A Zone Media.
Hello and welcome to Better Offline, your most punished podcast. I am your host ed Zeitron today I'm joined by one of the single best people in the tech media, Jason Kebler of four h four Media, regularly requested by listeners. But I punish you too, Jason. Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me. Wow, I did not know that that inflates my ego already always necessary.
I experienced ego death around episode seven, so I feel nothing anymore. But we were just talking before this about Facebook effectively Mark Zuckerberg effectively admitting that aislop was good for the platform. I think it's good for you to just walk me through that story. It's a four oh for me story. Won't me through because it's a good scene setup.
Yeah, so, as meta does all the time. I still hate calling the meta, but yeah, at this point I do, because they have so much fucking stuff going around that it I want to be clear when I'm talking about Facebook and when I'm talking about the other stuff. Had its third quarter investor call on Wednesday, and you know, people ask questions of Facebook executives, and I feel like
it's a real mask off moment. Where they sort of have to say, like, here are our plans, here's what we think is working, what's not, And very often it's like full of pie in the sky nonsense. But in this case it's like Mark Zuckerberg said straight up that the AI slop and spam that has taken over Facebook but also Instagram and increasingly Threads is the strategy, like that is part of the long term goal of the company.
He talked about adding like a separate AI generated feed, which when Facebook has added separate separate feeds, they call them separate feeds, but they always end up just like integrating in.
Yeah, being the dominant fit dominant feed, Like you can select a chronological feed on the Threads if you solve three riddles, click seven buttons.
Yeah, and fix it every three seconds.
Yeah, Yes, it is so. And I still saying to you beforehand, I get people saying I'm a cynic a lot, but then I read stuff like this, and I just don't understand how people aren't more cynical because it feels like this stuff feels actively dystopian, that Facebook is no longer the world's biggest social network but just the world's shittiest television channel.
Yeah, I think that we get blamed for being like doomers. You always have been. Like I've been a journalist for twelve thirteen years at this point, and I used to be back at Motherboard over a vice and now at four or four Media, and sometimes I would have to like look up and just be like, Wow, the last ten stories I've written have been incredibly depressing. They've been like really like horrible harms from technology. They've been you know,
I don't even think they're negative. I think they're realistic and accurate of like what our future is. But you know, our future sucks very often and are are present often is bad too, and I think that that is at the this is because of centralized power in tech and
over the internet. And so I also get called a cynic all the time, but I feel like I'm actually quite an optimistic and realistic person and there's lots of things that I'm excited about, just none of it is coming from big tech, Like none of it at all.
And what kind of things you're excited about, Let's balance this out.
I'm I'm very excited with like grassroots type new technology, like open source technologies. I think that people sort of like gesture at like the fetever and like this sort of decentralized Twitter alternatives, if you will. And I think that that's been promised for quite some time, yes, and I think that it's taking a really long time to
sort of come together. But I do think that that is something that we should be like working toward as a society where instead of having your audience, if you are a publisher, like we are, having it all tied up in you know, the number of Twitter followers you have, or the number of like Google ads you can sell, like you kind of own your audience. And by that, I mean you own the list of people that you can kind of like transport that around the Internet. I
think that's really important. I think that for a while, I was very excited about community Internet, like nonprofits where cities and towns were building their own fiber lines and still are and then sort of doing like getting really fast internet to the home sort of divorced from Comcast and your spectrums of the world so on and so forth.
And there's like a lot of kind of like individual people building stuff that are very cool, like proofs of concept, and the big problem is always like scaling that up or getting people to stop using Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Amazon is a big one. It's like, stop using Amazon, stop using Prime. It's very hard to get people to change their behaviors. And yet I feel in some ways
like we're gonna talk about indie media. But I think that the journalism industry, despite the sort of disaster disastrous situation that's been going on in the last few years, I think it's in a better spot now than it was two years ago.
I kind of agree in the sense that I think there are places where it got worse. In the sense though, and this is my own opinion you don't have to agree with, because it's not going to be a fun one to agree with. I think things like Platforma have
actually been detrimental to the tech industry. I think Casey Newton has dressed up Platformer as a kind of independent outlet where nothing where it's all just like, oh, we're independent, we're not bought off by big corporations, then writes two fucking fan fiction pieces about anthropic I think that is damaging. I think it's actually just spreading the problem. But even when you look at legacy media, the verge, which I have, I have tons of criticism for Nil Patel. The Verge
has actually done some really incredible in depth journalism. They had that wonderful piece about underground cables, and it feels like even at the Journal they have some of the best investigative reporters now Mike Isaac's on open Ai, which is terrifying for them. I think that we're seeing more a lot more investigative stuff than we ever have before. I wish it had happened a few years ago, but hell, I'll take it now.
Yeah. I mean I think that you know, you can name a sort of like newsletter writers and independent outlets that are doing really amazing work, and there's always been some of that, but I think that what we're seeing now is like ten years ago when I got into it, there were like five big tech websites, and they were all bad, in my opinion, Like they were all doing the sort of like, uh, there's a new feature on the iPhone, here's the new emojis that dropped, and it
was just like tons and tons and tons of that. You'd dump it on Facebook, you'd hope it went viral, and you would have people just writing like four or five stories a day, and then you had a bunch of sort of like I say this as a descriptor not as like a like you had, like your nd gadgets, your vices, your buzzfeeds, the sort of like middle tier of digital website where they're not the New York Times.
They're not like this gigantic, gigantic media conglomerate. They're sort of like middle sized things, and all of them have done great work, but they were all kind of doing like the same thing more or less. And I think that like the VC business model where we're just going to chase traffic and ad revenue has failed terribly. It's like not working, and I think it's going to be very hard to be in the middle where you are
like your website with a staff of like fifty. I think that it's something where you can have independent, subscriber funded publications that are doing increasingly good work because the infrastructure needed around journalism is not so much anymore. And then you're going to have your like New York Times is and your Washington Posts and you're like, I don't know, c net or something like just gigantic websites that are
going to be like, you know, middling. I don't like have a ton of love for the gigantic players, but I think that they serve a purpose of some sort.
There is there is a certain purpose for the your phone. Now does this media like people read that stuff for a reason.
Yeah, I mean I read that stuff as well, and I but I do think that like all the stuff in the middle has died and is going to keep dying. But I think that the years where those publications were propped up by VC but like weren't making money, weren't investing in their newsrooms because they were just trying to
stave off layoffs. Like I think that was the dark period, because the vibes were terrible at all of them, because there was a hatchet around the corner constantly, like there were always gonna be mass layoffs or some the sites were going to die at any moment because they were these like bloated organizations where executives made tons of money, the journalists made almost nothing, and like it just wasn't
a there was no sustainability there. And I think that I know that I'm rambling at this point, but I think I think that it's possible for like a bunch of small newsrooms like ours to thrive a bunch of independence reporters to thrive, a bunch of you know, newsletter writers to thrive, and then you know you'll have your gigantic news organizations that are going to continue to exist.
And I think that that that leads to probably some fracturing in the media ecosystem where there's not like the same people really like this dream that Jeff Bezos is pointing out in his recent op ed where it's like we're gonna be down the middle and we're gonna be everything to everyone. It's like that that's dead. That never works.
That sharing out before gone, No, it never worked. It perhaps worked when there were three television channels, like forty years before I was born, but I don't even know if it worked then.
And I think part of the problem is, sure it's this sense of doing everything for all things, but it's also the need to scale that I don't think has ever worked. Like I love. I love the idea of tech crunch, and there are right as there I really love. But I think as an organization, TechCrunch is just in the situation it's tech crunters disrupt while we're recording this. I think the pressure and probably the money that comes from Disrupt as event as a kind of venue is
so hard. I think every there's this thing where newsrooms start. You've got stories, someone gets a big scoop, it gets some traffic, gets some notes, and then they're like, shit, what's next, Let's do a conference. And now we're doing the conference. We see the conference makes way more money than the journalism, So how do we engineer one to feed the other? And the actual answer there is to say, make them entirely separate. The answer, however, is never the
one you'd listen to. So you do the thing where it's like, how do we change the content to appeal to more sponsors for the conference, and how do we make it so that we don't piss off people that we want to speak at the conference. I'm not even saying this is exactly what happened with Disrupt, but you see it with like the Information and Venturely and all these publications where and this really is inside baseball, but
now the podcast is free. It's it's frustrating because you could have a really good tech conference if you just all agreed to not be cowards. Like I respect Devin cold Away from tech Crunch so much because he asked the perplexity CEO on stage.
To find that was really good.
He punted personally. I would have kept asking until he hit me. I could take him a reven I'm not threatening you come on the show. But it's like it's frustrating because there is and this is actually a good point as well, and maybe kind of a question. It also doesn't feel like there's any solidarity in the tech media. There's some it's tenuous, but when it comes down to it, it doesn't feel like it's there.
I think it's a hard thing to build.
It's like, I also should say, this is not a condition created by intention. I don't think people like I don't give a shit about others but keep going.
Sorry, no, I mean I think it's really tough. And it's like I don't live in New York anymore, but I lived in New York for a long time and WECE was in Brooklyn, and then like all of the other publications were in Manhattan, like more or less. And
this is not Illuminati vibes. It's very much like there was a generation of journalists who were sort of all the same age, all living in the same place, and all knew each other from Twitter and they were like hanging out all the time because that's I don't know, that's how people made friends. And it always felt like wece was separate literally because we were on the other side of the river, and so like the happy hours, you had to go at like out of your way
to get to them and things like that. And I just feel like there's people ask me what I read, Like people ask me, like, what other tech publications do
you read? And it's like, I have a lot of respect for a lot of other tech publications, but I don't have time to go read all of them all day every day because there's so much going on on, right, And then I'm not like sharing other people's stories that often for that reason, because I just feel like the time has passed where you can like consume all of the Internet at once, right, And I feel like that when you say there's not solidarity, it's like I have
a lot of respect for other tech journalists and I like a lot of their work, but I will sometimes go weeks where I'm like, I actually feel like I haven't read the Internet because I've been heads down in my own stuff, and then you look up and it's like, oh cool, Like Ed did a really great piece, like Brian Merchant did a really great piece. There were like ten great articles in The Verge, and then it's like, oh, should I like go tweet their work now two months
after they published it? Like so, I don't know. I'm just speaking from my own perspective on that, but I feel like it's very hard to have like cross publication good vibe, not even good vibes, but like it's just hard. It's just hard to keep up with everything. I feel.
Yeah, And I think like one happened a week or two ago. And this is not a criticism of anyone specifically, but Sam Altman he claimed something Kylie Roberson of The Verge wrote about the next model coming from Open Ai, and he said fake news and she got dog piled for it. And see a single fucking journalist in her mentions. Now, this is not about you, Jason, not talking about you. I didn't see a single one though, and that really
turned my stomach. I went after the little bastard. Fuck you, Sam Moltman, O, huh, I'll keep right what I fucking
want about you, But it's it's frustrating. But now that you said it, it does feel like almost a remote work effect, but also the detritus of the New York waiting because I remember in like the early twenty tens how cliquey it was, yeah, and how the how you got I'm not, I like not saying othered in perhaps that way, but you were kind of in the in group or the outgroup, and you kind of still see
it within internet culture reporting. Yeah, like New Yorker guys that talk to the same people yeah, all the time. And it's frustrating because I think four or four has proven this. There's so much cool shit you can do in tech journalism, especially when you talk to more varied people than just the six people in front of you.
Yeah, I mean it really felt. I mean we talk about things like Twitter, main character, so on and so forth, and it's like that was a real phenomenon where it's like, oh, here's the one thing that everyone on the Internet is talking about right now. And I feel like this is a It probably has to do with Elon Musk fucking
up Twitter and like the fracturing of social media. But if you like ask me what is happening on the Internet today, I could name a bunch of different things and you might have a totally different list of things that you are seeing, and I think that that is a big change.
Yeah, I also think that that's something that leads to the failure of internet culture reporting, because if you I actually don't think that what there's been articles about this too. I don't think the main character was actually a social media I think it was a It is a thing that happened, But I don't think it tells us anything about internet culture, and I think a lot of internet culture.
I think it tells us something about how internet publications were in because there was like a while where Donald Trump's Twitter was being called like the assignment editor for the front page of the New York Times or whatever or whatever, and that, I mean, it's true, and Elon Musk was the same way, and to some extent is it's like, oh, Elon Musk tweeted that he's going to print humans on Mars, and then there would be like
eighty five articles about it. And I think that that was a function of like publications, not all publications, not
all journalists, and like certainly not all editors. But there is like a when you're getting into this industry, there's a period of time where you were asked or were for a long time to the news just like hit five stories a day, whatever it is, and like the things that you saw going viral on Twitter, that was something that you could go and write about and you would, you know, either win a Google or Reddit lottery or a Twitter lottery and you would get a lot of traffic.
And so almost every publication like had five people doing.
That, like a kind of an ultra normalization.
Yeah.
Yeah, it sucks because it's I think four or four has done. They're just gonna lavish you with praise. Here. Four or four had my favorite text story of the last year by far, and it was about the Indian guys who are just scamming Facebook. And it humanized it as well, because I think that there is also a degree of xenophobia towards Indian guys online. There definitely is that, like, and it doesn't help the fact that a lot of
Indian guys ran insane mindset Instagram accounts. But nevertheless, I loved the way you humanized it because it was like, here's the actual way that this is happening. This is Internet culture. Internet culture is being changed. But the fact that Facebook is incentivizing matching the like playing slop tetris where you kind of match the bullshit to the other bullshit, so the algorithm puts out and I feel like.
It's also it's also the thing that I really liked about that story was that the like Indian tech bro hustle guys were talking amongst themselves about what they perceived us internet culture to be, which was like very interesting, Like they were sort of talking to each other about like, oh, you know what, like Americans and British people fucking love their dogs, they love pets, and then they were talking about like other things and it's like, yes, like this
is a stereotype. But it was interesting to see what they thought American internet culture was and then how they tried to reverse that engineer that into viral content.
And I think the problem as well is that Internet culture is just culture now, and also internet culture is the nature of the algorithms fucking with us every day. Is not really anything, it's what the algorithm. So you wrote that wonderful piece about Mark Zuckerbog's mask off moment, I went back to one of my Facebook pieces I wrote, and it was a thing I worried about, which is what is viral? I don't mean does viral exist. I
mean what is actually famous? And the answer is we as people no longer decide that, in my opinion, and I think that that is also what it goes back to the tech media. It goes back to everything we're talking about, because it's what's the biggest news of the day. Well, whatever we think will get a bunch of traffic, what gets a bunch of traffic. Whateveryone's writing about what's important, Well,
it's the thing that will get us traffic. Elon Musk's tweet, I actually believe that the media contributed to the rise of Elon Musk in a way that's actually more egregious than Donald Trump. I think that if we did not have a tweet every time Elon Musk farted for a decade, and it was not recent, it was a decade putting a site, even the pandering to him, we would not
have him at the scale we did. Like he would still be insanely rich, but he would not have the power he does because he wouldn't be able to create news cycles. But on top of that, pointing a side, even the criticism, everyone just did the same thing. They kind of still do, but they really really did like it. I think that that's one way it's definitely got better because it used to be every site did exactly the fucking same thing, just crazy.
Yeah. And you know what, I wrote a lot of articles about Elon Musk's tweets, and at the time, I was like, this guy is really interesting, like that what he is doing is very oh yeah, And it took a while for me to be like, oh, but he's like this is like very bad, very bad situation. But I remember, like Ashley Vance, who's a reporter at Bloomberg, wrote the first biography of Elon Musk, and it came out like before Elon Musk was a fucking asshole and
very bad in that book, but he was not. He was seen as like someone who cared a lot about climate change and was like yeah, like blah blah blah. So I got an early copy of that book and I read it and I was like, whoa, there's like lots of crazy details in here. There was like one section for you was this. I think it was like
twenty fifteen, like it was. It was pre Trump, definitely, it might have even been earlier than that, like twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen something like that, and I had Ashley Vance on Motherboards podcast, which I was like hosting at the time, and we were like, Wow, this is like a super interesting guy. He's like in charge of Tesla and SpaceX,
Like that's nuts. And I remember I wrote a specific article where he and I believe his name is Craig Venter, who is like a DNA He's like a DNA sequencing guy, like from the early We're going to sequence the human genome days. And there's this anecdote in the book where Elon Musky and Craig Venter had this crazy idea to print humans on Mars, like sending a large three D
price they were joking. I literally was not like that's a story that I wrote, And I actually don't think that that particular article was bad, but it always like sticks out in my mind because I talked to like actual scientists being like, is this what is it? What are they even talking about here? Because there was a big period in like the early twenty tens where three D printing like pig organs to transplant them into human It was like a huge thing, Like we had millions of stories solid decade.
Before Better Offline existed. There was like, I don't know if anyone listening remembers this when three D printing was everywhere and there was just the assumption kind of like AI, that we would just no longer build things, we would print them using a machine that we both.
Yeah, it was like, Oh, you're not even going to like use Amazon. You're gonna have like a three D printer here in your house and it's going to print like hamburgers and also televisions. Like it's really insane. It
was so cool. Yeah, But anyways, it's like I wrote a bunch of stories about that, about Elon Musk saying he was going to do crazy stuff because like every once in a while he would do something kind of interesting, like uh, you know, put self not even like an autopilot into cars without it being tested properly and like kill a bunch of people and be like WHOA, that's
that's nuts. But trying to figure out in my head, like when do we stop enabling this, Like when do we stop letting Elon drive what we are covering as a publication. I think that's something that like probably every journalist has had to think about at some point, and that that's something that people did with Facebook. They did it with Apple, they did it with every big company when they had.
Did they have they They still write about every Facebook thing.
I'm not sorry they have not stopped, but a lot of the ones that did it have died. And then there's a lot I would say, there's a lot more like variety. If yes, look for.
I love that. I will absolutely give that. And I also want to be clear, though I'm critical here, I think that there are really fundamental logistical reasons this is the case. So first of all, there's no mentorship at all in journalism or in the workplace in general. But I think that there are so many people, young people who start aren't this industry and just go straight into it and no one educates them, and they don't educate themselves on how any of this shit works, because it's
quite difficult. I mean, I'm not perfect, but I have to pick up shit constantly, both from a PR job and for this and learn stuff without getting it wrong. Asking people you yourself, what doing your research? I imagine you bullshit test you own stuff. It's time consuming, and at the same time I'm being told, all right, three blogs, shi ahead, I want to see three blogs today. I need to know chat GPT as search. Now I need you to write eight hundred words about why this is
going to change everything. And so when you get to the point when I think you meant to say, trying to think critically about this, when right.
Or when are you going to like learn the intricacies of how this technology even works. And when you can't lose the intricacies, then you use company press releases or you sort of like use these shorthands where it's like, well, this VC said that this is how it's going to work, and like, I don't even know how to find someone who is an academic who can like criticize this in a coherent way, of which I think like millions and
millions of them. But I'm just saying, like, if you're a new reporter, you might not know how to do that.
I have I mean, do you ask, yeah, seriously, like how do you find out?
Right? So that's this is I'm going to try to say this in a the as least of bragging way as possible. But that was one of my favorite things about being the editor of Motherboard is that we were able to bring in people who were new to the industry and then and who had like deep interests in specific things and kind of teach them how to do
reporting and how to think about technology technology. And to be very clear, it's like every single person who came through there or that I've ever worked with has done the work. But I think something like very cool is like Edward Angueiso, who is amazing, like amazing, amazing, he.
Is joining us by the way for the bedrough line cees coverage.
Oh that's amazing. Yeah. It's like he came to Motherboard and he had he had a huge, huge knowledge about tech, labor and tech, and he had written a thesis about Uber and how Uber was emmiserating its drivers, but he did it or like his college thesis, but he didn't really know how to report when he came to Motherboard. But because he was so interested in that, it's like, did you know everything about Uber? Just work just write about Uber for a little while, like use your expertise,
like get to know it. And it's like he did it all of it on his own in terms of becoming the amazing reporter and writer that he is today. But I think that it like I'm proud that we were able to give him the space to do that and sort of like the guidance of here's how you, like, here's how you go fucking hard on uber without like libeling a million people, and like, here's how you stay out of lawsuits and things like that, which doesn't mean
pulling punches. It means making sure all your stuff is like very buttoned up and legally defensible and so on
and so forth. And I think that not just with Edward, but like many of the best reporters on the Internet these days are like I've worked with them in some way, shape or form, and that's something that they've always had in common, is having a deep interest in a specific topic or beat and like really specializing in that versus trying to write everything about every possible topic that there is, because when that happens, that's how you get like these surface level articles that are all the same.
I think it's I agree fully, and I think, just pondering this as you speak, there is another level that I've found with the show, which is to do this job right, you also have to be like a business and financial like Ed's Eden Guaiser Juni is one of the most gifted writers I've ever worked with. I'm so fucking happy to have him a CES because he is very good on socioeconomics. He is able to look at something and go, this will affect real people like this
that is not just the skill. It's like an actual talent that can be fostered. But it's tough because you have to start looking at the world in just this complete different way. I know a lot of listeners and I'm just the scritical of the media as well, have this thing where they look and like, how could journalists write like this? How could how could they just eat
up the slob. It's because we'll, what twenty years into tech journalists being educated to believe these guys, and we're finally breaking that down and saying, oh, could Elon Musk lie? Would Sam Olman?
Lie?
Would they? And I think that's it's weird because in almost every other, every other journalist field, you're kind of built like them.
Yeah. I feel like I woke up one day and I was like, oh, I'm like old now. Then by that it's like every day for me. Yeah, I mean I and I think that because I was always kind of like I always looked at myself like, oh, I'm kind of new to journalism, like I'm just feeling things out, like I'm I'm asking people what experts should I talk to?
How should I do this? Blah blah blah. And I would say around the three D printing bubble that we were just talking about is when I realized, I'm like, oh, wait, these like hype cycles where every VC, every company, everyone does the exact same thing and says it's going to be the future of everything, and there's like tons of money thrown into it. It doesn't always come true like
it it. Yeah, And so like you know, there was like VR and then there was three D printing, and then there was you know, Crypto, and then there was the metaverse and there's again and VR again and blah blah blah. And like at some point I was like, oh, I have been doing this long enough to now understand this cycle where the cool new thing is not going to change everything. It's gonna be or even happen or even happen, and it's it's gonna be full of fucking grifters.
All of them are full of grifters. And it's under like understandable why that is because many, many people have made a lot of money by rushing into a technology, hyping it up, selling their company or whatever, and you know, living in a mansion for the rest of their lives. But I think like as a journalist, I was like, oh, once I understood that that was the cycle, that that is, that was really helpful for my own work, I guess, is what I'm saying.
I think for me it was kind of crypto, But I think it was remote work. I think remote work was the thing that fully jokefied me because I had a few articles. I had an article turned down by Jilopnick, like twenty fifteen where I was like, hey, eat Al Musky's lying like it was actually kind of president. He was like, look, he said this about the model X didn't happen, isn't happening? Completely different said this about autoparlor hasn't happened. And even then I wrote like a positive
piece about auto public. What's kind of cool, Like that's the thing. If they didn't over promise, they could point to things to people be like, shit, this is really cool. But I think it was remote work because you just got to see this schism between reality and journalism. But for real, it was crypto. It was the twenty twenty one crypto craze where just people were lying. It wasn't
even like they were half true. They would just straight up like we will do this, and what they were saying was not possible, like not even and then they never did it, and then the companies were just dumping money and all these people were getting rich for nothing. And I watched this quite a lot of genalists just kind of wrote it up because they were like, well money good, yeah, money, money, lodge money, good money real.
I think also crypto. I've edited many stories about crypto, and I've written a handful of them, and it's fucking complicated. It's like if you want, and it's because it's so complicated, it's a space for tons of grifters. And I guess what I mean by that is like when you start talking about things like smart contracts and like dows and like blah blah blah, all that stuff, it's a really hard thing to parachute into and understand the lingo and
like what people are talking about at all. And then you go try to write an article about it because your editor says, this company made three billion dollars in the last two days, Like what's going on here? Go
write about it. It's like the amount of brain poison that you need to be to understand what they are attempting to do here, whether they were attempting to or not, but like to explain why it is a fraud was like a very difficult thing, and I feel like only a few journalists were ever, like very good at doing that.
But even then, the thing that got me to be clearly completely right I was writing about it at the time, and writing about it was occasionally exhausting because you'd spend the first court of the art being like, okay, this means this, this means that, this also means this. Okay, now you've learned all of this bullshit, I can get to the thing I want to write about, right. I think that the other thing is is it was when I realized so many journalists assumed that all of these
people had good intentions. That was when I that was what cracked it for me. It was the caven Rue's Slatecomers Guide to Crypto, or the article about Helium and all of these things where it was just like, oh, they said they got this partnership, did you fucking check? No? No, why would I They wouldn't lie to the New York time. Yes they were. They did. They literally lied, They literally lied, and they all lied all the time, and they're still
kind of doing it. And I think that I definitely had the experience of waking up and feeling old as well, because I've been doing pr from since two thousand and I've been doing prs since twand and eight, since twenty twelve,
and thus I've been the hype man. I still am some extent, but even then, in like mid twenty tens, with the indie go Go craze listeners and if you don't remember this time, there was a time when Indie Go Go and kickstarted started out and it was like every single company that on their got press, regardless of whether it was real or not.
That was one of my That was one of my favorite types of articles to write, because not like, hey there's a new Kickstarter, Hey this kick sorry that raised like three million dollars and was written about in like eighty publications, didn't make the thing, didn't try to make the.
Try like or they made it. It was just completely fucking broken. But I remember at that time also saying to new new business things like how are you making money? And they were like oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we are, and that's never well you don't want to hear someone being like yeah, sure a little bit and you're like, are you profitable? No, you're going to become profitable. But I remember even having clients that were like would
go to journalists. I'd take into journalis even and I'd be like, yeah, they're profitable, and they'd be like who cares, like just not necessarily as good, but they'd be like whatever, yeah, whatever, everyone's scaling. And then over time, thankfully I've got clients that are mostly profitable because suddenly journalists like, huh. If a company makes more more money than it spends, that's a good thing, and if it loses money, well that's
a bad thing unless it's open AI. And I think that's That's the other thing that's frustrate me as well. It's like, maybe you can actually give me an idea of this because I have a few thoughts, But why do they keep fucking falling for it so many times? It's like three hype cycles straight and this AI one is insane.
Yeah, that's the So we we've been painting with a very broad brush. You've added some specifics I've definitely been painting with a broad brush, and I'm just like, oh, yeah, like the industry, I apologize, No, it's fine. I'm just saying that I think with AI journalists, the ones that I read are like more skeptical than any technology that we've seen in a long time. However, the question is how many people are they like actually reaching and what
is that reach? And then you sort of have like some of these Kevin Roos's articles that we talked about in The New York Times where it's like I was seduced by an AI or like whatever, yeah, things like this.
It's like those are really really harmful articles and they go out to like a lot of people, and I think that it's just like it's really tough because I think on balance, journalists have been like really tough on AI companies, the ones that I read and the ones the ones that I like where I'm like, oh, like, Brian Merchant, you're really good on this topic, right at Zittron, you're really good on this topic. Kylie Robison, You're really
good on this topic. So on and so forth, and then but then I start thinking, oh, but like the New York Times often isn't very good on this topic, like the Wall Street Journal often isn't very good on this topic. And these are the sort of like mass market publications that whose audience sized dwarfs us.
I have to wonder if there isn't some degree of like them wanting to seem positive because they have a broad audience. I just don't know why. Yeah, like they want to be excited about the tank.
Yeah. I think that I have not worked at a big publication like that, but I know I know a lot of people who have, and I've like seen free like people I know of freelance for them and things like that. And I think that a lot of these publications have many, many, many levels of like bureaucracy and legal and like so on and so forth. And I feel like a lot of articles get a focus grouped
to death. Like I don't know what I'm linking on the term, but it's where there's like eighty people are looking at a thing, and then by the time it comes out, it's like, oh, this is like a quote unquote this in the middle it's like, yeah, you're just giving publicity to whatever, and it's like, oh, okay, this is not actually Like I.
Have to wonder if it's also a solidarity issue again, because Swisher, for example, the reason they'll find us a loathsome is that she pretends to be what she actually should have been, which is if everyone nearly Patel, Johanna Stone, who I love in general, Kara Swisher, who I find the testable, Casey Newton, who I find almost is the testable. The problem isn't that they're not getting these interviews. It's that when they have the person in front of them,
they don't ask them the questions they get. They ask them do you train with YouTube data? And they go eh, and it's like, okay, that's an answer for me versus and the British media has a litany of problems, but one of the things they do very well is harass Powell. And I think that there could just be this most subtle change in the world. When you get Sam Wrtman in front of him, don't accept whatever answer gives you immediately. Don't be like, well, seems reasonable to me that you
have no answer. So for revenue or how this stuff will become agi, I'm just going to keep going. But it's also if everyone started doing that, they would have to start answering that simple that if the only option they had was to get like Devin Cole, and I'll give them credit, Devin coldweight TechCrunch disrupt actually fucking answering the question to Aravin, the CEO of Perplexity about plagiarism,
could have pushed hard or whatever. We can. We can quarterback that later, but nevertheless, the fact the question is getting asked is so phenomenal, and Devin fucking respect to him. If everyone did that, these worms would have to run. Yeah, if everyone just fucking and it doesn't even need to be rude. You don't have to be a dickhead, you don't have to be as I would be very rude. Well, okay, I actually I take that back. I will get one of these people and you'll be shocked by how not
rude I am, because that actually doesn't get results. Ask them questions, right, what does that mean?
I think that So I don't like listen to every episode of Neli Patel's podcast, but I think this is something that he started to do a lot better. He like talked to the CEO of into It the other day and was like, uh, you know, badgering him on into Its lobbying about like why why we still fucking have to use turbo tax more or less year they've spent millions and millions and millions of dollars doing.
And then pushed him on lobbying as well.
And I think that, uh, I mean, I thought that that was a good example. I think that I just wish he'd have done that with with Sundar. He did give him his phone. That was.
It was.
I didn't listen to the whole thing.
The Google CEO is touching my phone, ask him compound questions the whole way down. Now, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna I'm gonna pull that back a bit, though. The intuit thing was the exact example of what everyone needs to do. He wasn't rude at all. He just kept asking the fucking question, and that's why it rocked. That's why it was good.
Well, So what I I was gonna say is I agree with you. I think that what has happened is you have fucking like Mark Zuckerberg going on Joe Regan and going on Lex Friedman and going on like all these other podcasts and pretending like they're like the media is a problem. And I agree with what you're saying. I also think that tech PR has gotten a lot smarter in the last few years in like keeping their executives away from anyone who will ask them hard questions. Yeah, and that's very calculated.
And I also I also think that I think you're completely right. I don't know if I'll ever say that PR people are getting smarter based on any of them, but I will say I think that they have just learned the lessons from celebrity PR because the tech media has allowed these people to be treated like celebrities like that is I think I'm very critical of Daylight Patel, but really the intuit one was great, but because he treated him like a businessman, he treated Sandapashy like a celebrity.
And I think that the problem is, and this is me like genuine empathy. For a while, they were for a while we laugh about the twenty fifteen Indiegogo era, but it was fun. Things were happening these people. Elon Musk wasn't just an inveterate racist. He wasn't post like talking about the fourteen words he loved the most. He
wasn't he wasn't just retweeting active Nazis. He was just like posting my lunch rocket go bum cargo fast and everyone was like cool, even I was, and I can understand why everyone kind of oriented themselves in that way. But these people aren't celebrities. They're fucking business people.
Yeah, that was something about So I've seen Elon Musk speak a couple of times while I was reporting, Like I went to the Gigo factories opening and sort of covered that when they started making batteries in Nevada and something, and I thought I did a good piece. Actually this was now many years ago, but I wrote I think the article is called like the Cult of Elon, and it was about his like very cultish fans who are just fucking obsessed with him even then. And he's a horrendous public speaker.
He's really he's not gifted.
He's not gifted. He's very awkward up there. And for a while that that was actually quite alluring is the wrong word to me, But I was like, Wow, this guy must be really smart, because he's so bad at talking that he might he must just and yet he's still like the CEO of all these companies and a billionaire and blah blah blah. And I was like but he can't string two sentences together really on stage, so he just must be like engineering behind the scenes all
the time, like building rockets himself. And I think that we really did a very bad job, not just with Elon, but with like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and all these people, treating them as geniuses who did all of this stuff themselves from a garage and not as businessmen who had thousands of people working for them, Like building on.
The backs of any of us would have combined, yeah.
And building on the backs of like a million other inventions by a million other people. And it's like fine, Like you built the smartphone, like cool. I use the smartphone all the time. That's very cool. But like Steve Jobs is not the inventor of the smartphone there there, or the iPhone. It was like thousands of people at Apple leveraging like thousands of years of you know, not thousands of years but many years, yeah, dozens of years of you know, like Wi Fi chips and touchscreen stuff
and blah blah blah. And I think that in treating Steve Jobs as a singular inventor of the iPhone, which is it's the subject of my friend Brian Merchant's book The One Device, like all the sort of stuff that went into it. We made these people celebrities. We made them celebrities because we're like genius inventor vibes versus likes ruthless businessmen and did like made big company in subsidies.
And I've written about this quite a lot. It's a little easier to swallow that way. When you see someone who's so otherworldly, rich, who's so powerful, who can do all of these things in their normal life that we never would, not about them being smart or good, just that they have that much money and power. It's much easier to look at them and say, damn, they must be so much different to me. They must be they
must know something I don't. And I think what we're seeing in the media now, as this kind of cynicism feeds in, is people beginning to realize that was never fucking true. Wasne The Act was a genius is a genius like Jobs was a great marketer and a good operator.
I mean, whilst the Act also like I don't know him personally, but he strikes me as like quite humble relatively speaking, and like still like.
I ran into him once and The thing that he talked to me about for half an hour was a twenty year old browser called like I Cab I Cab think it was yeah, the taxi Fata. It's some like low face like it's the only one I use. And
it was adorable. And he seems to like tech. And maybe that's the greater thing that I don't know how many people who were popular and in the industry actually like technology you talk to yourself about, like you're excited about some things, like there is still tech that excites you. I don't know if that's as common within the industry as it should be, both in the executives and some
members of the media. And I want to be wrong, because I think if everyone was actually excited about AI, if like that was really driving them, then that would be cool. That would be interesting. We would have some interesting shit come out of that. I just don't even think it's about it. It's like, I'm excited about what everyone else is excited about.
Well, it's very interesting that the crypto to AI, crypto to web three to AI pipeline of like, oh, this is going to change the world. Wait, no, Metaverse is going to change the world. Wait no, AI is going to change the world, and it's like, okay, cool, like you're into the thing that's going to make you a lot of money regardless. Yeah, I don't. It's funny you say that I'm not that into tech. And at Motherboard we were a website of people who were super skeptical of tech and.
Didn't which I think is fine, by the way.
I know, I know, I'm just saying that I am not. I'm not really excited about tech. I think I'm excited
about what some people are doing with technology. I'm very interesting community, I guess, and diving into those communities of people who are excited about things like I recently wrote about the people who are taking the red Box DVD kiosks home from Waldgreens and I'm like sitting in their discord watching figure out how this thing works and like flashing new software to it and stuff, and it's like that is very exciting to me, not because it's going
to change the world, but because I like seeing their excitement about learning how this like obsolete device works. And I don't want to be a part of that community myself because frankly, just like I don't know, I feel like I'm a busy guy, don't I don't like and
I have very like short attention span for hobbies. I would say like, I don't want to reverse engineer KIOSK, but I want to watch you do it from afar because you are finding out lots of like weird stuff about it, and I like writing about that sort of thing. And there's many, many, many like micro communities around the Internet still that are very exciting to me because they are so they found a place on the Internet or using technology that is not so fucked up and terrible
all the time. And I like looking at that. That's what makes me optimistic.
And I still think that that is a I still think that that is a perfectly valid thing to be excited about, and that is still being excited about tech. Some of my favorite moments in tech have been Sidier and the original homebrew community and the iPhone. The homebrew community around the PlayStation portable was fucking cool. I don't even mean the piracy, which may or may not have
been cool. I wouldn't know even then. Going back to like two thousand and six, are their homebrew community with the Xbox, the shit, the people that you could like just rip games and games you wont to the Xbox and they would run faster play Deaf Jam, the fighting game. There is still cool shit like that happening, and I feel like that does give me hope as well that people are still doing this shit, like why are you ripping up a red box thing? Because I can.
Yeah, yeah. And I've written a lot about like rights for repair and people you know, trying to fix their iPhones and so on and so forth. And the thing that's been really interesting about following that world is that the the like guy at the mall who puts the the iPhone screen on when you break it, he knows more about how that fucking iPhone works than probably most people who work at Apple. And I find that to
be really interesting. There's been like a couple massive Apple scandals that have broken because these like repair people who are just looking at a bunch of broken iPhones have realized there was like an engineering flaw that Apple mess something up on and it's like that's cool, Like this is just some dude who works at the mall in a kiosk and he has just like discovered a flaw in the iPhone that is gonna in a just world
cost Apple billions of dollars. In the real world that we live in, everyone gets like a fifty dollars refund maybe lucky, Yeah, for lucky. Or they'll be like a class action lawsuit where you get twelve dollars and fourteen years. But I like that kind of thing too.
So as we wrap this up, and this could be the final question, what is next for four or four? What do you actually get? Are you going to scale it much further? Are you going to do a conference like is that in the cards? Or are you going to keep it small?
We're going to do conferences, We're going to do whatever, We're going to pivot to video, We're gonna speed run. Yeah, no for real. So four or four Media has been around for a little over a year. It's me, Emmanuel Meiberg, Sam Cole, and Joseph Cox. I personally wanted to do it because I spent a lot of time editing the last few years of my life, and I really wanted to get back to writing. And I've really enjoyed doing my own reporting and writing again, Like it's been amazing
for my brain. I feel I would like the company to get bigger, Like I think that we probably will hire people at some point. But I think that the tricky thing for me is if we do that, will we have time to continue doing our own work? Like
how will that work? And so that is, you know, that's stuff that we talk about sort of like behind the scenes, Like right now we are the four of us doing everything in terms of just like we're doing our socials, we're doing the business stuff, you know, if we're talking to our lawyers and I'm printing merch and like mailing it myself, and I really like that hands
on aspect to it. But I think I'm trying to think like if we grow, will that give us more time to do the work or will it give us less time to do the work because we're then sort of like managing other people, which is a blessing in many ways because the company is starting to get close to a place where I think that we could financially justify hiring more people, but it's also does that fundamentally like sort of change what we're doing on a day
to day basis doesn't itself? Does that work and doesn't make it better? Is that what our readers even want? And I think that like any people that we would bring on would have a similar ethos to us and would be able to cover like I'm sure they would
be fantastic at whatever they're reporting on. It would allow us to have like more breadth of topics on the site, which is something that we want because you know, I've written a million articles about Facebook's AI and there's like a lot of fuckery going on that we should be covering across many topics. But sort of like what does that look like? I think is something that we talk about a lot. But the good news is it's going well.
I think that we will grow at some point. We're being very careful about it because we worked Advice and they hired a bunch of people and it seemed like they had money, and then you know, they did something bad, Like nothing specifically bad happened. It's just like grow this way, grow that way, and then it's like, oh shit, we don't have no money and we're bankrupt now. So yeah,
I don't know. I think it's been very hard to plan long term, I would say, because I'm very heads down most days, just like interviewing people and writing articles. But we want to do more, like we want to grow, we want to be bigger, but we want to do it, like very very.
Slowly, and also do you even have to?
Yeah, I mean that is a big That's another question that we ask ourselves because I do think that we've been able to do impactful work with just the four of us, and there's many people that I would love to work with more and again and in addition to But at the same time, it's like, is that something that I want to bring on ourselves, not because it would be bad, but because it would be additional. It's like, there's only so many hours ahead.
It's more shit to manage more personalities. Yeah, where can people find you? Jason?
So we're at four or four media dot Co. We're subscriber funded publication.
Give them money.
I paid you, give us money. Thank you. We really do appreciate it. And then you know, I'm on every fucking social media platform. If you search my name, you'll find me.
And then it will be in the episode notes. Jason, thank you so much for joining me. You've been listening to Better Offline, I'm at Zetron, you know all the shit to find me. It will be following this with a really nice, non acerbic little speech. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening. To Better Offline.
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O S O W s ki dot com. You can email me at easy at better offline dot com, or visit better offline dot com on more podcast links, and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot Where's youoead dot am to visit the discord, and go to our slash.
Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.