The Pomp Podcast - #1203 Ben Smith | Famous Journalist Reveals Media Secrets

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Ben Smith is the co-founder of Semafor, and the author of a brand new book called, ‘Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, And Delusion In The Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral.’ In this conversation, we talk about the state of the media, what is going right, what is going wrong, what he learned from working at BuzzFeed, Politico, New York Times, and now starting his own media company.  ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 235,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Ben Smith is the co-founder of Semaphore and also the author of a brand new book called Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion Dollar

Race to go viral. In this conversation, we talk about the state of the media. What's going right? What's going wrong? What did he learn from working at BuzzFeed, Politico, New York Times, and now starting his own media company. Ben constantly is thinking about the media industry and what is actually going to happen in the future. So it's always a pleasure to talk with him. His new book is fantastic, which I think that you will enjoy as well.

Here is my conversation with Ben Smith. At Desjardins Insurance, we put the care in taking care of business, your business to be exact. Our agents take the time to understand your company so you get the right coverage at the right price. Whether you rent out your building, represent a condo corporation, or own a cleaning company, we make insurance easy to understand so you can focus on the big stuff.

Like your small business. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Desjardins.com slash business coverage. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Ben here with me. Ben, you wrote a brand new book, Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral. It seems like that's the whole name of the game today in the media is just like go viral, get clicks. at least that is from people outside of the media looking in, how do you think about, you know, how much of media today is actually just trying to go viral and get clicks versus what I think maybe is the nostalgic, like true journalism, hey, let's go find truth and say the

things that speak, you know, kind of truth to power. You know, I think it's changing a lot. And I mean, the book tells the story of these people in downtown Manhattan in the neighborhood I'm in now, you know, in the early 2000s, places like Gawker, BuzzFeed, where they like, I mean, it was, I mean, you remember this, but it was early days. Like it was the first time you could really see. You had this website and you could see each visitor. You could see who was reading it. And it changed how people thought about media. I mean, everybody had always wanted to be read, but suddenly it was like you were flying with instruments. You could see exactly what was happening. And everybody wanted to be connected to their audience. And suddenly you were right

up in the face of your audience with people talking back to you all the time. And I do think it like deeply, deeply changed media. I mean, if you look at then this sort of explosion of social media and exchange society but i also think i mean it's interesting i mean i think people got sick of it i mean i think the sort of way you talk about chasing clicks and virality you know there was a period where that felt fun and exciting which is a little hard to remember and i think people now feel that they're that they're they're being kind of manipulated by algorithms that they don't really there's so much incoming that they don't know what to trust and i actually think there's a real shift away from from that moment which you know i've spent a lot of

I'm thinking about and talk about a lot more into a new moment where people are looking for like individual trusted voices. I mean, podcasts like this are a big part of that. Actually, newsletters like we do are a big part of that. So I think I think actually the audience is to some degree kind of caught on to that sense that media companies are trying to manipulate them, trying to get clicks and are sick of it. So this whole idea of like attention is the new oil. What I always kind of default to is people definitely hear that and they think kind of negatively about it because of the number of things that you're talking about. But they blame media companies. And I've always wondered like how much of it is like a media business and the incentives within those types of organizations versus just like, no, everyone's trying to get attention.

Like if you have a Twitter account, you're trying to go viral, right? If you have a sub stack, you're trying to go viral. If you're just like a dude on the street with a sign, like you're kind of trying to go viral, right? Is that like just a human nature thing or is there something inherent about like a media business and the incentives there that kind of change or maybe put it on steroids? Well, I think these big platforms, Twitter and Facebook, first of all, but in other areas, Pinterest was part of that. There used to be something called StumbleUpon, if you remember, you know, and now there's a number of other smaller ones, you know, Reddit. I mean, I think there is, you know, maybe everybody wanted attention, but everybody did not have access to the attention of everyone in the entire world. And I think, you know, in the sort of peak, peak days of Facebook, like when I was working for BuzzFeed in 2015, we published this picture of a dress that could either have been white and gold or blue and black, if you recall.

And everyone in the world saw it within, you know, an hour. I remember I had a colleague, I was in New York, you know, my colleague was like, this is crazy, we should publish it. She said, a woman had been at this wedding, sends it to BuzzFeed and says, my mom and I are arguing about what color this dress is in this weird, bad photo I took. and then we're arguing about it and we post it. Another colleague of mine was in Jakarta that day and an hour later in Jakarta, everybody's arguing about it. I mean, it was this instant moment of global culture

and actually it was virality on a scale. Like we used to think and we think things are really going viral. They're not like that anymore. Like nothing's like that anymore. And in fact, remember we were so proud. We thought it was cool. Like it was just a fun, sweet, silly thing.

And Jonah Peretti, the CEO of BuzzFeed, and this is sort of one of the things in the book, you know, soon after that ran into a senior person at Facebook and basically said, wasn't that cool? And they were like, we're not sure that was so cool. Like, how often do you think we should let that happen? And we were like, right, this is something they were letting happen. And B, they're getting a little scared about the loss of control of their own platform, the sense that anything can just take it over instantly. And I actually think, you know, one of the things really, i think the sort of purest sort of viral scale particularly for kind of news information

conversation ideas even probably like peaked in 2017 and i think a lot of a lot of people have left those platforms twitter facebook for you know particularly again i'm talking about kind of news and information like tiktok is obviously this huge entertainment space but for podcasts for newsletters for more controlled spaces where they're not just assaulted by a zillion people all of them trying to go viral with some thread and are in a more authentic conversation. And I think another thing that people found, both individuals and certainly media companies, is that attention turned out not to be like oil. We all thought in 2005 when you were getting a $9 CPM and you were like, this is just the beginning. We were making $9 on 1,000 views

in this year and we only had 100,000. But next year, we're going to have 200,000. Next year, 300 000 like this is going to be a this is like oil and we just hit a well this would be a huge business turned out the difference between attention and oil is that oil is scarce oil is a limited resource right i mean like you know like bitcoin in fact the core the you know the thing that makes commodities valuable is that they're scarce and attention did not turn out to be scarce attention turned out to be nearly infinite and the scale of platforms like google on twitter meant that even a publisher that got an enormous amount of eyeballs and attention like buzzfeed couldn't support quality journalism on it you talk at the beginning of the book about

jonah and i think it's his college roommate they're kind of always making these uh two dollar bets right and and you perfectly laid out where uh he i think accidentally went viral early in the 2000s yeah and then his buddy's like i bet you can't do that again and then you're like for the next 20 years he tried to figure that out and so it begs this question of like the dress it it sounds almost like it wasn't engineered, right? Like you guys were just like, oh, this is cool. We don't actually have an answer. Like, let's see kind of what the audience does,

like post it and it just explodes versus maybe the threads or some of this other, like what I would consider like viral engineered content where people very much sit down and say, I am going to create a piece of viral content. And that means it needs, you know, aspect A or aspect B or aspect C. I'm going to post it at a certain time on this platform.

I'm going to get my friends to retweet it. Like that feels very different than just like we posted a picture of a dress and it exploded are those two things changing because of the way the algorithms work is it like people now are caught on to the viral threads and so the dress thing still works how do you think about engineered verse not it's funny because it buzzfeed when i was there and all through media there are sort of two kinds of people you know there are people who think okay i have a piece of content and and if i adjust these seven elements of it it will go viral and then there are people who are just like whoa this is so cool i bet everybody else will

think so and i do think that media that ultimately the winners are the second kind because it is this because because part of what makes the most interesting most compelling things interesting compelling is there something surprising something you couldn't have predicted something weird and human and like and the thing and the version of it that's micro-engineered oh you know never quite reaches that that said but you know i think you can develop if you are a person type a you can also develop a passion for things and get better at the actual substance and if you were a person type b at buzzfeed in particular was full of people who were just good at the internet they weren't hyper analytical about it but they swam in those waters it's like you're really good at

english grammar not because you studied english grammar because you're fluent in english and i think like for people who live on the internet and get great and i think the people who are the people who are best for better and worse and making viral content like say president donald trump it's not because he like made a study of the seven aspects it's because he just knows it yeah it's like intuition almost to a degree and really gets it um so we've got buzzfeed on one side and we've got gawker on the other side uh kind of in the book and there's two uh tales if you will i think if you went on the street and you ask people who pay attention but maybe aren't inside the media uh there's a generalization that like buzzfeed is like a positive uh place that's

like cool and they have the listicles and like maybe some people think it's like kind of like dumber content when it was really going viral right but it's like very much positive oriented and i think that they think about it as like hey they don't really do harm gawker on the other hand i think people again generalization would be like oh those people are constantly tearing people down and there's like some negativity associated with it etc i'm not saying whether those are fair i I think that's true. I think if you ask people who worked at those places, that's how they saw it. BuzzFeed slogan, when I got there, was no haters.

And yeah, it could be dumb. And gawkers relieved in what they would call a kind of ruthless honesty. And you know, when they started, they were like a little blog written by these kind of clever young women in New York who would infiltrate the Condé Nast cafeteria and write about how ridiculous it was, which was sort of like genuinely kind of harmless, not like harmless fun and picking on much bigger, more powerful institutions that deserve to be poked at. There were these two very different philosophies of what is the internet going to be like? Jonah, who founded BuzzFeed, really thought as people start to share things in public on social

media, they're going to share positive stuff that makes them look good. We definitely had a specific theory that there's no way people are going to share divisive political content because it makes you look like a crazy person like who would do that that did not turn out to be a true theory um and gawker had this other approach which was that the thing the internet can really do is say the things that you would never say before to like the you know just to like journalists you talk to a journalist about their story and they're really fun and interesting to talk to and they give you all this gossip and then you read the story and it's really boring and gawker was going to be like no we're going to say the stuff that we say to each other in bars but

not but but not in person i mean it turns out sometimes you don't say that stuff because it's incredibly malicious or mean and as gawker grew more powerful and more of a cultural force suddenly it's less fun and games and it's more like this big scary culture you know publisher is attacking random civilians and i think they didn't i mean i definitely have felt this i'm sure you felt this if you start a media thing and it's little and you're a weirdo outsider and then suddenly you're kind of a powerful player. And it's a weird adjustment to realize like, oh, suddenly I have power and that comes with some responsibility. And I think Gawker accumulated all this power and reach and scale and audience and never quite got its head around that that puts you in a

different position and you're no longer the kid throwing spitballs in the back of the class. It's interesting because I didn't understand this kind of phenomenon, if you will, until when I first started writing on the internet, it was very much like, if you're punching, you can only punch up right like there's literally no one below you because you're on the you're on the floor totally i remember that like literally there's no punching down because literally there's no one below you um but as you get bigger audiences and it's not even necessarily like more power i actually think just like size of audience right yes that equates somewhat to power but like even if people don't even care that is power yeah and they're just you know kind of

listening or whatever somebody once said to me you know once an email crosses a certain size of audience like you'd be the number one article on a cnbc.com every single day if that was listed as just an article and not an email newsletter or, you know, take a tweet and how many impressions it gets or whatever. And so they were like, again, that doesn't mean that like you should go and do that. That doesn't mean that it's a replacement for that stuff. It's just, it's different type of content, but to give you a sense of like comparing audience sizes, like you very quickly can accumulate a large audience on these other platforms. And so if we go back to this idea of like Buzzfeed and Gawker, when Buzzfeed started to go more into like, I'll call it like the serious

journalism, it almost felt like virality was. Yeah. And that's when, that's when I got there. that was sort of my job exactly and it felt like virality was really the way to grow an audience and then it almost felt like okay now we have to get serious and like build a business we have to actually do real journalism like all that type of stuff is that something that now in hindsight knowing everything you know about what worked what didn't work etc a playbook that you think people will follow or do you feel like um you know when you start the company today it doesn't seem like you're like oh let's go viral right it actually seems like you're like no let's do like great work from day one and build an audience that has like a different brand promise than maybe

what buzzfeed had in the early days yeah i mean i think it's you know people want to find sort of like big sweeping generalizations about the media business and as you know it's just like a weird hard business and there are lots of different corners and i think it's worth understanding with these big viral companies that grew so big raised so much money hired so many people buzzfeed and vice probably the biggest like here's what they were here's what we were thinking which was that in the 1980s, some entrepreneurs rolled cable lines out across the country and rolled wires into people's homes. And to get people to adopt them, they needed MTV, they needed CNN. And they knew from the start that they needed to pay a huge share of the money they

were taking in to MTV, to CNN, to ESPN, to get people to look at these, to turn on the televisions and plug them in. And the core of that cable business model was there's distributors who own the wires. There's media companies who create the content. And there's got to be some financial arrangement where everybody gets rich or the whole thing doesn't work. And the theory that Vice and BuzzFeed and others were operating under fundamentally was there's this new form of distribution. It's Facebook, it's Snap, it's Twitter, it's Pinterest. And as those guys compete with each other, as they compete with everything else in the world, just like cable, they're going to start hiring media companies to make the content for them.

They're not going to depend on user-generated content forever. Now, you can argue about whether that was totally delusional or whether things just didn't break that way, but they did not break that way. And the reason you see these companies going out of business is there are a lot of reasons, a lot of mismanagement. We did lots of stupid stuff. But the fundamental bet, the fundamental thing that people were putting in hundreds of the company, investors were putting hundreds of millions of dollars into those companies was

that bet. And I think that's just the notion that you're going to build your company as a supplier of content to a social platform that will somehow pay you, that would be insane to try to do today. And so instead, I think what really all cross-media people are doing is trying to find an audience who's really interested in what you're doing and building a one-to-one relationship with them that isn't mediated by some platform. Yeah, but that's not a business where you can reach a billion people on your first day either. talk about the age of disinformation what's fascinating to me is like uh we're talking about virality and the dress is awesome like i remember debating it with people and being like i don't give a shit about this dress but like if you want my opinion and you got opinion like you know let's duke it out and see uh who's right who's wrong um but when that all of a sudden

becomes something that's much more either serious or could potentially harm people or uh almost program people's minds like i think a lot about like the algorithms especially on social media I recently tweeted and was like, you either train the algorithm to show you the things you want or it programs you, right? Like there's only two paths here. And I think one thing about young people now

that's so interesting is that people who use TikTok are hyper aware that they are programming TikTok to feed them what they, you know, and that their behavior is being mirrored. But no, what you said about the dress is really interesting.

The thing about the dress was it was incredibly divisive. That's what made it so fun was some people, you know, two thirds of people thought it was, I think white and gold and one third thought it was blue and black. They were correct, by the way, but the, but it was divisive and people argued about it.

It was divisive in the most harmless and sweet way you can imagine, but it was divisive. And the reason it went so big on Facebook was Facebook had, you know, when Facebook wasn't trying to elect Donald Trump or elect Joe Biden or whatever, Facebook was trying to, you know, you'd been spending 14 minutes and they wanted you to spend 15 minutes. And the way that they could keep, get you to stick was quote unquote, engaging content. And they were running all these experiments, but what, you know, how do we find the most engaging stuff? for a while it was like well if you share this that's an indication that it engaged you and

you'll somebody else will be engaged with it but then it turned out there was all this stuff that was like hillary clinton has been replaced by a body double if you pull a muscle all of a sudden you realize how often you use that muscle so the bladder is exactly like that when it's working well we don't think about it but when it's not working properly you're getting up at night or in the cases of many men you may have some leakage if this is something that's affecting your quality of life. There are really good solutions these days. Penn makes the guard and the shield. The shield would be if you have some leakage on occasion, if you have heavier leakage, you could use the guard. And like you would share that because like LOL kind of, and also because

you hate Hillary Clinton or whatever, but not because you read it and liked it. And actually, it was garbage content and it was an embarrassment for them. And so they thought, okay, that doesn't quite work. Okay, the way we will really detect engagement is by comments. Like forget the shares and the likes the really engaging stuff is the stuff that people comment on now it turned out the thing people would comment on most in the world is like i post like a super racist meme and then you write you're a racist and then i write no you're a racist and then we have like a really elevated conversation like that for a while the algorithm says wow this is incredibly meaningful engagement we're going to show this to everyone on the entire platform and particularly

particularly racially divisive content spread like wildfire on facebook and so when you take again maybe racially divisive is uh i think many people in society hopefully most people would say hey that's wrong right we don't want that type of stuff being the dominant uh content that people are being consumed i don't think the platforms are like hey this is the type of content we want to be promoting or any of that type of stuff so let's just assume everyone's a good actor right for the the purpose well i would say the platforms had these ideas about well we don't we don't want to look at the details of the content we just want to measure its performance and so they were very reluctant to just like look at a horrible argument just an obviously terrible destructive screaming

match about race and say look this is bad like they were just reluctant just to say that which any normal person could say but anyway they got there okay so if you take that and you now look Let's take an election. I think that's probably the one that at least people in the modern day, they point to and they're like, okay, regardless of what side you come out on, on political affiliations or whatever, there was a whole bunch of stuff that happened in 2016 and in 2020 and likely will happen going into 2024 in terms of the use of these platforms. We saw recently that Ron DeSantis is supposedly going to make his announcement with Elon Musk on Twitter. Some people love that idea. Some people hate that. You can already see the wheels are in motion here. Is it just like this is the trajectory and there's no going back?

Like is the genie kind of out of the bottle on a lot of this stuff? And whether the platforms actually want to change or not, like they're addicted, people are addicted, and it is just this game of attention even if we're going down a path that like may not be best for society or for individuals like mental health type stuff? You know, I could be really wrong, but I think actually the platforms are fundamentally in decline. Like, I don't know about you. I've been, I spend very little time on Facebook these days. I mean, I'm on there once in a while to check on somebody's birthday. And when I go on, it's, it's re it's, it's cute animal videos and the reels, that's how they're trying to keep people. And they are cute. Like my, I saw a really cute video of a dog the other day when I was on there, but like, I don't, I mean, I think Facebook was 10 years ago, seven years ago, Facebook was this

centrally culturally relevant force. And I think it is clearly not anymore. Twitter, I think, you know, Musk is trying, I mean, I think it was already kind of falling apart. And for me, again, just as a longtime power user, love Twitter. It no longer does the job if I open Twitter, I just want to know what's happening today. I'm a journalist. Like, is there a crisis in the Middle East? Like, what's going on? I still find Twitter pretty fun and interesting because it's like everyone's screaming at each other about Twitter, but it no longer does the job of what is happening like i go to the drudge report and to the new york times and i think twitter again like not that it's not going to remain a real place and a real business and a real whatever but it's

not a centrally called it's not as culturally central as it was five years ago i mean the leading indicator that which musk actually noticed is that celebrities have all left celebrities to be on twitter they're not anymore like it's just it's not it's and i think you know there are spaces i think reddit is the best example of a network that kind of like stabilized found a place in society. Nobody thinks that like America is run on Reddit, but it's actually pretty great and interesting and useful. I think Twitter could easily become that. Facebook could become some version of that. I lost my dog actually recently. And the first thing I did was go to the neighborhood Facebook group and somebody had found the dog. It was great for that, but I didn't elect the

president of the United States. And I know, so I actually think, I think that moment of us all having our brains melted by social media is kind of drawn to a close. And I think it's basically because we're all sick of it like i think that's why so i have this question for you you have no clue that i'm going to ask you this but i felt this would be a great way to take everything that you've learned about virality platforms content human psychology like just everything in your life right and boil it down to if you were running for president of the united states today where would you go post-concept like where would your focus go would it be in online like to the Twitters to Facebooks and those platforms, would it be like dances on Tik TOK? Would it be, you

know, Hey, forget the online stuff. Like I'm just going to go do rallies in person. Like, how do you think about running for president? And it appears is all about like, take a message and get it out to as many people in the most convincing way possible. So then on a certain date, they go and they vote for you. Right. And like, yeah, it's funny that I was actually, I'm honored to announce my presidential campaign on your show. That was, that was the plan. You know, people have been people often call me and they say ben you ought to run for um yeah i mean i think you know the politics is kind of is the media business and i mean i think and i so i mean and for years has been increasingly um what do you mean by that i mean i think and i think i mean just so you know

that you're putting out images and ideas and videos and audio and you're competing for attention with people like you and me and i remember i first noticed this covering the obama campaign for politico and we were making these dumb videos where we like interviewed each other about politics and about the obama campaign was making vastly better really beautiful and slick videos and it was like oh my god we're competing with the people we're covering and they're beating us this is terrible and now that's just sort of the world we live in but so i think that a lot of that same kind of thinking is going on in these campaigns i mean republicans and democrats are very different If you're running for the Democratic nomination, there's a series of sort of establishment gatekeepers like The New York Times you want to impress.

If you're running for the Republican nomination, you want to show, particularly in this post-Trump era, that you are not part of the establishment. You want to have fights with the establishment. You want to show how independent you are of the establishment. So for Trump, like going on CNN and attacking Caitlin Collins is like the ideal version of that. For Ron DeSantis, you know, I think going on Twitter is sort of his version of that and doing it with Musk. um i mean i think the big question now and i could be totally wrong is you know because it's really i mean it's again it's like for now right now it's a question about republican primary voters do republican primary voters you know they watch television they read twitter they see that people are mad about um transgender rights they see that people are mad about

bud light and something something they see that people are mad about um a bunch of things that that have no zero impact on their daily lives. And I think there is a big question of, do you run a campaign that is about these cultural issues that like, I don't know, like I send my kids to public school in New York City and this stuff never comes up. And I would assume that if you were in Iowa,

it is very unlikely that your school was spending a ton of time talking about race and gender. Like it just, I just think it's a huge part of what you see on Fox News, what you see on Twitter and a very small part of people's lives. And I think there is this thing where Ron DeSantis is making a bet that these Twitter, these issues that are really only exist when you look at the internet are really going to compel people and they might.

And I think Trump always, I mean, the core issue that he ran on was immigration, which was not a fake issue and wasn't something that was mostly on Twitter, was something that Republican voters were furious about, had been furious about for years for, you sometimes because they were racist, sometimes because they were mad about the declining incomes of electricians. I mean, a range of reasons, right? Some kind of disturbing and some totally legitimate. But I guess, I mean, maybe I am really naive, but I do think that you got to find at some level, the candidate who's going to win is going to be talking about stuff that matters in people's daily lives, not stuff that only matters when they turn on their

screens i do wonder how much um of the world is like a mirror to the internet we talk a lot about like these you know twitter's a mirror of society you know will be something i hear people talk about but like obama i think actually was the first one you know he had the uh um kind of the button-down shirt with the rolled up sleeves and he was trying to he was still presidential but he was trying to be a little bit more relatable i think and kind of uh connect with people and you've seen um to some degree like across society people have become like less serious right and you kind of see this degradation of seriousness and

I always wonder like how much of that is driven by the media versus like the media is just reporting on like what they're seeing and so it is this like reinforcing thing and maybe like the most kind of obvious example is like Mark Zuckerberg with the hoodie made it cool

and like that was like free reign for an entire you know industry basically to like suits like why would we wear suits right and so you get this movement in that direction and it was signal i mean for you know why you know i think i mean i think it's all signaling and it's sort of i mean you know donald trump wanted to signal that he was going back to like a sort of 1950s idea of america and part of that was wearing a suit and having a wife who'd

been a model and his perfect family staring up adoringly at him or whatever like i think it's all signaling policy i think republicans mostly are very buttoned like look like men almost mostly men from a while ago with big stuck out jaws and adoring wives who don't necessarily work because that's the sort of that's the values they're trying to project in a you know in a substantive way i think it's always signaling i mean yeah i remember it's some and i actually i covered the obama campaign and there was a point and maybe it was the financial crisis when they decided he had to wear a tie and it was like a big thing he didn't really wear ties i'm sure he ever worn ties and they were like all right now you're you have to look presidential and that

involves wearing a tie and it is funny because people mostly comment on women politicians appearances and everybody gets annoyed at you when you do but of course these choices they make are incredibly deliberate and are and do sort of intend to signal what they're up to i don't know i mean there was this kind of crazy moment i remember this kamala harris was on the cover of vogue and they put a this very informal looking picture of her wearing sneakers and her team freaked out and i think her family got mad and they said it was kind of racist to do that and i'm not in keeping with the dignity of the office which i thought was insane it's like no no like you the person like the best the reason that people liked her when they did was that she

felt like this relatable normal person not in the dignity of the office of the vice president but i do think these are choices that politicians take incredibly seriously and think about a lot go back to this idea of the competition because we're talking about like the politicians right Is that still true in the business world as well? Like do you think that the journalist that you all employ or a journalist at the New York Times or name your publication and then like, I don't know, maybe take like the Substack writer who covers a similar beat if you want. I'll kind of put that in air quotes because I don't know if you guys would agree that it's a beat or not for a Substack writer. Oh, totally, yeah. And then also maybe take like the shit poster on Twitter.

at Desjardins insurance we know that when you own a nail salon everything needs to be perfect from tip to toe that's why our agents go the extra mile to understand your business and provide tailored solutions for all its unique needs you put your heart into your company so we put our heart into making sure it's protected get insurance that's really big on care find an agent today at desjardins.com slash business coverage right like yeah or the or the or like autism capital right like or the sort of twitter rando who's incredibly wired in and breaks news no i mean i think it's a yeah i mean i think you have to see yourself as competing with and talking to everybody all the time when you're like a

and i don't think i mean i'm not a big fan of the notion that there's like this thing called a capital j journalist that is different from another person who is good at getting information and ideas like there's i think when journalists pretend that they have some like special set of skills because they went to journalism school. Like, that's not true. And eventually people figure that out. So, and I think the big thing that media companies are wrestling with right now is, you know, if you're the Wall Street Journal, you are used to treating hundreds and hundreds of journalists as sort of interchangeable cogs in a machine that produce Wall Street Journal articles. But you have an audience increasingly that does want to connect to individuals.

And by the way, like not all those journalists are as good as each other. And a few of them huge stars, but you've sort of hidden that, like, you know that, but you're like not letting the reader in on that. And so certainly at Semaphore, like our whole theory of the case is that there's a kind of journalist for whom doing your own Substack thing is not natural. It's like, it's kind of just, I am, it's like people who do a lot of reporting, who break a lot of news, who get into some of the big legal and political fights over the news they break, do kind of need and want a newsroom, need and want some legal support. It's not, I think Substack has been great for commentators and analysts, but you don't see some, you need a team. Sometimes the

story's going to take a couple of weeks and you're going to need to vanish. And if somebody else write your newsletter for a couple of weeks, like it's, it's a kind of journals and it's harder to do is it's not really a solo thing, but those reporters do have voices, do have ideas, do have things they want to say, do covet that direct connection with the audience that you get in contemporary media. And you don't get at the wall street journal or the New York times. And so for people like for me, for Liz Hoffman, who to my mind was like maybe the best reporter at the Wall Street Journal, who we hired to cover finance for us, you know, we're trying to say, come to Semaphore, you can have the best of both worlds.

You can have a great newsroom and the kind of infrastructure of a newsroom. But we also understand that the way media works now is the audience wants to hear from a human being, not from this faceless brand. And so I think we're trying to build that system, in some sense, build like kind of platform for that kind of journalist. What I find fascinating about what you all are doing is not only the types of people you're trying to hire, but also even some of the form factors. I think it was Liz, actually, I saw she did an interview and it's almost like text messages, right? Kind of back and forth. Talk a little bit as to, you could just post it as an interview, right?

Hey, first of all, we are very authentic. When they're text messages, they are actually text messages. But I think people really feel I mean, I mean, I feel like there's this weird, like opacity to a lot of media, like you read an article in the New York Times. And there's some ideas in it. And there's some assertions and like, which ones are the reporter's opinion? Which ones are their editor's opinion? Which ones are the policies, the New York Times, which are just indisputable facts, it's not totally clear. And that is, and I think that there's a kind of an uncanny valley there. And so we are obsessed with kind of transparency, which isn't to say kind of old fashioned objectivity. Like I am a robot who has no point of view and I'm just

delivering you the facts. No one, no one believes that. So if we, but so it does mean like, if I love text messages, cause you know, with a video interview or a profile, the reader can wonder like, Oh, did you edit it? Like how, what, what, you know, what was like, what's the real thing, even with the transcript with tech messages, what I love about texts, actually, like you see exactly what I see. There's no additional context. Like it's kind of cool that way. And then in our articles we also in a stylized kind of deliberate way label the sections like here's the news and here is ben's opinion and like anthony thinks i'm an idiot and has a different opinion we're going to stick that in too and and label it and so yeah i think that's that's something you know

people seem to like right now when you take this uh kind of unique way of presenting the news how do you think about distributing it obviously you guys have the newsletters um what's kind of the long game is it like okay let's get the newsletters up and running and then we can eventually like get people back to, you know, an owned and operated site, podcast, like just talk about like distribution in general. I mean, I would love your advice. It's such a weird world right now. Cause it's like the whole social media, social media has just massively kind of receded the, all the traffic that used to come from places like Facebook is gone or a lot of it. Um, but nothing has really replaced it. And so, you know, for us, newsletters are a great way to reach people and it's, you know,

great individualized way to reach people with something that they've signed up for that they want. You can see if they don't open it, you can take them off the list. Like it's just very natural. But also email is this technology from the 1990s. Like, I can't believe that the final form of internet journalism will be email. The web is important for us. We get, you know, a lot of readers there, but it's not what it once was, isn't the central pillar of an organization. We do a lot of events. It's a huge part of what we do. And that's, I do think post-COVID, it feels like there's this huge appetite for it. That's been very, very successful for us. we do you know we produce great videos and are you know but not at a huge scale and they're

thinking about audio you haven't just didn't want to bite off more than we could chew at launch honestly but i do think audio fits into that kind of direct you know way of reaching an audience directly and talking to people directly but it it does feel i'm sort of like okay what's next like you know like i think like substacks like oh is it can we build this world inside substack with notes there's this thing artifact apple news is out there i mean there's a it's a really interesting strange moment part of why i wanted to start a new thing it feels like a moment when everything is changing again when you see what is working um what are the things that like maybe people don't realize have more impact than they do right so like the newsletter is to me just

watching what you guys are doing like okay obviously the newsletters are working right yeah but are there other things that you have discovered as you guys have tried different things and kind of launching this that you're saying hey you know this works much better than people maybe would think so i would say i've only been doing this for six months and so no one should like you're supposed to be an expert advice but it wasn't the new york times for two years before kind of throwing stones into everybody else's glass houses writing about media um i mean i would say events are the thing that have been surprisingly successful for us um how do those work you you're getting just like a single person for an interview is it like no we're what we've

doing is getting you know a huge lineup of news makers too like when the imf and world bank met in washington we had this world economy summit where poppy harlow from cnn came and interviewed lael brainerd biden's top economic advisor there was a bunch of ceos and big government officials and made a ton of news lots of people came sponsors wanted to be associated with it because it was this sort of central conversation about these huge issues so we've done that that kind kind of stuff and that's been yeah it's just been i think you know in the actually it's all the execution you have to actually get incredibly interesting people to then and then push them on stage to say interesting stuff but that's been really good for us um you know yeah but but i guess

i mean my the other thing and this is and this is a silly thing to say because it's so obvious but in my part of the journalism business scoops are the coin of the realm like it's called news you got to have news and so you know for we've broken a lot of news we broke i think maybe the biggest story we broke was that microsoft was about to invest in chat gpt um in open ai but but and a lot of stories on a lot of finance a lot of out of washington and that's i mean ultimately that's how you break through and just get people like even people who've never heard of you are like hey what is that thing so so we focus a lot on breaking news it's not it's that's not a um you know it's not sort of nobody's gonna come and come back and back just because you're randomly

breaking news but but it is a way to introduce yourself to people how do you see the relationship with sources changing when you know you're at buzzfeed politico new york times now you have your own thing if you just were like a pseudonymous person on twitter you had an account like how do you think about uh are they willing to tell you more less do they care where you are versus it's you? It's really different. I mean, it used to be, well, I think the biggest change is that sources always have the option of just going direct, right? It used to be, if you were a political figure and you had a story to tell, you basically had to go to the New York Times or the Washington Post and one of two or three reporters and you, and they had all this power and you,

and you would kiss their ass all the time in the hopes that, you know, when you had something that they would write it in a nice way um and now you can just tweet it and like if you want and and why would you take your news to the new york times and it and it has changed it really has sort of changed that power dynamic i mean it also it was not the highest form of journalism to rewrite people's press releases so who kind of who cares but um but but yeah i think that the you know the gate i mean this is one of a million ways in which gatekeepers used to exercise so much power and it is like it's it's sort of dumb i mean so obvious that it's it almost feels dumb to say but it used to be if you wanted to reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people

there were two ways to do that you could purchase and own a printing press or you could have the rights to a broadcast tower those were the two ways there wasn't a third and like it's it's sort of and then the people who controlled those two or if you count radio three you like in pieces of infrastructure were the people who controlled information and when there was like a coup in a country you know in the fall of the soviet union the people where people were killed in the 91 when the soviet union's falling apart were around television towers because in places like latvia and lithuania the people the freedom fighters were defending the television towers against the tanks because that was in it's like hard to remember now that that that that that

that was the case because now it's wide open but i still think there's sort of a impulse in some of these legacy media companies that like we're the gatekeepers all information runs through us it doesn't exist if we don't publish it and that's just so disconnected from the reality we all live in now talk to me about funding uh of these media businesses i think that there's kind of two interesting things right so uh you all raised money um sam beckman free was a part of that you guys kind of got into that whole thing you just today we i would say i'm in a great mood today because we closed the book on sam bankman freed we raised a new round we repurchased his interest all right so explain kind of uh maybe like initial fundraising and how you thought about

you know where where do you go find funding for a media organization like who's even interested in funding this type of stuff and then how you think about like okay now i've got to uh go and raise more capital and i know henry kravitz jerry yang like a bunch of these kind of you know very well-known people are investing so you're asking like what kind of lunatic would invest in media in this day and age well not only what kind but also just like how do you think about it right because like although people don't look at it this way like it's very much a double opt-in like you want certain people to invest right and then you also uh want to make sure that or you need to go find people who want to invest and so like how do you get the double

opt-in there yeah i mean you know i think i would one thing is when we were at buzzfeed you know we had this idea that that i talked about earlier on cable that this could be a huge business that could return massively and actually had we sold to disney for 600 million dollars in 2014 i suppose it would have to those early investors who were venture capitalists, Andreessen Horowitz was an investor. I go back and I think, you know what, media is certainly not, news in particular is not a business that is going to 10X in three years and give you a venture-like return. It's a thing that's important for the world and if you are good, experienced operators

and work incredibly hard, can be a pretty good business, can be a profitable business with a good return but you need people who believe in the mission who and believe in the mission to the degree that they're not gonna that they're gonna resist the temptation to try to use their investment to meddle with the content and and then you and ideally and i think in that context it's good to have a like a diverse group of investors an ideologically diverse group of investors so you're not you know so that they understand that there's sort of an arm's length relationship they have to be and they have to be patient and then the other thing i mean i think part of i mean my own experience right was this sort of crazy ride at buzzfeed and so coming to

semaphore it was really i mean the part of the reason that i went into business with my partner justin smith no relation is he's really like the best news business operator of our generation he was ceo of bloomberg before that he turned the atlantic around series of very successful senior roles in the news business and there's this quirk of the news business that has been such a bad business for so long that the ranks of executives at news businesses are not always the best and the brightest. Like, would you want to sell ads in a newspaper or would you want to sell like used cars? You might prefer to sell used cars just in terms of your comp. And so as the news business has declined and been in kind of this awful death spiral for years, like the quality

of talent on the business side is very uneven. And so, you know, it's a really hard business And the difference between great execution and, you know, not great execution is huge. And it's a tough enough business that it's not a place where you can just kind of come in and like put your hands out and collect money. I mean, that's probably not true anywhere, but I definitely, you know, wanted to build like a grown up sustainable business around news. When you think about what that looks like, is this something where, you know, Vice obviously just filed for bankruptcy and like they hired hundreds, if not thousands of people at one point? Is that like the type of business today? Or do you think it's more like 50 people and you kind of punch above your weight in terms of employees versus, you know, reach and monetization? Yeah, I mean, I think it's somebody who goes back to the talent stuff we were talking about, you know, in a world where people want to feel very connected to an individual, you don't want to hire 100 business reporters, you want to hire one or two really great ones.

And, you know, you can maybe in other verticals and other niches, you can hire one or two people, but you're not looking to. Yeah, I mean, both of necessity, but also in reality, it doesn't make sense to try to the goal isn't to grow infinitely. But I think a lot of our companies sort of looked at these big industrial age news companies and said, well, that's kind of the model. You want to have hundreds and hundreds of journalists. And I think that's both not how people connect to media now and not an incredibly irresponsible way to build a business. You want to race to profitability and then you can start thinking about growth.

Last thing that I've got on this is in the book, you talk about Breitbart. And I know you worked at politico and like there's like specialization right and so there's like political uh type content but then there's like political left political right there there's um you know you can go across these sectors even if you look at um inside of some of the financial markets like you have very specific viewpoints and things like that it seems like you guys aren't really going after that like you're you're taking a stance maybe on like what type of media company needs to exist you know you talk about like meeting the moment but it doesn't seem like you're specializing on any one topic or any kind of viewpoint yeah we're certainly not trying to

kind of i mean i just think that the there obviously is a huge business in serving committed right-wing partisans or committed left-wing partisans and that's not the business but also there's a lot of people doing that and i think that the the dynamics of the trump era and of the sort of new subscription businesses pulled a lot of mainstream outlets into a kind of resistance this cheerleading posture in the Trump moment that they're kind of trying to dial back from. And I mean, I do think that it's often framed as there's a debate between our job is to be totally objective, just the facts, maybe I'm a journalist with no opinions, or our job is to stand on the barricades against Donald Trump or for Donald Trump or whatever. And I guess I don't

think that's actually what anybody's asking. I don't think any reader is saying, please lie to me if that's what i want i mean i think people are saying like we want a human being who's with a point of view who could be wrong who has the humility of knowledge by the way they could be wrong and he's bringing new facts and he's helping to navigate this very chaotic complicated landscape um i think there's a big i just think there's a big demand for that your new book traffic genius rivalry and delusion in the billion dollar race to go viral when somebody reads this uh how much of this did you write for entertainment purposes as to like like telling the stories versus like there's a message specifically that you

want to get across. You know, I'm basically a reporter and I kind of came out of, I got to the New York times in 2020 and just think, and, and just thought like, what the hell did I just go through? Like what was the last 15 years? And mostly, and I did not, I mean, I think there are lessons in that about, about certainly about the business and about the sort of shape of American politics and global politics, but mostly it really is. It tries trying to be the story.

like it's sort of the crazy origin story of this bizarre moment we're living in uh the fact that you say you're basically a reporter uh is almost like a uh qualification that you have i mean i'm not a deep i mean i mean i'm not it's not meant to be a sort of like six principles of how to succeed in business yes although you can it's sort of the opposite there are many lessons is i think a good way to put it yeah but they're not all like positive lessons yeah maybe lessons of what not to do uh thank you thank you so much for taking the time to do this so traffic genius rivalry and delusion in the billion dollar race to go viral if you haven't read it yet highly suggest you go pick it up we'll have the link in the description and

then ben talk a little bit maybe just in terms of if people want to check out what you guys are doing now at semaphore uh where should we send them are there a specific newsletter a website i mean go to go to semaphore.com and check it out but i do think for for your listeners in particular liz hoffman i'm to my mind the best business reporter at the wall street journal came over and joined us is just dominating these big stories about Wall Street. And we've also just been covering the hell out of AI. Reid Al-Bergati, who is best known in his life for having broken the Lance Armstrong story, but is digging really deep on partly the untold backstory of this AI moment.

He had this incredible story the other day about how Elon Musk, who had been a huge investor in the first version of OpenAI had this previously unreported confrontation with Sam Altman where Musk basically said, this company's failing, you're falling behind Google. You should, I need to, I, Elon Musk, am the only man who can save this company and should take over right now.

And Altman and the other founders sort of fought him back and Musk walked away with a billion dollars and incredibly high stakes, interesting stuff happening right now in that world. And so that's our tech newsletter that I hope that I think your audience might like. I read multiple things you guys put out and I really enjoy it.

So keep up the great work and the book is fantastic as well. I will wait for your next act and then we'll do this again once you get something else to talk about. Thanks, Anthony. And this is really generous of you to have me on.