← Liftoff with Keith: Conversations with Super Founders and Growth Experts sharing useful insights
Liftoff with Keith: Conversations with Super Founders and Growth Experts sharing useful insights
The Look Back sits down with Walt Mossberg, Founder of Recode, Code Conference and All Things Digital team @Wall Street Journal
00:50:44
Loading summary
Transcript84 lines
- [00:00]
A
Because I've done the interview before and forget to hit the record button. So being my own producer and engineer has its own set of difficult technical challenges. Okay, Walter Mossberg, welcome to the podcast to look back. I'm so delighted to have you here.
- [00:20]
B
I'm delighted to be here, Keith.
- [00:23]
A
Thank you, Walt. So I know you're super busy. Where, where are we finding you today? What are you, what are you doing?
- [00:30]
B
Well, this is my home office in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. where I have lived for a long time. And in fact I've lived in the D.C. area for 40 some odd years. And you know, I spent a long time covering normal Washington journalists, stuff like national security and the Pentagon and the State Department and the Cold War and economics and energy and the environment and just a whole lot of flawed, a lot of different beats and things. And until I started covering, started doing my technology column and that kind of worked out well. And so I, that that was what I landed on staying with, hey, no.
- [01:36]
A
No pun intended, but that is quite a pivot from the, the journalist days ink stained wretch days to, to writing what became one of the most well known, if not the most well known column in the heyday of the personal computer you wrote for the Wall Street Journal. I think the column was called Personal Technology with Asperger. And you would pick, typically pick one technology or set of technologies and give it a review in that column space. And it, it had an amazing following.
- [02:08]
B
It did. We, we named it personal technology. I'm 99% sure no one was using that phrase until we did that. But we stupidly didn't trade market. So it was everywhere very quickly. And in those days, and even now, I'm pretty sure for a print publication, in stark contrast to the web or an app, you cannot in a print publication know from moment to moment, let alone day to day what people are reading in your publication. But what they used to do, all, all the newspapers and magazines used to do was they hired these companies that specialized in what they called reader surveys. And they tried to get a handle on what the readers were reading and engaging with and what they wanted. And after about 10 weeks, my column was showing up as the second most popular thing in the entire paper. And it remained that way. And so it suddenly elevated my or clout, my autonomy to really do what I wanted with the column, including when Kara Swisher, who was another Wall Street Journal tech columnist, she wrote more about Silicon Valley and the culture of Silicon Valley and I wrote more about the price products and the technology And. But we were friends. Close friends. Still are club, very close friends.
- [04:06]
A
And dynamic duo, to be sure. Yeah.
- [04:09]
B
No, you know, sometimes partnerships like that work super duper well, which this one did, and sometimes they don't, but this really worked well. And, you know, so they didn't want to lose me. And it's one of the reasons they allowed us to. To start the conference, the All Things D conference, which later became the Code Conference. And one of the reasons that they gave us a good profit split on that conference and the website that came along later and continued into the Recode website. And. Yeah, so, I mean, you know, it's all journalism. It's just different kinds of journalism covering different things. I had all the same ethics policies and standards in writing the tech column that I did and, you know, covering the Gulf War. But it was a wonderful. It was, you know, I'm retired now, but it was a wonderful experience.
- [05:26]
A
Yeah. I want to touch on it only because it was such a seminal point in the technology era. And again, for those people that aren't aware, a lot of my audience, you know, is aware and follows these ties of topics. But when you wrote about something, you really did have the ability to make and break product and make or break at least launch and attention of those products. And I kind of. I think it's fun to look back, as the name of this podcast suggests, and say, what do you remember the most fondly, like when you opened up a product and got to review it and what was your greatest disappointment or regret or one you nailed or one you missed, or. Because I remember, Walt, the early days of the Mac and the iPhone and the Palm Pilot and, you know, Bing. I remember all of your columns from those days. Tell me, give me a little behind the scenes now.
- [06:22]
B
What I most enjoyed was finding good products that would help my reader. And I sat down every day, whether I was testing, whether I was writing, whether I was interviewing the head of the company or whatever it was to get a feel for the, for the product and the direction they were heading and all that. I sat down and said, I am going to look at this from the point of view of the mainstream audience, not the techies and not the IT manager at a big company. In fact, I Never, in the 27 years I wrote those columns, I never wrote about a single enterprise product. I. It's just not because I hate the enterprise or big companies or those particular, you know, I don't hate Cisco. It's just that you have to make a choice. And if you, if you have A target audience in. In what I was doing or in anything, in sales. In this podcast, you have a target audience. I don't know what it is, but whatever it is, you're. You're smart to stick to it. And so my target audience was average consumers, not stupid people. These people were very smart about whatever their business or hobby or whatever it was, was if they were a travel agent, they needed to be smart about that. If they were an artist, they needed to be smart about that. I wasn't smart about those things. I was smart about something else. But they were not stupid people. And they know, eventually they realized they wanted to and needed to use personal tech, consumer technology. And the other thing was, I had had this 18 years of journalism behind me. True, I was covering other things, but it was the same thing. I understood how to operate as a journalist. And, and to be honest, a lot of the tech journalists at the time I started my column, which was in 1991, were not trained journalists. They were often people out of the industry. They were not stupid people either. They, you know, they learned a lot about journalism. Some of the. Some of them had been journalists, but not many. And, you know, the first thing Bill Gates said to me when I met him a couple months after I started my column, he said, well, where did you come from? Because he took pride in knowing all the tech reporters and being able to figure out how he could get the best stories out of each one of them. And he was comfortable with them because they were all people who wrote in jargon, who talked to him in jargon, who, as I said, came out of the industry in many cases. And I was out of journalism. I was not part of the tech industry almost.
- [09:56]
A
They were almost enthusiasts or fans.
- [09:58]
B
So that was a bit. That's right.
- [10:00]
A
And.
- [10:00]
B
And look, I was accused of being a fan, too, because I liked certain things, particularly things that were easy for people to grasp, and yet they. They got things done for people. So he. He was. And also I was a little older, and a lot of those people, I was 44 years old when I started writing my tech column, and I had all this experience under my belt doing journalism, so I was just a. A weird and different thing. And when. When Gates said that, I. I mean, I'm sure all the other CEOs I met had the same, you know, at the beginning at least, had the same question like, who is this guy? Why is the Wall Street Journal doing this with a guy who, you know, we've never heard of and, you know, whatever. So, you know, I Would say, the thing that I thought was the most exciting to me and fun was finding a cool product that really solved a problem for people and that, and that gave a lot of weight to ease of use. Ease of use was the thing that the industry didn't care about. Basically, the credo in the industry for the first 10 or 15 years was we're techies and we're going to build something for techies, and we expect you, the user, to study up and become a techie in order to use this thing. I mean, that's the story of. I mean, what is dos? DOS is learning a bu. It's like learning German or something. You know, you have to learn a whole other language. You have to just exactly get the command right and the syntax and all that stuff. Normal people weren't going to do that. You had to be a hobbyist or a techie or something like that. And I had been, by the way, a computer hobbyist for about 10 years while I was covering other things. My hobby at home was computers. And so when I approached the Journal to start the column, I knew a lot about computers. It just was nothing that ever showed up in my professional work. Yeah, my professional resume. So I, I could talk jargon with these people, but I could never write it because I didn't want to. I wanted to. I wanted to try as much as one person can, to, to wrestle the industry down to the level of actually talking in English to, To or whatever the language of the country was to, to real people.
- [12:59]
A
But isn't it amazing? Isn't it amazing to look back and say, but that hit with such timing and impact, like when you hit that column, for it to become the second most important thing in the Journal, it really says you nailed it, both in terms of the quality of the content and the market timing. There was just a huge void. People were talking in bits and bytes, and nobody was talking in a language that made sense to the business consumer.
- [13:27]
B
Right? Bits and bytes, speeds and feeds, they used to call it. And I, I didn't do that. I mean, you know, here's an example. I mean, I, I would. And I, by the way, I rigorously tested every single thing I reviewed. I tested it all myself for many years. And then I was able to hire a reporting assistant who did some of the tests to help me out, and she was great. But, you know, this was, this was rigorously done and I reported things. I mean, if I didn't understand why they had made a choice or if something wasn't working on the product, I would call the engineers. I mean, I would call the PR people and say, look, you know, I like talking to you, but I need.
- [14:16]
A
To work at this thing. I can't boot it up.
- [14:19]
B
I need to talk to the product manager. I need to talk to the engineer. In some cases with small companies, that meant talking to the CEO. And I very often talk to the CEO, because one of the things that I wanted to know was not only why is this failing or why did they design it in this way that I found strange, but what was their concept in doing this thing in this product? What was the problem they thought they were solving? And I didn't ever tell them until it was published, but did I agree that they were solving that problem? A lot of people built products that were in search of a problem to solve. They just got excited about building something and it did something, but it didn't really help you. So the most exciting thing for me was to find a product that helped average people and they could use it. And, you know, the Palm Pilot is a. Is a good example. That was a product that I remember writing in that column. And I'm paraphrasing, so I may not have the exact words, but it was something like, this is the first handheld computer I would carry. And I did. I did buy one and carry it. That's another thing, by the way, they would lend reviewers these products. A lot of the reviewers who did not know anything about journalistic ethics. I'm not saying they were awful people or dishonest people. They just didn't understand how. How a journalist is supposed to operate would keep the product. I sent them all back, every one of them. And except if the company didn't want it back, like, I don't know, a mouse or something that sold for $29 there, what we did, if you kept them all. Well, I had a little museum, but there were things that I had owned or I had bought secondhand. But if it was a mouse or something like that, we would give them away to the other reporters, if only if they brought in a donation of food, canned food that we would then take to a food bank. So in other words, we. We transferred those things into. Into a charity situation. So if I could find a product like the Palm Pilot as an example and be able to recommend it to people, and it wasn't perfect. None of this stuff was perfect. I would always point out the flaws, you know, in them. But if it was. If it was largely a good thing, smartly designed with average people in mind, and that I felt I could put my name to the recommendation. That was the most exciting and fun thing. And it was especially great if it came from a startup, a small company, which is what Palm was at that time.
- [17:36]
A
Right.
- [17:37]
B
I mean, I first I had a meeting with Palm at their headquarters. They were like on the second floor of a bunch of retail stores in I think Los Altos, someplace like that. And I remember going to a Chinese restaurant around the corner with the CEO to interview him was Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky. They, they were running the company. They had very few employees and, and that continued with their handspring and their trio smartphone. I mean, I had a relationship with them.
- [18:15]
A
Let me tease that question out just a little bit. So we had the Motorola Razor, we had the Newton, we had the BlackBerry, which was just a huge success. Also, how did it happen that after all of those successes, many successes, modest success, did the iPhone land on your desk and all of a sudden that was the game changer? How did you.
- [18:41]
B
Well, I'm happy. I mean, that's a fascinating. That whole, that whole smartphone evolution thing is fascinating. Yeah, there were a lot of things that were called smartphones that weren't really smart and that weren't really all encompassing. So let me go through the. Just the ones you mentioned. The Motorola Razor did nothing that a, that a flip. It was a flip phone.
- [19:10]
A
It was cool.
- [19:11]
B
Absolutely nothing that any flip other flip phone could do except it was really well designed and it had metal instead of plastic and places. And they sold it for 500 bucks. And I reviewed it, I carried it around for a while, tested it, reviewed it, and I said what I just said to you, essentially, if you're looking for a smartphone, this is not a smartphone. This is just a really classy kind of expensive, posh feature phone. So that was the razr. I mean, I wasn't trying to kill it. It, it sold fine. But I wanted people to understand that because it was popular and everybody, every other publication was writing about it and the was on TV and all that. They shouldn't think that they were getting an advanced product. It wasn't an advanced product in terms of the Newton. The Newton was a failure. The Newton had genius ideas that Apple carried over into the iPhone under the hood and into other products. Like it really, really could, it didn't have, there wasn't any wireless communications in those days and you couldn't. So you couldn't do texts or emails, but it could send faxes and I guess you had to plug it into your computer. I forgot how it sent faxes. But what it could do, what one of the key things that Newton could do is you could say to the Newton, the Newton understood that certain words were what were called action words. So if you said send Keith a fax about blah blah blah, and you could dictate it, then Newton understood that the word fax meant oh, and it immediately put up on the screen a fax form that you could fill out. And if I said Keith and, and you were the only Keith in my address book, it are it pre filled it out because it knew it was you. That was a smart, that was intelligent, that was smart. Nothing else could do that. The what made the Newton a failure was that Apple, the CEO of Apple Time, John Scully, went on TV multiple times and promised that it would understand your handwriting flawlessly and that you could handwrite anything on it and it would make it into a document or treat it as a command or whatever it was. And of course the handwriting recognition on it was terrible. And it was terrible because the processors did not exist to do handwriting. Even today, handwriting recognition, it's good, but it's not perfect. And in those days, my God, I mean, the chips were primitive. So for him to go around promising that they didn't deliver that. And that's why it failed, in my opinion. And when Steve Jobs came back to take over Apple, which was on its deathbed, he killed the Newton. And fans of the Newton, you know, there's little literally were mass demonstrations outside Apple headquarters when he killed the Newton because the Newton had fans. But the Newton wasn't selling.
- [22:46]
A
Right.
- [22:46]
B
The BlackBerry is a different story. You're quite right that the BlackBerry was very popular, but the BlackBerry was primarily sold to corporations and institutions, not to consumers. Consumers could buy it and there were consumers that owned them, but most of their business was selling to law firms, to corporations, financial. Yeah, whatever. And, and the BlackBerry at the time, I, in the early days of me writing my column and for most of the time between 1991 when I started, and the iPhone in 2007, for most of that time, BlackBerry couldn't do much of anything except email. That's what it could do. That's what it was meant to do. That's what it was designed to do. And the way they did email was they compressed your, your email, which was easy. You can. Compressing text is easy. Once you get into graphics and photos, which they did. Eventually they started compressing those and they made them crappy and grainy and awful.
- [24:02]
A
Yeah.
- [24:03]
B
And then they would reroute your email into Their own email network, which wound up in Canada. So basically your email was running was. Was being put on a company's private network in a foreign country. I know Canada is our friend and is a lot like us. I love Canada. I love Canadians. But it's still a foreign country. And then it would come back into the open email system. And people who did their business all day via email or text loved their blackberries and they learned how to type with their thumbs and all that kind of stuff. But there was no comparison between the BlackBerry and what the iPhone could do. Yeah, iPhone could. Could read the open Internet and actually read the brow. I mean, on. On the first of all, the screen on the iPhone, it was all screen. It did not have a plastic keyboard. I took up a third of the. Of the. Of the front and couldn't change. One of the things about the software keyboard is if you're. If you're on a. An email app, you have a certain kind of keyboard. If you switch to an app that's like a game or some other thing, the keyboard can change because it's software. On the BlackBerry, on the trio, on all those other phones, the keyboard couldn't change.
- [25:36]
A
Yeah, it's fun. It's fun. Thinking back to that. Yeah.
- [25:39]
B
And so the iPhone had like 25 breakthrough things that none of the other phones had. And that was. And that was the difference. And I. I was hardly the only person to.
- [25:54]
A
I'm gonna. I'm gonna leave the comments on the review side. You did so many great reviews, and I think. I think the other compliment, Walt, to what you accomplished there and that no one's really filled the void. I can't think of one reviewer that has that kind of attention today in terms of doing technology reviews. And you could argue there's just as much to look at today. Maybe it doesn't come in a box that we buy at the retail store, but there's phenomenal technology products introduced in all over the place. Anyway, I want to pivot to all things D and what you created again, with your team around what we'll call live media, that in person, conference and events that took. Live journalism. Live media.
- [26:39]
B
Live journalism is what we called it. Yeah.
- [26:41]
A
And that was amazing. You were. I mean, it was amazing in the sense that you brought people together that were not used to being together, and you brought them on stage and interviewed them in a way they weren't being used to being interviewed in public.
- [26:56]
B
Well, I don't agree with the first part of that. A lot of these people were used to Being together at. There were conferences before ours. Yeah, but they did not. They were not running. Mostly they were not run by journalists. And secondly, they were not all interviews. Those conferences tended to allow all these people, whether it was Bill Gates or the head of Lotus or any of these companies. I was going to say Steve Jobs, but he never went to any of them. Whoever was the head of Apple before Steve Jobs, there were a bunch of them. They might go to the conference, and most of them were allowed to stand at a podium and give a. An unchallenged speech about how great their product or their company was.
- [27:49]
A
Exactly. That's what I meant.
- [27:50]
B
And then they might have one in the. In the whole conference over a couple of days. They might have one, what they called Fireside Chat. And that was an interview. And that interview was conducted by whoever was the host of the conference, mostly not journalists, occasionally a journalist. And the person being interviewed in that Fireside Chat knew all the questions. And so it wasn't an unrehearsed interview, and it was not a rigorous journalistic interview. So Kara Swisher and I both had columns in the Wall Street Journal, and we were friends and we would. But she lived on the West Coast, I lived on the east coast, and we didn't see each other every day. We probably talked to each other every day or every other day, but we didn't see each other, except we would see each other at all these conferences. And there were a lot of these conferences. This is before. This is when we had the tech bubble, before it burst. There was tremendous money in these tech companies. I mean, you. You could. If you went to all these conferences. I used to joke about this. You could go to. There was a conference almost every day in. Somewhere in the Bay Area, and you could go. And if you were. If you were broke, you could pretty much live off eating the free shrimp at the conferences and the free breakfast. So Karen and I would sit together, usually toward the back of the room, and we would say, this is terrible. We can do much better. And we knew, by the way, we knew most of these big CEOs who were upstate on stage by then, and we would say, we can do much better. And then eventually it came to be that we said, let's do much better. Let's do our own conference. And here's what we're going to do. It's only going to be interviews. No one's going to get to show up. PowerPoint deck, there won't be a podium. There's not going to be one keynote speaker. And everybody else is a. We're not going to have panels of nine people.
- [30:10]
A
While we did the big red chair.
- [30:12]
B
We did this, these chairs. This is mine. I bought this. Kara bought one.
- [30:18]
A
Beautiful.
- [30:19]
B
And we decided it would be all interviews, unrehearsed. They would not know the questions. We didn't actually even develop all the questions before we went out on stage. We just developed a general theme. We planned the whole conference, which was a three day conference. We planned it in about an hour on site. I mean, obviously we planned who we were going to invite, who we wanted to have. And we did all the invitation of the speakers and we had a staff that understood how to negotiate with the hotel and how to deal. And we had a sales staff, you know, that went and got the sponsors and all that kind of stuff that we didn't have to do. But we, we even picked out the swag. Karen and I, you know, the. What was going to be the bag, which was always, always, always spent money on that. I mean that stuff was the best in the business. I still see people walking around with all things D, bags at airports, the jackets, the, you know, whatever swag it was.
- [31:23]
A
Well, who do you remember being at the first one or two of the events that you put on?
- [31:29]
B
Well, at the very first one in 2003, it was just when people were emerging from the tech bust and everyone kind of came and we had no track record of doing this. They knew who we were, but they didn't know if we could put on a conference. But they all came. Bill Gates came, Steve Jobs came. You can just think of everyone. We had a group discussion between Jack Valenti, who the former White House aide who was the head of the Motion Picture association and somebody else from the music industry against several of the people that were doing digital music at the time. Not Apple. This was before the ipod or anything like Napster. We had somebody from. It was either Napster or one of the other ones. Yeah, had the head of the recording industry and the head of the motion picture industry. And you know, they got into a, they got into a fight. Rob Glazer, who was the head of Real Networks, who was one of the, one of the disruptors at one point during the discussion, which I was moderating, got down on his knees in front of Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture association, said, okay, you think you're right? You're. I guess you're right. And, and he, at one point he stood up and he said, I know you think all the heads of the movie studios are dumbasses. He's speaking to the whole audience, which was mostly tech people. So I know you think they're dumbasses. I'm sorry, I have to leave the panel early because I have to go to Hollywood and have lunch with the dumbasses. And we. The conference was in San Diego, so he had to get. He probably took a helicopter for all I know, but got to L. A for his lunch. But so we had. I mean, everybody important was either speaking or in the audience hung around. And it was like. It was fantastic. It was just fantastic. At which point most of them decided to keep coming and we would put the tickets on sale, which were not cheap. Even in the first. The beginning, I think our tickets were in the thousands. And by the time I retired, the tickets were minimum $7,000 a piece.
- [34:02]
A
Now you're talking from all things D to code. Code events that were broadcast on tv on cnbc, I think, in large part. And we're at swanky hotels and beautiful venues.
- [34:13]
B
But all things D was the same thing. Yeah, yeah. See, covered it. It was at a swanky resort back. The two of them were at the same resort when we switched over. Code was. Had a few differences, but it was primarily a continuation of the D conference.
- [34:31]
A
It was a brilliant model. Brilliant.
- [34:35]
B
The Wall Street Journal made millions from it. We did very well also financially because we did have a profit participation. But the. The Journal was hesitant to let us do it. But they didn't want me to defect, basically. I don't think they cared that much about. Kara had not been there that long. They didn't want me to defect. And so they let. They let us do it. And we. Even after we said we're not going to do this through your conference division. We want 100% autonomy, no editorial interference.
- [35:14]
A
Love it.
- [35:14]
B
And we're going to hire a team from outside the Dow Jones, which is the company that owned the Journal. And they let us do it. And they were skeptical. I'm sure they thought it would fail, but it didn't fail. And they were happy about it after a while. And they used to print a special section in the Journal the next week, I think the next Monday, with excerpts from all the interviews on stage and what people said and, you know, all that. And eventually we streamed it. And like you say, CNBC was there. They. They got to not only interview Karen me, which they were very nice to do, but they. It was like, for them. I mean, it would take them months to get Bill Gates to go on cnbc, but he was right there. They were set up on the lawn outside and, you know, they would deal with his PR people and all he had to do was walk 20ft and sit down and spend five minutes and be. Or 10 minutes and be interviewed by them. So they loved it.
- [36:25]
A
I just, I was so grateful to be part of, just a small part of that. But again, you created this and it was hugely successful. Now it's gone. I think they've sunsetted the code conference even of this last year.
- [36:38]
B
No, the code conference is going to continue.
- [36:41]
A
Okay.
- [36:42]
B
And they have new Kara. After I retired, Kara essentially took it over by herself. And then she announced last year that she was going to step away from it and not do it anymore.
- [36:57]
A
Okay.
- [36:58]
B
She has a million things going on. And so Vox Media, which owns the code conference, announced, I want to say two or three weeks ago that a set of new hosts, people who had nothing to do with Recode or all things D, people from Vox. I think they're all very good journalists and I think they made a good choice. So the code conference will continue. They might change the format, they might change things. You should be always look on the lookout to change things. And I prove that. But yeah, the code conference will continue. Recode as a website is gone and it's been absorbed into Vox.com there are only. We had 42 people when we sold the company and it's down to maybe four people left or something like that.
- [38:00]
A
Well, hard to be replaced still. But you bring up some points and I guess it's a natural transition and I'm taking a little bit more time than I planned to with you on your schedule, not mine. I'm enjoying the heck out of this. I appreciate the time, Walt, but I have you here and I know you're still actively involved in journalism and ethics, around journalism. And it just. We're in another crazy time where there seems like there's a lot of things happening all at once, which is the challenging economic business model around journalism. You know, just recently the buzzfeed challenges some things going on, obviously with Vox, but a whole bunch of other places. And then you have these titans acquiring media. It started with, with Gates and Bezos and now Musk and, you know, what's, what's, what's Benioff buying and what's, what's Zuckerberg gonna get? You know, and, and you have these interesting things and then the cross current of ChatGPT and I just wonder how in, in your goals in the literacy projects and the, the media watching that you're doing, how you see these things Starting to all gel.
- [39:12]
B
Well, this could be an hour and a half podcast by itself.
- [39:17]
A
Yeah.
- [39:18]
B
So let me just keep it to one topic, which is misinformation and disinformation. I think this is the biggest problem with people getting their news from social media. It's, it's something that I decided. It's one of the reasons I decided to retire at the age of 70, which I did. That was five years ago. And I am on the board, I'm on the executive committee, actually, of a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization called the News Literacy Project, where we teach students, middle school and high school students, using a digital curriculum that runs on their Chromebooks or their iPads or whatever they use in school, or if it's a poor school that doesn't have those things or doesn't have bandwidth, the teacher can project it onto a screen and teach it that way. And we reach hundreds of thousands of kids every year, and then we reach something like 10 or 15,000 teachers who teach millions of kids. And we are trying to teach them not what to think, not who to vote for or what issues to believe in, but how to, to separate facts from lies. Online, there are actually simple ways to do it. If you know them and you have some of this probably built into your brain and don't even realize it, I certainly do. Most journalists do. You can tell, you can just tell that something is fishy. You know, you can tell if nobody else picks it up that it probably was fishy. You know, you can tell all these things, but these kids, their best friend sends it to them. Best friend may be a great, you know, young woman or young man, but not somebody who's savvy about this. And so they figure they'll share it. And that's how it gets amplified. It gets shared all over. We're saying, stop for a minute. Don't share it, even if it comes from your best girlfriend. Instead, here are the two or three things you ought to do to decide whether is this real? Is this a fake? You know, what is it? And, and so we do that. And I have been. Not since I retired. I wasn't, you know, when I was a journalist. If you work for a high quality organization, news organization like the Wall Street Journal or Recode when we founded it, you have a code of ethics that's very tough. And it doesn't allow you to take anything from anyone you cover. You can't ask them for money, even if it's for another cause and not for you personally. You can't ask them to donate A bunch of products or anything like that. And so when I retired, I was no longer a journalist. I wasn't covering them. I didn't have to worry about that. And I've been able to raise quite a bit of money from the big tech companies and individuals in tech who have the considerable resources to help us out. And I've also been involved in running the News Literacy Project. I personally feel that misinformation and disinformation, which is spread through social media primarily, is an enormous threat to democracy and that this is a. One of the ways we can help save our democracy. And I'm not kidding. None of this is kidding. I'm deadly serious.
- [43:18]
A
This is fantastic.
- [43:19]
B
I'm glad this is what I have been doing in my retirement. In fact, earlier, I told you earlier offline, I told you, I. We had our quarterly board meeting just this morning for, for two and a half hours. So that's what we do. Yeah.
- [43:38]
A
And it's the comments about Congress trying to stop youth from accessing social media. The latest news.
- [43:49]
B
Yeah, we, we don't, you know, we don't deal very much in politics. We are trying to get state legislatures to make it a mandatory thing for students to take a media literacy course in order to graduate. You know, you have to, you have to do English, you have to do science. These, these things are all state laws or state regulations. We want to add media literacy to that. And a number of states have done it. Illinois, New Jersey, Delaware and Tech, believe it or not. Texas has done this.
- [44:29]
A
Oh, fantastic.
- [44:29]
B
They have different starting dates when it kicks in, but they're doing it. And we're putting people in those states with, with our materials and saying we can help you. Here's the stuff. It's free and here's what it does.
- [44:47]
A
Well, not to, not to belabor, but is this a curriculum that you're packaging up or.
- [44:51]
B
Yeah, it's a curriculum we wrote and we did that we're packaging up and it's about, only about, it's about news literacy. We teach also the First Amendment because most kids don't know any. What's in it. It's a little bit of civics like you and I had to take. But they don't teach it now. We teach what quality journalism is and what's the difference between that and non quality journalism? How can you tell what do journalists really do? Where do they come from, that kind of thing. By the way, we bring teachers into newsrooms all over the country where we're used in all 50 states. Blue, red, it doesn't matter. Purple doesn't matter. And. And so newspapers in New England, in California, in the Deep south, have opened their newsrooms and had the local school district send teachers and principals and librarians in to meet with the journalists, to have workshops, to ask them questions, to say, why did you write that headline? It was terrible. It was, you know, a lie. And they would have to explain why they did it, and it wasn't a lie, and whatever. And so we're doing all these things, trying to pull every lever we can to help out, and that's what I'm doing.
- [46:17]
A
Please tell me it's going well because it's so necessary and I see so much potential for kids to be taking these courses for this curriculum all the way through K12. But even. Maybe even at the college level, to be seeing this type of.
- [46:33]
B
Well, we're beginning to be. We're beginning to have some traction in community colleges, and it is going well. We don't. We don't go below the sixth grade because we. We have our edu. We have an education team of experts based in Chicago. Yeah, they believe sixth grade is about. Is about the minimum you can do to teach these concepts. And so, you know, it is growing well in terms of our going well in terms of our organization growing and our uptake of people using our materials growing fast. I mean, it's about quadrupled since I joined the board. I don't mean that I did it.
- [47:18]
A
What's the website Arch Walt, just for.
- [47:20]
B
Is it computerliteracy.org it's news newslet.org.org but here's the thing. The problem is growing faster than we ever imagined. So just Musk taking over Twitter and eliminating the verification badges, the blue check marks which say Walt Moss. This really is from Walt Mossberg. It is really the real Walt Mossberg. And you can tell because there's a blue check mark. And we have vetted that it's the real Walt Mossberg or the real, you know, Joe Jones or whoever it is that's gone. And now you can have a blue check mark. If you pay him eight bucks a month. And they don't verify it, you're not verified. You could be anybody.
- [48:11]
A
That's more of a vanity, so.
- [48:13]
B
But that's bad for people understanding who they can trust.
- [48:17]
A
Yeah.
- [48:17]
B
The other thing, which is much More important is AI ChatGPT to the extent it can write a plausible tweet, which it easily can, which is full of lies and designed to serve a political agenda, and then it can create a photo of a politician, you know, doing something horrible or embarrassing. Or it could take audio and edit it in such a way that the politician appears to be saying something they never said. And it could do this, like this. You could just ask it to do. I mean, I've, I've fooled around with it.
- [49:01]
A
Yeah.
- [49:01]
B
I mean it can do these things. Yeah.
- [49:04]
A
Yeah.
- [49:04]
B
That makes the problem 100x worse. So we are where on it where you have a teams working on how to try to counter it or how to try to at least give people a means to figure out if it's AI or real. Now, there may come a day when it be impossible to figure that out, but we're not quite there yet. And there are ways to tell we're incorporating it into our curriculum. But, you know, things are bad. Things are bad in terms of understanding. And I, you know, I'm very worried and I'm going to continue my work.
- [49:43]
A
Oh, man. Well, thanks for fighting the good fight and I hope some of the listeners here will take heed as well and see what we can help. I mean, I want to be a participant in this as well. Fantastic. I taken way too much of your time. Thanks for, for sharing. Okay. It's, it's great.
- [49:59]
B
I'm glad to have done it.
- [50:01]
A
I, I'm glad to see the, the former columnist now off to another exciting adventure post quote, retirement and doing something so important and having so much fun, it seems.
- [50:16]
B
Yep, I am and I really am retired. I mean, I, I don't get paid for any of this work that I do for these, for this organization. And you know, there are days when I get to take a nap that, that's kind of being retired, you know. Yeah.
- [50:36]
A
Well, great. Thanks for sharing the time and it's great seeing you.
- [50:40]
B
Take care, Keith.