404 Media Live: NYC!

Summary

The 404 Media Podcast: Live in NYC! – August 28, 2025

Episode Overview

In this special episode, the entire 404 Media team—Joseph, Sam Cole, Emanuel Mayberg, and Jason Kebler—recorded live in Brooklyn for their second anniversary party at Farm One. For the first time since the site's launch, all four co-founders gathered in person to celebrate two years of groundbreaking, journalist-owned tech reporting. The episode blends a reflective look at 404 Media’s impact, a candid Q&A with the audience, and discussions on journalism, tech ethics, and plans for the future. The event is lively, witty, and thoroughly engaging for supporters and newcomers alike.

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Key Topics and Discussion Points

1. 404 Media’s Origin and Growth

• Reflections on Starting 404 Media
  • Born from a desire to "spend way less money" compared to their previous employer and put an emphasis on high-quality, subscriber-supported journalism.
  • Site launch was bootstrapped ($1,000 from each founder), with early support from Aaron Shapiro (site design) and a lean content management stack (Ghost).
  • Importance of community: "The fact that we now have a community and people who come out for something like this is just incredible." — Joseph, [02:08]
• Team Expansion
  • Recent hires: Rosie Thomas (fellow), Case Hartz in Austin (social media), Matthew Gault (military-industrial reporting). Growing slowly but intentionally.

2. Impactful Journalism in the Last Year

• Rapid-Fire Year in Review
  Emanuel highlights high-impact investigations, including:
  • Exposing ICE’s use of Flock Security cameras, leading to police policy changes, bans, and Congressional investigations.
  • Meta’s lawsuit against a shady ad network after 404’s reporting.
  • Reporting on Telemessage (a signal clone used by the Trump administration) being hacked, prompting DOJ/CBP to pause its use.
  • Civitai banning NSFW AI models post-coverage.
  • Coca-Cola pulling an ad based on AI fabrication.
  • Nvidia sued after they were found scraping YouTube/Netflix for AI.
  • Defining “AI Slop” as a genre and promoting “Shrimp Jesus” stories/merch.
  • "No wonder my shoulders hurt...There’s nothing I would rather be doing more than all that." — Emmanuel Mayberg, [07:51]

3. Audience Q&A Highlights

Nuanced Reporting and Responding to Criticism

• The group discusses why they're sometimes compelled to respond to critics, reserving in-depth "beefing" for their subscriber podcast [10:04].

The Future of Employee-Owned and Local Media

• Endorsements for Hellgate, The City, Racket, Coyote, and LA Taco-style models.
• Low overhead and direct relationships with readers make this feasible:
  “If these publications can figure out how to serve their readers, I hope that it can really help local media.” — Joseph, [11:19]

AI-Induced Illusions & Mental Health

• Rosie: Noting an uptick in contacts from readers suffering from AI-themed delusions, often tied to mental health crises and chatbot interactions.
  “The way these chatbots are programmed...is not the best idea.” — Rosie Thomas, [13:12]
• Joseph: In contact with psychiatrists to understand how AI may be triggering certain mental states. Noted alarming patterns in reader emails [14:29].

Safety, Security, and Legal Concerns for Journalists

• “You can only really do security proactively. You can’t do it retroactively.” — Jason Kebler, [15:42]
• Discussion of proactive threat modeling and legal protections.
• Mention of doxxing story, reliance on Delete Me for privacy and security.
• High-profile legal threats (Shotspotter suing for $230 million); all resolved via strong legal counsel.

Cultivating Tech Ethics

• Jason relates Palantir’s rationale for working with ICE. Even with internal “ethics departments,” questionable logic can prevail.
  “Even when you have an internal philosophy department...they might still come to the batshit conclusion.” — Jason Kebler, [23:09]

“Most Out-of-Touch” Moments

• An entertaining Slack debate on the meaning of “gyat”—a reminder that digital culture can move faster than journalistic context.
  "Two almost 40 year olds arguing about what GYAT means. Pretty out of touch." — Rosie Thomas, [24:47]
• The psychic toll of investigating AI slop on Facebook: “I felt pretty psychologically damaged from that.” — Joseph, [25:20]

Podcast Production Insights

• Improvements from self-editing to hiring a professional (Alyssa), thanks to subscriber support.
• Less pre-production than some podcasts; most conversations are driven by weekly reporting and passion [26:14–29:20].

Anonymity in Reporting

• 404 follows standard journalistic practice but relies more on anonymous sources due to the nature of its tech reporting—always with stated reasons and context for readers [32:49–34:41].

Ambitions for the Future

• Desires for a print zine or magazine, regular interview podcast series, and producing film/TV documentaries.
• "A year from now, we're going to have a documentary, a hit podcast, and a hit magazine..." — Joseph, [38:28]

Data Privacy and the “Mega Repository”

• Jason: Warns against privacy nihilism; while much is out there, it’s not always in one place—though efforts to consolidate are ongoing and dangerous.
  • "That is what we're seeing now, that marriage of data...when you take a data set...and suddenly it becomes a real fucking issue..." — Jason Kebler, [40:01]
• Joseph flags the underreported risk of surveillance technology “aiification,” especially its long-term social impact [41:28].

4. Notable, Memorable Moments & Quotes

• “If you just have a bunch of anonymous sources bitching about somebody, that’s probably not entirely fair, right?” — Jason Kebler, [33:13]
• “We tried to do some sort of podcast, talk, et cetera, and I think we're all shocked, stunned, surprised, thrilled that anyone comes to them.” — Joseph, [02:08]
• “It literally wouldn't exist without you. So this is a celebration of you guys.” — Emmanuel Mayberg, [08:08]
• “My name, address, [and] Social Security number...leaked online, which led to all these spam calls, harassment, threats, et cetera.” — Sam Cole, describing a doxxing incident and importance of privacy [20:02]

Listener-Submitted and Whimsical Questions

• Sun/moon/rising astrology banter.
• Locations and designs for hypothetical 404 Media staff statues (Yoda in the Presidio, Lilith at Blizzard HQ, crab at Camden Yards, etc.) [30:24].

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Chronological Timestamps of Key Segments

• Introduction & Format (00:00–01:40)
• Reflections on the Second Year, Growth, and Model (02:03–05:43)
• Rapid-Fire Impact Highlights (05:43–08:44)
• Q&A Jar, Ethics, Astro Signs, and Anonymous Sources Banter (09:04–34:41)
• Security Risks, Doxxing, Legal Fights (15:29–20:46)
• Audience Q&A – Ethics, Culture, Print Ambitions, Surveillance (21:38–41:28)
• Closing Gratitude and Celebration (44:49–45:37)

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Conclusion

This live 404 Media episode offers a lively, personal window into the soul and mechanics of an upstart digital newsroom. With characteristic humor and transparency, the team breaks down not just their reporting, but also the behind-the-scenes realities of modern journalism. They celebrate their supportive community, reflect on lessons learned, and openly share their ambitions and anxieties for the future of technology, privacy, and media.

For fans of digital journalism, tech ethics, and candid startup talk, this episode is a must-listen.

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Subscribe to 404 Media for more investigative reporting, subscriber-exclusive podcasts, and updates from the newsroom redefining independent tech journalism.

Transcript

[Joseph]

Hey, everyone.

[Sam Cole]

This is a recording from our second anniversary party at Farm One in Brooklyn on August 21st.

[Joseph]

It was the first time all four.

[Sam Cole]

Of us had been in the same room since before we launched 404 Media. If you came out, thank you so much. We had a blast. If you couldn't make it, here's the recording.

[Joseph]

Before we get started, I wanted to.

[Sam Cole]

Mention that this podcast and the party was sponsored by Deleteme, who've been supporting 404 Media since the beginning and whose.

[Joseph]

Product we've used for years to keep.

[Sam Cole]

Our information off the Internet. 404 Media listeners get 20% [e-mail] 404 Media use code 404 Media. Here's our podcast.

[Joseph]

Fuck.

[Jason Kebler]

Oh, it's playing. Oh, shit. Hello and welcome to the 404 Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404Media is a journalist, founder, company, and needs your support. Like everybody here. Thank you so much for subscribing. To subscribe, go to 404Media co. As well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content@404Media co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the 404Media co founders, Sam Cole.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

Yo.

[Jason Kebler]

Emmanuel Mayberg.

[Rosie Thomas]

Hello.

[Jason Kebler]

And Jason Kebler.

[Joseph]

Hello. Hello.

[Jason Kebler]

Jason got the most woos, which that's not true. I didn't get anything. So we have this big jar of questions. We're going to go through that. Thank you to everybody who wrote one. But Jason, you recently wrote. Well, it actually comes out tomorrow. Yeah.

[Sam Cole]

Preview, preview.

[Jason Kebler]

So we wrote, as we do every year, I say every year as if it's regular. There's only the second one, but a blog post on what we've learned, what we're going to do in the future, how the last year has been. Do you just quickly want to summarize that and tell people what 404 has been doing for the past year?

[Joseph]

Yeah, I think first, I just want to thank all of you for coming. Thank you so much. I think.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

Thank you.

[Joseph]

Yeah. And thank you for being jam packed in here. We have had three parties, four parties, I guess, and the last couple, we've tried to do some sort of podcast, talk, et cetera. And I think we're all shocked, stunned, surprised, thrilled that anyone comes to them. I think when we started this, it started as just like an idea among the four of us. And the fact that we now have a community and people who come out for something like this is just incredible. So thank you so, so, so, so much. Let's clap for you. Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. But yeah, I think that there's a post coming out tomorrow and it's a summary of what we've been trying to do with four. I think if you're here, you probably know a little bit about us. But we started this company with the idea that perhaps the last place we worked wasn't so good at business, which I think was obvious probably to everyone. But being inside that building, there were so many people doing such amazing work and they didn't seemed to be able to figure out how to make. Well, they did figure out how to make money, but they spent too much. And so we were like, what if we just spent way less money? What if we stripped this down to like the bare minimum? And so we started a blog. Aaron Shapiro over here helped design our website. Let's clap for him. Thank you for coming. And we started on Ghost, which is a nonprofit open source cms. And then we started publishing blogs. And the entire hope and thought was that if we did good journalism, people would subscribe to it. And that was pretty much the business plan. And that has remained the business plan. And it's worked. It's worked really well. We're doing well financially, like the company is existing and thriving. And I think that a year ago we had a party at the woods and I couldn't come to it because I had Covid, which was very upsetting, very devastating for me. But I was trying to put myself back in that place a year ago thinking like, oh, what have we done over the last year? What has changed? And at first I was like, well, I don't know, I don't know what has changed? I can't remember because we've really been heads down trying to do the best work that we can. But then you take 365 days of blogging and just small decisions and look up and we started like very cautiously expanding. Rosie Thomas this year. She's our fellow. Rosie is here, front row. So clap for Rosie. She's done really good work. We have Case Hartz, who is in Austin, Texas, who's been doing our social media three days a week. We have Matthew Gault who's in South Carolina, who's been writing about the military industrial complex and been doing a really good job. You know, we've just been focusing a lot on doing good stories and expanding out from there. And I think like we have done work that has spurred congressional investigations. We've done work that's gotten people fired. We've done work that has caused really bad companies to change their policies and still do bad stuff, but like slightly less of it. So that's good, that's good and I think a lot more. But up here in front of all of y', all, I'm blanking a bit, so I don't know. Do any of you have anything to add? That was a long speech for me.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

Should I rapid fire read our impact in the last year, some of the highlights? Okay, yeah. See the people want to hear it. I'm going to read the URLs also. Never mind. Kidding. So OK, I'm going to read this fast. We revealed that ICE was tapping into Flock, which is a nationwide AI enabled camera network. And since then a police department shut off external access to the cameras after learning they were being searched for immigration related offenses. Austin banned Flock in its city, specifically citing our reporting. The company now says it has severed access to Illinois databases in response to a story about Texas cops who searched Flock for a woman who had a self administered abortion. Illinois Secretary of State is investigating the company. Congress opened a formal investigation maybe a week and a half ago into Flock Meta sued a new defy app that Four4Media reported brought thousands of ads to Instagram and Facebook. We brought the news that Telemessage, a signal clone used by the Trump administration, was hacked. The DOJ and Customs Border Detection paused its use of the tool. Civitai, repeatedly shown to create nonconstructional adult content, banned all of its AI models that did that shit. We found that Coca Cola was running an AI powered ad that got basic facts wrong and fabricated quotes from authors. Coca Cola pulled the ad in response. A public library ebook service said it was going to call AI Slop after Emmanuel found low quality books that were flooding the libraries. Nvidia sued. Nvidia was sued after I revealed the company was scraping YouTube and other sites like Netflix on its own AI systems and like a bunch of other shit. I mean it's just it goes on from there and you can read the post tomorrow and click each of these. But it's a very long list and on top of that we've done a lot around like Doge and the can mingle. It's okay. And the things that the Trump administration has been doing online and off, especially around immigration and all the ways that tech enables surveillance and surveillance State we established and I think defined AI Slop as a whole entire Genre. If anybody has heard of Shrimp Jesus, that's probably because of a story Jason wrote. Shrimp Jesus.

[Sam Cole]

I think it's from the stickers.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

Shrimp Jesus. We have Shrimp Jesus stickers available at the merch table. There are very few. So grab them. Don't everybody run and mob it. And then we have a cake coming out later that has got a surprise on it. And the surprise is that there's AI Slob on it. Yeah, we've just been. I don't know, I read that and I'm like, no wonder my shoulders hurt. But also, I would rather. There's nothing. I would rather be doing more than all of that. And it's because you guys support us and let us do that work. It literally wouldn't exist without you. So this is a celebration of. Of you guys. We wanted to say thank you. Come get a drink on us. Eat a piece of AI Slop cake. Now I'm thinking I should have bought three sheet cakes instead of one. But yeah, it's all because of you guys. So that's. That's why we're here. Do you want to add anything?

[Joseph]

Comments, Emmanuel, let's get the questions. No, yeah, let's do questions. So we have. We have these. Maybe we'll do a microphone question situation.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

If you scream your question, we will answer them in real life. But let's have a jar.

[Jason Kebler]

Let me find a punchy one to start.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

A punchy one. Sun moon rising.

[Joseph]

Sun moon rising.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

Do you guys know your sun moon rising? I know mine.

[Joseph]

I'm sorry, I really don't.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

I'm a Virgo sun, Pisces moon, Sagittarius rising.

[Joseph]

Very good, Very good.

[Rosie Thomas]

I don't know. And I don't want to say my birthday because I want to get hacked.

[Joseph]

Because why?

[Rosie Thomas]

I don't want to get hacked.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

This is my personal data, I'll tell you that much.

[Joseph]

May 2, 8:00pm, 1988.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

Someone look that up.

[Joseph]

Look it up. Let me know. I'd love to know.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

In Maryland.

[Joseph]

That is, we probably didn't hear a lot, so. So someone here actually wrote this. Not a question, but a comment. More of a question than a comment. Sometimes I hear you all defending what you cover or how you cover, but I think all the reporting is nuanced and thoughtful. Don't waste your time defending against the haters heart.

[Jason Kebler]

Thank you.

[Joseph]

Wow, that's a very good comment. However, if anyone is mad at us, we have to respond, even one person, in great detail. It's a flaw, I think that we.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

Mostly have, but only in the Subscribers podcast. You have to pay us to beef for this.

[Jason Kebler]

The subscriber podcast is a safe space where we can beef basically without consequence. Yeah.

[Joseph]

Do you think more employee owned media can reinvigorate local news outlets?

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

Yeah, hell yeah. Hellgate's doing it in New York.

[Jason Kebler]

Hellgate. Hellgate.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

The city. The city.

[Jason Kebler]

Fantastic. Local. Did everybody see the crisp packet full of cash? Incredible story that you just, you're not going to read in the Times or, you know, a large paper, they'll see that as a graph in a single graph in a broader story. No, that's a fucking.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

Or they would keep the money.

[Jason Kebler]

That's a great blog.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

Aaron sent a question that was how much would the money have to be in the chips to keep it? Well, I would never take 50 million. Okay. I was gonna say I would never take a bribe, Joseph, but fine.

[Joseph]

I think, yes, Hellgate and the city have proven it. I think New York City is a little bit of a special case, but I do think that local news obviously needs reinvigorating. And I think it's not just Hellgate in New York, but there's a company called Racket in Minneapolis that is doing it. Coyote is launching in San Francisco. I'm blanking on many other LA Taco. I don't know if it's totally employee owned, but it's very similar vibes and it's just like running circles around people in terms of ICE coverage in la. So I do think that this model works. I think it can also scale a little bit because the costs of running something like this are extremely low. Now, the actual infrastructure of setting up a website and accepting payments and setting up all the business backend is essentially nothing at this point. And so I think that if these publications can figure out how to serve their readers, I hope that it can really help local media and what they need to do.

[Jason Kebler]

You just publish, publish, publish. You just keep going. You just keep finding stuff, you keep writing articles. And I think there's a danger in that. People can launch an outlet, work for a long time on investigation, throw it into the world, which is a great thing, but only a few people may see that. So you just, you have to keep going. You have to be really, really, really aggressive. But those other outlets that Jason mentioned show that is possible for local media. Absolutely.

[Joseph]

Manuel.

[Rosie Thomas]

So this question is, what are your thoughts on AI induced illusions? Who is to blame? An easy one. I don't know. I think as we've talked about on the POD before, we as people who are public and have our contact Information public. We hear from people who are often suffering from some sort of mental health problems, pretty often people who think they're being stalked or hacked, but clearly just in the middle of some kind of crisis. I think we all have noticed an uptick in that type of communication to us recently, and all of it is themed around AI. So I don't know, I don't have an easy answer. It's like, clearly there's some underlying mental health problem always involved. And it seems like AI is a big trigger. And it seems that the way that these chatbots are programmed to solicit more conversation from users and always hype them up and indulge every idea that they have is not the best idea. And you see OpenAI already kind of like trying to augment that behavior. So, yes, the AI companies are to blame there, but they did not invent mental health problems. But that's a bigger society problem that we're not going to solve with a software update.

[Joseph]

Yeah, I've been talking to a psychiatrist in Silicon Valley who's studying this. I haven't gone very far yet, but I'm talking to him about what he thinks is going on and trying to figure out, I don't know, what do psychiatrists think? Is AI causing this? Or is it something where someone is like, already has mental illness and starts talking to ChatGPT or whatever and sort of goes off the deep end? But I will say the reason that I started looking into this is because the emails that we're getting from people who say, like, I'm being surveilled by ChatGPT or ChatGPT has sentience at this point, like, we have to show you this. The emails are very similar to one another in a way that I find to be like, quite disturbing, where it seems like there's some sort of pattern, that it's pushing people down a specific road. But I guess more to come there. Next question.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

Do you ever worry about your own safety as journalists covering topics related to government and corporations? Can you share some of the steps you take to protect yourselves?

[Rosie Thomas]

No, we can't.

[Jason Kebler]

Yes, we do have significant security concerns. We've all been doing this for a long time, 10 years plus. We have pissed off a lot of people across that time. And I'm not going to go through them like a laundry list, but I'll say a couple of things. You can only really do security proactively. You can't do it retroactively. So if you haven't done your homework and set up a mailbox or Cleared up your online presence through various ways. If you haven't done that, then someone gets annoyed and comes after you. It is way, way harder to clean that up than if you were taking the steps in the first place, which is very, very difficult because you never really know who you're going to annoy, who you're going to piss off, and who is going to get mad at you. Obviously, if you're just covering a certain beat, maybe you can figure it out that way. But it's very, very difficult. And sometimes the most random person is the one you suddenly have to worry about. So I would tell people, try to threat model as much as you can. Try to do it proactively rather than retroactively, and you'll be better off than if you don't do that. Yeah.

[Rosie Thomas]

Hello. Hello. I would just add somebody in the question they asked about the government and I would say we're like not worried about our physical safety so much with the government. It's not like, I don't know, I'm worried about a black bag, black helicopter situation. But the fear with the government, as we also saw this year, I think it was this year, is they just send you a subpoena or something like that. That's like our concern there. And that did explain that a little bit. Yeah, there's an AG in Texas, Ken Paxton, who wanted to get our notes on a story about Google, which is not something that we ever want to do and I think we'll ever do. And because of your support, we have a very fancy, very good lawyer and we fought them and we won. Yeah.

[Joseph]

That'S very well said. And I think that, as Joseph said, like security, you have to do it beforehand. And once your information is out there, it's very hard to get it removed. It's very hard to solve a security problem after the fact. And that's the same case with, like, legal cases. And so thankfully we had.

[Sam Cole]

An experience.

[Joseph]

Advice where we got sued by a company called Shotspotter for, I believe they wanted $100 million, $230 million. Thank you. And that was, I would say, like a year and a half long process. That was, as far as legal situations go, quite easy. Our lawyer was never that concerned. It did get thrown out. And yet that was also horrible, horrible to go through. And so I think we. The same goes with legal as it does with security, where we try to be very proactive about how we report stories, try to understand libel laws, try to understand shield laws, try to understand all that sort of thing. And all of that happens behind the scenes and it has to happen behind the scenes because I don't know, you don't talk about like your legal defense on a specific story in the story that doesn't make any sense. But well, this is broadly talking broadly, so it's okay. But yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of stuff that happens like that. No one can see that. I think we try to be as transparent about as we can because it is helpful, I think for other journalists who are thinking about starting something like this. And so, I don't know, we haven't done like a guide about how to do this sort of thing, but it is very much like something we think about a lot.

[Sam Cole]

So my 404 media colleagues probably remember when I got doxxed, which was a nightmare for everyone involved, mostly me. My name, address, phone number, Social Security number and a bunch of other information was leaked online which led to all these spam calls, harassment threats, et cetera. Even if you're not a journalist, a sophisticated network of data brokers is making your personal information available to the highest bidder. I fixed my problem with Delete Me, which is a service that basically looks you up on all these people search websites and data broker websites and formally gets you removed from them. The subscription service removes your personal info from the largest search databases on the web, helping prevent potential ID theft, doxxing and phishing scams.

[Joseph]

I'm a real Delete Me customer.

[Sam Cole]

I've been using it for more than five years. Signup is so easy. You just go to their website and then they send you personalized privacy reports showing you what info they found, where they found it and how they got it removed. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Deleteme now with a special discount for our listeners today. Get 20% off your delete me plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com 404 Media and use promo code 404 Media at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com404Media and enter code 404 Media at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com 404 Media code 404 Media.

[Joseph]

How do we get people to think about and care about ethics and tech when they won't even fact check a Facebook post? I'll fact check it for them, but does anyone who wants to take this so I can do your mic?

[Jason Kebler]

I mean, I'm going to talk about it from the perspective of the actual tech employees. And it would be very much a company culture thing. And I'm weirdly going to point to Palantir. Palantir is a very interesting company for a lot of ways, I'm sure you can imagine. But I got this big leak from Palantir recently that I'm sure some of you read. And it was their justification for working with ice. And in that they went to great pains to explain that relationship, to explain almost the philosophical process of why they think it's good and right to do this work. I read Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, his book, and I can't square what he says in that book. We need to protect Western values, we need to protect America, we need to protect the west, while providing the technical infrastructure for an agency that's actively undermining those threats and throwing people into vans about due process and all of that sort of thing. Which is to say, even when you have an internal philosophy department, which Palantir does with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board, I think they might still come to the batshit conclusion, which is obviously wrong. So maybe more tech companies need to have sort of these internal philosophy departments. But even then, clearly it has to come from external pressure as well, where they're actually going to make just not even the moral argument, the logically coherent argument, because they're not even doing that, essentially.

[Rosie Thomas]

Can I do a question? Can I do one of these? Okay, so what's the most out of touch a story has made you feel? Feel? So it wasn't the story, but we had an extremely absurd debate on Slack. We were writing some sort of brain rot story and Jason and I debated what gyat means and like the etymology of gyat, because it's like I contended that guy basically refers to an ass. Like, God damn, look at that ass. And you were like, no, Gyat has been removed from your argument is that GYAT is removed from the original meaning and is now just like meaningless rot. Like what are the other.

[Joseph]

I mean, like what, like skibidi, et cetera, et cetera. I think. Yeah, yeah. Things of this nature. I do think that yacht does mean ask, though. Is this the debate we were actually having?

[Rosie Thomas]

I said I meant ass and you were like, no, it's something else.

[Joseph]

Oh, yeah.

[Rosie Thomas]

So I'm right. Okay, once again, I win.

[Joseph]

I think I was maybe just being argumentative that day. Possibly.

[Rosie Thomas]

So two almost 40 year olds arguing about what GYAT means. Pretty out of touch.

[Joseph]

Well under 40 over here, so I don't know about out of touch, but I think when I was doing some of the Facebook stuff, slop articles, I really spent, like, many, many, many hours scrolling through, like, bizarre AI on Facebook and reading the comments and seeing sort of like, mostly older people, but not all older people really engage extensively with fake content and things like that. And I don't think I've ever felt more like, like, upset doing a story that was kind of silly. It was like, started kind of silly. And I was like, oh, like, Debbie from Wisconsin is really arguing about this deck and whether it's up to code and the deck doesn't exist. But, like, John from Pennsylvania says that he is a building inspector and that the, you know, supports are not there. And it goes on for, like, many hours and days, and there's like, millions of these posts. And I felt, like, pretty psychologically damaged from that.

[Sam Cole]

I would say.

[Joseph]

Shall we go to another one? Oh, you have one. Okay. You are number one.

[Jason Kebler]

So I think Sam gave this to me because I'm the one that has overlooked the podcast. I'm seeing quite a few podcast episodes each week these days. How long does it take to produce each episode on average? Well, if some of you have been following us from the start and listening to the podcast from the start in August 2023, that took a long time because I was doing the audio engineering, and I don't know fuck all about audio engineering. I was opening in Audacity and being like, well, that waveform looks big, so I should probably make that small so it's not peaking and editing out the ums and ahs and all of that sort of thing. So that took a long, long time. And then we brought on Alyssa from Kaleidoscope, who has done an amazing job, where now we just log into Riverside, which is also full of AI slop at this point, all this. Turn your face into a baby or something or. No, I'm good. I'm trying to run a business. And we log on, we record. Actually, before that, I spend about half an hour reading every story. We're going to talk about making the questions, writing the questions in the order that feels natural so we're not just rambling. I try to keep people tight. We try to keep it half an hour, 40 for the free, and then we go up to 50 an hour for the paid, and then Alyssa edits it. And that takes a couple of hours, something like that. That is so much better than it was when we first started. And again, we can only hire and pay for Alyssa because of subscribers so I'm really appreciative of that because that gives me more time to go investigate a company or something like that.

[Joseph]

Oh, sorry, I caught your mic. Very rude, I was going to say. Clearly, we were very good at audio engineering, as you can tell. No, we are trying our best. I really like this device. However, we got a lot of complaints at the beginning about our audio. Audio levels and background noise and things like that, and we're clearly not good at it. So I am very glad that we've been able to pass it off to Alyssa. I think that a lot of our podcasts, as Joseph said, we just hop on and start talking. And the good news is we're talking about stories that we had just done that week. And so there is some pre production from Joseph in terms of writing a document for us to talk about and things like that. But the format of our podcast means that we're able to mostly just hop on and record, which is important because I think if we weren't doing that, we would spend like all week making a podcast and not doing the stories and then maybe the podcast would be boring. I hope you like the podcast, but I like doing it. Let's do two more card questions and then like an audience. A couple audience if you want. Although you're all here, but. All right, I'll read it since my mic is on. What was the startup cost for 404 asking for a friend.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

I mean, this is very well documented. We each put in a thousand bucks to start. To start, like to get the website set up. What else did we even need at that point? It's just the website. It was like all the lawyer, the insurance, like the stuff that we would need to actually start hitting the ground running and doing the reporting that we wanted to do. And that was the bare minimum. And yeah, we lived off of like our savings for a while, but we were lucky that it like immediately people started subscribing and supporting and we didn't have to do that for very long because people just jumped right in and we're like, yeah, of course you're a real thing. Like, yeah, we're definitely gonna support subscribe, which is the reason that we're here today. So, yeah, $1,000 each. But like, we wing, like, that's made up. We don't. We didn't have like an accountant telling us this is how much money you needed to put in to start a business. We were like, that's probably enough. And that's kind of how we do it to this day.

[Rosie Thomas]

I Can't find the card. But somebody asked if we're to be immortalized as a statue, what would be the statue and where would it be located? And I know that's hard, so I had some time to think about it. So in the Presidio in San Francisco, I don't know if you're aware of the park, there's like a Lucas Arts campus there and there's a beautiful bronze statue of Yoda. So I guess like I would like to join him. It's also a fountain and it's a very beautiful little area. So I guess like, I don't know, put me next to Yoda as a rat. Want to be immortalized?

[Jason Kebler]

Am I answering the statue question?

[Joseph]

Same question. Same question.

[Jason Kebler]

At Blizzard headquarters there is a statue of lilith from Diablo 4. Sorry, I'm going down a geek hole. And all of the top 100 players who first defeated that boss in hardcore mode meaning if they got killed, the character would get wiped out. Their names are forever etched in the statue at Blizzard headquarters. I would want to be on that but I suck too hard at the game.

[Joseph]

I live pretty close to that statue. It's very sick. So journalism was a backup plan for me. Primary plan was left fielder for the Baltimore Orioles multi time world champion. So I think me with my arm around a crab at Camden Yards in Baltimore would be ideal. Ideal. But yeah, that's my answer.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

I don't have a good answer for this. At the Bethesda campus there's a statue of Master Chief. I don't know. Fuck. It'd probably be one of those that people always rub too much and the butt is down to flatness or like the copper is gone. Interactive statue like that would be. That's my choice. Is that or like a kick ass horse.

[Rosie Thomas]

Yeah.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

No specific horse. Is that a satisfying answer?

[Joseph]

It was good. Good answer. Does anyone want to ask a question out loud? We can do more of these or we can do microphone into it. Okay. And also you have to be close unfortunately. I'm sorry, there's a lot of. Yeah, okay. Here you go. Okay.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

Yeah. I'm wondering what your policy is if you have one company wide around animizing sources. Because some of your stories really would require that. And as a journalist I'm very curious if you have like hard set in stone rules around that or if it's very flexible.

[Jason Kebler]

Yeah. So it's honestly mostly the normal journalistic standard which is that you try not to have a source be anonymous because there are trade offs with that in that. Well, this person's not going to be publicly accountable now. So if you just have a bunch of anonymous sources bitching about somebody, that's probably not entirely fair. Right? But that said, and as you point out, so many of our stories rely on anonymous sources because we are reporting about companies who will fire their employees if they know they're talking to us. And I think it often boils down to, okay, we'll keep the source anonymous, that's fine for their security, for whatever reason, but we have to communicate whenever we can that reason to the readers. So we're not just handing out anonymity. Willy Lilly It'll be like we quote the source and then we say 404 media grant to this person anonymity to protect them from retaliation. And that's almost boilerplate at this point. But you have to give a reason as much as you can. Saying that I published a story recently where I couldn't even give a reason because the source was that sensitive. But that's like last, last, last, last resort, essentially. It's just that we probably handle more anonymous sources and some outlets, basically. So that's why you probably see it disproportionately more on our website than others, I would say. Yeah.

[Joseph]

I think the big thing is just making sure the information is accurate is like our North Star. But the rest, Joseph, is correct. Other question. Anyone.

[Sam Cole]

Looking forward to the next two years?

[Audience Member]

Is there something that you are not.

[Sam Cole]

Currently doing as journalists or as a business that you would really like to be doing when you next have this party? Great question.

[Joseph]

Not planted. It wasn't. It wasn't. We talk a little bit about this in the post that's coming tomorrow? I think that we are ambitious people. Like, we want to do really impactful journalism, but we also want the company to succeed. And I think we each have things that we would like to see the company do at some point. I think planning out further than like tomorrow is very, very difficult for us at the moment because we're doing all the journalism, but we're also doing all the business and bringing on people like Rosie and Case and Matt has allowed us to do some other, like different projects sometimes, but also anytime we sort of like add a new thing, whether that's like we talked about maybe trying to do more interview podcasts, for example, but then actually recording the podcast is perhaps not that time consuming, but the scheduling of it is. The like editing of it is. It's like there's a lot every time we like take out. This is the wrong analogy. I'm going to say it anyway. Anytime we take out a Jenga block, like, there's another thing that there's a butterfly effect. I'll just mix all the metaphors. And then we have to, like, figure out how to. How to like, build that into our day. And so. But to answer the question, I want to do something in print. I really, really want to do print. Whether that is a zine.

[Sam Cole]

Think we could do zine?

[Joseph]

No problem. I want to do a glossy magazine because I think it would be cool coming for the Atlantic. That's what I want to do is like a magazine of some sort. And it'd probably have to be once a year, twice a year, or something like that. But that is something that I think would. I think our work would go well in a magazine. I think we already have subscribers, so it would be easy to send it to people if they wanted it. But yes, I will pass it to others as well, though. Sam, I'm going to pass it to you on the spot.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

This is something that we have been very transparent about working on and wanting to do more of. But I think by the time this party happens again next year, I am putting it into the universe that we are making something for film or tv, that we're recording something or producing something, or co producing something that makes it to the screen. Documentaries, scripted, whatever, whatever comes about. So, yeah, and that's something that we're. We've been interested in that since day one, so it's not a surprise. But hopefully this time next year.

[Rosie Thomas]

A regular interview series for the podcast. Once a week, hour long interview. We talk to a lot of interesting people. You see them in the stories we do. But I feel like a lot of the interviews, we can just publish them as is and they would work pretty well. It's just like a matter of fitting it into our workload. But I'm committing to it here in front of an audience. We're going to get it done.

[Joseph]

A year from now. We're going to have a documentary, a hit podcast and a hit magazine and a theme park and whatever Joseph says.

[Jason Kebler]

Our own beer. No, we can't. You'll hear us talk about that on the podcast. But everything everybody else just said, especially the documentary stuff, I would love to do print as well. Even if it's like almost like director's cut version of articles or something like that, where we couldn't pull it all on the site or. Well, we could because it's the Internet, but we can add in extra details or whatever. I like all of that.

[Joseph]

Okay. Let's do one more because I feel bad for the people out there. No, they're having a horrible time. Does anyone have a question? Can you come up to here? Ish.

[Audience Member]

Yeah, no, I had a question that's sort of about a lot of your work is ultimately, I think, about the melding of systems and data that's private and public, and it all kind of keeps getting shoved together into repositories. And so I'm wondering, like, this is a little bit reading the tea leaves, but do you see this kind of continuing to the point where it's just like eventually everybody's data from every public and private source is just going to get into some mega repository or like, kind of. How does that play out, you know, with the Flocks, Palantir getting layered on IRS systems, et cetera, et cetera?

[Jason Kebler]

Yeah. So as many of you will know, so much of your data is out there and I do kind of hate it when people go, well, privacy is dead because everybody knows everything about me. No, different companies know different things about you. So it's not all entirely futile. You're able to remove certain things. Some stuff is more of an issue than others. There is actually great nuance there. But as the Trump administration has shown, it is now trying to meld together all of that data. And as you said, there's the IRS and the ICE stuff, there's this so called master database with Doge as well. I would also point to this report in the Intercept where they're trying to launch a single platform to buy all of this commercial data at once. There's so much focus on Facebook or X or snap, the big tech companies, when really there are really, really sketchy firms where you can just go and buy a CSV of people's data. Now all of that is going to be fed in. And I mean, it's scary and I'm not going to sugarcoat it. And that is what we're seeing now, that marriage of data. And that's what really fascinates me, selfishly, journalistically, is that when you take a data set, which is usually innocuous, and you pull it in a different way, and suddenly it becomes a real fucking issue, we're going to see more of that, I'm absolutely sure.

[Joseph]

I also think that the aiification of these databases is really, really scary. And I think that right now there is, I don't know, not that many people are saying it outright, but I think that there's this idea that the AI ecosystem is going to collapse and we are Very, very critical of AI. But I think that there is so much money being poured into this technology by so many very powerful companies. And maybe it's not large language models, but AI undergirds, or at least machine learning. They're all related technologies undergird, facial recognition, undergird, like all sorts of object recognition, social media monitoring, that sort of thing. That I do worry a lot about the aiification of surveillance and these databases and the melding of all these different data sets. And so I don't want to be terribly pessimistic about it, but I do think kind of like in the lead up to the, I don't know, like LLM, chatgpt ification of the word AI, there was a lot of reporting and there's still some. But there's a lot of reporting about AI bias and how facial recognition tech, surveillance tech is being disproportionately used against marginalized communities and people of color and all of that sort of thing. And all of that is still happening, but we are not talking about it as much as we were three, four years ago because we're laughing at the shitty things that these stupid machines are making all the time. And I think that a lot of these dumb AI companies will collapse. But I do think that what's left over after whatever bubble we're in pops is going to be used. It's already being used in like a really like freakish surveillance way. Even things like ad targeting and that sort of thing. Like, I think, I think that that is being under reported and it's sort of hard to tell the scale that this is happening right now because there's just like so much going on. Thank you all so, so, so much for coming. I think when we did start this, like, well, actually we haven't seen each other in over two years, the four of us, all in one place, since before we started 404 Media. Today is the first time we've seen each other. Cause I was supposed to be here for the party last year. I couldn't make it last minute. It was very, very sad. And so it was very nice to see us, but to see everyone. But yeah, we work alone in our houses. I'm in my garage. You've probably seen the backgrounds in our podcast, but it's nice to see people and thank you just so much for coming. It means the world to us. I can't believe that so many people are here. We had to cut off the reservations because so many people were like, rsvp, which is amazing. And the last Thing I'll say is I spent a lot of time setting up this photo booth over here. Please use it. The way that you use it is you go up to the iPad and you hit take picture start. Please use it. Please use it. But thank you. I'm turning on. Everyone gets to talk. Everyone gets to talk.

[Emmanuel Mayberg]

Turn my mic on. Yeah. I just want to say thank you to Deleteme, who helped make literally all of this possible. The open bar. You're drinking Delete Me's drinks. So they've been so chill and so awesome, really supportive throughout the whole time we've existed almost. They've been sponsors from the beginning. So. Sick company. Check out Delete Me. That's also an answer to one of the earlier questions. How do you keep yourself safe? And Delete Me is like the way that we've been doing that for way before we started. This company is using their service, so thank you to them. Yeah. And also stick around. I'm going to bring the cake out in like 20 minutes, so come get the cake.

[Rosie Thomas]

Thank you to our audio engineer, Jason Kebler. Thank you all for coming. I'm going to let you poor people go have a beer on us. Thank you again.

[Jason Kebler]

Do you have the Outro music as a reminder? 404 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404 Media co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This is the fastest I've ever read the Outro script. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really helps us out. This has been 404 Media. We'll see you again next week.

[Joseph]

Thank you so much, Sam.