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- [00:01]
Joseph
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- [00:30]
Jason Kebler
It's kind of mind boggling as to like how Meta allowed this to happen. A lot of the people who used to work on this type of support have been laid off and replaced with AI.
- [00:47]
Host Joseph
Hello and welcome to the 404 Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404 Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to the best comments. Gain access to that content@404 media co. I'm your host, Joseph and with me are the other 404Media co founders, the first being Sam Cole. Hey, Emmanuel Mayberg.
- [01:22]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Hello.
- [01:23]
Host Joseph
And Jason Kebler.
- [01:24]
Jason Kebler
Hey, what's up?
- [01:26]
Host Joseph
So Sam and Jason, you had an event this past weekend, I think. Tell us about it.
- [01:34]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, we were at the LA Public Library, the Central Library in downtown LA with our friends Dexter Thomas and Geeta Jackson from Aftermath, which you should check out Aftermath. If you haven't, you should check out Dexter's YouTube and podcast if you don't know him. We were talking about how AI is changing the Internet. It was very fun. Sam, did you have a good time?
- [01:58]
Joseph
Yeah, it was really fun. I mean, I love hearing Dexter and Gita speak in general. And you also. I hear you speak quite often, but I get to hear them less often on stage. But yeah, it was great. It was a really good time. I'm glad everybody came out who came out. I think it was an interesting crowd because there were quite a few software folks and tech folks who were showing up and saying similar to what Emmanuel wrote about recently. I'm experiencing this AI influx at my job and am interested for that reason to talk about how AI is infiltrating all of our lives. So that was cool, it was a good time. And the LA Public Library is lovely, the people are lovely, the place is beautiful. So I'm back in New York now, but yeah, it's a good time.
- [02:43]
Jason Kebler
It's really crazy. The library is. They have this thing called the Octavia Lab, which is named after Octavia Butler, a fantastic dystopian science fiction writer. And it has like a bunch of gaming PCs with like 4090s in them, as well as like 3D printers, embroidery machines, podcast studio, like incredible resource. People are gaming in there. I went in after. Really nuts.
- [03:10]
Emmanuel Mayberg
You can go in and game, dude,
- [03:11]
Jason Kebler
you can go in and game at the library.
- [03:13]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Wow.
- [03:14]
Jason Kebler
And they're like, you know, the cases, the computer cases have see through like sides. Like they have cool cases and stuff too. It's like, these are good, these are good devices.
- [03:26]
Host Joseph
Maybe I can do that and I can find the game on the PC.
- [03:28]
Jason Kebler
My tax dollars at work. But like in a good way. In a good way. But anyways, this will be on the Internet soon. I don't know exactly when, but I think probably in the next few days it will be on the LA Public Library's YouTube channel and we'll try to get it on our podcast feed. I'll talk to them about it, but yeah, you'll be able to watch it.
- [03:50]
Host Joseph
Yeah. And if not, I'm sure we'll link to it somewhere. It'd be great to get it on the feed. Sam mentioned sort of tech and software people coming and talking about AI at their workplace. We're going to definitely touch on that in the second half of the show. As for this first half, we're going to start with Jason's really wild. This is one of the wildest hacking stories I think has happened in quite a while. The headline is, is hackers simply asked meta AI to give them access to high profile Instagram accounts. It works, Jason. We'll go into who was hacked, the sort of people doing it, all of that sort of thing in a second. First, can you just very simply explain how the hack worked, what did the hackers do and how did they gain access to these accounts? We'll just start with that.
- [04:41]
Jason Kebler
Yeah. I mean, it's funny because this is one of the craziest hacks, but it's also one of the simplest things you can possibly imagine. And so basically, back in March, Meta launched this AI support assistant, which is basically a chatbot assistant that goes beyond the type of help bots that you might have encountered on other websites where, I don't know, like customer support. You start talking to an AI chatbot and it just sends you a link to a guide that says, here's what you should do if you're locked out of your account or Whatever. What they've done is they've empowered this chat bot with actual access to like the support back end of meta of Instagram and Facebook, meaning that this chatbot not just can give you like, oh, here's what might be going on, it can actually change settings in your account, which is like very critical and a difference. It's like it's an LLM that's actually hooked up to people's accounts. And so what these hackers basically like groups of people on Telegram learned was that they could just talk to these chatbots and say, hey, I lost access to my old email address. This is my account. And they would send the account that they wanted to take over on Instagram and they would say, can you please send a recovery code to my new email address? And then they would just provide an email address that they controlled. The chatbot would send a two factor code to that email address. The hacker would then take that two factor code, provide it to the chatbot, and then the chatbot would send a password reset link. And so basically the chatbot was changing the email address associated with an Instagram account and allowing that person to then change the password, letting them take over Instagram accounts, like in huge numbers.
- [06:45]
Host Joseph
Yeah. And like, usually when a hacker wants to do that, as in, hey, I want to put my attacker email address onto an Instagram account, it usually has to be a lot more elaborate. As in, you know, maybe they'll just phish the original account owner and they'll swap it themselves in the back ends and the, the owner's locked out and now they have it linked to their email, that sort of thing. I mean, depending how elaborate it gets. Obviously there's lots of SIM swapping and stuff of Instagram accounts. A lot of these accounts are very, very valuable. Right. In the underground, where you have ones with just one letter or maybe just a single word or whatever. And I think we saw some of those here as well. But now you just ask Meta AI give me access to this account. And the AI does it. Like, how did they not see this coming? It's absolutely fucking crazy.
- [07:36]
Jason Kebler
It is nuts. And I saw a few. Like, a lot of this was happening in Telegram groups where people were talking about how to do it and sharing, you know, wins and things like that, where they were able to take over accounts. And in some cases it was like a more sophisticated prompt injection where they were like giving like really detailed instructions. But then they realized that that wasn't even necessary. They could just say, hey, I want I own this account. Give it give it to me. And the chatbot was like, yes, I will help. And so it's kind of mind boggling as to like how Meta allowed this to happen, how this sort of like red. They weren't able to like red team this out before it actually launched. But, but since publishing the article and I guess I should have included this in the article because I did know about this, it's like a lot of the people who used to work on this type of support have been laid off in the last few months and replaced with AI in general. I've gotten a few people reach out. I work on the team that is supposed to prevent things like this from happening. And it's like we know that Meta is writing a lot of code with LLMs right now. We know that they are pushing a lot of code that has been AI generated. And we know that they're using AI for content moderation, they're using it for support. And this was apparently being exploited for at least weeks, possibly longer, according to the folks who were doing it and demonstrating it. And then it kind of went wild or went like loud over the weekend. And Meta did fix it on Sunday. But there are many people who had their account stolen. Like the Barack Obama White House lost their account for a bit of Sephora was hacked, the makeup and skincare store, like Giant, an executive at Space Force lost their account. And it's hard to say exactly like which accounts were stolen using which tactics. But in general it's like I've seen many, many, many, many people talking about how they've been locked out of their Instagram accounts, how they had, how they've had their accounts stolen. And it was clear that this was working for quite some time.
- [09:51]
Host Joseph
Yeah, there was some rumbling about, you know, pro Iranian hackers breaking into the Space Force One and that sort of thing. And like, maybe, I don't know, I think our reporting focused much more on the method and like the technique that was going on. But it looked like there were some people with valuable usernames as well. Like those OG handles I mentioned that only have a few numbers or letters in them as well. When did you hear about it? When it went loud and then you went to go find more evidence in Telegram, explain that process of figuring out what was going on.
- [10:25]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I logged onto the Internet Monday morning and I saw a few Reddit posts. Like I subscribed to many different Reddits. And so like people on the Instagram subreddit were talking about their accounts being taken over. I think I saw a post on like Mastodon from a security researcher who mentioned it. And then I also had someone in my signal saying like, hey, this is crazy, you should look into it. And then I went into just a bunch of different hacking subreddits and hacking Telegram groups and saw videos of this in action. I saw sort of discussion dating back weeks as to like how this was working. I also saw, you know, specific accounts that were taken over and then some of the accounts had still, were still hacked and then others were totally disabled and then a few of them had been returned to their owners. It seems like it's been a big bit of a mixed bag there. I don't know, I guess this is something I feel comfortable saying on a podcast, but not in the article. It seems like this originated out of an Arabic language, like hacking group. Like that's sort of everything I've seen has pointed back to them sort of discovering this like a specific Arabic language hacking group. So I don't know, maybe it's too much of a leap, but I don't know, maybe that, that speaks to. Well, I don't know actually, I wouldn't
- [11:50]
Host Joseph
say it, but that's still interesting in and of itself. Yeah. And I think we've sort of sighed that you obviously have this community of fraudsters and hackers and scammers called Com. We've covered many, many times before and there's definitely more, not even cooperation, but overlap from them and their English language primarily with people in the Middle East. Like we've actually seen some hackers in Jordan and that sort of thing who are now kind of part of Comm. So there is some swapping of techniques, it seems there. And if this originated in the Arabic stuff, Arabic speaking stuff, then it seemed to have break containment basically.
- [12:31]
Jason Kebler
Yeah. And I mean they're saying it's like the Arabic sect of Qom. So yeah, the other thing, there's one more step, one more thing that the people who are doing this claim that they had to do, which is that they turned a VPN on to make their account look like it is in the account of or in the region of the target. And so there was also these big text files of OG usernames. So basically, as Joseph was saying, like high value usernames that have like short, you know, like their single words or they're just like really high value ones like iPhone. I saw like the Instagram account for iPhone was taken over for a bit. It was a list of those usernames. But then also the geographic region that they're associated with. And so then people would turn on a VPN to put themselves in that geographic region, and then they had a higher success rate.
- [13:34]
Host Joseph
With this chatbot support, it can also impact people's livelihoods. Right? I mean, the Sephora account got taken over. Yeah, sure, whatever. Brand accounts get taken over all the time. And then I think after we published, it was just shared in one of our group chats that somebody was saying, this is the account I use for my livelihood, and now it's entirely disabled and I can't get it back. And it seemed that the people who were impacted, they, of course, when they tried to get access to their own account, there was no human to speak to, because, as you said, it's all been outsourced to this AI anyway. So then the victims are totally screwed as well.
- [14:12]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, so the victims are screwed. And then also, I think that because Meta's support is notoriously so terrible, because of what you just mentioned, there's, like, very few humans in the loop. It's like anyone who's lost access to their Instagram account for any reason has been saying, like, oh, it must have been hacked through this method. And it's like, kind of unclear at this point. And they can't get any help, so they don't really know, like, what's going on. Like, some of these accounts might have been disabled or taken over or some, like, through some other means. Like, it's kind of hard to say. And so I've seen, like, quite a lot of just confusion from influencers or from people who have business accounts. There's like, a lot of viral threads on X and on threads about, like, losing access to an account and not, like, spending hours and hours talking to a chatbot and not getting anywhere. And I think that this whole thing just shows the danger of outsourcing all of your support to an LLM. It's like there's any number of, you know, unexpected things that can happen. Like, we've seen with all chatbot tools that, like, you know, testing the guardrails and jailbreaking them is something that people like to do for fun. And so if there is a monetary incentive for a hacker or something like that, like, we're going to see that happen. And so it doesn't really matter how much you red team or test this stuff, like, there's enough kind of unknowns and exactly how any given prompt is going to work or how any given tool is going to work that there may be vulnerabilities introduced.
- [15:55]
Host Joseph
Yeah. And there's kind of a weird ironic layer here where people have been locked out of their Instagram accounts going back years. Like, we covered this at Motherboard a bunch and I think a little bit at 404 Media as well, where people would get hacked or they'd lose access to their Instagram account, hackers would extort them or whatever. And the customer support mechanism was so complicated and crap that victims would end up hiring white hat hackers who knew how to navigate this system to basically break back into those accounts. And now it turns out that maybe victims could have used this to get into their long dormant Instagram accounts or something. I don't know. It's a complete mess, as you say. Meta gave the statement to Averr. We fixed it and we're, we're restoring access to the accounts and stuff. But like this is a complete garbage fire. It's absolutely crazy. All right, we'll leave that there when we come back after the break when we talk about Emmanuel Story and Amazon's AI Leaderboard. We'll be right back after this.
- [17:15]
Jason Kebler
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- [18:53]
Sponsor Voice
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- [20:48]
Host Joseph
All right, and we are back. The headline for this one is Amazon shuts down internal AI leaderboard after employees cheated. So first of all, Emmanuel, what was this leaderboard and what was it designed to track exactly? You heard about this a little while ago?
- [21:06]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah. So a few weeks ago I wrote a story based on quotes from a bunch of software developers across many companies in the tech industry talking about how they are being forced or heavily pressured to use AI coding products. Whether it's AI coding agents or other AI tools to produce code and how that is not working out so great for them or the company, but that it doesn't matter because that's what leadership wants. They want to show that people are using AI tools because they think that it increases productivity and it's the way of the future. So that's how you have to work. In response to that story, I heard from a bunch more developers, this is something that they're very riled up about. I think we're going to do a bunch more stories about how this is shaking out internally at various companies. One place where I thought there was an interesting story was at Amazon. As I was talking to some people at Amazon, they were telling me that one way that they are incentivized, I will say kindly or pressured,
- [22:24]
Jason Kebler
I think,
- [22:25]
Emmanuel Mayberg
is how some employees are experiencing this, is that there is a thing called the Kiro leaderboard. Kiro is Amazon's AI coding agent, much like, I believe it's Codex for OpenAI. And cursor is another independent, very popular, very successful company. And essentially what the leaderboard does is keep track of how many requests or tokens employees are using with Kiro. And whoever uses more moves up the leaderboard, and that's what it's tracking. The point of it is friendly competition. If you guys recall, our reporting back at Motherboard on Amazon Warehouses is employees compete for pieces of flair that they wear on their uniform. And there's something very similar here where internally there's like an employee registry called Phone Tool, I believe. So people who move up the ranks get pieces of flair they can put next to their username and the company's internal registry. So there's no monetary rewards or you get days off or you get some kind of vacation or something like that. It's just telling you you're doing a great job if you're using keyrail a lot. And I guess another way in which the pressure is applied is I've heard from one employee who had a performance review and they kind of got the hint that they're not using AI enough. So then they moved up the leaderboard in order to show that they're responding to the criticism.
- [24:21]
Host Joseph
Yeah, we'll talk about those other employees in a second. Just to sum it up. Yeah, basically a leaderboard for. With all the employees names or whatever, or their handles or whatever it might be. And this is how much you are using AI based on the token usage. That doesn't necessarily mean that you've contributed the most to this product you haven't provided the most value to shareholders. Whatever stupid of a metric you want, it's this uniquely stupid metric in that you are using AI more. So you go up leaderboard and in Amazon's eyes, and as you said, were a bunch of other tech companies eyes, that's probably a good thing because that's what they want. But they're not actually saying you're doing better work or anything like that or it's not soul destroying. They're just saying that number go up basically. So that's good.
- [25:09]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah. I was trying to think what would be the equivalent for us.
- [25:11]
Host Joseph
And it's the corporate, right, the traffic numbers.
- [25:17]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Well, no, because the traffic numbers don't cost us money. I was thinking like it's as if you worked at Vice and people there was a leaderboard for like how many getty images you paid for. Regardless of whether they ended up in stories or they led to good traffic or anything like that. It's just like good job. You spent a lot of company money on this resource.
- [25:37]
Host Joseph
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is the other way around. You're correct. Yeah. That's how many pens you bought or something like that. Right.
- [25:44]
Joseph
I would love to see that happen. Advice specifically. That would be so fun. I feel like people were doing that unofficially for sure.
- [25:51]
Jason Kebler
I mean it could be like how many Slack messages you send. Because we did do that. Yeah, well Slack does send some like weird like, like ranking system and you can check that. And it's like Slack as a proxy for like doing actual work is so stupid. And if, if we had chosen to prioritize that, it's like you could just send dozens and dozens and dozens of DMs to yourself or like to your friend at the company or whatever and that would push up the leaderboard. And it doesn't cost. It's worse. What you're describing is worse because it costs the company money, as you said, like with the AI tokens. But like it's basically the same thing where it's like this is useless, like this is useless as a proxy for work.
- [26:37]
Emmanuel Mayberg
I remember one time Jason got fed like the company data and Slack use and either you or I were like the number one.
- [26:48]
Jason Kebler
We were definitely one and two because we were just talking to each other all the time.
- [26:54]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Definitely 90% not about work either.
- [26:58]
Host Joseph
But Jason, you mentioned gaming the system there by DMing yourself on Slack. Well that is basically what some people at Amazon did here, as you mentioned, Emmanuel, somebody goes into a performance review, they get the impression that hey, you're not really using AI enough, so you need to use more AI. I know you have to be a little bit careful in specifics here, but how did they go about that? And sort of the. Why was it just to sort of settle those concerns? Because they basically cheated. Yeah.
- [27:32]
Emmanuel Mayberg
So imagine you're a software developer. The way you would legitimately use Kero is you would say, you know, I need you to, like, plug in a piece of code to this thing I'm working on. I need you to, like, code out this widget for me. But even coming up with the useful tasks was, like, too much labor and unnecessary labor for this employee. So in order to get their score up, as you say, I don't want to say specifically what they did, because that can help identify them, but just imagine any completely useless, unnecessary task that you can automatically have Kiro takes over and over and over and over again. So you're like, hey, Kiro, generate me a poem. And when you're done with that, generate another poem and then do that infinitely. And that is not producing anything of value to the employee or Amazon as a company. But on the back end, it makes it seem like the employee is shooting up the leaderboard.
- [28:37]
Host Joseph
Yeah, yeah. And then you spoke to other employees as well, who may not have necessarily cheated, but for some reason, of course, they came to you and told you about this leaderboard. So what were they? What did they make of it? And sort of why did they come and tell you about it if you. If you know.
- [28:56]
Emmanuel Mayberg
So the reason that people brought up the leaderboard is because I was specifically asking employees at tech company to tell me about ways they are pressured to use AI. And that's how people at Amazon read the leaderboard. There was one employee that I talked to who actually reached out to say, I use AI. I find it to be pretty useful. I think that the people who are complaining about it are suffering from a skill issue. And he was basically like, I'm kind of like, pro this tool if you know how to use it. All that being said, the leaderboard is clearly having kind of like a toxic effect at work because it is just promoting AI use for the sake of AI use. And he found that to be detrimental to the company, detrimental to him as an employee, and detrimental to the adoption of AI tools, even if you think they're useful, which we have to do. Some speculation here, but it's informed. Speculation is what eventually led to Amazon to terminate the leaderboard and why we end up running this story.
- [30:06]
Host Joseph
Yes. So Amazon does close this leaderboard. What is the reason that Amazon gives. And I think I might be wrong here, so please correct me if so, but there's sort of two different announcements. I think they announce the closure internally and then they also give a statement to you publicly, Is that right?
- [30:29]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah, correct. So initially, I mean, this whole thing is not a public facing leaderboard or like a press or consumer facing thing. It's entirely a piece of internal company policy. And what happens is on May 18, people log into work and some of them are checking the leaderboard to see how they're doing. And rather than seeing leaderboard, they just see an announcement from Amazon that says, hey, the point of this leaderboard was to incentivize people to use Kiro and to teach them AI skills. And we have seen that people completed. I don't want to say the specific number because I'm worried about being potentially identifying as well. But overall at Amazon, many thousands of tasks were completed with Kiro since we've introduced the leaderboard. And that to us says that the leaderboard has accomplished its job and for that reason it's no longer necessary and we're shutting it down. Somebody on bluesky commented something that I thought was funny and accurate, which is, oh yeah, there's no better corporate policy than shut down a program that is working extremely well. So it's like a suspect. A suspect explanation.
- [31:59]
Host Joseph
Yeah. Well, and now it's closed. So now people are going to rightly chill and not do as much. Well, I suppose they'll still track the AI usage and it'll still come up in performance reviews and stuff, but they won't be the leaderboard. So Amazon says, hey, mission accomplished, we can all go home, we can retire, we can retire the leaderboard. It's all good. What do the employees speaking to you think? Do they link it to the cheating that was going on in their eyes?
- [32:28]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah, I mean immediately several employees reached out and said, because they were talking to me about the leaderboard having this toxic impact before this happened. And then they were like, hey, guess what? They just shut it down. And what I heard from them is this was said to people in like Zoom or in person meetings. They got the impression that Amazon, from their managers that the reason, the real reason that Amazon was shutting down the leaderboard is because they eventually figured out that it was promoting waste. Whether that refers to straight up cheating and burning tokens and money and power just to game the leaderboard or it's referring to just like very inefficient use of the tool is not clear. But that's the impression that several people got separately from different managers. And then I should also say the Financial Times beat me to this news. I think they published something on Friday and they have some sources kind of higher up the management ladder. And their sources say that like explicitly this was the reason. The reason is that Amazon figured out that this was promoting wasteful and costly use of AI.
- [33:48]
Host Joseph
Yeah, very, very interesting. And I don't know, I'm sure other companies are trying similar things, right? Like, maybe it's not as on the nose as like a big leaderboard, but I don't know, they're trying to incentivize it somehow. And this obviously blew up massively in their face.
- [34:05]
Emmanuel Mayberg
I mean, the leaderboard is a literal representation that the entire company can look at of something that we have reported is for a fact happening in many, many companies, not just tech companies, which is this idea of token maxing. Right. So it's like maybe not everybody is looking at the chart beat equivalent of how many tokens are being used, but managers are like talking about it on LinkedIn to be like, we've spent so 100,000. Jason has reported on this. There was just like this whole toxic manager LinkedIn brain about we're burning through hundreds and thousands dollars worth of tokens that we must be doing really well with no comment or insight about what the actual impact is on the product or the company or the customer, et cetera.
- [34:54]
Host Joseph
Yeah. And I mean, maybe we'll cover this, I'm not sure, but it's kind of out there. But as we're recording, I think GitHub just turned it on, so it's now charged per token in a lot of cases rather than the subscription. And people are like burning. They're like, oh, the amount of AI usage I got for $60 a month or whatever is now nothing compared to what I'm paying per token. So, I don't know, there's some really interesting economics that are going to impact people who are using this tool. But with that, if you're listening, wait,
- [35:24]
Joseph
can I share the leaderboard for us, our Slack leaderboard?
- [35:28]
Host Joseph
Wait.
- [35:29]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Oh, shit.
- [35:29]
Joseph
I haven't really. I'm definitely in first in the last 30 days.
- [35:35]
Host Joseph
Wait. Okay, go ahead.
- [35:36]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Well, I haven't been here, so I'm good.
- [35:38]
Host Joseph
Okay.
- [35:39]
Jason Kebler
Jason is like way in first.
- [35:41]
Joseph
Joe is first by a lot.
- [35:44]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Wow.
- [35:44]
Joseph
By a lot, a lot. I'm next.
- [35:48]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Wow.
- [35:49]
Joseph
And then it's Jason and Emmanuel. Emmanuel, you're last by a lot. But you were.
- [35:54]
Emmanuel Mayberg
I mean, I haven't. I've Been out like most of the month, so I don't know.
- [35:57]
Jason Kebler
This is not all time. This is just the last month.
- [35:59]
Joseph
This is the last 30 days. Let's see if I can do all time. Um, I'll do a longer range.
- [36:03]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Dude, I don't like it.
- [36:04]
Jason Kebler
Low. Low.
- [36:05]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Slack use indicates depression.
- [36:08]
Jason Kebler
Perhaps it also indicates you're barely doing any work. Well, that's how you know. This is how you know by Slack.
- [36:15]
Host Joseph
Mine is high functioning depression. Maybe I'm just like, it's the other direction.
- [36:21]
Joseph
Let's see. August 2023, right?
- [36:25]
Host Joseph
Sure, sure.
- [36:26]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah. Wow.
- [36:27]
Jason Kebler
Where are you finding this?
- [36:29]
Joseph
In our Slack analytics, which is something that I didn't know we had. Oh, my God.
- [36:35]
Host Joseph
We pay for those Slack AI tools so we can get.
- [36:38]
Joseph
Oh, it can only do from. It can only do from May 1st to today. So let's do today
- [36:45]
Host Joseph
2023.
- [36:46]
Joseph
20, 2025.
- [36:49]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Right.
- [36:49]
Joseph
Okay. Jason's first.
- [36:51]
Host Joseph
There you go.
- [36:52]
Joseph
By a margin. Not a big margin. And then Joseph and then me and then Emmanuel.
- [36:58]
Emmanuel Mayberg
I don't like that. I'll get my numbers up. I'm sorry, gang.
- [37:00]
Joseph
You're busy blogging.
- [37:02]
Jason Kebler
We.
- [37:03]
Host Joseph
We literally have a room in Slack called counting. And it's fun.
- [37:07]
Joseph
Oh, I haven't even done counting.
- [37:08]
Host Joseph
We're supposed to just. If someone does the number 1, 2 5, then someone else does 1, 2, 6. Clearly a manual. You need to get in there to inflate your numbers. But then all of us have to reply, so we inflate all of our numbers. So then we'll have to scrap the leaderboard, basically, and it'll be disaster.
- [37:24]
Joseph
Yeah, that's the latest.
- [37:26]
Emmanuel Mayberg
We're up to 215. We could check in at the end of the year or something till.
- [37:30]
Jason Kebler
Seems like we're up to 215 in two and a half years. Not so high.
- [37:37]
Host Joseph
Oh, my God. Yeah, let's keep an eye on that. For sure. All right, if you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying four or four me subscriber, we're going to give you direct access to the Slack leaderboard and you can come in and follow it yourself. No, we're going to talk about our lawsuit against ICE and some documents we got. From there, you can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404 Media co. 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 the Subscribers Only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is produced by Alyssa Midcalf. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really does help us out. This has been 404 Media. We'll see you again next week.