Radio Better Offline: Paris Martineau, Jeff Jarvis

Summary

Better Offline: Episode Summary Featuring Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis

Released on January 15, 2025, Better Offline delves deep into the intricate relationship between the tech industry and society. In this episode, host Ed Zitron engages in a compelling discussion with Paris Martineau, reporter at The Information, and Jeff Jarvis, author of The Gutenberg Parenthesis and journalism professor at Stony Brook University. Their conversation navigates through pressing issues in the tech world, including the rise of hookup apps, the evolving responsibilities of digital platforms, and the future of journalism in an increasingly digital landscape.

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1. Sniffies: A New Player in the Hookup App Landscape

[05:24 - 07:20]

The episode kicks off with an exploration of Sniffies, a burgeoning hookup app tailored specifically for men seeking men, positioning itself as a direct competitor to established platforms like Grindr. Unlike traditional dating apps, Sniffies emphasizes immediate hookups without the necessity for a dating relationship.

Paris Martineau highlights, “It's a hookup app just for the first time. It's not like Grindr's Kinkster; it's an actual hookup.” However, Martineau brings to light significant concerns regarding user safety, specifically the alarming number of underage users accessing the platform. Jeff Jarvis corroborates these concerns, noting, “It's about still around afterwards is the thing that shocks me.”

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2. Legal Liabilities and the Role of Section 230

[07:09 - 10:19]

The conversation pivots to the legal implications surrounding Sniffies and similar platforms. Martineau and Jarvis discuss over a dozen cases where adult men were charged with sex crimes involving minors met on Sniffies, raising profound questions about platform responsibility.

Martineau explains, “When you have a child user issue, when you're a dating and sex platform, you also have a child sexual abuse platform.” This grim revelation underscores the loopholes in current legislation, notably Section 230, which has historically shielded platforms from accountability for user-generated content. However, shifting judicial perspectives, as evidenced by the upcoming Doe vs. Grindr case, are challenging this immunity. Jarvis underscores the gravity: “...if they rule Grindr shouldn't be able to hide behind section 230...”

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3. Meta's Content Moderation Rollback and Its Consequences

[20:08 - 25:42]

The discussion transitions to Meta (Facebook) and its recent decision to scale back content moderation efforts. Martineau and Jarvis express deep concerns about the resurgence of harmful content, including homophobia and harassment, as a result of these policy changes.

Jarvis critiques Meta's approach, stating, “It's better offline, but it is very online, so... I think what you're seeing with the destruction of meta...” The guests lament the increased prevalence of abusive content and the platform's failure to uphold its commitment to a "safe space," potentially exacerbating societal divisions and misinformation.

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4. Impact on Journalism and the Future of Media

[30:03 - 45:16]

A significant portion of the episode examines how Meta's content policies are adversely affecting journalism and the broader media landscape. Martineau discusses the dwindling reach of reputable news outlets, with Jarvis highlighting a sharp decline in traffic to major publications like The Washington Post.

Jarvis observes, “These large publications have been so used to social traffic and they've not been working out what the hell to do with it for a while.” The guests delve into the challenges traditional media faces in adapting to digital platforms, emphasizing the need for sustainable, subscription-based models that prioritize quality over quantity. Martineau adds, “I think there needs to be a way to make news and journalism profitable. And that doesn't exist at all scales and for all companies.”

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5. The PR Industry and Media Relations Challenges

[66:21 - 86:56]

The conversation shifts to the Public Relations (PR) industry's struggles amidst evolving media dynamics. Jarvis criticizes the current state of PR, labeling it as ineffective due to its reliance on outdated practices that fail to engage meaningfully with journalists and audiences.

Martineau shares her experiences, stating, “It's extremely easy to do bad PR and extremely hard to do good.” The guests discuss how the traditional PR model is becoming obsolete, unable to navigate the complexities of modern media relations where authenticity and direct engagement are paramount.

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6. Prospects for Sustainable Journalism Models

[86:57 - 99:55]

In the final segments, Martineau and Jarvis explore innovative models for journalism that emphasize smaller, more focused media outlets. They argue that decentralizing journalism and fostering niche publications can lead to more sustainable and impactful reporting.

Martineau reflects, “I am at the point now giving up on big old media. The newspaper chains are almost all run by hedge funds. Broadcast is geriatric. Magazines are dying. It's a disaster all around.” Jarvis concurs, advocating for a return to human-scale media operations that prioritize depth and quality over mass reach, thereby restoring trust and engagement with audiences.

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Conclusion and Final Thoughts

[99:55 - End]

Ed Zitron wraps up the episode by reiterating the importance of adapting to the rapidly changing tech landscape. He emphasizes the need for accountability among tech giants and the evolution of journalism to meet contemporary challenges. The guests leave listeners with a call to support and engage with emerging media platforms that prioritize ethical standards and quality reporting.

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This episode of Better Offline offers a profound examination of the intersections between technology, society, and media. Through insightful discussions, Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis shed light on critical issues affecting user safety on hookup apps, the responsibilities of digital platforms, and the urgent need for transformative approaches in journalism. Their expertise provides listeners with a comprehensive understanding of the current tech landscape and its broader societal implications.

Transcript

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[Alec Baldwin]

Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This past season on my podcast, here's the Thing, I spoke with more actors, musicians, policymakers, and so many other fascinating people like writer and actor Dan Aykroyd.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I love writing more than anything. You're left alone. You know, you do three hours in the morning, you write three hours in the afternoon.

[Alec Baldwin]

Go pick up a kid from school, then write at night and after nine hours you come out with seven pages and and then you're moving on. Listen to here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.

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[Jeff Jarvis]

Change is coming. Now it's my time to record radio. Better offline, right here in the beautiful iHeartRadio studios on 55th Street. And my God, we're back from CES. You couldn't stop me. I got off. I did 13 and a half bloody hours on the radio, on the podcast thing. I just don't know why I keep calling it radio. And then got on the flight, moved to New York. It was nothing. Wore her off a duck's back. And now it's Tuesday. I'm already recording again. You'll never get rid of me. And today I have two amazing guests. I have Paris Martineau, reporter at the Information, and the mighty Jeff Jarvis, author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis and journalism professor over at stony Brook University. Mr. Jarvis is currently. He is fielding a phone call. So I'll go to Paris. How are you doing, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm doing great. I'm astounded by your energy levels, given the amount of podcasting and radio you've done in the last week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ed, I am. I am fired up. I love doing this. I think this is what I was meant to do.

[Cara Price]

How are your feet after ces?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fantastic. I got inserts from my. I, like, came to this show fully prepared. No one realizes how much like, the amount of, like, Google Docs I had of things prepared. Like, the suitcase was packed, like, two weeks in advance. And then I got to New York and I'd forgotten things like gym shorts and some shoes. And basically, I prepared my life for one thing, not both things.

[Paris Martineau]

And it's podcasting. Podcasting and blogging and nothing else. Who needs sleep?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Slave to the content now. Mr. Jarvis, how have you been?

[Cara Price]

Oh, good, good. It's cold here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is cold.

[Cara Price]

Do you have any regret coming here right now?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Absolutely not.

[Cara Price]

Okay, good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'd rather take this real last weather than the nonsense I get back in England.

[Cara Price]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, it's kind of cold, but I usually see you two on this Week in Tech, so it's good to have you here in person.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, it's lovely to be IRL with You irl. It is. Some might say it's better offline.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's better offline, but it is very online, so. All right, Paris, you had a story come out over the weekend.

[Paris Martineau]

I did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Tell us about it.

[Paris Martineau]

So it is a story about this website called Sniffies. Have you guys ever heard of it?

[Cara Price]

Right there. I wanna stop and I don't wanna know anything more.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think that's actually kind of where I'm.

[Paris Martineau]

That's probably a fair estimation. It is the up and coming, I guess, competitor to Grindr. It's a website for men seeking men. But it is specifically unlike kind of your dating apps of yore. It's not really about dating.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's about actual hookup.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a hookup app just for the first time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So it's not like field for Kinkster, it's like an actual hookup. It's an actual app.

[Paris Martineau]

And it's supposed to be kind of about translating the gay cruising scene into online.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sure.

[Paris Martineau]

Potentially great idea.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why not?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. People seem to really love it. It started in some kind of infancy form in 2016, but in the last couple of years has really taken off among gays in big cities and cities honestly, big and small, however.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So nothing went wrong then?

[Paris Martineau]

Nothing went wrong. That's the end of the story. I just like writing about when companies do good. Yeah. So in this case, part of the thing that made Sniffees so attractive to its users is it's kind of a no holds barred approach to hookup platforms. You don't even have to make an account to sign in. You could just type in sniffies.com, say, yeah, I'm over 18, and then get to like, navigating a map full of dick pics and butt pics and messaging people and meeting up. Okay, that is a problem because it seems like the site has a bit of a child user issue. And when you have a child user issue, when you're a dating and sex platform, you also have a child sexual abuse platform.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

So me and my colleague Corey Weinberg identified over the last kind of year or so, more than a dozen cases where adult men had been charged for sex crimes involving a minor they met.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And all facilitated directly on this platform.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. And that's a lot, it seems, for a relatively small platform.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's about still around afterwards is the thing that shocks me.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I mean, part of it is because the question of legal liability in these cases is a bit tricky. You have companies like. There's long been an issue of kids getting onto adult Dating apps and meeting adults. But up until recently, every legal challenge that a parent or child that has grown up have tried to kind of throw against these companies saying, hey, you're actually not doing your job when it comes to policing underage users. Every legal challenge has been swept away by the company saying, Ah, section 230.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Even legal challenges aside, would they not want to stop the children getting on the sex app?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it's hard, sensibly.

[Cara Price]

That's the problem.

[Paris Martineau]

It's not easy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, but did they try?

[Paris Martineau]

Not really. Because all they wanted. They don't want to have to try harder, it seems, because right now the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Standard thing they don't want to try harder on is stopping adults having sex with children.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, because that would require taking on some responsibility. And right now what all these companies do is they just ask you for your birthday and assume that you didn't lie. Because if they were going to do anything more stringent than that, that could open them up to liability.

[Cara Price]

Explain something to me. So Backpage and Craigslist took down their sex sections.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And also just for the listeners, Backpage. Can you just run us through that?

[Cara Price]

Backpage was a place where you could hook up. It was, pardon me, more of a singles into sex thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Cara Price]

Craigslist was pretty much singles, but within that people would find each other for that purpose.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then Backpage was shut down.

[Cara Price]

By the end, Backpage was shut down and Craigslist voluntarily got out of it because the liability was high. Right, so they were shut down because it was sex trafficking or what's the difference between that and what? Snuffies?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sniffies.

[Paris Martineau]

Sniffies.

[Cara Price]

Sniffies is doing Sniffies.

[Paris Martineau]

I believe part of the difference is when it comes to Backpage and Craigslist seeking connections, part of what they were originally shut down for involved fosta, Sesta. It involved specifically sexual exploitation and sex trafficking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And what is fosta just for that?

[Paris Martineau]

Fosta and Sesta were a package of bills that kind of went through some amount of years ago that ended up regulating and making it. Making it so that these companies could not use the Section 230 defense as a way to get around claims by.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which they mean they were made responsible for user generated content, because. Right, got it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. And so in Sniffy's case, it's a bit different. Well, in some ways it's not a lot different because part of the issue of what we found of those dozen cases, I'd say like over a third of them did involve money being exchanged for sex with minors. However, part of it comes to the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fact, the love of the game, I guess.

[Paris Martineau]

I guess part of it is that up until fairly recently, dating apps hadn't really had legal claims like this against them. Whenever they had, they'd been basically laughed out of court saying, oh, of course Grindr's not responsible for connecting your 14 year old to a bunch of 30 year olds. It's a tech platform, it's user generated content. However, due to kind of shifting tides in the way that judges are viewing Internet companies like defenses, that's starting to change. Right now there is a lawsuit that is going to be heard by the ninth Circuit Court of Appeals involving a case called Dovey GRINDR, where a 15 year old basically got on Grindr, ended up being connected with four men who raped him. Oh my God. And part of what the attorney, Carrie Goldberg is claiming in this appeal or arguing is that Grindr shouldn't be able to hide behind section 230 to say, hey, it's not our fault that we didn't age verify that Grindr should be held liable for its faulty age verification policies under kind of product liability law saying that this is a defectively designed product. And that's a specific argument the 9th Circuit Court has been amenable to when it comes to other tech companies like Snapchat for instance.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So what happened in the rest of the story?

[Paris Martineau]

In the rest of the story, basically we identified all of these different cases. We talked to Sniffies, they said that they are working on an ID based age verification solution. But in reality, the only way that that's currently in practice is just in the dozen or so states that currently have pornography restrictions to where like, part of the thing is, if you open up Sniffies, it's like a map and all the profile photos are like photos of penises. So if you are in one of those states, with. If you're in one of those states, if there's anybody you recognize, you can see exactly where they are. If you are in one of those states, when you open it up now, you'll see a blurred image. And if you want to see the penis photos, you have to enter in your id. However, the company says that they're maybe gonna expand this in some way. It hasn't happened yet and that would.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Potentially open up legal liability then.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but part of the thing is users also don't wanna do that. So I mean, that was kind of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What I was thinking. That would kind of kill it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, an app or a platform like that is never going to be successful if it has that sort of barrier to entry and privacy implications are huge.

[Cara Price]

You're handing over your identification to a company called Sniffies. Yeah, and I mean, I wouldn't feel terribly secure in that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I would, of course, but that's just me. But no, you're right though. It's like these. I imagine part of the thing here, other than the thing you're doing on there, is that it is kind of anonymous.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, that's the whole point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Completely hidden thing where you can go off and touch all and sundry. The problem being all and sundry there, what are the legal ramifications though if, like the. What was it? Doe versus Grindr.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I mean, so the thing is, if that case, when it's appealed to the 9th of the court, if they rule in a similar way that they have in the past and say, hey, when it comes to product liability cases like this, tech companies don't have a defense that could have huge ramifications for every company in the dating.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not just for dating even.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it could, yeah, be way bigger than dating, But I mean, the immediate impacts, according to the attorneys I spoke to, would be certainly on the dating app scene, which is huge.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What would change with those then?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, probably what would change is they'd have to find a way to determine user age beyond just asking you for your to enter in your birthday. So it could be things like some of the other dating app companies out there already have stuff in place. For instance, I believe Bumble and one other maybe Tinder scan user profile photos when they're uploaded to see like, does this person look like clearly a child? And if so, they might ask you to upload your ID to verify that you're over 18.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I feel like there could also be a big problem. So I've been on the dating apps for a while. Not that I'm not single, it just that nobody likes me. And I remember when I was on them, it was like months and months actually. No, like last year, like early last year. It's been a while. There was a huge fake profile problem. And I wonder if there's not a secondary problem here where the dominance of these fake profiles on there might get pushed away when they have to stop verifying every user because that feels like the on it, the thing that could happen.

[Paris Martineau]

But I mean, then part of the problem, if you're thinking about it from a corporate perspective, is then your user numbers go down and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Damn right.

[Paris Martineau]

And probably in those cases those fake profiles are like, the person is probably paying for that fake profile because Then it increases their reach if they're running some sort of scam. And then their paying user numbers would go down, which would be bad for most dating app companies that are already doing poorly. A weird thing I learned during this story is that Grindr is like the most profitable dating app company because gay users don't. I mean, this is a bit of a simplification, but from what I heard, it is that gay users just seem to pay for the platform and use it for much longer. In part, researchers think, because gay users are more likely to be in non monogamous relationships. So you're not using, you're not signing up for Hinge Premium, using it for a couple months, then getting in a monogamous relationship and never using it again.

[Cara Price]

So believe it or not, I once was an executive overseeing parts of brides.com.

[Paris Martineau]

Ah yes, you're so bridal, Jeff.

[Cara Price]

Yes. And I used to love to say I gotta go to a brides meeting. But the interesting thing there was that our audience would come in and leave in nine months and for their sake, you hope they didn't come back. Yeah, right. This is the other extreme of that. What happened with the cases that were done against Sniffies? What was the status of those cases?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I mean, so the cases that we, that I tracked were all kind of like sex crimes, again, involving specific, like male offenders. In two cases that we kind of follow throughout the story involving this then 14 year old who made an account in Sniffies and had sex with two adults. Those two adults have since been sentenced to upwards of 50 years.

[Cara Price]

So I asked the question wrong. Those weren't cases against Sniffies in any case.

[Paris Martineau]

They were against the case against people. That's the thing is Sniffies has had no cases against him. I spoke to a parent, the parent of that 14 year old, and she said like, of course Sniffies should be sued. I don't know how to do it. I'm dealing with, you know, three dealing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

With a criminal case.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm dealing with three foster kids that already were fucked up. And now my 14 year old is super fucked up and has tried to commit suicide because of this whole thing. You know, she's like, I don't know how to do this. But I do think that if something happens on the DOE versus Grindr front, you might see cases like this increasing, increasingly being filed throughout the country.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And could this not be extrapolated out to a much wider series of issues as well, like assaults that happen with people of age that still happen as a result of a platform Like Tinder or something.

[Cara Price]

But that's what I wanted to ask next is when you go to product liability, it's usually that you're not matching a product promise. This is gonna make you thin, this is gonna make you beautiful. Does sniffies promise safety? Maybe you get a solvent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Tinder has these features. I believe Tinder has features about check ins or maybe one of the platforms has safety features. So kind of Grindr.

[Paris Martineau]

One of the things noted in that is that Grindr promotes itself as a quote, safe space. And all of these apps and plat say like our users are 18 and up. Like they say that they check users age.

[Cara Price]

So there you go.

[Paris Martineau]

Promise that in a way. But then I guess the question goes, does asking someone to enter their date of birth in just a form, does that mean you've actually checked their age?

[Cara Price]

Well this is the interesting thing, we've talked about this on our podcast on the speaking Google is where does the liability land? Is it at the platform and technology level or is it at the intermediary level or is it at the user level? And if we try to expect the platforms to solve all the problems of mankind, we know they're going to fail.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I think they will fail specifically with Tinder. Under their safety and policy center. It says, and I quote, our safety tools. We utilize a network of industry leading automated and manual moderation review tools, systems and processes and invest significant resources to prevent, monitor and remove inappropriate behavior, impersonation, harassment and more from our app. These tools include automatic scans of profiles, red flag languages and images, manual reviews of suspicious profiles, and it goes on and so forth. And they also have a zero tolerance policy of harassment and encourage their community to report any instance of misconduct.

[Cara Price]

Do they have a liability statement there?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now let's scroll down.

[Cara Price]

The bottom is where the lawyers live.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's see.

[Paris Martineau]

It's probably in all caps or something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Additional policies decoration harassment under it. Bloody hell, they got a lot. Now there's just a lot of like things that might be under the terms of use, but nevertheless if Doe vs Grindr happens, it feels like that won't stop people suing and using this as a promise.

[Paris Martineau]

Certainly.

[Cara Price]

Yeah, but there's a problem with that too. I've argued. I mean Facebook is now completely fucked up and going full maga. But I've argued strenuously over the years that it should have had a raison d'etre, a North Star, right? And it should have said we're here to be nice to each other, we're here to build Community, we're here to make strangers less strange. They do none of that. And I wish they would have because perhaps then there is a standard to hold them against and also their users. However, in this discussion, if they say, well, you said you're gonna be the place where people are nice and now you're filled with harassment, it motivates them not to make any promises.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Cara Price]

Yeah, and that's a problem.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think there's also an IDC company. So I don't really. That's the company that owns Tinder and Match Group and a bunch of other ones like chemistry.com, and I don't. They're evil. Like this is my statement. You don't have to follow. I think they're deeply evil companies. But this Sniffy's thing is a level worse.

[Paris Martineau]

And I mean, I just think it's interesting because Sniffies, I mean, is kind of like the worst of all these problems because it is completely without any of the safeguards that these people and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All about a frictionless experience.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. But it's also gotten so popular in the last couple of years. Dating. The big dating apps are taking notice. Like Grindr shouted it out basically in one of their most recent earnings calls. What did they say when an analyst had asked like, oh, are there any competitors in this space that you're looking for keeping an eye on? And their CFO had said something along. There's like an anonymous. They basically described Sniffies in name but without using their name and said, we're keeping an eye on them. They also then introduced a feature I believe called Right now that users on Grindr can turn on if they're looking for sex. Right. That instant and other apps in the gay dating space have kind of emerge that are trying to take kind of a similar map based cruising approach.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is really funny though that the ultimate thing is they were just like, yeah, what if we didn't follow any rules?

[Paris Martineau]

It is pretty funny.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What if we just turned off the rules part? And I think that kind of leads us to meta right now. Because I think what you're seeing with the destruction of meta and I'm sure you two have heard, but for the listeners, meta has now got rid of all of their content moderation stuff. They've got rid. Well, they're claiming.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, they're fact checking.

[Cara Price]

They're fact checking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sorry, sorry. Fact check. And I just fucked up the fact check, didn't I? And now. And now they're laying off 5%. No, thank God someone else didn't know what's going on now. They're laying off 5% of their people for quote, underperforming. And they're gonna, they're claiming that LLMs will replace like second tier engineers. And also they have Casey Newton, actually. I've given him a lot of shit, but he's put out some really good things recently about what Meta has said inside and how they're doing allowable things like just straight up homophobia, straight up abuse.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean they just around the same time that these announcements rolled out that an internal directive went out to remove tampons and pads from any male restrooms on Facebook campuses, which is just a ghoulish thing to. It's just like that is costing you money. You already have those dispensers in there. Why not just leave them there?

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I think that it's something above MAGA as well. And I think that people willing to do what I'm about to describe might lean conservative. Cause it's evil. Now if you're listening, you're conservative saying, ed, don't be so rude. Shut the fuck up. I don't care.

[Paris Martineau]

Now I'm surprised you've made it this far in the podcast.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I don't know how you are there. No, it's all the anti monopoly people who are like God damn it. Yeah, Matt Stoler. Anyways, so the point I'm making is I think Meta is going to be the largest scale example of a company just not giving a shit in history. They're just doing all the evil stuff. They're using this as a chance to get rid of these troublesome things such as of diversity, equity and inclusion. Harassing trans people by removing them from spaces.

[Cara Price]

It's all around American industry now. McDonald's which depends upon black customers and depends upon black employees and people of color. No, dei, get rid of it. We don't care anymore. We're not gonna do that anymore. And Meta, which cared about society and getting together and all that bs, right? I was very impressed. Mark Lymle, who is a Stanford law professor and a big deal in west coast law, he is deactivating his account, but he's also firing Meta. As a customer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hell yeah.

[Cara Price]

As a client. And he said, I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's descent into toxic masculinity and neo Nazi madness. Yay. And that's a lot of it. It's not just political, it's this toast your donads I actually know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I take back my hell yeah. I recant my hell yeah.

[Cara Price]

So this is you. Thank you. They're waiting for this moment.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no. But also, like, hell yeah, now. But like daylight dollar short. As you can ask Jeff. Jeff Horowitz, Wall Street Journal, author of Broken Code. Meta. Has been backing up the MAGA people for years and years and years they have been. They allowed plandemic to spread a horrible conspiracy film that I'm not even going to describe. It sounds stupid and it is stupid. It's for morons. Eh, whatever. It's meant to be a big ten. I don't care. Jeff Kaplan, who is now the head of Global Policy, I believe.

[Cara Price]

Joel.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Joel Cott. Why do I keep mixing those fact.

[Cara Price]

Check you again, man.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, this is why you have guests. Cause I'm too stupid to remember things. He intervened with the public health group specifically to allow Pandemic to continue to go through. And when Kevin Roose attempted to report on this and report that CrowdTangle, this internal tool, had allowed them to see that these things were spreading and that Dan Bongino and all the conservatives were basically all that was being recommended. Alex Schultz, the CMO of. Of Facebook at the time. Meta. Now he just shut down. Crowd tangle, baby. You can't have that. Can't have people knowing. Alex Schultz also recently suggested on the anti LGBTQ front, and he is a gay man, that seeing homophobia and some such business on there would make people more sympathetic to the cause of LGBTQ people.

[Cara Price]

This is perverse.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is. It's disgusting. But the thing is, it's. I think what's frustrating me, and perhaps I need to stop saying things like, it's not just maga, it is maga. Of course it is. But it's been here for a while and it's been here egregiously. They've been supporting the conservatives at scale, and I mean supporting as a media property. And so it's just. I just can't take it so seriously when people are going, well, this is Mark Zuckerberg finally giving in. No. That repressed little fuck. He's. Oh, going on Joe Rogan. Toxic things are not masculine enough.

[Cara Price]

What a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The least masculine thing I've ever heard. Anyway, ran over.

[Cara Price]

So this week on Google last week, I said, is there anybody left? I thought that Jeff Bezos was responsible steward of the Washington Post. He's not. Mark Zuckerberg was always a dork, but I didn't think he was this bad. Jack Dorsey gets weirder by the day and on and on. And I said on the show that Jensen Huang, the CEO and founder of Nvidia. I'd watched his two hour keynote at ces. I'm impressed by him constantly. I thought, well, maybe there's a smart.

[Paris Martineau]

Guy right the next day that's believing the good in people.

[Cara Price]

The next day on Mastodon, somebody said, this is your good guy, Jensen Huang, signing a woman's breast.

[Paris Martineau]

I was about to say, jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, first of all, if she asked, if she asked. But also, I will choose the other thing that Jensen Huang did at ces. So during one of the presentations, an audio guy was like, hurried on. He goes, I can hear myself. I can hear myself. And the guy's like, no, no, Mr. Mr. Huang. It's reflecting off the sides. He's like, no, no. And he was called Sebastian, I believe. He's like, I'm. When I. When someone makes a mistake, I'm gonna call you the Sebastian going forward.

[Cara Price]

Okay, Never mind that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that's the thing.

[Cara Price]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is a fair thing, though. And I'm not saying I think there are some who want this more than others. It would be nice if one of them wasn't insane. I thought it was Mark Benioff. For a while, I thought. I thought Marc Benioff was all right. And I actually had coffee with the reporter after I met him and, like, described him positively. And she said, so he's just another white tech CEO. I'm like, oh, shit, I'm doing the thing that I'm doing the exact thing. But also Benioff's. Benioff's a worm, too.

[Paris Martineau]

So may I put together my theory forward? My theory. It's called CEO brain worms.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Please, please.

[Paris Martineau]

It's simply that if you are a CEO of something, especially a large company, you increasingly get brainworms, which is just. You are surrounded by people whose job is largely to say yes to you, make you feel good, and that would make anyone insane. If you are surrounded by sycophants for long enough, I think that you are going to become untethered from reality in a way that is distressing to a person that exists in conflict.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Someone on Twitter once said, being a billionaire is like being kicked in the horse, in the head by horse every day. And I think that's fair.

[Cara Price]

But there's something different now. I think they've always been sexist. It's a male structure that's given, but the permission structure has changed radically.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, yes.

[Cara Price]

And I don't think necessarily their essence has changed, but they're all freed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're untethered.

[Cara Price]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And yeah, I fully agree with that. And I Think you're really seeing it with Zuckerberg. And it kind of makes so much more. I wish I would have called this one because he is doing exactly what you'd expect. He's just. I'm going to remove all of the stuff that makes Facebook already a basically unusable platform. I'm going to make it. I'm just gonna add all the racism back. We need some of that more racism there. And I'm just gonna fire a bunch of people and I'm gonna go on Joe Rogan and talk about my sad little wheelie or whatever he said. I didn't watch. I don't care. It's just. What happens with Google now is my question. What is the untethered Sundar Pichai experience?

[Cara Price]

I'm gonna be naive again. I think it's different maybe because Sundar is educated and Larry and Sergei are educated and Zuckerberg left sophomore year. Seminar brain.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sure. But I'm not sure that I've met plenty of psychotic people in college.

[Cara Price]

True.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I'm just.

[Cara Price]

True.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm just wondering. Perhaps I should reframe the question. It's like what happens to Google now? How worried about Google's quality I am. Because this is what. What Meta is doing is effectively what Google's been working on. It's the whole thing of degrading the quality of the service by taking off the things that makes it good.

[Cara Price]

Well I argued differently that the problem for Google isn't just Google. The problem is the web. The web is being ruined as a whole. And it's a window onto a worse web.

[Paris Martineau]

And in some ways Google is accelerating that by Google has as it is the portal to the web. Entire industries upon industries have emerged to game that portal of the web which results in kind of a self fulfilling prophecy of slop.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. The content that they raise becomes the most popular content which in turn informs what will be popular next.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Cara Price]

Oh, it's an omelet of chicken and egg.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Yeah, I'm hungry. It's. I think that this is really going to hasten the raw economy that I think this is just going to begin more rot. Because before there was this layer and they obviously all resented it where it was just like oh yeah, there's different color people. I guess there's woman now. Jesus Christ. And they've always like grumpily accepted it. And Meta has been weirdly one of the better ones. Which means that the ones who are not. What do you think fucking Tesla's going to be like? Tesla's not Going to have bathroom for women anymore. That's a guess. It's a joke. I don't know. Who are you worried about, Jet? Like, who's the real bastard left? Who's the bastard who hasn't bastard it yet?

[Cara Price]

I think that's the. I hope that Google's not going to go that far. I think for their business it wouldn't be any good. Here's the other question. Blue sky, right? Do we have any hope for blue sky? So I have, but I'm an optimist. I hold out hope. I like blue sky.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm a nihilist. But I have hope for blue sky. Selfishly, yes.

[Cara Price]

And then I saw. Did you see the thing yesterday? I've got to pull up the rundown. There's an effort to raise $30 million.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is this the free. My app Free Off Feeds.

[Cara Price]

Free Off Feeds, which is filled with people like Shoshana Zuboff.

[Paris Martineau]

Can you explain this to me? What are they raising money?

[Jeff Jarvis]

This was already on my notes. I'm glad you brought this up.

[Cara Price]

It's really on my notes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What is it?

[Cara Price]

And Dave Weiner, who's one of the pioneers of RSS and podcasting and blogging and so on, his response was. There's no nerds there. There's no technologists there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I also. It doesn't seem to be saying what they'll do.

[Cara Price]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

So what are they raising the money to?

[Jeff Jarvis]

They've not even raised the money.

[Paris Martineau]

They're declaring their hope to raise money. I'd also like to declare that I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Also need $30 million.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll spend it on a brownstone and give you 10, 20 million.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I will keep the money and do nothing else.

[Cara Price]

What's the name of it again?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Free Our Feeds.

[Cara Price]

Because I want to go down the list of the people who are associated.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no, it's really funny. There's Cory Doctorow and Shoshana Zuboff, which if. If you've ever talked to Corey about Shoshana Zuboff, let me just say that's a weird coffee date.

[Cara Price]

Yeah. Mark's sermon from Mozilla, who I think is a good guy, but Shoshana drives me crazy. Roger McNamee. Oh, Mark doesn't call me anymore. Drives me nuts. Mark Ruffalo, Jimmy Wales, we like Brian Eno is everywhere. Carol Cadwalader from. Well, the Guardians, Soon Turtle.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's just a bunch of people who don't build.

[Cara Price]

They don't build. They don't build. So my friend Craig Newmark is on there extensively.

[Paris Martineau]

What they want to use the raised funds for is to launching a public interest foundation to support the project while creating independently hosted infrastructure, giving Blue sky users, developers and researchers access to content and data.

[Cara Price]

You don't need $30 million to do that. I need 6 million. Mastodon built up to what it was just until the point where Musk bought Twitter. Mastodon had raised an entire gene 500,000.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Mastodon literally just did a nonprofit operation like a day or two ago saying that they're kind of decentralizing it.

[Paola Pedrosa]

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[Mel Reid]

Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there? We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons and birds. But what if there's something else, something much more ominous that appears under the COVID of night, Silent, unseen, watching? They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road, or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home. Drones? Or are they?

[Cara Price]

We used to word drone because it was comfortable to other people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

One minute was there and one minute it wasn't. Oh, that is beyond creepy.

[Mel Reid]

Do you feel like this drone was targeting you specifically?

[Cara Price]

Yes, absolutely.

[Mel Reid]

Listen to Obscurum Invasion of the Drones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Os Velozian]

Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Osvar Loschin, one of the new hosts of the long running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical but obsessively intrigued.

[Paris Martineau]

And I'm Cara Price, the other new host, and I'm ready to adopt early.

[Os Velozian]

And often on tech stuff. We travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology.

[Jeff Jarvis]

One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians.

[Paris Martineau]

Like Data is a a very rough proxy for a complex reality.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How is it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night?

[Paris Martineau]

Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the singularity. So join us.

[Os Velozian]

Listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Alec Baldwin]

How serious is youth vaping? Irreversible lung damage serious. 1 in 10 kids vape serious, which warrants a serious conversation from a serious parental figure like yourself. Not the seriously know it all sports dad or the seriously smart podcaster. It requires a serious conversation that is best had by you. No, seriously, the best person to talk to your child about vaping is you. To start the conversation, visit talkaboutvaping.org brought to you by the American Lung association and the AD Council.

[Paola Pedrosa]

Welcome. My name is Paola Pedrosa, a medium and the host of the Ghost Therapy podcast, where it's not just about connecting with deceased loved ones. It's about learning through them and their new perspective. Join me on the Ghost Therapy podcast.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Whoa. My lights in my living room just flickered.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm a little nervous. I'm excited. I'm excited nervous, you know, very spiritual person. So I'm like, I'm ready and open.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was amazing.

[Paris Martineau]

I feel so grateful right now. I got to speak to my great grandmother Abuela, and she gave me a lot of really good advice that I'm gonna have to really think about. Wow. Okay. That's crazy. Yes, that is accurate.

[Paola Pedrosa]

Listen to the Ghost Therapy podcast as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See, I don't enjoy Mastodon at all, I don't think.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it's a bunch of scolds.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it feels like I need to do a content warning because I didn't use a capital letter in the right place.

[Paris Martineau]

That is exactly how it feels.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're like, I'm eating lunch. Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

How dare you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See that guy in the Matrix? He didn't even have a mouth. Now, I think what frustrates me here is, like, Mastodon did something real, that they moved stuff around and this thing I got reached out to by them and I read a few articles and I'm pretty stupid. So I Was like, maybe someone else saw something and sent to a few friends and everyone's like, this looks good. I guess it isn't anything.

[Cara Price]

There's nothing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's just.

[Cara Price]

There's nothing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why is everyone covering Will Eramis? Call me Will Eramis of the Washington Post. Do I adore. Why are you giving them a Q and A? He talked all about them. It's just, it's frustrating because I think it was they. They've done kind of. I hope I'm wrong. I hope this thing does the thing that they're non spiff.

[Cara Price]

But you could do it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What is. Actually, I don't. Why am I even saying I hope they do it? I actually cannot tell you what they do.

[Paris Martineau]

And that's concerning to me.

[Cara Price]

It should be to federate Blue sky to take the AT protocol and make it Federated. Like Mastodon is not like Activity Pup. Right. That requires Jay Graber and Blue sky to have enough resources to put out what's needed for Federation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I wonder if that costs $30 million.

[Cara Price]

No, it doesn't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What they want to do, from what I understand of this vague promise now, is I think they want to be like, hey, do you want to fund like the other Blue Sky? It just feels this kind of vagueness. And now that we've listed out all the names, I'm just kind of like, this is a cynical. This is like one of those stand up to cancer things.

[Cara Price]

Would you call it nihilistic? No, it doesn't qualify.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's cynical. It's cynical. And I like. The thing is there are people. I look like Cory's awesome.

[Cara Price]

Absolutely.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it's like all of these promises without really promising anything. What does that sound like? The tech industry? Like, why don't you come to this with some things? And the answer is they just want to talk about. We want to make it billionaire proof. What the fuck does that mean? Billionaires have way more money than $30 million. They've got like 150 million more dollars than that. That's how much a billion is.

[Cara Price]

Exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it's just everyone's kind of fallen for it. And I hope it does something good, but I really cannot say what that might be. And if their answer is, well, you didn't read it well enough. Not my fucking problem, mate. You explain this shit when you're talking to Allan Sundry about this.

[Cara Price]

Have you seen anything from Jay Graeber at Blue sky about what she thinks of this?

[Jeff Jarvis]

She gave a canned quote and said it was good. Because I mean, if in her position. It'd be funny if she's like this bullshit. Fuck these people.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I guess, yeah, if someone wants to buy out her startup for $30 million.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's not even that. She was just like, yeah, it's a pretty good thing. I think it might have been Jay. I don't know if it was Jay who did the quote, but it was something along the lines of, like, this is good. You know, somewhat protocol.

[Cara Price]

Mike Masnick is now on the board a Blue Sky. He's the voice I'll trust on this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, I generally trust Mike. We have some differing opinions, mostly on section 230, but I think that that's everyone's experience with Mike. It's just.

[Cara Price]

No, because I agree with Mike on section two.

[Paris Martineau]

Biggest Mike. Stan.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, I know you. No, I'm a huge Mike. He was a guest on the show. He was one of my favorite episodes. The Streisand Effect.

[Paris Martineau]

I think Mike is lovely.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's wonderful. Really, really good storyteller and actually a good journalist, which is why this whole thing is something I really would like his opinion on. Because it feels like the kind of thing you'd get. Like a Carl Bode. Bode.

[Cara Price]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, like an article being like, bunch of tech people shit it up again. I love Carl.

[Cara Price]

Oh, he's great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I love. But also, I don't want to be a wet blanket here, but sploosh. Like, it's just frustrating because you know what we actually need right now, like Pixelfed or whatever, the federated Instagram thing that is currently being blocked.

[Paris Martineau]

What is Pixelfed?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's just an Instagram that's decentralized, much.

[Cara Price]

Like Mastodon's off activity.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's an actual thing that probably could use $30 million. And there's an actual story beyond it being blocked. But the thing getting covered is a bunch of people getting together and saying, wouldn't it be nice if something was nicer when you actually have someone doing the thing? Because what we need right now is an. Is a blue sky for Facebook. Or we need Facebook equivalent and Instagram equivalent. Because once Meta loses their grip on those two things, they are fucked. They do not have a real business. The whole AI profiles thing, which we'll get to in a minute, and all of this here. We're going to take off the. We're going to take off all the things that allow you to say the 14 words every post. We're going to allow trans people to protect you. Don't do that just because you're evil. Capitalism is generally gonna move towards the most profitable direction. You do this because all that stuff just got in the way of more stuff and more growth. You break that machine with an alternative that doesn't suck constantly.

[Cara Price]

Let me try a different theory on you, okay, which is that I made fun of Musk buying Twitter. $44 billion. What a fool you are. And we all know how wrong that was. Because he's worth 10 times more. Because he has access to power the world around.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, he used it.

[Cara Price]

Is Zuckerberg simply jealous of Musk's political clout?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nah, I don't think so.

[Cara Price]

He's more by money than power.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think he could just give money. What do you think?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I think that that could be something. I think that certainly access to political power is something that he wants, as do all of these people. The fact that Zuck, Musk and. Who is the third person, A bunch of tech CEOs are gonna be sitting in Trump, and Bezos are gonna be sitting in Trump's little box of the inauguration, I think speaks volumes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you cover Facebook? And I feel like you've covered them previously.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I covered them earlier on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. Is there anything historic about. Cause I was just thinking, has Zuckerberg generally hung out with presidents in any way? Has he ever really been social with them?

[Paris Martineau]

My understanding is no, not to this extent, but I could be.

[Cara Price]

He's not terribly social, period.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He'd remember.

[Paris Martineau]

I remember his. It was notable in, like, 2017 or 18 when he did a tour across America, taking his little photos staged to look like he's normal height. And everyone was like, oh, wow, he's making a political statement. He could be moving. He looks like he could be 5 foot 9 now looking this up. Yeah, no, it's. There's definitely him standing on boxes or in photos. Standing. He's five, seven, standing forward so that he looks taller. However, I remember that being notable because it felt like, yeah, he's actually, like, entering into the political sphere maybe. But I think that he is. Just as his political star has risen, for better or worse, over the last decade, he is cozied up to power quite a bit.

[Cara Price]

I'm about to say something terrible.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hell, yeah.

[Cara Price]

Which is when I was in Davos.

[Paris Martineau]

Jeff, I'm sorry, you gotta leave. Bye, Jeff. Lovely having you.

[Cara Price]

I was there at a session with Mark Zuckerberg, and it was before he was media trained. And I've watched him in a few conference settings back in the day, 10 years ago, and he obviously hated it then, but he's changed he's definitely changed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think he has got the brain worms, but also, like many of these guys, he's got all of this money, got a reasonable age, and then he's like, what do I enjoy? And then he's realized he enjoys nothing. I personally am a barbecue guy. I have never seen a man less interested in cooking in my life. Sweet baby Ray. Sweet.

[Paris Martineau]

He loves to smoke those meats, though.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And there's nothing wrong with a cheap rack of ribs and with some sweet baby rays. If you're feeling lazy, we've all done it. It took six hours. You're not lazy enough. Not so lazy. You wouldn't cook it, but you don't want to go to the store. No. And also, he got a big green egg. He got the. Nothing wrong with the big green egg. But you know what? If you got all this money, you can get yourself a really interesting stick burner. You got like, a pitch.

[Cara Price]

You could buy Nashville.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You could go and get a bits and spits out of Texas. That's where I get my grill from. Beautiful steel beast Coy over there. Put it together. Really don't want to look at the politics there. Just realized, as I said that, never looked at it, please. If it's bad, don't blame me.

[Paris Martineau]

Don't tweet at him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But also, he doesn't enjoy anything. None of these people do. And so, yeah, he's just like, I've seen clips of the Rogan thing, and he just seems. He seems as bad as Elon Musk. He seems just, like, pissed. Like, another day with my billions.

[Paris Martineau]

A detail I think is notable and has been stuck in my head ever since I read it. It was a Wall Street Journal piece kind of tied to this rebuff of fact checking. They had a detail right at the end that I think in maybe, like, November of last year, Mark Zuckerberg had gone through some sort of knee surgery because he pulled something relating to MMA and made a Facebook post about it being like, here is me at my knee surgery. And I guess the post didn't do well. And so he freaked out and messaged his team, being like, why isn't my post doing well? Turns out it was because it was being suppressed due to Facebook policies on potential medical misinformation. And I don't know, seems fairly notable that right before Zuck decides to roll back all of these policies limiting the reach of certain posts, his own knee. Knee Facebook post gets limited.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What I love about that, first of all, other than the lack of poster spirit and this pathetic yeah, absolutely. All my posts didn't post better, but also post harder. He actually ran into a problem of Facebook that people complain about, which is that I don't seem to distribute my post to everyone. It seems to get stopped somehow. But instead of being like, maybe that's a problem with the platform, he's like, why are people not looking at my knees enough?

[Cara Price]

No, he knew. He knew it was his platform.

[Paris Martineau]

He knew it was his own platform. And they were like, fix it for my thing. And it's a similar thing that Elon Musk has done with Twitter to where he was like, well, people aren't seeing my tweets enough, so we're gonna need to put my tweets in everybody's feed always. And it's intolerable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I would do this. I mean, just to be clear, like, immediately, right now, like, and why? Because I love people looking at me. But it's so much sadder if you have all the money in the world and you could actually make people look at you and you could go and, like, see anyone. You have enough money that foreseeably anyone would meet with you. You might have to pay someone, but you could meet everyone, probably. And I. But I was just shocked, even in the clips I saw of how, like, petulant he seems. Like he doesn't, like. It's not like he's like, finally, the attention. He's like. He's, like, resentful because.

[Cara Price]

Because Maga is anger.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sure, sure.

[Cara Price]

That's the whole. That's the whole shtick.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He didn't feel like he was leaning into it, though. He felt like there was a man pissed off.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it makes sense if you think about it historically, because Zuck went on this huge apology tour after the 2016 election and also with Cambridge Analytica, stuff that happened. He was for years, just like a political punching bag. And he put himself up for it. He, you know, went before Congress. He went and apologized to a bunch of parents recently.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He did this whole very reasonable things to ask about.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, very. I mean, but, like, in the mind of someone who is the head of a company, that might seem like you really have gone through the wringer, and yet people still continue to be mad at you no matter what you do.

[Cara Price]

Actually, the apology demanded in Congress was by Josh Hawley, who's now his bff. It's all just sick upon sick.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it's. Now I'm thinking about Sundar Pichai. Probably not Sundar. Or Satya Nadella. I think Satya Nadella from Microsoft might adjust and become the nice CEO. Or he will find far more specific ways to do it that will allow him to get away with them. But it really is. It's gonna be interesting seeing the people who turn their nose up at Facebook now. Cause right now I can't delete my Instagram. It's the only way I speak to like 11 people. And there are people who only interact on it. But if that's your only business model, that's not great. But that's also most.

[Cara Price]

But that goes back to. Back to Musk. My presumption, besides it being a bad investment, was he was ruining it and people would leave it. Yes, people left it. It doesn't matter to him. It doesn't matter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think Facebook matters to Zuck. I actually do. I think. I think he. He is. He's not obsessed with it because that would involve him, like, looking at it for more than two seconds. But no, actually, maybe. I take this back. He might not care if you look at it now, I guess. No, it's just. It looks like shit and it doesn't.

[Cara Price]

Really, because what did he care about? The stupid goggles.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, right.

[Cara Price]

And now he cares about. And here's one of the funny things about Meta, is that I think that they're a leader in AI. Jan LeCun, who's there, is one of the. Well, he's one of the more, I think, rational people around it. He's not a doomster. He's not full of all that crap. No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

AGI argues with Elon Musk and Gary Marcus all day.

[Cara Price]

That's God's work.

[Paris Martineau]

Is it? Or is it a Sisyphus?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wanna get him on here just to call him Yann Lecombe, but I think he'll kill me. But no. So they're leaders in AI.

[Cara Price]

They're leaders in AI. He's still.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know if I agree, but.

[Cara Price]

Is still doing the goggle crap. You know, AR and VR. He got bored with Facebook a long.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Time ago, so with. With that, I agree. I think he might love the financial entity known as Meta, though. I think he's like, really attached to just the numbers because they've always been from the very early days of Jan Olivan and Naomi Gleitt and Alex Schultz. They've always been like growth pigs. They love.

[Cara Price]

They were written off, remember? It wasn't that long ago. Oh, Facebook's over. Meta's over. It's just a mess.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Markets never did that.

[Cara Price]

Oh, yeah, well, they did for a little while. They did for a while. And Then it's. It's been a hell of a story.

[Paris Martineau]

Now it's meta. It's the future of the web. We're onto Web 75.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're onto Web 4.5. And this is when it gets more racist.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, the legs are racist.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The legs are racist.

[Cara Price]

But don't forget, in the early days of print, Malleus maleficarum came out, which was the guide to burning witches that killed lots of people. And it was print's fault. So maybe this is just a phase for what? Until we have institutions that finally bring us quality. Same thing happened, honest to God, with print. That's a plug for my book, the Gutenberg Parenthesis now out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You could do it at the end.

[Cara Price]

Jeff, where I write about this, right. And I think that we're at a stage where the scale of speech today cannot be handled by the institutions we have. With print came the institutions of editing and publishing were invented for that purpose because nobody knew what was made on this press. It had no provenance. Anybody could make this crap.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So are you suggesting it would be a private market effect rather than the governmental one?

[Cara Price]

I'm suggesting it's institutional and institutions can be either.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. So I think it's possible, and I actually think it's very difficult, but not as hard as people think to destroy meta in that it would take someone with enough money and enough moments like Blue Sky's growth came from a moment where people went, let's check out what's on X. Oh, Droiper42 is threatening to kill me. And that is somehow my suggestive from the algorithm. And he DM me as well. I think that person will kill me, though. And then people went, I don't want to fucking be there. I don't want to be associated with this. I think with meta, if depending on how bad the guardrails are pulled off, because we really don't know yet, it's going to take a little time. I think people will just be like, this platform already sucks. I won't look at anything. And that's the real question. Do they go nowhere? I'm really curious about the TikTok ban. We might find out.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I think you're right on meta, perhaps in some US circles, but I think the question when it comes to something like Facebook is what ends up happening to internationally use Facebook. Oh, the global south is the Internet.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And that is actually genuinely worrying because the destruction of the content. I know content moderation is still there, but the very clearly lax approach they're gonna use now is gonna hit the global south so much more. And it's gonna hit people that are more subject to disinformation and misinformation.

[Paris Martineau]

And I think it's worth noting that while, like a lot of studies have shown the jury's a bit out on whether fact checking works or not, it does in some cases. But for most, like politically charged things, it just makes people dig their heels in more. The one thing I think is under covered or I guess underemphasized, is fact checking's ability to limit reach of misinformation. Like, sure, it's a con. It's not poulting the horse saying, like, yeah, I posted misinformation and saying on my post. Your post is misinformation probably isn't gonna change my view, but it will potentially have an impact on the 20 people that might have seen that and fallen into that rabble.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And the thing is, and I think it was someone from 404 made the point that Meta's fact checking wasn't great.

[Cara Price]

Certainly I was there at the beginning. After 2016, I raised a bunch of money from Facebook, gave it away to places like Data and Society and other good folks who are doing lots of work on what as Joe Bernstein has since called big disinfo. And I was watching as they were trying to build their fact checking structure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Cara Price]

And it was a clusterfuck from the beginning. They had to, well, we can't do this. We can't make judgments. Everybody's frightened of judgment. So they had to go to the fact checking organization. Imagine their fun conventions. They have them. Oh, yeah. And you've gotta verify who's a good fact checker. And then that group wouldn't verify ABC News. So then Facebook had a fit about that. And so it was rounded around and around as who's allowed to be a fact checker? From the very beginning. That's what it was. And then there's debate too, about how.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you scale that to billions of people.

[Cara Price]

Exactly. In all kinds of cultures and languages. And so I'm not against fact checking. I'm not against facts. But facts to my mind are not the problem.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I think the problem. So that Jeff just got sent $5 from the fact organization on his phone. They sent you $5.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you for repairing. You'll figure out how to.

[Cara Price]

Oh, grandpa, let me show you how your phone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you see, when you said I was there at the beginning, I had to stop myself being like of time with the dinosaurs.

[Paola Pedrosa]

That's me.

[Paris Martineau]

Every week on this Week in Google. I'm like, tell me about black and white tv, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's. I think the bigger thing is I'm more worried about the ramifications of this attitude because they already were pretty lax. And in the global south, in the rest of the world, there's less media that understands those language, the languages, even Jesus. But also less people in the Western world, which Meta is arguably more scared about with the media. And I think as well, the other thing that I really haven't seen talked about is Meta is already limiting traffic on journalism. Do you think that they're gonna increase the sharing or decrease it?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I believe that they said they're no longer going to limit the reach of like, civics related content, which I think I took to mean, like political news.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, you're right.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know whether that will apply to all journalism.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is such a euphemism. Right, sorry.

[Paris Martineau]

Civics related.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, civics related. So they'll allow the influences they like.

[Cara Price]

But probably not links.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, well, they'll allow links, but they won't. They'll depress them.

[Cara Price]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, they allow them. Well, versus Canada, where of course they're not allowed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Cara Price]

And I think Meta was praying that Canada, like Bill, would have passed in California because they said that they would eliminate news in California, and I think that would have been an open door. Ah, screw it. Let's eliminate it in the US let's eliminate it everywhere. And that would have been easier for them. Puppies, parties and pedophiles and what's another P word for bad people?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Guy Fieri's gotta stop making TV shows. It's just, it's frustrating and it's only gonna push people towards blue sky. But it's also, I think, a real inflection point for legacy media as well. So there was a story in.

[Cara Price]

Oh, legacy media's dead.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I know. So Jeff Jarvis over here, big fan of the Times and the Post. You actually. I like. He does this thing where it's broken.

[Cara Price]

Post and broken times.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Broken times, but good times. You've also put it a bit.

[Cara Price]

A rare moment when they do. Well, yes, you've got to give it to them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The other day they did, but that's. I think that those publications are more at threat from this than people realize because Semaphore had a story saying, I think it was today it's media. So I assume. Mr. Taney, Max Tani. That story said that the Post went from having like 20 million unique monthly visitors to like 2.5 to 3 in 2021 to 2.5 to 3 in 2024. Jeff is astounded. I was, too.

[Cara Price]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Guys, Garwa, friend of the show, made the good point.

[Paris Martineau]

Goofy's has about 3 million monthly visitors.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think if the Post helped you.

[Paris Martineau]

Get late, that would probably.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It would work out really well.

[Cara Price]

We used to have that as a business model. We used to have personals and newspapers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Cara Price]

Before you were born.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what they took from us.

[Cara Price]

That's all we had. Feel sorry for us old horny people.

[Paris Martineau]

That's all we had was submitting a single sentence to the Washington Post.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My new favorite quote.

[Paris Martineau]

Feel sorry for us old horny people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I. I, like last week, was already apologizing for the amount of times people talked about horny checks and stuff. Well, we're back, folks. It's just crazy, but I think it's. These large publications have been so used to social traffic and they've not been working out what the hell to do with it for a while.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, a lot of them are betting that getting checks from AI companies could soften the blow, which I don't think think is going to change much.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They only get one of those as well.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, they're supposed to get one a year or something like that from.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The company that burns $5 billion.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Dot dash Meredith had. I think their numbers are public. And if you do the math, it equals up to like 1% or less than 1% of their yearly revenue they get. And I just don't. I think it's a terrible trade, and it's the same sort of mistake these companies made.

[Cara Price]

And it screws the rest of all media because it's just the moguls get their bags of money, but Ed here gets nothing from OpenAI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I. I would love to sell everything words wise to Sam Altman. You just have to text me back. Sam, I've been texting you. I have not heard back and I'm not sure why. I simply asked you a question. Come on. Come on, man. Mr. OpenAI, I need you on my show. I won't hurt you much. Not physically, but emotionally.

[Paris Martineau]

Just six texts unanswered.

[Cara Price]

We are going.

[Paris Martineau]

Come on, you coward.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We are going to be crying, both of us. I will start crying and you will finish crying. Mr. Altman.

[Mel Reid]

Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there? We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons and birds. But what if there's something else, something much more ominous that appears under the COVID of night, Silent, unseen, watching. They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road. Or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home. Drones. Or are they?

[Cara Price]

We used the word drum because it was coming vulnerable to other people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

One minute was there and one minute it wasn't. Oh, that is beyond creepy.

[Mel Reid]

Do you feel like this drone was targeting you specifically?

[Cara Price]

Yes, absolutely.

[Mel Reid]

Listen to Obscurum Invasion of the Drones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Os Velozian]

Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Os Velozian, one of the new hosts of the long running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical but obsessively intrigued.

[Paris Martineau]

And I'm Cara Price, the other new host, and I'm ready to adopt early.

[Os Velozian]

And often on tech Stuff. We travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology.

[Jeff Jarvis]

One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians.

[Paris Martineau]

Like data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How is it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night?

[Paris Martineau]

Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the singularity. So join us.

[Os Velozian]

Listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Alec Baldwin]

How serious is youth vaping? Irreversible lung damage serious. 1 in 10 kids vape serious, which warrants a serious conversation from a serious parental figure like yourself. Not the seriously know it all sports dad or the seriously smart podcaster. It requires a serious conversation that is best had by you. No, seriously, the best person to talk to your child about vaping is you. To start the conversation, visit talkaboutvaping.org, brought to you by the American Lung association and the AD Council.

[Paola Pedrosa]

Welcome. My name is Paola Pedrosa, a medium and the host of the Ghost Therapy podcast, where it's not just about connecting with deceased loved ones. It's about learning through them and their new perspective. Join me on the Go Therapy podcast.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Whoa. My lights in my living room just flickered.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm a little nervous. I'm excited. I'm excited nervous. You know, I'm a very spiritual person, so I'm Like, I'm ready and open.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was amazing.

[Paris Martineau]

I feel so grateful right now. I got to speak to my great grandmother Abuela, and she gave me a lot of really good advice that I'm gonna have to really think about. Wow. Okay. That's crazy. Yes, that is accurate.

[Paola Pedrosa]

Listen to the Ghost Therapy podcast as part of the My Cultura Podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, this is Mel Reid, LPGA Tour winner and six time ladies European Tour winner and Kyra K. Dixon, NBC sports reporter and host.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You forgot to say warmer.

[Paris Martineau]

Miss America, by the way. And we've got a new podcast, Quiet Please with Mel and Kira. We are bringing you spicy takes on sports and pop culture, some golf haps and interviews with incredible people who have figured out how to make golf their superpower or just people we like. Plus tales from the road and everything in between. By the way, golf isn't just for the dads, brads and chads. Yeah, it's actually life's cheat code. And we're not going to be quiet about it on or off the course. We're bringing on some of our friends like Michelle, we, Heather McMahon, Amanda Baliotis. So if you want to keep up with us, and here is Yap, tune into our new podcast, listen to Quiet Please with Mel and Kira, an iHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You can find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports.

[Jeff Jarvis]

These deals, I assume that the Washington Post isn't getting say $175 million a year, which is what their revenue is. They're probably getting like 2030. I just tried to look it up. I could not find it from this OpenAI deal. I think it was for the AI powered search. Is that a content deal with them or did they not sign one yet?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not sure. So what I understand is the two big media deals that we have like public numbers on as far as the amount it's. It equals up to like a single percentage point or less of their overall revenue. When you calculate it like they are business, they are getting pennies.

[Cara Price]

No, they're not good at business, otherwise they wouldn't be in such terrible shape right now. They screwed up the Internet, they missed the boat, they didn't know what they were doing. They cry and try to get protectionist legislation and so now they cry and try to get money out of OpenAI and it's not a business model.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, Jeff, this is actually one of the many reasons I wanted you on. Can you kind of explain what you just said? So what is it that they missed? What is it that they should have done differently?

[Cara Price]

So let's not just make that third person. I'll make that first person too. Because I worked for Conde Nast advance and I was there as it was going on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And what was it in this case?

[Cara Price]

The Internet. I started at advance in 94, just a month after the browser came out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right, right.

[Cara Price]

So the company was debating, okay, now we're going to Uncle Jeff time.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm sad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was back when the browser was a room sized machine that printed the website.

[Cara Price]

So we were debating whether to put our content onto Prodigy or AOL or.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This new website on the portals themselves when it was just like one website.

[Cara Price]

So I worked for Steve Newhouse, who's now the chairman of advance and kind of, and he's really, really smart and he's the one who taught me about interactivity and community. And he knew that print content was not valuable online. But every other publisher thought their great value was in repurposing their print content to online and trying to license it and get money for it and sell it. And they didn't understand.

[Jeff Jarvis]

To the portals.

[Cara Price]

To the portals and then eventually. And paywalls. They didn't understand that the essence of the Internet is conversation and community and collaboration and creativity. That's the last of my alliterations. And so they insisted to just do what they'd always done, subscription money and ad money. And as the ad money went down, because the number of avails went way sky high, availability of advertising, then as happens, when supply goes up, price goes down. So then they tried to put it all behind a paywall. And they're not all the New York Times and they can't do that. And they never saw, I think, what the essence of the Internet is. And so now they're still in mass media mind. They're still in, we have to please everybody while they go piss off everybody.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. So what should they have done to them?

[Cara Price]

What should they have done? I think that they should have seen themselves. They could have started Reddit, they could have started aol, they could have started these things. I was part of this whole world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But would that have funded journalism? Like.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah, you're talking about something like Kinja, the commenting Reddit, like commenting system under goner blogger.

[Cara Price]

I was there at the beginning of that too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, Conversations the first man.

[Cara Price]

Well, Nick Denton first hated. I said he had put comments on Gawker. He said, no, I hate comments. They're awful.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true.

[Cara Price]

They are, actually. They're not. I know. But then at one point, he became a believer because he was gonna do it Nick's way. And that became Kinja and that became everything else.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think my big thing is. Sorry, that was one publication, owning Reddit. Do you think that that makes, like, how would like something like Reddit? Because you're saying that they should have seen Conversations as a thing. Does that mean a social network? Like what? Because what you're describing is a company that sells journalism. And you're like, the thing we will sell is not journalism.

[Cara Price]

Well, in fact, my old boss, Steve Newhouse is the one who bought Reddit. He wanted to buy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but he ran it like shit.

[Cara Price]

No, he didn't. It's now worth a fortune and it's better.

[Paris Martineau]

Up until recently. He ran it like shit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Cara Price]

Doing well now.

[Paris Martineau]

No, he doesn't.

[Cara Price]

It's worth a fortune now. Right. There was also a horrible clusterfolk in the industry called the New Century Network.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Cara Price]

And the newspaper industry got together the top 12 companies, and we were gonna start a way to sign into all newspapers across the country at once and subscribe at once and sell ad works across. And it could have been a real thing. Right. This is the same time that Yahoo is putting up news and AOL's pretty ups.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm surprised you'd be into something they.

[Cara Price]

Could have done this. What stopped them? So half the company along came Kleiner Perkins, and they said, this is a good idea. We want to invest in this. We want to make this scale and be big. Half the newspaper publishers said, how dare you? You can't get a piece of our business. No, absolutely not. Because we're too valuable. You're just a penny. Annie Little.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So it seems like that is the same problem.

[Cara Price]

None of it's male CEOs again.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I don't like Jensen Huang very much, but one of his things he would say is, like, always act like you're going out of business. I'm surprised more newspapers don't do that for more obvious reasons. But I don't know if I agree with you about the conversation part. I don't actually think, what are we doing right now? I know, but like, this isn't how you run a newspaper.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I'd agree. And I think there needs to be a way to be able to make news and journalism profitable. And that doesn't exist at all scales and for all companies.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It doesn't exist at scale. I think might be the problem.

[Cara Price]

Scale's the problem.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Cara Price]

Before the mechanization and industrialization to print poor Paris has heard me say this a hundred times. In the mid-1850s, the average circulation of a daily newspaper in the United States was 4,000.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Interesting.

[Cara Price]

It was only with the mechanization were they fairly distributed because you had to pull with a human muscle, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you'd have a local. Local printing press which would print local.

[Cara Price]

You could only print so many and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That distribution of 4,000 people. A small town or something.

[Cara Price]

Or even in New York. In New York in 1900, by this time you had a half century of the steam powered press and you had the rhinotype and you had other things come in. Then you had scale come up. But still in New York City, including Brooklyn in 1900, there were 46 daily newspapers. That is to say that they spoke at a different and human scale. Broadcast killed all that. Broadcast came along and you had one or maybe two papers in a town and they thought they could serve everybody. They thought that scale was the only goal, that we are the mass it's growth. And it was a lie. People realized pretty soon. This doesn't speak to me because none.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of these people, like many businesses in tech as well are capable of saying we've grown enough. If there is a. The athletic was better as an independent from the Times. But I forget who said this earlier. It's like the reason the Times is picking up this stuff is because the Times is actual brand. Maybe in Casey actually the Times brand is like falling apart. And it sucks because the actual lessons recently that I've seen in media are fairly straightforward. It's what if we had interesting people doing unique stuff? What if we then had them cover something that happened, right? And then they write it down. Some sort of like analysis I think I'd call it. And then at the end of it you'd be like, wow, I know who this person was. I know who this person and I heard them talk and I like their voice. The Last week at CES, 20 people interviewed. I'm not just doing a thing about me, don't worry. But the thing I got through it is there are so many reporters who are so much more charming than their bylines. And it's not a failure of their writing, it's a failure of the outlets. It's a failure of the form it used to be, at least. I don't know much about the history of media, but I Remember there being a lot more opinion people in tech yet. Eric Benderoff, you hear. Arthur Bray, I think is still around. He had like David Pogan. These people. I'm not saying that they were perfect. In fact, I have some views about some of them specifically. Huh. There was still something to the popularity of having a real voice and having a real person. And that person being white. And you as a news outlet were like, I got to keep these names and I got to make sure they can talk. And the times, it's like, well, who do we do for that? Who is the most insane person? Do we have a transphobe? Oh, don't worry, we have a whole database for those. You have any insane war hawks? Oh, please. That's the other database that we spent $50 million on. We had to lay off a few people. We needed to know the people who would put the most troops in California.

[Cara Price]

Paris, let me ask you something. The information is really good. I pay for it. Same discount, though, I'm glad to say. And. And it works as a business.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Cara Price]

Now it works because there's reporting like yours that's valuable, that is specialized and covers technology and the society and business around it really well. Why is there not the information in a dozen areas on the same model? Politico, one might say. Is that Politico's crap?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Politico is just conservative news.

[Cara Price]

Yeah, it's awful, right? But that's. Theoretically, it should be the information of politics, but it's not. I can't think of any. The information of.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it's. I think the answer is a little multifaceted one. I think when Jessica Lesson, our founder, she used to work at the Wall Street Journal, founded the information a bit over a decade ago, everyone thought she was crazy. Like, there's a bunch of very funny to read now blogs from Business Insider being like, this crazy lady wants you to pay a couple hundred dollars for a subscription to a website with news on it. Who would ever do that? And I think that it took a while for people in the media industry to come around to the idea of a truly hard paywall and creating content that is worth paying for and sticking by that. I also think that's because there are obvious trade offs. The reach of the information is much smaller than a politico because you can't get around our paywall.

[Cara Price]

And it doesn't need to be huge.

[Paris Martineau]

And it doesn't need to be huge because it is self sustaining.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I also think there's another detail. She founded this in 2013, the end of 2013. So everyone was still high on the hog as far as ads went. The ads industry had not. It hadn't become as difficult. Also, I say this with no offense to you, Paris. Jessica is also well known as being well connected with the Zuckerbergs and also well known for being. And there are times with the information where the tone shifts and it is a little more rah rah, I think is the fair thing. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing.

[Cara Price]

Maybe just charitable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, the podcast I'm thinking of.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, the podcast is a Jessica lesson podcast, but also it's not our reporter podcast.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Some of the ways the AI thinks are framed are not necessarily critical. But you know what? Certainly every outlet has bias. Also, I cite the information all the time.

[Paris Martineau]

I think that there's a bit of a difference between some of our newsletters or podcasts or opinion stuff versus reporting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But agree, you've got some of the best. Like Anisa Gardizzi, Stephanie.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, we have like fantastic. Who do fantastic work. And I think part of what you're getting at here with comments with Jessica is also what made this work is she had the like it was self funded. She didn't need to take on venture capital to start it, and that meant that it could grow at its own pace. Versus. I have worked at a total of three places in my about a decade of a journalism career. The first two I got laid off from. The first one was, well, I guess other places. The first two staff jobs I had, I got laid off from. One was a place called the Outline that raised venture capital and then quickly ran out of it because it spent too much money on silly things.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Mr. Topolsky, his favorite game, found an outlet. Lose the money, walk away.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, you know, it's a great. We'll see.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey, they paid me then.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, as long as people get paid. Neither one was Wired, which is part of Conde Nast, which was going through its own growing pains because it has a bunch of print publications and is largely supported by advertising.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Always fucking growth pain. It's just they must be bigger and the best work. Like one of the things that has made the rise of newsletters happen, in my opinion, and indeed this show, is that people are kind of tired of the standard big box thing. They're tired of these kind of. Every major publication really drains the life out of. And I don't, I think even smaller publications do. They standardize the copy. And I realize you can't have everyone be as being a sloppy blog worm like me. But it feels like the publications really investing in allowing the person behind the thing to talk are doing well. Engadget, we had a ton of them on the show, and they've done a really bloody good job in their coverage and in their podcast, actually bringing the personality out. You've got Sherlyn Lowe, you've got DaVinci Hardawar, you got Karissa Bell. And these people are fun and varied and different. And I wish that there was more of that in journalism, but I also think it's why people are turning away from legacy media.

[Cara Price]

Let me ask you another question. Do you yourself or do you ever hear any colleagues say, I'm glad I have a salary, but I wish I had a little more fame or a little more impact or a little more presence.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I can't think of any examples or even, like, peers when I. I'll give you this. When I was deciding whether or not to go to the Information versus a couple of other places, I called up my mentor at the time and was like, oh, if I go to the Information, will I, like, fade away into obscurity behind the paywall? It's a terrible career move. And he was like. Rightfully, he was like, paris, there are two groups of people that you care about reading your work, if we're being honest. One is other journalists and the other are people that work in tech. Both of those groups subscribe to the information. You're gonna be fine. And I think that that is the way that a lot of people at our.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know if I love that.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, it's a practical way of thinking about it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For careerism. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, Careerism.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I also feel like you do. I'm actually pushing back. I think you actually give a big shit about your readers.

[Paris Martineau]

I do give a huge shit about my readers and my general.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just want to make sure that the pigs on Reddit don't come. Come and argue with you about. Because it doesn't seem like that's your point.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, no, I care a lot about my readers and things like that. But part of the thing, I guess, if you're talking about larger career moves wise, like, those are the two groups you need to think about potential sources and potential, like, colleagues in the industry.

[Cara Price]

And doing good work.

[Paris Martineau]

And yes, doing good work is. Yeah, so let me go to your other career.

[Cara Price]

Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

[Paris Martineau]

If part of my calculation for going to a place like the Information is despite the limits of being behind a hard paywall, it's one of the few places I think that exist in media still where I get to just do like I spent a month on that sniffy story. I spent a month on most of my stories. That is, which is cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you also, your readers are very focused.

[Paris Martineau]

I imagine my readers are very focused. They read. We have an incredible like read through rate and it, I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's really cool actually. I didn't know.

[Paris Martineau]

Quite nice to be able to be at a place where you can do that sort of focus. But I don't think that that exists. That exists infrequently at scale.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think at scale as well, you have the problem of you do have those deep readers, but you also have the people who saw the headline, they scroll down, they see a name, they're.

[Paris Martineau]

Like, fuck this, they just hit retweet. Yeah.

[Cara Price]

Let me ask you in your other life. Pr, right? So I talked to an executive at one of the big tech companies and he said, how do we get our message out at scale? I said, you don't anymore. And then I talked to a guy who just left a big PR company. I'll leave them both nameless for now. And he said, oh yeah, the PR industry is all about getting on techmeme and whether you get the publications.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a guy who hasn't, there's a guy who hasn't pitched anyone in fucking ever. I'm sorry, you ever hear a guy be like, he can't be on TechMean. That's a person who does not talk to journalists. I know it's important for journalists.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think it's that important.

[Cara Price]

There are the clients is what I'm saying.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Clients don't give a shit.

[Alec Baldwin]

That's.

[Cara Price]

Well, that's where I'm going is, is where's the. So where is. What do they value now?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So what it is is like I actually got this last, last week as well. It's like, what are your clients like? And it's the smart clients. The money I take are the ones that know they have a good story and also know they don't know how to get to journalists because there's 1000 PR people per.

[Cara Price]

Do they need the journalists still?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, absolutely they do. Because at the moment, right now there may be a lack of trust in legacy media, but people still trust media in general. I bring up Steve from gamers Nexus million plus subscriber Coffeezilla on YouTube. Now I'm not saying those would even be PR targets, but Linus Tech Tips absolutely would and indeed has worked with people I've Worked with. People still need to get through. But the thing that has changed is there's a lot less journalists who are just willing to run anything unless it's for OpenAI. By the way, I'm just going to do this. There is a two tiered system within the media right now. And the reason we have Meta and the reason we have Elon Musk and the reason we have these things is partially to blame for the fact that startups actually really have to prove their worth. It's remarkable. One of the reasons I have a fucking career in pr. And it's frustrating because you'll be like, hey, I got. They do a really good thing. They make money like a school. And they're like, yeah, but, yeah, but like, did they raise like more money though? And like, I don't know if I want to write about someone who's just a good idea. And then they will post an OpenAI thing that is like a feature that my toaster has. And it's just. And the problem is is that I understand when you, as these outlets somehow get bigger, but they have less people, you have to do more stuff. So you just have to go, oh shit, what is the public good? What does everyone want to know about OpenAI, anthropic what have you? And that makes sense. But to your point, startups kind of need PR as much as they used to. Big tech also does too, because right now all of the big tech companies, they're playing the same game, which is, well, Donald Trump's in the White House and the right is winning. So I don't give a shit about fuck, I'm just going to say whatever I want. And indeed the two tiered system I talked about, the reason that Sam Altman has been able to lie at scale and Elon Musk has been allowed to lie at scale for 10 years, is because the system that operates against the Series A, and I don't say this with any bitterness, by the way, everyone should be held to this standard. Everyone with the media should have to prove themselves. But someone like Meta, someone like Tesla, they come along and say whatever the fuck they want and it gets printed even to this day with the test, the robot event. So you're in this situation where media relations, what I do is get journalists to cover stuff is very important. And then there's the other problem, which is about 15 years ago when I got into this job, people started writing up articles called Media Relations is Dead. Why? Because talking to reporters all day and learning everything they do and knowing what you're talking about when they're talking about what's happening in the world and then being able to take that and put it into a smart thought, including the client, that's actually pretty difficult. And PR people are lazy animals. They love to sit around and send emails and write documents. They're about as functional as Sundar Pichais. They're just meeting goers. If you're a PR person, I've been saying that, I've been saying that you need to change your ass for years. Except now I have a microphone. I hope you're upset. Long story short, get wrecked. Get absolutely wrecked bodied, et cetera. You can talk about me on your podcast if anyone would listen. But the point I'm making is PR is necessary, but it's also killing itself. And the biggest clients are becoming so weird about it that they'll have pr. But then like why is the media not saying everything we want them to say? And it's because the media but doesn't just copy paste things. They may write down exactly what you say with the bigger companies, but journalists have brains and will hear stuff now and go wait, what the fuck does that mean? And even with OpenAI, they're finally learning it. It's just that when that happens, you're gonna need the media relations people. Except the PR industry go and Google media relations is dead. They've been killing them for 15 years. It's hilarious. It's like the one fun job in this industry.

[Paris Martineau]

It's extremely easy to do bad PR and extremely hard to do good. Primary.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Cara Price]

There are times when I get an email offering me an interview and one time I just want to take it just to say so afterwards the person says, well, what's his audience? He doesn't have any audience.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The thing is he's got a blog. A 23 year old who works 17 hour days is going to get fired because of that.

[Cara Price]

I know that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know it. They're going to lose their sublease on an 8 person 1 bedroom.

[Paris Martineau]

I probably got 10 weird PR pitches that are completely unrelated to me while been sitting here.

[Cara Price]

You still get them even though I.

[Paris Martineau]

Still get all the time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I love the PR people who pitch me because.

[Paris Martineau]

And I block people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I do too. But so, and that's. This is the weird thing as well. There's like this whole PR industry just spams people that I've been making fun of for like my entire career and getting in zero trouble because they're all cowards. And it's just, it's frustrating because we're just describing industries run by people who don't understand the process. Like, how do you run a good news outlet? I don't know. Create good news and make sure the people make it.

[Cara Price]

Make sure it has value in people's lives.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, and it's this drain of personality from everything. The information is fairly straightforward, but you have some specifics, you have some. Who is it that emails me every day? Pisses me off?

[Paris Martineau]

Martin Pierce.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

But that's the thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I actually kind.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a newsletter and he loves to experience. That's kind of his job, to piss.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I am actually saying this. I get pissed off with it regularly. I read it every time.

[Paris Martineau]

Jeff gets pissed off at it regularly.

[Cara Price]

I get mad at him once.

[Paris Martineau]

And Martin loves it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that's the thing. At the very least, he fucking stands for something. Why would people go. I don't know. Why would people go to influencers who don't necessarily run their facts very well or at all? And the answer is because they care.

[Cara Price]

All right, I got a question for you. So you saw Lisa Rubin? Not Lisa Rubin, Jen Rubin.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's also my show. I'm kidding. Jennifer Rubin.

[Cara Price]

Jennifer Rubin left the Washington Post. Right. And she started a new substack newsletter, the Contrarian. The Contrarian.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, God.

[Cara Price]

What is it about substack? How does it. See now? It's tech still is that. We all know that tech is that the substack has its own Nazi problems. And why does everybody still go there?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I actually think it's the thing we've been talking about. That's just some legacy media shit. They're like, why do people come to the newspaper only for Jennifer Rubin? And a series of bland right wing people that have found a way to pretend they're liberals and they're like, well, why do people read the paper? For me, they read it, and the thing they hate about the media right now is it's not contrarian enough. Like, it's just this is exactly the kind of shit that a legacy media institution would do. It's what happened in 2021 when the Atlantic had like eight different newsletters and then didn't treat them any differently.

[Cara Price]

Hot, hot, Take factory.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But no, God, it's the Atlantic. It's lukewarm take factory, crybaby shit. And it's. Or just like anti Palestine shit, which is disgusting. Anyway, we'll get. We'll get to that on the other show where everyone gets mad at me. But the point is, it's just the same fucking wheel Turning it's people going, shit, what do people do? What a big. Now what A big newsletter. They send those. What if we all got together and combined our audiences of people that barely read us and do not look at the facts or really care, but they like sharing it with their other vacuous friends. Except make it dc. It's not gonna work very well.

[Cara Price]

Who are tired of subscription upon subscription. Upon subscription.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They've got like George Conway in there. Yeah, they have George Conway. I didn't even know. I didn't even know. I just guessed the like.

[Cara Price]

At worst, they have Andy Borowitz.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, God. Fucking hell. I was not pro censorship before this show, but now I am actually really pro. I don't put any links to anything if it keeps Borrowitz out my feed. Oh my God.

[Cara Price]

That was the perfect reaction.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh my God, I hate Andy Boris. But it's Paris. I'm actually like really glad you were here specifically representing the information though, having your own opinions. Just being Cliff Legal disclaimer because you kind of. I have my issues with how the information does business and some internal ones that I will not read, but it's. It still works. It works. And the journalism is like very, very good. Anisa Gardez and another person I can't remember the name of. I'll link to it in the episode notes. They had this incredible story about Nvidia's like, has people canceling orders. And Aneesa is super young.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like in her 20s. And she's just getting this shit all the time. She's had so much of it. The fact that you have this happening is proof that this model works and that.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it's proof that journalism can still exist.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it sells.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it sells. And it matters. And the real people doing it matter. And it's frustrating because I don't think anyone is learning this lesson very well.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, a lot of outlets are now trying to pivot to a more subscription heavy model. The Atlantic is one of them. They've the Verge.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, everyone possibly want to miss Alex Heath. Fucking. I'm such a bitch. But it's. But the Verge is actually an example, I think, of doing it wrong because the Verge is very much like, we're now gonna pay all stuff you weren't paying for. And it's like, okay, well now the reader will be pissed off. And you have great people like Carly Robeson, one of the best journalists in the field. Incredible. And Misato as well. Two incredible journalists. Paywalling them hurts them far more than I think they realize, how about give, make. Give them more money and then let them write private stuff? Put the private stuff in the private. Make it worthwhile. At least try. But no, it's, we're gonna pay more. What? Tom Warren, Alex Heath.

[Paris Martineau]

Make it so that at least readers feel like if they're paying, they're getting access to something new rather than restricted. Yeah, it's a. You are paying to access something rather than being restricted.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And is that money going into more journalism?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I'd assume it's going into making so that Vox Media doesn't collapse in and of itself.

[Cara Price]

It's the last resort business model.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And the thing is, you can make it a deal with the customer. You could be like, what if we gave you more? And now it's like, what if we gave you less? And you put out reporters who have built relationships with readers in a free environment and then say, no, it's gone and you'll get cited less. I cite paywall stuff all the time. But, like, you will be cited less because people on social media will be like, oh, another paywall gift link for the no pig. No, not everyone pay pig model. It's just frustrating because it could actually be better. But I think the actual answer is everything needs to be smaller.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. And I mean, it's just like, how do we get to that without a lot of ruin and destruction?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't really think we can defector 404 aftermath. The answer is that.

[Paris Martineau]

And actually, and those came out of ruin and destruction in the case of defector and 404 specifically, their, you know, sites were shut down, they were laid off. And from the ashes rose a worker supported co op.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, Jeff, final question to wrap us up. Do you think that there could be a future for journalism where it's kind of a return to the. I don't mean literally 4,000 readers, but a return to that kind of older thing where it's just. It is more distributed.

[Cara Price]

I hope so. I want to see media at a human scale. I've spent the last 10 years of my career kind of accidentally chronicling what I think is the end of the long century of mass media. Okay, what does that mean? Well, first, it's a confession because I devoted my career to mass media. Right. I worked for big publications and I wrote about television. And I recognize now the bankruptcy of that. And so I think we've got to return to, as I say, media at human scale. And it's going to be a messy transition.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It already is.

[Cara Price]

It already is. And I don't have the answers to every business model of how to get there. The information is one. There are a few others out there. And I think that we're going to grow new sprouts out of the ashes. For a long time, especially working in a journalism school, I had to be. I think I presumed I had to be nice to the likes of the New York Times.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right?

[Cara Price]

Fuck em. I mean and let's be clear, there is still good reporting at the New York Times. I did a good Times hashtag about vaccinations only yesterday. The institution though, but the. Well, the culture right now is trying to piss off the people, the last people who are loyal to them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And who would that be? Just to be clear.

[Cara Price]

Liberals.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, Liberals.

[Cara Price]

Jay Rosen in 2018 wrote that the New York Times primary support now has shifted from advertising to subscription. This is gonna change the relationship of the Times newsroom to its public. And he wasn't saying how. But now I think the way it is is that I think the Times is saying see, we pissed you off. You don't own us. Even though we depend upon you for money, you don't own us New York Yankees style. Yeah, yeah. If Steinbrenner were the publisher of the New York Times might as well be. So I'm at the point now giving up on big old media. The newspaper chains are almost all run by hedge funds. Broadcast is geriatric. Magazines are dying. I wrote a book about that too. Major national media is getting it from all sides. Costco is going to stop selling books. Hollywood is a mess. Linear cable televisions are getting sloughed off because they have cooties. That's old big mass media. It is a disaster all around. So what interests me instead? My students go to. They don't want to go to places like that. They want to go to things that are doing new things like documenters or city bureau or places like that. They're building a new ecosystem out there. It's going to be messy. A lot of things will fail but some will succeed. Like Paris, the information.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Paris, where can people find you?

[Paris Martineau]

You can find me on Twitter if you're still using that site arismartno or better on blueskyarris nyc. I'm also publish out the information regularly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's theinformation.com had the story about Sniffies. Yes, I'll link it in the notes. Mr. Jarvis? Professor? No, Jeff. Jeff, where can people find you?

[Cara Price]

I'm Jeff Jarvis. Everywhere. Too many places. And [e-mail] you can buy my books.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Please buy the books. I've been so this has been so much fun and like the first real radio Better Offline. It's been so much fun. Thank you both for being here. Thank you to our producer, of course, Daniel Goodman. You've been listening to Better Offline. I'm your chief pig, Mr. Zitron. You know where to find me. You're already listening to to my words. I just want to repeat to everyone who sat through the CES show. Thank you again. We will do it next year and we're already planning to add a new guest, a standup comic that I'm not going to name yet, but she's going to be absolutely incredible. Thank you again for listening everyone. You know where to find me and you're going to hear a very old message after this. Some of you going to be very unfair about thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ezeteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat where's your ed at? To visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

[Paris Martineau]

Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Os Velozian]

Do you want to see into the future? Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? Do you want to experience the frontiers of what makes us human? On tech stuff, we travel from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars, from conversations with Nobel Prize winners to the depths of TikTok to ask burning questions about technology, from high tech to low culture and everywhere in between. Join us Listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Alec Baldwin]

Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This past season on my podcast, here's the Thing, I spoke with more actors, musicians, policymakers, and so many other fascinating people like writer and actor Dan Aykroyd.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I love writing more than anything. You're left alone, you know, you do three hours in the morning, you write three hours in the afternoon.

[Alec Baldwin]

Go pick up a kid from school and write at night and after nine hours you come out with seven pages.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then you're moving on.

[Alec Baldwin]

Listen to here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.

[Tisha Allen]

Get your podcasts, you are cordially invited to the hottest party in professional sports. I'm Tisha Allen, former golf professional and the host of welcome to the Party, your newest obsession about the wonderful world that is women's golf, Featuring interviews with top players on tour, tips to help improve your swing, and the craziest stories to come out of your friendly neighborhood country club. Welcome to the Party with Tisha Allen is an I Heart Women's fourth production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. Listen to welcome to the Party that's P A R T E e on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you know that 70% of people get hired at companies where they already have a connection? I'm Andrew Seamus, LinkedIn's editor at large for jobs and career development, and on my podcast, Get Hired, I bring you all the information you need to, well, get Hired. Landing a job may be tough, but Get Hired is here for you every step of the way, with advice on resumes, networking, negotiation, and so much more. Listen to Get Hired with Andrew seaman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you like to listen.

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