Podcast
The 404 Media Podcast
Hosted by 404 Media · EN
Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way technology is shaping–and is shaped by–our world. We bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL through investigative reporting, smart blogging, and breaking news. At 404 Media you’ll read, and hear, stories you can’t find anywhere else written by journalists who are leading experts on their beats. Subscribe to 404 Media at 404media.co to gain access to an ad-free version of this podcast, as well as a bonus podcast episodes. Subscribers are the bedrock of building a sustainable business for our journalism.
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144episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Flock is Tracking People, Not Just Cars
3d ago00:46:46Summary readyTake control of your data footprint risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Go to https://incogni.com/404Mediaand use code 404MEDIA for 60% off an annual plan. That's code 404MEDIA at https://incogni.com/404Media Our listeners can buy one pair of glasses and get 20% off any additional pairs at https://WarbyParker.com/404 — and using our link helps support the show. #WarbyParker #ad We start this week with Joseph’s story on how cops are using Flock to track actual people, not just cars, with searches like “male with tattoos.” After the break, Emanuel tells us all about the company that is explicitly selling mountains of books to AI companies and promising to keep the sales a secret. In the subscribers-only section, Jason tells us how he learned about the Suno hack and what it showed us. You're Invited: 404 Media's Third Anniversary Live Podcast and Party! How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/6xSes4VMVyo Subscribe at 404media.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Summary404 Media Live: How AI Is Destroying the Internet
5d ago01:01:36Summary ready404 Media teamed up with the Los Angeles Public Library's LA Made to do a live show at the LA Central Library at the end of May. Jason, Sam, and our friends Dexter Thomas and Gita Jackson talked about the ways AI is threatening workers in all industries, changing how we consume the internet, and slopifying Hollywood, video games, social media, and art. Support Gita's work: www.aftermath.siteSupport Dexter's work: https://www.youtube.com/@dexdigi YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/-wLUJEjCCQE Subscribe at 404media.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SummaryWe Are Living in a ‘ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic’
1w ago00:45:31Summary readyGo to https://surfshark.com/404Media to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN, with the reassurance of a 30-day money-back guarantee, or just use code 404MEDIA at checkout. That's https://surfshark.com/404Media. Our listeners can buy one pair of glasses and get 20% off any additional pairs at https://WarbyParker.com/404 — and using our link helps support the show. #WarbyParker #ad We start this week with Jason’s story about the ChatGPT flyer pandemic. They’re everywhere! Thank you to the readers and listeners who sent in their own examples. After the break, Sam tells us how Waymo snitched on kids and drove them to a group of waiting cops. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains why he bought a $3,000 suit that electrocutes your muscles. Yep. We Are Living in a ‘ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic’ Cops Say Waymo Snitched on Teens for Allegedly Drinking and Shooting a Toy Gun I Bought the $3,000 Fitness Suit That Electrocutes You. I’m Sending It Back YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/Pc_uE7JF63k Subscribe at 404media.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SummaryLiberation, Eroticism, and Sex in Public (with Angela Jones)
2w ago00:53:39Summary readyIs your sex life as private and personal as you think it is? Or is it shaped by – and constantly shaping, in turn – the society and systems you exist in? This week we’re joined by Dr. Angela Jones, who asks these questions and much more in her new book, Sex in Public. Angela is a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. In addition to scholarly works published in many distinguished journals including Porn Studies and The Black Scholar, she's the author, co-author and/or editor of several books, including Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook and Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry which came out in 2020 and advanced and informed a lot of my own understanding of the online adult industry especially. Her latest book, Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives, just launched this month. As Angela writes: “Revolutionizing how we talk about sex means thinking not just about what a single solitary person should or shouldn't do in bed.” We get into the history of sexology, how sex toys complicate our understanding of what counts as sex, whether sex needs a definition at all, what happened when she bought and used a sex doll, and why the most vulnerable moments in their book are also the ones everyone wants to discuss. Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives Cash/Consent by Lorelei Lee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SummaryHow Influencers Fake Being Rich
2w ago00:50:58Summary readyTake control of your data footprint risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Go to incogni.com/404Media and use code 404MEDIA for 60% off an annual plan. That's code 404MEDIA at incogni.com/404Media. This week, we talk about Jason's dive into the world of LARPing, where hustlebros and influencers use fake YouTube, OnlyFans, and Stripe dashboards as "proof" that they're rich in order to sell low-quality get-rich-quick courses in pyramid schemes. We show how easy it is to pretend like you're rich, and how these strategies are used all over social media. How I Bought a Private Jet By Selling $10 Subscriptions to 404 Media Inside Cannes, the Advertising Industry’s Biggest Party YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/Tmsayhy94RE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SummaryIs the Best Game of the Year a Failure?
3w ago01:40:07Summary readyRemap Radio’s Rob Zacny and Emanuel dive deep into their current favorite game, Marathon, and what its middling success says about the future of games. If you listen to the 404 Media podcast by now you probably realized that Joe and I are a little obsessed with a game called Marathon. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve played it for almost 300 hours since it was released in March. But as much as we’re enjoying it, and there are thousands of players who feel the same, Marathon so far has failed to find the audience we’d expect from the developer that made Halo, Destiny, and which a few years ago acquired by PlayStation for more than $3 billion. It’s bad news for Marathon fans and a good sign for how much the video game business has changed over the years. I wanted to have Remap Radio host Robert Zacny on the podcast because much like me and Joe, he’s been obsessed with Marathon as well. One of Rob’s greatest skills is dissecting how and why games get their hooks into us, and what a game’s popularity, or lack thereof in Marathon’s case, might reveal about the state of the industry and culture more broadly. Remap Radio: https://remapradio.com/ 00:00 Rob Zacny Introduction 03:08 What Is an Extraction Shooter? 08:42 The Genre's Evolution 14:48 Why Marathon Works 18:36 Bungie's Design 22:27 Cryo Archive 34:02 The Thrill of Extraction 47:33 Is Marathon Dead?52:22 Can Bungie Save It?58:50 The Business Problem1:05:20 A Millennial Medium?1:12:59 Aging Out of Gaming1:13:40 The Rise of Sweats1:20:06 Bungie's Layoffs1:23:09 The Destiny Era1:28:00 The AAA Dilemma1:34:22 Sony's Big Bet YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/K4U4mWObX84 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SummaryThe Tokenpocalypse Is Here
3w ago00:42:51Summary readyGo to surfshark.com/404Media to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN, with the reassurance of a 30-day money-back guarantee, or just use code 404MEDIA at checkout. That's surfshark.com/404Media. We start this week with Joseph’s story about the Tokenpocalypse, which is companies scrambling to stop spending so much on AI after providers started charging per AI token. After the break, Joseph and Emanuel tell us about the ways companies are trying to do this, including using a tool to make their LLMs talk like cavemen. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel explains how entirely fake AI-generated flowers are all over eBay, Etsy, and Amazon. The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI Companies Are Making Claude and Codex Talk Like Cavemen to Stop AI’s Soaring CostsScammers Sell Seeds for Exotic AI-Generated Flowers That Don’t Exist Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/Sia4LZGNkVs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SummaryHow Brands Use Reddit to Poison AI Search
4w ago00:41:54Summary readyThis week, we're doing a deep dive into how marketing companies are poisoning AI search results by manipulating Reddit. You may remember when Google’s AI search results first launched, it recommended that people put glue on their pizza. Well that happened because it scraped a 10 year old Reddit comment. We’ve learned over the last year or so that this sort of thing can be done on purpose, and brands are taking advantage of it. There’s been the rise of AEO or GEO, which stands for AI Engine Optimization or Generative Engine Optimization. Basically this is trying to get mentions of your brand into web content that’s likely to be scraped by AI tools. It’s the new version of SEO and lots of marketers and companies are trying to do it. The most reliable, easiest way to do this appears to be by putting brand mentions onto Reddit. Reddit’s volunteer mods have noticed an increase in bot accounts and entire sequencing efforts—where a post and its comments are all basically done as a stealth ad—intended to boost brands. I wrote an article about this a few weeks ago, about r/biohackers banning mentions of peptides, which were a popular promoted class of product. After we wrote that article, researchers from Cornell University reached out to me about a new study they had just done. The research is called “Deep-research agents can be poisoned via user-generated content,” which provides a mechanism for the ways reddit, wikipedia, and other sites that allow users to post are being attacked by brands doing AEO: "We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently," the study says. We spoke to two of the researchers, Hal Triedman and Tingwei Zhang, about this problem and what, if anything can be done about it. Deep-Research Agents Can Be Poisoned via User-Generated Content: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24245 Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/2uG8ohZHOD8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SummaryIf AI Is Sentient Then So Is ‘Age of Empires II
Jun 2400:41:38Summary readyTake control of your data footprint risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Go to incogni.com/404Media and use code 404MEDIA for 60% off an annual plan. That's code 404MEDIA at incogni.com/404Media. Our listeners can buy one pair of glasses and get 20% off any additional pairs at WarbyParker.com/404 — and using our link helps support the show. We start this week with Matthew’s story about a fascinating paper that argues if LLMs are sentient, then by those metrics so is the classic game Age of Empires II. After the break, Matthew tells us about a wild story out of Texas with a data center being built on land that was donated to be a park. In the subscribers-only section, we talk hacking and basketball. If AI Is Sentient Then So Is ‘Age of Empires II’ A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Massive Data Center Instead Hackers Publish Knicks and Madison Square Garden Data Online Madison Square Garden Made Dossier on Activists Who Opposed Facial Recognition YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/LlWJTM18z3E Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SummaryStopping Tech Company Censorship (with Jake Hanrahan)
Jun 2200:44:19Summary readyGo to surfshark.com/404Media to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN, with the reassurance of a 30-day money-back guarantee, or just use code 404MEDIA at checkout. That's surfshark.com/404Media. Our listeners can buy one pair of glasses and get 20% off any additional pairs at WarbyParker.com/404 — and using our link helps support the show. This week Joseph speaks to Jake Hanrahan, creator of the independent conflict-focused media company Popular Front. They talk all about conflict journalism and how to get your journalism out there when platforms like YouTube make it all that much harder, sometimes. Popular Front Away Days Plastic Defence: Secret 3D Printed Guns in Europe Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/Yf51H5IuRcM Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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