Pirate Wires - A Fiery, But Mostly Peaceful Conversation About The Media | PIRATE WIRES EP#5

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

EPISODE FIVE: On this week's Pirate Wires Podcast, Mike is joined by Kmele Foster and Ben Smith to discuss the death of new media. We get into the unrealized hope for new media, how Trump changed the media landscape, "disagreements" over mostly peaceful protestors, the death of BuzzFeed and straightening of the New York Times, and the future of the media. Featuring Mike Solana , Kmele Foster, Ben Smith Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: New Media Is Dead: https://www.piratewires.com/p/new-media-is-dead-long-live-new-media Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Kmele Twitter: https://twitter.com/kmele Ben Twitter: https://twitter.com/semaforben TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro - Welcome Kmele & Ben To The Show! 3:15 - The Death Of New Media - What Went Wrong?? 10:50 - How Subscription Services Took Over 14:10 - How To Build Subscriptions, Homogenization Of Everything1 5:15 - Trump & Facebook - Is FB To Blame? 23:00 - How Trump Changed Everything 26:50 - Daily Wire's Rise, NYT Dominance 28:00 - Elon Takes Over Twitter - Future Of Twitter 34:00 - Will Threads Succeed? 35:30 - Censorship On Twitter (C*ovid, H**ter B*d*en) 41:00 - Jan 6th & Riots 45:00 - The Future Of Media - Fragmentation of Media 53:50 - Will Mike & Kmele Be Future Writers For The NYT?! 54:28 - Listen To The "Fifth Movement" Podcast! Read "Traffic" By Ben Smith and "Semafor" 54:55 - See You Next Week! Pirate Wires Podcast Every Friday!!

All right, happy Friday. Welcome back to the pod. I have two huge guests in the world of new media today. I've got Camille Foster, my good friend from the fifth column and Freethink. And over to the right, actually, I'm not really sure if it's the right on your screen, it's the right on my screen. We have the one, the only BuzzFeed Ben, formerly BuzzFeed Ben, now the editor-in-chief of Semaphore and a founder of Semaphore, a new, new media company. Semaphore Ben on all platforms. Semaphore Ben. Follow him.

Like, subscribe. Also, like and subscribe to this podcast. I never ask people to do that, and I'm realizing YouTubers do that, so we got to get into it. The topic of today's conversation is just, it's the media. And I think, so Camille and I have known each other forever. And we've, I think probably, originally it was a Founders Fund Connect. And then, I mean, what we have in common is media, our love of media and also other stuff. But that was like, I think the thing that we talked a lot about, certainly Ben and I,

like I only, I think, know you through my perspective on media. And we ended up following each other. Yeah, just arguing with Sether and Twitter. Softly. Yeah, softly, I would say. I mean, I wouldn't say it's been that brutal between us. No, it reminds me of like the good old days of Twitter when you could have like good faith arguments with non-maniacs. Yes. Or with maniacs who were suppressing there.

I think what goes a long way, and I won't even, before we get into the whole conversation, I mean, Ben just wrote a great book, Traffic, on the history of new media, or really the rise and fall of new media, I would say. And that's going to kind of frame the conversation. And then we're going to get into,

obviously, Elon Musk and threads, Mark Zuckerberg, all of that, the future of media. But it is true. You and I, I think there's another journalist who I'm not going to throw his name out there, but I just, he went after me years ago and I was like, that sucks actually. Cause I like his writing and very rarely do I have that reaction. Usually I'm just like, fuck that. I'm going to roast them back and it's going to be so much worse. But this one, I was like, oh damn. And I actually just like wrote that. I was like,

Hey, like this bums me out. Like, I really like your stuff. Um, and then we just started, he like apologized and then we like followed each other. And then we started DMing and we have like this kind of nice behind the scenes conversation of friendship. But I have a lot of that with people in media now where for whatever tribal reason, it's just, um, and it was a lot worse, I think a couple of years ago, but, uh, people just, you know, you don't want to be seen as like nice to your perceived ideological combatants. And in that era, it was the tech first, everybody else sort of phase. Um, and I think if you can just get in DMS, things kind of, kind of chill out and that's, that's beautiful. But I don't really remember the Twitter days you talk about because

I was just a wee lad, uh, 23 working at Penguin, terrified of Gawker when you were architecting all of my nightmares over at Buzzfeed. Um, let's talk about, I want to talk about, I want to talk about, uh, I want to talk about your work, um, this book traffic and, and the history of this, because, um, let's see, I guess maybe a few months back, I think it's the reason you sent me the book. Vice and the end of BuzzFeed News. And it occurred to me that when I started in tech, everybody believed everybody in tech, not just media, but like in tech, there was a general belief that old media was dead. The New York Times days were completely numbered. It was obvious. It was like a lewd-eyed opinion to think anything else. And the future was BuzzFeed as clownish and silly as it looks, just because of the quizzes and whatnot, they were doing serious news as well. And the future would look different, but like that was the future. And I was, it was a shocking sort of moment to be like, wow, we were really just

so wrong about that. Take me, why don't we just start with like, go back to the beginning and, uh, and tell me, I mean, was that the sense that you had to kind of back then? And, and what was, what was all of that like, sort of the new media era? Yeah, I mean, I think it is sort of hard to get your head back into that moment. But there was this moment, probably after the bubble burst in San Francisco in 99, 2001. And there was this meme, which was like, it's laughable, actually, to think of now. But that Silicon Valley was dead. was like, it's laughable actually to think of now, but that Silicon Valley was dead and the center of investment, energy, and sort of like dynamic new companies was Silicon

Alley in New York, in Manhattan. And this is like a three year, it's a very short period. Some point Facebook gets going and some other companies, but there was this sense that like this intersection of kind of culture and technology, which is to say Huffington Post and Buzzfeed and other insider and media companies, but also like adjacent companies. Etsy is one that made it. Foursquare was huge in that moment. This was like the new frontier. And New York, because it was where the old media was, was like the place for that intersection. And meanwhile, I think like in the broader culture, which we'll kind of forget again,

you know, the old media, which people, I think, romanticize a lot now. Like, remember the days when the newspapers, the Metro newspaper, you know, where everything is all so great and three television stations, you know, had just massively discredited themselves and their coverage of the Iraq War for lots of regular people. Right. And meanwhile, we were all already emailing and looking at the web and these new television channels and newspapers just weren't on the internet or in any normal way. Like when they tried to be on the internet, it was like they were speaking. It was like Linda Iaccarino's tweets. It was like they were not on the platform. And so there was this real logic for an audience to say, wow, we're just going to communicate this is 50 million, a hundred million, 10 million,

like big chunks of money. And Disney would have, as you wrote about. Disney would have, like, what were they thinking? And it's actually like very specific what they were thinking. A lot of them had been around at the birth of cable and they'd seen, you know, these guys lay, these boring cable operators lay wires in the ground, and they need people to then at the end of the wire pay the monthly fee, and what they need in there is content. And so they pay huge amounts of money to MTV, to ESPN, to CNN, to these huge successful new companies that do expensive work, basically, of creating content. And the long-term 50-year run of the cable business

is built around like a pretty generous revenue share with the people who make the content. And actually like the cable business isn't such a good business because they have to pay all this money to CNN and MTV and Fox. And like, I think the thesis was there's these new wires. The wires are, you know, it's unclear exactly which level is the wire. Maybe it's Apple or maybe maybe it's Facebook, or maybe it's something else. But somewhere in this digital space, there are these new pipes being laid. Maybe it's Snap and Twitter. They're going to compete against each other. And eventually, if you make content that's really good for them, they're going to wind up paying for it because they're competitive with each other. And they want to sort of each wants the better. And as you know, I still slightly have this dream, but obviously did not

work out that way. Question of whether it was always totally delusional that would ever work out that way, that news publishers, that media publishers would ever be being paid by Facebook and Twitter and staff. Maybe that was delusional or maybe it just didn't break that way. But that's the reason both people invested in why it was such a disaster. I think what you were right about, which the New York Times was sort of, and the sort of old guard media was sort of ignoring at the time, was that something very important and new was coming and that you had to take the internet seriously, right? I think there was like an aesthetic issue here, which is that when things would go viral, they would be silly. And so the internet felt silly and not real. I remember

as a kid, like early 2000 thousands in the basement on message boards, and I would get all worked up talking to strangers about fucking X-Men comics. And I would go upstairs visibly upset. And I remember my mom saying like, like, Michael, why are you so upset? They're not real. Like they, they are not real. That phrase came out of her, out of her mouth. And I was just like, that's crazy. Like she has no idea. I'm talking to a guy from England right now. That's insane. Like it's a very big deal. And it's just like there was a basic, they didn't take the internet seriously at all. But what nobody maybe really understood was the degree to which it would be different and weird in that it would amplify single people over even institutions. single people over even institutions. And so, I mean, there was so much content all of a sudden. Camille, I don't know if you want to jump in here. I wonder what your sense was of that era. No, I think Ben encapsulated it pretty well. What's interesting though, is that in addition to those cable providers and their initial opportunity that they're trying to capitalize

on being all of the various television stations that they were beginning to seed, they were still playing a very similar role in the internet ecosystem as well. You needed that connectivity to get online in addition to the devices. So the subscription revenue still made great sense for them, but that connection between the subscription revenue and the resources that were going to fund the content operations was completely broken. And that spelled doom for a lot of these people who were entering into the ecosystem. I think the one other thing I'd say is I suspect a lot of what ended up happening is that there is just no there's no gate around the Internet. There's no gate around the internet. Anyone can log on, can take a couple of hundred thousand dollars, really, maybe even tens of thousands of dollars and essentially start a channel.

And if it catches fire and is starting to work, they are cannibalizing some of that attention that would have gone to Tubi or BuzzFeed or some other offering. And that's a really huge deal as well. It's hard to make really significant investments when you don't have that assurance that this is gonna work. But the main thing that, the title of Ben's book is Traffic.

I think the whole early era was, I think it's such a great title, by the way, and it does just completely define everything that people were thinking about then. But also I think sometimes the way that people are incorrectly thinking about things now because the winner was not just, it wasn't just like the New York times one subscription, the subscription model is what is what, and we push back here, but I

believe it was the subscription model that won because what people actually, what you actually needed to survive was a, an audience that trusted you and, and liked you enough to pay. Um, everybody who was surviving on advertising revenue seems to have died. And that was the weird thing about that is it was like the idea that New York Times jumps in, I forget the year, was it like 2011 or what year was that? Yeah, they started playing around with it in 2011. And they were like, we're going to pile drive into subscriptions. That was the piece

specifically that seemed so dated and old, almost laughably so. It was like, we used to pay for the news, but no one pays for information now. It's free. And nobody will ever pay for it. Yeah. No one do it. I believed. I was like, that's crazy. No one's going to pay for information. Like what is this, 1920? This is insane. It felt kind of offensive that they were taking this from us. It was so dumb that dumb that it's exactly right. It ad revenue. And that's actually what new media did. I mean, would you kind of, am I right there roughly in my diagnosis? Yeah, I think I tend not to be as ideological about subscriptions and advertising. When you look at like successful mature media businesses, and this is like the most boring thing you can say,

but if you look at like Disney or NBC Universal and you say, what business are they in? It's like, well, they're in 14 different businesses, including advertising subscriptions and theme parks and cruises and 11 other things. And it's not, media is not such a, and I think this is actually something that Silicon Valley thinking brought to the media business, like much to the media business's

like ultimate kind of tragedy was like, we're gonna figure out a silver bullet, single focused business that can scale. Like that's the models. You got to stay focused in your startup. You have one thing, it scales. And then you believe in that, like a religion. And maybe it's Buzzfeed early, it was custom, it was native content, new internet native advertising. And then for a period, I would say that's over now, it was subscriptions. And it'll ultimately for successful media businesses be a mix of things. I think you're seeing a lot of sub stackers, a lot of subscription businesses hit a ceiling

and find, oh wait, the ad business over there is pretty good. Let's go over there now. And I think ultimately there'll be a lot of mixed models, but I do agree with you that a lot of people bet wrong on what this digital media space was going to look like. And actually, the reason it changed was that it wasn't the news didn't drive it. The New York Times didn't drive it. Spotify and Netflix trained a generation of people who had not paid for content, something you could on your phone, and were doing it every month, pay for content. And the rest of us little minnows in the media space, which is news, could stream along behind them.

Is the subscription revenue a proxy for something as well? I mean, you'd mentioned, Ben, I believe either trust or credibility a moment ago and the role of coverage of the Gulf War or the Iraq War being something that was a real kind of really damaged a lot of people's credibility in the media space. I suspect that that is perhaps what's going on when people are paying for particular people on Substack. Like they trust this person, they value this relationship in a particular way. And absolutely, I mean, having Bill, a rather prominent Substack, we're definitely also interested in ads. But you know something about that too, Solana.

It is a proxy for that. But actually, another way to build great subscription businesses is to lie constantly. Sure. If you look at the best subscription businesses around, if you look at the top of Substack, you see Alex Berenson, right? I just think it's not quite so straightforward. But it's still trust. Even if they're lying, it's trust.

Right, it's trust. But it's saying, and if you look at the Iraq War period, I mean, the New Republic, as I said, it was one of the leaders, sort of most prominent forces cheerleading the war. I don't think it's, I think people, in my own experience now that I'm old in media, is that everybody talks their book

and tells you that whatever revenue mix that they are invested in is actually not just a good way to do business, but like deeply moral and true. And a land of kind of fishing for attention because there's a limited amount of it. And critically, what we really have to talk about here are the platforms because a tiny change in the algorithm completely changes what has to change your entire strategy. And then separately, what it does,

in a world where everybody's fishing for the exact same attention and there's just a very specific set of things that get you that attention, everyone sounds the same. So there's no differentiation. And that is really, I think, that was why the new media companies died is because they didn't sound new. They didn't feel like anything to me. They were completely disposable. Yeah, you're total. There's this homogenous Facebook drove this incredible homogenization. kind of written about how this was a big driver of the Trump era. And maybe Obama was the precursor.

These crazy Silicon Valley people sort of didn't know the Kraken they had unleashed. And it seems to me a little bit that it seems like it misses the point of what's happening. And maybe Facebook did create this movement. But my sense was like the realities of globalism created this this this oh yeah i think if you ask yeah it just seems like by writing about it in this way you almost missed you almost missed the reason that so many people felt the way they did facebook just gave them a platform to talk about those things but it's like that stuff had come and it you wrote about it as if and many people do this right now and so maybe in pushback i could be mischaracterizing your position but it's like that stuff had come and you wrote about it as if, and many people do this right now. And so maybe in pushback, I could be mischaracterizing your position, but it seems like many people write about this moment as if it's new, but it's like very Reagan-esque. And

before that it was Nixon and Goldwater. There is this resurgence of the populist, let's call them the common sense right or something, like the folksy, like the guy at the factory. Populism. Yes, it seems like a major part of American history and almost inevitable. Yeah. So I guess I think that when you ask a journalist or about, which category that includes the three of us,

basically, about... Basically. It's not a word I love. My first boss told me a journalist is an unemployed newspaper man. So maybe it doesn't include us. But why something happened, they'll tell you the one reason. And if you ask a historian, they'll tell you, well, there's 23 reasons. And I think certainly the rise of right and to some degree left-wing populism in the 2010s, well, there's 23 reasons. And I think certainly the rise of right

and to some degree left-wing populism in the 2010s, there are a lot of reasons. People were really angry about the Great Recession, about the Iraq War, about globalization. For sure. Yeah, absolutely. And imagine a world where there's not social media in this form that expresses itself in some different way. But also, but you know, that said, it flowed, there were elements of it that kind of flowed together with these changes in media, then I'm not sure I'm not going to like make some big claim about cause and effect. critique. And I just searched in my book on page 242, I have a big, like, to be sure, several pages saying that, like, there's not cause and effect here, the Cambridge Analytica was nonsense, etc. But I do think when you look at the shape and the sort of color of this sort of right wing populist movement around Trump and around Duterte and around Bolsonaro and all over the world, it was not really an American phenomenon. A big part of it was these leaders proving to alienated, angry people that they were truly outsiders, that they were really

not part of this corrupt establishment. And they did that by saying outrageous shit. They said sexist things. They said gross sexual stuff. They said racist stuff. They said stuff they'd lied. They said stuff that was, I'm not sure it was calculated, but they had the effect of having the whole establishment say, like wag their finger and say, you are beyond the pale. And that bonded them to an audience who fell into an electorate who felt that they were outside that establishment. I mean, this is ridiculous. And Facebook was built, and Facebook in that moment, not deliberately, but happened to be built around these engagement dynamics where that style of politics worked so well. Like Mitt Romney could not get one like on Facebook. Right. but the media generally was exactly of the opinion that you have now. And what is it?

The characterization of Trump is just like sexist and misogynistic. And like you go to the racism and it's like, you're not listening to any of the actual, or maybe you're listening, but you're not hearing, you don't seem to care about the actual motivation behind it, which is why people hated the media, which is what you, it's like, that's the reason that Trump was, it was so easy for him to vilify the media because the media really was his enemy. And if you're his enemy, then you're the enemy of all of the people who actually he's speaking to. And it's not the racism that's motivating them, as you mentioned, like many times, like the economic reality of your life. I think. Well, again, I think, I don't think it's quite that simple. There had been,

I mean, there have been American politicians like Bernie Sanders for decades and the right and the left in Pat Buchanan who had been, I I mean, that's shared. There's a strain of economic populism. But in the 2010s, all over the world, and it's totally not just Trump, and you're in racism, sexism, whatever, it doesn't matter. In Duterte's Philippines, it was about threatening to throw people out of helicopters. But I just mean those things that in our cultural context, Like, it was just a bit, but I just mean those things that in our cultural context, the way to get the establishment to yell at you was to say stuff that was sexist or racist. And it totally worked. And it got the establishment wagging their fingers at him. And it validated him with people who I agree were not, I don't think they were primarily attached to him because they agreed with him. But some gross thing he said about women, they thought it was funny. But they also thought it was funny that all the people like me were wagging their fingers and they felt like they were in on the joke and we weren't. And that there was this style of politics that was very, very effective. And he did really dominate Facebook where a lot of more conservative people, people were more conservative on these issues, by the way, Mike Huckabee, whatever, like we're not going to get traction

because there was a style that really, really did work on social media all over the world. Yeah. Well, in many respects, I mean, he didn't just jump his turn. He sort of jumped over the turnstile altogether and pushed everybody else out of line. I mean, the reason why he broke through to the American public broadly has a tremendous amount to do with his celebrity, with our ability to have certain kinds of conversations that circumvent what was kind of the establishment perspective on this person who was deemed unacceptable and couldn't possibly win. They had a different perspective. They had a different relationship with this client that didn't depend on elite media institutions. And that I do think Solana is very right.

Like there is this there was this dominant narrative about who he was. And there was the perspective of everyone else who actually went out and voted for him. And the delta between those two things is really important. And I'm I'm promoted the book for a very long time. But I think Martin Gury's take on just how information, information technology or information broadly has reshaped the media landscape and our culture and our political norms and institutions is hugely important. There are two guys I like to go back to. One is McLuhan. I think that's just like everyone goes back to McLuhan. It's like the greatest media philosopher ever. And then after that, Neil Postman. And Neil Postman wrote a book called Amusing Ourself to Death. McLuhan famously

talks about the way that our mediums kind of shape us. I just didn't know if the attention span to make it through either book. So I'm glad you're summarizing. So McLuhan, I didn't make it through his book either. It's a fat, dense book. But I've gone through it, read different essays. Postman, I've read cover to cover. It's a great book.

It's meant to be readable, I think. book i mean it's a short it's a it's meant to be readable i think um i think in this way i really do think it's i don't think it's like we can it's not like uh because we were talking online about certain things certain political outcomes happened i think it's more like one thing that is really strikes me as true is the mediums themselves altered the way that we've what is even acceptable politically and what is what is what looks what looks, what, what, what makes us laugh and what, what works. And the thing about Trump that I always, from the beginning, I mean, it was undeniable in the Republican, uh, in the Republican primary on stage, he's just, he was really funny. And there were people who didn't, didn't maybe understand that or didn't

want to believe that, but he's very, very, I've watched. I was just watching a clip of his the other day with Jeb Bush. Like he just Jeb Bush is not equipped for that. Like it was it was like when the Europeans came over to America with smallpox. It was like he they wiped out the other Republicans. They just they had no defense against that. the other Republicans. They just they had no defense against that. And there was one moment where Jeb's talking about his mom, like Trump maybe made some comment about his mom. And Jeb's like, don't talk about my mother. She's the strongest woman who's ever lived. And he's like, she should be running for president. My mom is the strongest woman I know. She should be running. This is not about my family or his family. Done. Like, over. He lost the the presidency it could never come back from that and that's because we're consuming sound bites like that like that's we've been rewired in a way to communicate this way and the people who communicate this way who who kind of ride along with the

medium are the ones who are rising to the top this happens not only in politics with acasio cortez i think he's also very very good at this, but also in business to a certain extent. Increasingly, you see this and certainly in media. Yeah. Although it's interesting because I totally agree with you. Trump's hilarious and people don't. And when you're really freaked out by him, like the prospect, this guy, the president, it's hard to be amused. And I think a lot of people who were scared about him did not see the humor in it. But if you were not, obviously a huge part of his appeal is how entertaining he is. I think a lot of Republicans, people love him, just miss him on TV all the time. He was such

a great show for them. But I think that you've also seen just over and over people try to imitate that style and how just like, not just, it's just how cringy it is. Like, I mean, obviously Rubio on that campaign, would it tie like the small hand stuff? Like, no. And actually when Elon was talking about measuring his dick the other day, it was like, oh no, like you are trying to do the Trump thing, but like only Trump can kind of do the Trump thing sometimes. And I think that's like, I mean, Trump is a quite unusual figure

and maybe the moment is passing a little too. Which do you think the Trump moment, you think maybe people are looking for? No, no, no. I think if he gets reelected, it'll be much, much more on the stuff that you were talking about first. Not that he's entertaining and new, but that people agree with him on immigration and on the FBI conspiracy theories. I think it's those other things or maybe the reason his message traveled. Maybe he doesn't even understand. He strikes me as like a savant,

not someone who is really thoughtful about, you know, I'm reading McLuhan and I know that I have to change my message to fit in with whatever. It's just like he has an instinct. He's pretty self-aware. I think he has an entertainer's instinct. He's had it since television

and now it's just like, but he's just made for the internet. It's way better for him. What about, I mean, we're kind of butting up against Elon here. We've got to talk about the future. I mean, we saw the rise and fall of the new media. New York Times is dominant today,

but so is, I mean, I would say, I think the Daily Wire is almost just as influential at this point. Certainly, they're having... Well, we'll see. Maybe that's too bold of a claim, but they keep growing. It's $100 million or more at this point in revenue a year. They are definitely the most powerful. I mean, it's like them and Fox. I think that they're more important than Fox because it's like the whole... You don't think so? No. I mean, if you're looking at like who reaches Republican primary voters who are elderly people and get them to vote, it's still Fox.

But Daily Wire, incredibly, I agree with you, rising. I mean, I think people like us overestimate the new thing and underestimate, like change happens, things get displaced, but you kind of look into the future and see that and underestimate sometimes. Like Fox, still pretty big thing, still reaches a lot of people.

You know, like I think, but I agree with you, Daily Wire, thing, still reached a lot of people. But I agree with you, Daily Wire, incredibly important, interesting acquisition target for Fox. So Elon buys Twitter. The media completely loses its mind. For good reason or not. I mean, let's just go back to six months ago. Is it more? December. I feel like that was the spike for me. That was when I wrote what felt like the grand grand finale elon takes twitter enters the house starts just firing everybody who had been censoring us that's the conclusion of the story um blue check status nuked paradigm shift complete overton window broadens, good thing or a bad thing? I mean, Ben,

what was your perspective as the man? That must have been horrible for you. I see it so different. I do think that, I don't know what your perspective is. I do hope that people, because I think that people had real theories about the ecosystem of Twitter and about their ideological enemies on Twitter. And to Elon's credit, he put his money where his mouth was and he thought, you know what, these people draw their status from these blue checks, I will charge them. And so I think that that thesis was clearly falsified. They didn't pay. Right?

And I think people misunderstand these social networks. I actually think Twitter was doomed by the time Elon bought it or pretty close. These are social institutions. They're much more like bars or nightclubs than they are like the water system. And you go there because your friends are there and because it's useful. And you go there for a while and then you have kids and you go to a different place or some of your friends leave or some guy buys the bar who you think is a jerk or none of those reasons and things just come and go and facebook's of the blue facebook apps obviously unraveling at the same time like

they'll tell you their traffic in the philippines is up but it's in that stage of social media where it's going away as we knew and becoming a short video player twitter i think it like you know the most the cultural moment where people thought it was fun to have these cross-ideological conversations ended a few years ago and like you know i think like that doesn't mean it was fun to have these cross-ideological conversations ended a few years ago. And, like, you know, I think, like, that doesn't mean it's going to go away. It doesn't even mean it's going to be a bad business. Like, Reddit, I think, is a great example of a social platform that endures, is wonderful. But nobody is like, you have to be on Reddit.

I can't do my job without it. It's just another thing. And I think that's where Twitter is going there. And I think it's actually totally fine. I mean, do you want to? want it yeah I mean it is interesting he just this morning I was looking at some of the new stuff with threads and Elon with Twitter and it it's an interesting dynamic that makes me wonder for not entering into this this phase of decentralization and fragmentation like on social platforms

as well there I mean it's already the case that now Twitter has a communities function, which I'm sort of in one community. I suppose I could be more online. I would probably be in another. You should be more online, definitely. You're not left online. But I think that if that trend continues, then the network effect that was driving you online

becomes a bunch of different network effects that are kind of keeping you in one place in one particular community, as opposed to, you know, Twitter having all of this profound sway because of the kind of broadcasting it allows you to do to a wider audience. that if the right sort of person builds a big mainstream social media platform, plenty of people are willing to give that a try in a way that they probably wouldn't have been willing to give it a try 12 months ago. But I just think if you think about it as a social institution, like the Twitter, you know, when the guy who owns the nightclub says, I like this set of customers better than this set of customers, like you're not going to be super surprised that the second set of customers leave. I think nobody would have been, maybe you would have been referring to it as a social

institution. I think the average person would not have been talking about it this way. Right. They were confused. Had Jack Dorsey still been in charge or had the following guy still been in charge today because it's an ideological shift that occurred. See, I think that you're seeing it that way. I think that you're seeing it that way because the reason that it's no longer fun for you

is because you're no longer amplified and winning. I love it. What are you talking about? See, this is what you're projecting. You just said it's no longer fun. You just said it's no longer fun. No, no, I don't mean for me, actually. You're still addicted and you love it.

I'm addicted. I'm on it all the time. You're talking about the others. And I love it. Okay, great. But obviously, a lot of people have left. I'm someone who, like the asshole who says he hates me. Who is left?

Buys the bar. Who is left? I still see them all tweeting. They're on threads hoping it's going to work, but they're still on. The celebrities left first. The celebrities never mattered. Who followed the celebrities for their tweets? No, let's talk about the celebrity.

Let's just go by the numbers, Ben. You are the traffic guy. You're the traffic guy. Let's look at Sarah Silverman's engagement on Twitter. I know Elon keeps releasing fake numbers. I don't know what Elon's talking about. I just went on Sarah Silverman's feed two days ago to go and look at her. There was something that someone was mad about, and I went to go just see what she's been up to.

She has like 500 likes on a tweet. People don't care what she has to say. This has been the case for a long time. There are celebrity outliers. But in general, there were people who were creating for Twitter specifically who were very popular. And that's the case across, I think, probably most of the platforms. There are celebrity outliers, but like your random people on television, even a lot of your news anchors. Taylor Swift still does tweets occasionally. Is a celebrity outlier.

Is a what? That's, I think, I mean, she tweets occasionally, but like a lot of celebrities used to be on there a lot and backed off it. I mean, I guess I just think you have a thesis that is sort of overlaid. I'm sure it's not the exact same

as the way Elon sees it, that is just demonstrably not playing out the way that he hoped. What do you think my thesis is? I don't think I've even laid out my thesis. Oh, I think his thesis,

which was about things like this, that this kind of brand safety didn't matter, that bringing one community, I don't think I've was a very, very, very difficult, unstable thing to maintain. And at the best of times, you come in and you slam your hand on one end of the table and say, I figured it out, and shit goes flying on the other end of the table now. It's not going to be fixable. It's just an era that's gone. I think the main thing is that we're not in a pandemic and we're not in the middle of an election right now. And we're about to approach another election, and that'll be the real test to see where people want to go. Th is already so to mark zuckerberg's threads already saying they're gonna silence political whatever i think that's a bait and switch and they won't it's just

going to be the sort of like very censored left of center to left-wing version of twitter is what i think what they're probably going for um but maybe i'm wrong and maybe it's not maybe politics yeah and i think but i think a lot of liberals would prefer that and will be there. And I think a lot of conservatives have a, I mean, I don't know. Like I see on Twitter every day and maybe it's, I may be following the wrong people, but I just see overt anti-Semitism that I probably went years of my career without, without being in conversations or seeing conversations about whether the Jews were like secretly manipulating things. And I don't mean this horrible Twitter. The worst thing of

Twitter is that people screenshotting their ideological enemies, like the dumbest people in the world and shoving them in the face. I don't mean that actually. I'm being served some stuff that I'm like, yikes, this is insane. I have a very high tolerance for this, by the way. I'm not going to close the platform. I scroll by whatever. It kind of grosses me out. But grosses me out. But I think there are a lot of people for whom the stuff that you say was being censored that was outside the Overton window, they didn't want to see it and they will vote with their feet. And a big part of the reason it was being censored, by the way, awful bad censorship, was that there were a lot of users on the platform and advertisers who would leave if they heard those opinions. I mean, that's a real thing. These are real dynamics, social dynamics. They're not ideological dynamics.

Well, the kind of censorship that I didn't want to see was censorship on vaccine stuff, on public health, on like, should I be forced to take the vaccine? Can I talk about that? Did it come from a lab? Like, these are the kinds of things that bothered me. Hunter Biden's laptop, can we talk about that? Like, those are the things that we really do need to talk about. And so the censorship- These are good examples. Like, we can talk, there are two things I have in here. It's like, there's like a product thing. And there's a question of what makes for a better product. And I am of mixed, I've never really, I liked Twitter. Like I didn't like the threat of being destroyed every day on Twitter. And by, I mean, by destroyed, I mean

erased. Like that was the fear. If I crossed some line, I would be erased. Uh, but the product I love Jack Dorsey is a design. He's like a design genius. I think he's, he's incredible at this. I think he built a really beautiful product and, um, I don't know what makes for the best product, but there's this separate question of what, what is better for the country. And, um, I think this is not, I don't, I also don't think Twitter is a free speech platform. I think that's pretty obvious at this point. I think that it's just a very different set of rules. I think that's pretty obvious at this point. I think that it's just a very different set of rules. I don't like the anti-Semitism stuff either. I think that there does- Should it get deleted? Should the anti-

Let's say I tweet something like, I don't know, I think the Jews have too much power in media. Who deletes that and why and how? It's really tricky at heart. That's why I like Jack's, I like the idea of the, I like the Jack, Jack's sort of blue sky approach. I think it's like, you don't want to live in a world where people can just be erased, but you also want platforms that you kind of opt into that sensor in whatever way that they want to do. And some people want a slightly wider bit. Some people want it, want a little bit less. Um, I mean, Camille's the anarchist in the chat. What do you think? Well, I'd certainly believe that private companies ought to be able to operate however they like. And in general, I am probably pretty partial to Jack's vision of this kind of decentralized choose your own adventure experience on social where you can decide how much of that stuff you want to be exposed to. And it, it seems to me that it wouldn't be too hard to at least allow for that kind of toggling on Twitter as well. Um, so that they have, you know, a regime that's perhaps a little more refined, a little,

a little more safe. Cause I, the stuff that actually bothers me is like the graphic video content that you'll get when you're like flipping through like a couple of tweets again. And there, there does seem to be a hell of a lot more of that kind of thing it's closed the app stuff it's stuff where you're just like ah yeah yeah i think it's it's enough for that so i do think that there's obviously a place for curating a kind of experience online what i don't want is to see as you were saying solana like legitimate perspectives and legitimate debate about things um thrown off of the platform because

of these like maximalist condemnations that appear out of nowhere. Part of the challenge is the expansion, expansive way that we use words like anti-Semitic and racist these days. There's a universe of things that only moments ago, everyone would have recognized, well, he couldn't have possibly meant it that way. And at this moment, it's, well, he couldn't have possibly meant it that way. And at this moment, it's, well, he obviously meant it this one particularly heinous way. As a result, he must be thrown off the platform and perhaps 15% of his followers too. I think seeing that go away is probably right. But pendulums nearly always do this, swing a little bit too far in the other direction when the correction happens.

I just think that people underestimate the natural tendency of one of these things is to fall apart and unravel. And that keeping all these people in your nightclub all day and all night is like unbelievably hard and entropy prevails. And Twitter had this moment where it somehow managed in this less polarized culture to have all these people who hated each other talking to each other all day. I don't really see it. But that's not true at all. It blew up

at the most polarized moment. That was when it was the most, when America was at its most divisive is when Twitter was the most popular. 2020, right? The height of that, that seems like the peak. But I don't know how the numbers are.

I think of 2016 as the peak, but I think we'd look at the numbers. I guess we could look at them. But I think- And the pandemic was, I mean, I think it's complicated. I just think it's hard to maintain that. Shamil, you mentioned the like, what was the phrase you used for censorship that was legitimate? And the pandemic was right. I mean, I think it publicly. And at that point, this is my thing that I always go back to is like, you had ideological consensus among a

very small handful of people in Silicon Valley who controlled all of our, like there are only a few major platforms. So they controlled our entire, that a monopoly on oligopoly, let's say on distribution. Ideologically, they had complete consensus with the people at sort of like, let's say the New York Times who set the tone for the entire elite press and significant elements of the government. So that's like, if you have that level of consensus across the board, then what is legitimate is like a very narrow set of things. Whereas now, and this is why I really, it's not that I, I think Twitter has gone, you know, remarkably, I think it's gone fine. I think it's not been obviously a slam dunks, never been better success. I think it's like, I need it. I really, really want it to work because we need one place where, where the rules are just different. Because if you have even one place that's even sort of

remotely popular, it, it kills the broad censorship thing completely. You will never have another moment. I hope where overnight the sitting president of the United States of America is deplatformed everywhere. What happened that night? Wait, what happened that night? Well, it depends. I mean, are you one of these people that's kind of like over? No, no, but just hold on. Like, remind me which night it was over that that happened.

Well, do you think it was a coup? Are you a coup person? No, just remind me. Did something like happen that day that freaked people out? What happened think it was a coup is this are you a coup person no just remind me what did something like happen that day that was a riot what happened it was a riot the same kind of riot that happened the six months previously and i don't think any of your friends were talking about those while i was locked in my house and rioting was legalized i consider you a friend i think my friends were no it's bullshit it's so crazy obviously the big the bigger danger was not that that small group of people the grandma and like the fucking shaman with his furry hat the bigger danger was not that, that small group of people, the grandma and like the fucking shaman with his furry hat.

The bigger threat was the oligopoly that silenced a president. Clearly. How is that not the bigger threat? I mean, I guess, you know, people can reasonable people can perhaps disagree on how serious the taking of the U.S. Capitol was, but a lot of reasonable taking of the Capitol. So, I mean, the people who ran into the government, chased all the legislators out and threatened to hang the vice president. Should have been shot. As all rioters-

Should have been shot. Jesus. Yes. I don't think they should have been shot. That's crazy. You're a hardliner. You don't think that someone who is ostensibly, you just said they were trying to take over the country.

I was pleased that they were able to get some people out of the building. They should have been shot. So what should we do to people who stormed the capital and tried to kill congressmen or whatever? What is this? Because this is the reason that Trump has deplatformed. I don't know. So what should we do to people who storm the Capitol and try to kill congressmen or whatever? Because this is the reason that Trump has deplatformed. I don't know. I think you're spending too much time on Twitter, man.

A lot of this stuff is pretty far from reality. Well, maybe we could take a step back for a minute because it does. I do think you're raising an important parallel, Solana. And I don't know if we want to have a January 6th conversation in particular, but there is something very interesting about the way that a lot of the platforms responded to, and not just the platforms, but public policy as well, responded to the protests that were ignited in May of 2020, and the way that they responded to January 6th. And a lot of that had to do with precisely the oligopoly that you were describing, Solana, with respect to the particular culture and cultural and philosophical milieu that pervaded a lot of elite media institutions, a lot of the top technology platforms as well, kind of shared their values. And it was easy for them to see one thing and to kind of paper over the excesses of that summer to kind

of ignore, very quickly perhaps to develop a sort of forgetfulness about just how crazy things were in November of 2020 when cities across America were being boarded up for fear that New York City and Washington, D.C. would descend into violent chaos if the election went the wrong way. Like that was the thing we were all preparing for when January 6th happened. I think appropriately in some respects, but in other respects, somewhat, there's a lot of hyperbole as well. Like there was probably a bit of a over response with respect to the way that some of that was treated. There were plenty of people who were, quote unquote, mostly peaceful. It's not impossible for me to imagine essentially the same kind of euphemism

being employed to describe that crowd that was used to describe people who in the summer of 2020 in June surrounded the White House, were shaking the fences and screaming that they wanted to kill the president of the United States. That's why I disagree with Solana about shooting, though. No, I definitely think you need to be shot. I think if you storm the Capitol building, you need to be shot. But that is not, I think that as you're alluding to, it's for me, there's a broader story here. The January 6th wasn't just one night. We forget how crazy that year was. We're talking about, we're in a world of coerced vaccination at that point.

We have the most polarized the country has ever been. We're still in a pandemic and cities have been under siege for months and months and months. And it's just like kind of normalized at that point. We were in a very crazy place. And I think a lot of that has to do with what you're allowed to talk about and what you're not. I'm glad that rioting, we all now agree that it's wrong because we didn't before that. Maybe moving forward, we just kind of of like we don't do that stuff again but i think to get to that place uh you need to be able to talk about it and that's why you need a place where you can talk about different things yeah i mean i guess that those all broadly seem like true facts to me i just think that like it's hard to abstract away say again i want to know

about the future so you guys both have media companies. I do as well. I think we're all in a way betting on this fragmentation, aren't we? I mean, I think that what Camille said before about fragmentation, I mean, I think that's what we're all seeing. I mean, I think that is a bet against the sort of continued dominance of centralized social media. Or maybe, or who knows, or about a turn in that space. But I think when you talk to, like, not to our own sort of demented brain damaged selves, but to actual consumers, what they tell you is like, you say

like, hey, do you like what you're getting in the news environment? Like, no. And they feel like totally overwhelmed by just the amount of crap. And they don't know who to trust. And they feel like even if they do trust the New York Times, they don't know which byline to trust. And they feel like totally overwhelmed by just the amount of crap. And they don't know who to trust. And they feel like even if they do trust the New York Times, they don't know which byline to trust. And they read a story in the New York Times. And then they have to Google the subject and like find six other stories to try to triangulate what happened. And that's a miserable experience. And so I think, you know, we're trying to, I think all of us probably in different ways are trying to build kind of direct connections with an audience who trusts us. I think from my perspective, a big thing we can do is both the two things that we're trying to do is like break big stories so that, you know, you know, to get into your headspace. But then, then even when we break a big story, say, here's the FT's version, here's Camille's version, here's some other

versions, some of which disagree with our analysis. And we're going to be really transparent about what are the facts, what are our analysis and to leave kind of a space for disagreement that I think he's like has gotten that people feel genuinely like they're being that the society of the incumbent, like big establishment publications and their ability to just use their kind of vestigial credibility to power through anything. If they're doing bad coverage, I think eventually it's going to catch up with them, even if they're doing it for audiences that want to hear a particular narrative. They're going to make a lot of mistakes and it's going to add up. I'd also say that in addition to betting on the fragmentation, I expect a lot of realignment and rebundling to happen as well. I'm bullish. I think there'll be a lot of weird experimentation and I hope to see more investment coming into the space as well.

So I think there are plenty of interesting opportunities there. Media is a hard business. It doesn't seem like it's doing better. It seems like it's getting harder and harder for new companies to emerge. And I think, I mean- Definitely harder to raise like $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz, I'll tell you that. Yeah, there's something, I mean, you have this recent history problem. This is the problem that Mark Zuckerberg had when he was raising. There was just a dot-com crash and everyone was like, are you crazy? I'm not giving a college student money. Everything I realized is once I started seriously writing, it was very hard to deny that most of what I was writing about was sourced by people, either the New York Times or something very New York Times adjacent. I could write about it as

much as I wanted, but they were creating the world that we lived in. And so that sets the bounds for the entire conversation. I don't know how you need a lot of resources to compete with that. So it seems like they're going to, like, do they just, are they thes for the entire conversation. I don't know how you need a lot of resources to compete with that. So it seems like they're going to like, do they just are they the winners for the next 10 years? Like, I mean, yeah, I think in my book, like I didn't really didn't expect the sort of conclusion of the book to be that the New York Times had won. I think it's just really clearly true. But again, it's a different kind of winning. And this is back to what you said about subscriptions. For the New York Times, I think they have a kind of stretch goal of having like maybe 10 million subscriptions

at some point. And they acquired The Athletic and they have Cooking and they have Crosswords. And so it's a country of 300 and what, three or 50 million people. And success for them doesn't require the kind of like broad cultural dominance that it would have for CBS News in the old days. It requires being like the sort of, you know, being the paper of record for a segment of society. And there's a lot, you know, and leaving and having a lot. And if you sort of annoy and alienate some people along the way, you know, that's fine. Other people can serve them. I wonder, can I ask a question, Solana, maybe? You can ask whatever you want, Camille. Great. Well, I'm broadly interested in your perspective on where newsroom culture is now.

I distinctly remember when Wes Lowry was writing a piece, I think he was still at WAPO at the time, but it was published in the New York Times maybe, about moral clarity. And I also remember when Barry Weiss wrote that tweet about the civil war inside the New York Times and the way in which she was condemned for lying and misrepresenting her colleagues. And at this point, it seems undeniably true that not just the New York Times, but most elite newsrooms. And I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I think it's just kind of the best way I can describe the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Nexus, that they were all roiled by a particular kind of cultural conflict, which it seems to me is in a very different, at a different phase now. So you're building a newsroom. I don't know how much you think about culture. I think about this all the time. I mean, one thing is, I think it was a mistake to see it

as newsroom culture. Like I think PepsiCo had a lot of internal, you know, we're handling about race in the summer. I think the New York Public Library did. And I think like Ford Motors, you know, like this was a huge cultural wave that swept through society of which newsrooms are part, and we play out our own dramas in public. And newsrooms traffic in narratives in an explicit way, which makes the dynamic different, but sure. I don't think it's really fundamentally different from what's happening in the rest of society, although it plays a role in shaping it, but not the only role. But it is a very, very different moment. I mean, I think you see the Times trying to, in a way, you know, I think they regret having fired James Bennett, the opinion page editor over this piece by Tom Cotton about sending the National Guard to put down riots. very timesy in a way. They're trying to refight that fight by sending stern letters to staffers who tweet angry things about their trans coverage. I think they're trying to say like, shut up, you work for us. We're going to take a more centrist position, like it or not.

Well, it's great because that's how the world works is the people who work for a company or a brand online, they're all brand ambassadors, whether they're officially brand ambassadors or not. I mean, it's not totally how sort of the talent-driven media works or has ever worked. I mean, it's a complicated- But it is how the New York Times brand- You need to speak with the manager. But the New York Times brand has improved over the last few years since they silenced

their reporters. And I think that that's, I mean, maybe I would be very interested if you disagree with that. Do you think that the New York Times has suffered? I would say it's probably improved to you and to me. There are probably other people who like it less. I'm sure they're doing tons of research on it. I don't know. What's the valuation of it?

I guess this is more data. I mean, it's obvious. The Trump bump for the Times was a separate and very powerful thing, and they're struggling to find their way out, the sort of path away from that. But there is... I do think that the real businesses of these companies are not always co-extensive with what's happening on Twitter. Okay. The core New York Times reader is my mom, who is in her early 70s, lives in the

Upper West Side, liberal, wants to know about the world, well-educated, not on Twitter. That's their core, core business. And I think part of what's going on with a lot of these media companies is they're eyeing the demographics of their readers, of these elite media companies. They're embarrassed at how white they are. They're concerned about how old they are. And they all, I mean, the Bud Light was the crudest version of this, that Bud Light executive who basically was like, we got to fire these goons who represent our current audience and hire is the crudest version of this, that Bud Light executive who said, who basically was like, we got to fire these like goons who represent our current audience and hire, you know, cool, diverse young people as our new audience. And in fact, that is commercially important for every brand

that like they got to find, tap into younger audiences or die. But I think one thread of what is going on in the news business is that. All right. thread of what is going on in the news business is that. Alright. Well, it sounds like we're all, and me specifically, too online. You specifically. You specifically. Yes.

So I guess we're building a bunch of new companies. Trust is the game. And we'll see you all back here in 10 years to celebrate the New York Times' second victory. I think the real question is, what are the odds that Solana and Foster are New York Times columnists 10 years from now?

I think I would give even odds that one of you has a column in the New York Times in the next couple of years. This has been Camille's play from day one. This is not true. I don't like to write. It is a struggle and it is pain. Well, I mean, how often do you have you noticed how infrequently New York Times columnists actually write?

This is the ideal job for you. Well, it depends. Some of them do have special privileges. Barely ever write anything. But you would never notice them. Well, listen, it was great having you guys on thank you for joining everyone should go and listen to the fifth column it's my favorite genuinely am i just saying this it's my favorite podcast i don't listen to many uh after firewire's course uh check out you mostly just listen to

your own podcast all day over and over again i gotta get good at this um and then definitely check out traffic if you want a history of media because there's not a better history of the rise and fall of new media. And maybe check out Semaphore on Mixed, frankly. Frankly, I will accept Mixed. It is good. Good to see you guys. All right. Thanks, guys. Talk to you later.

Thanks.