'll believe that that's real. Yeah, they're not going to look into all the connections that Nick Shirley has to the Minnesota GOP and all that. They just, they see it and they see it has a lot of views. And they're like, oh, well, he must be doing something, right? You wrote a great end of year piece about five media trends from last year that you think will end up being a big deal going forward. Just want to go through them quickly with you because

I thought they were on point, starting with Ryan Liz's substack series on Olivia Newtsey. and the RFK Jr. I think I hate that this model might work, but you want to explain why you think it could? Yeah, I just think that serialized publication reading is like the oldest form of reading and that there will be people who will be, like if you want to draw subscriptions

and that's what everybody wants to do, including us, right? The best thing you can do is leave a cliffhanger about a story that people think is kind of juicy and exciting. And if that whole thing had been one post, I would not have sent Ryan Liz of $5 a month, right? But I did because I was like, got to see what happens. Still waiting on part nine, by the way. Yeah, exactly. You know, I will say that I wrote this thing and it was around part three or something like that where this thing came out and maybe it was part four.

And then by part seven, I was like, okay, look, you got to stop emailing me. So too many emails. The declining quality was quite rapid. Yeah, exactly. after a while. I was texting my mom. I was like, I think this guy,

Ryan Liza, emails me more than you, you know? Like the most emails I get from anybody is from Ryan Liza. But I do think that more and more people as newsrooms contract and that people have these reporting skills. I do think that that's how this will happen. I think it'll happen in sports quite a bit.

And I think it'll happen. Always everything in media ends up just being true crime in the end. And that'll be like the big frontier of this, I think, is true crime. That's where podcasts went, right? That's where TV news, like you said, Dateline and 48 hours, like they all just turn into like shows about either a husband that kills a wife or a wife that kills a husband. And then, you know, that's how they. I do wonder if it may, one benefit of this, it may solve the challenge of investigative journalism, which like I know now when I see a Times piece or Washington Post piece or whatever, just, big institutional outlet that clearly has spent a ton of money. And there's, you know, four reporters on the byline with this like, you know, a couple thousand word investigative piece. And it ends up getting as much attention as someone's tweet.

Yeah, or much less, yeah. It always makes me a little sad because I'm like, all of the rest of us are going to be talking about that piece of journalism. But those people actually did the work and we need that work. We need the source work to actually do something. And I don't know how you're going to fund that. But maybe if you start doing investigative journalism where it's like a six-part series that you're charging people for and you leave cliffhangers, you know, maybe you get more investigative journalism. Yeah, we should send it to the audience team at the Times. Yeah, Barbarra's doing cliffhangers on the daily.

All this fraud going on. If you'd like, download the cooking app and subscribe, right? And then you can get it. Offline is brought you by Sundays. What do you want more of this year? More health, more happiness, more time with the ones you love? How about yes, yes, and yes, right? Well, how about you share some of that new year, new meat energy with your four-legged friend and feed them Sundays?

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financially supports local independent book. We love independent bookstores here. I have one of my neighborhood called Chevaliers, one of the oldest bookstores in Los Angeles, and they're fantastic. We love to support that independent bookstore and others because it's important and it's helpful in a community to have your own independent bookstore. So use code offline 10 to get 10% off your next order at bookshop.org. That's offline 10 at bookshop.org for 10% off. How does AI change news and journalism now that we've got AI just sort of creeping into stories? Yeah, it's interesting. There was a story that was happening where a Toronto publication, one of the editors of it, had realized that one of the people who had pitched a story, A, did not live in Toronto as she had represented herself and had written a lot. She had a lot of clips in that a lot of these had seemingly used AI, right?

And so the question was like, now that we have this ecosystem in news where most people are freelancers, people aren't really on staff. We don't ever really see each other. I've worked at New York now for three and a half years. I've not been in the office yet. Well, I went once like when I was hired, but in three and a half years I haven't been back, right? And so that means that all sorts of things can happen, right? There's no real oversight on any of this. And these LOMs are getting much better at writing. You know, some of them, I don't know, it's like something I'm probably write better than me. And in the end, you're just like, well, will this overtake journalism and will we just be reading a lot of slop and maybe not even

know about it, right? And I don't know. I don't know what the answer to that is, but I do think that what will happen is that a lot of things will be seated over just because we don't really have, A, the money or even like the sort of infrastructure and the employment base to really produce the amount of news at the public demands at this point. So I imagine it's going to creep in a lot. Yeah, I do worry there's also a, I mean, everyone will talk about like sort of the misinformation problem. There's also a lowest common denominator problem where everything starts to, you see this with LLMs already, everything starts to seem the same, sound the same. There's sort of like a lack of creativity because that's what they can't do without new source material and the more that we're just relying on,

or at least these models are relying on sort of old source material, then everything starts sounding the same. And so I don't know if there becomes like a backlash to that. And that's how people realize that they're just reading AI slop again or what, but it doesn't seem like a good development, that's for sure. Yeah, yeah. My co-host, a podcast I do, and I did this experiment once where we fed the transcripts of some of our podcasts

into one of the LLMs, and we had it write a script, and then we had the AI version of our voices, read it, and did the beginning of the podcast. Welcome to Time to Say Goodbye. Today is March 6, 2024, and I'm Jay Caspian Kang. And it wasn't that far off.

You know, the only thing is it just messed up a little bit less than we do, you know? And that's about it, right? And it was more cordial to one another, you know? I mean, at some point, you'll be able to tweak all that. Yeah, it'd be easy to go back. It would take two minutes to, like, add in like five, like, oh, wait, is your audio right, you know, or whatever it is, I would make it feel more real. Yeah.

You write about streamers politics maxing, which is basically talking about sort of algorithmically popular political topics to chase views. It's interesting this is happening with streamers, even though a lot of other non-political media and entertainment personalities in Trump 2.0 have sort of stayed away from politics more than they have in the first term. Why do you think that is? I think it happened before this, but the big flashpoint was Theo Vaughn talking about Gaza, right? That got so much attention and so many views. And around that time, I think a lot of the other streamers decided that they were also going to talk about Israel and Gaza, right? And Joe Rogan decided that he was going to, I mean, Joe Rogan is so big that I don't

think he's actually affected by these types of algorithmic forces, right? But the other people who had like Aidan Ross, for example, who I don't mean this to slander him, but I don't know if he's ever read a book, right? And I don't, he's never talked about politics. He's a game streamer guy. and he starts talking about politics, right? And that I think that the algorithm was really rewarding, specifically TikTok, I think, was rewarding politics conversations.

And this is when you have like the rise of a lot of people like Dean Withers, right, who is a guy on the left or Hassan Piker, and that these clips keep getting unearthed on social media, Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts or whatever. And then obviously when that's all you see and that you, you see tons of views on it, then everybody else is going to do it, right? And I think that that is interesting because it can just go away. They could just change the algorithm.

So basketball is the thing that everybody thinks about, and then everyone's going to talk about the MBA. And that part of it is really interesting to me because at that point, you just think, well, people do have control over what the conversation is at this point, right? Because everyone is just incentivized to follow the algorithm. It's fascinating to me the difference between, because I've seen the difference now between podcasting and doing stuff on YouTube, because you don't have those incentives when you're just doing a pod because there is no search algorithm there, at least not one that's as sophisticated as YouTube. And so when you're thinking of topics to podcast on, you're like, well, I'm going to just going to talk about what's on the news and what I care about. And then you do YouTube and it's like, well, Epstein file stuff is really, it's just really cooking this week.

Yeah. shit, I don't want to just follow the algorithm the whole time. But the incentives are clearly there for people. You mentioned the continued rapid decline of actual news outlets, especially local news. But you say you ultimately believe that people will support local news efforts that try to meet them somewhere in their regular rounds through the internet. I really want to believe that. What's your reason for believing it? Well, I mean, after I wrote that, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette decided that it was going to close.

And that's, you know, yet another main. legacy newspaper that is an American institution that has just decided, hey, we're just not going to do this anymore. It's really concerning. And I think that what basically is happening right now is that both tech companies and NGOs are the things that are supporting local news through grants and initiatives and that there are all these little newsrooms that pop up all the time. At UC Berkeley, for example, they have like in the school of journalism, they have grant money that they give out and they sort of teach people how to start local newsrooms as well. The sort of the viability of that on a large scale is difficult to imagine, right?

Like you can have small operations that people really love that do really great work and that might win some awards and things like that, but is there a business behind that outside of if all the money has to come from the grants? And I do think that at some point, something will arise, but it will be very small and always be independent and it will always be like a small, small version of something that caters to a specific audience, but it will also be local. And so here, where I live, for example, there is a woman who used to work for local news outlet called Berkeley Side, which has sort of our newspaper, which she stopped working there,

and she just basically does crime reporting here. And there is a population here that is very concerned about crime, and they support her, right? And that she's able to make a living that way, and she gets a lot of scoops because nobody else here reports on crime. If you ask some of the people, they'll be like, oh, that's because of wokeness or whatever. I think rather there's also a lot of not that much crime here, right? But because of that, she's both able to capitalize on the fact that she seems like

the one person willing to tell the truth about crime, a catalytic converter theft or whatever. And she also is able to have an audience that really wants that type of local news. And I think it'll be a big ecosystem of things like that. It's interesting. you mentioned that crime works because it is like, I've heard someone say that like local sports, high school sports is like a good way to sort of anchor local news because people like to pay attention to high school sports. The similarities with sports and crime is it is this more like

you need to kind of dramatize the news locally because, you know, everything's nationalized now. And that's why people pay more attention to national news and they do local news because local news seems boring to them and national news seems exciting. It's game of right, who's up, who's down. And obviously that is not great and has not led to great things. But it feels like if local news is going to be successful, people are going to need to figure out a way to make it more clickbaity than it is right now. Yeah, and high school sports also has a benefit that it happens and it has a result and that you can report on it, you know, whereas like, what are we going to do about housing in the Bay Area? Although that, I guess, is the most, if you go on Twitter, it appears to be the only thing that people want to talk. Yeah, if you want to, if you want to yell about abundance for eternity.

Yeah, it's like half the Democrat. It's like, I don't know. I'm surprised. I'm like, I live here. I care about housing, you know, but like, why should somebody else care about my housing problems? I don't know. But, you know, it's wild. It seems like it's really gotten big.

So maybe that's the worst example that I couldn't have given. But, you know. Yeah, but people covering like school committee meetings and town hall meetings. That's not as it, yeah. Last media train you write about is one. I've spent way too much time talking about on this. show, which is that Twitter is no longer the media's village square. You write that we'll miss it more than we think. What do you think we're losing with the Village Square version of Twitter? Or what do you

think we've lost since we've almost lost it? Well, I think it was democratizing in some sort of way, right? It did demand a different variety of voices. It was fun to follow things in real time as they happened, even though obviously that came with all sorts of problems, right, during the Boston Marathon. bombing, for example, just all this, I don't, I don't like to use word missing. Just people are like making stuff up, right? Or they were wrong about something. And some people really had their name tarnished in ways that it shouldn't have been, same thing happened at Brown, right?

But that wasn't, that wasn't the media doing at that time. That was just like people acting horribly. But I think that there was a time when the news felt a little bit more accessible to people and that the public could interact with it, right? Like they could yell at me, for example, or they could yell at you. and that I think for people like us, it was actually quite helpful to have that accessibility because it meant that we were more than just bylines or that we were more than just like a face that popped up that was inaccessible.

And obviously that is all curdled and now become what you see today. I mean, it's quite unbearable to go on that website, especially the last couple of days. I mean, I don't even want to give like attention to the stuff that you see. I mean, it tests your faith in humanity in a way that is surprising when your job is to kind of wade through that stuff all the time. Like, it just seems to be getting worse. And I don't know. It's pretty weird. I don't know.

I think, look at Twitter and it's like, it's like all dudes. A lot of dudes yelling. Yeah, it's like tribes of dudes. It's like the Bay Area Housing dudes, you know, yelling at like the leftist dudes, you know. And then there's like the Nazi dudes yelling at the, it's just crazy. It's just a lot of dudes yelling at each other. And all of them are like the most unpleasant person that you've ever met in your life.

And it's horrible. So it doesn't surprise me that most people have to camp somewhere else, right? They either are doing video podcasts or they're on blue sky or whatever. But yeah, I think it's pretty much over. I just think it's a place where you go to sort of like if you want, like a blast in the face of like humanity or something. You're like, all right, I'll go look at these tweets about like what happened in Minnesota. Yeah, I find myself like, because I am addicted to it still, I'm still on there. Partly it's because of my job, but partly it's like, I'm like, what am I looking

for here? I'm looking for a place. Ideally, it would be a place where people who cover the news and politics for living as well as, you know, perhaps politicians that actually want to speak like humans and not have their like staff post for them sort of gather share news talk about stuff you know maybe they get out of hand once in a while and say stupid shit but like whatever it's sort of a dysfunctional place that you can still go to get informed and to like hear interesting discussions I'm like I'm looking for that and that's certainly not Twitter anymore but it's also not any of these other spaces it's like we don't have that now anymore yeah we definitely don't I mean the good faith part of it is gone. And I think that's just a reflection of just country's discourse at this point.

And if you want to find that, then maybe you just have to go to like a coffee shop or something. You know, I just try and organize these things with some of my friends because I'm, like, getting older now and where I see these people in Berkeley. And I think they all were probably part of the new left together. And they're in their 70s. They're at a coffee shop and they're having conversation for like three hours. They're just sitting there. And I don't know. I kind of want one.

I've been trying to organize one of those for years because it's like my ideal life. It's a good idea. Yeah, but Twitter was kind of that, you know, for a little bit, right? And that's why we all liked it. And we would be like, I don't know. I didn't think I would be able to talk to and interact with people in different parts of the industry or even people who were working in politics and stuff like that. And that was very exciting.

And now it's just, you know, none of that is true anymore. It's just like everybody is either. selling something or they're, you know, kind of being demagogic about whatever it is. It's like, you know. I find myself thinking that whenever I go back to D.C., which I do very sporadically now, and I get back to L.A. and I'm like, well, you know, it's horrible and I'm glad I'm not there anymore, but it's small and dense and concentrated enough that you always run into people who are in politics and media, which you don't, it doesn't happen as much in L.A. And I'm like, Oh, having those conversations with people, you know, I'm glad I don't do it every single day.

I'm glad I don't live there anymore. I did that for 10 years. But it is nice to be around people in real life who share those interests where you can actually talk to them without having to have it mediated by algorithms. That is a nice thing. So maybe I'll try to get one of those going down here, down here in LA too. Yeah, yeah, I know. I wish I had that with writers here, but all the writers who live around me are way more famous and successfully. You know, it's like Michael Lewis and Michael Pollan. You know, like, hey, you guys want to hang out at the coffee shop with me. Michael Lewis would be a good hang.

I bet. Yeah, yeah. Look, I just, like, you know, I just feel bad. I feel like, I think I'm wasting your time. You know, you write a book a year. Well, if you're ever down in L.A., let me know. We'll hang out at a coffee shop. We'll talk politics.

Jay, Casimir King, thank you so much for joining. And really appreciate it. This is good. Thank you. One quick note. exciting news for Friends of the Pod and anyone who wants even more Pod Save America. We just launched a new weekly newsletter. It's called Pod Save America OpenTabs.

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