Watching the Watchmen with Jason Koebler

33:27And to be very clear, it's like every single person who came through there or that i've ever worked with has done the work but i think something like very cool is like edward angueso who is amazing like amazing amazing writer he is joining us by the way for the better offline ces coverage oh that's amazing and david roth yeah it's like he came to motherboard and he had uh he had a huge huge knowledge about tech labor and tech and he had written a thesis about Uber and how Uber was immiserating its drivers, but he did it for like his college thesis. But he didn't really know how to report when he came to Motherboard.

34:09But because he was so interested in that, it's like, dude, you know everything about Uber? Just write about Uber for a little while. Use your expertise, get to know it. And it's like, he did all of it on his own in terms of becoming the amazing reporter and writer that he is today. But I think that it like, I'm proud that we were able to give him the space to do that. And sort of like the guidance of here's how you like, here's how you go fucking hard on Uber without like libeling a million people. And like, here's how you stay out of lawsuits and things like that, which doesn't mean pulling punches.

34:49It means making sure all your stuff is like very buttoned up and legally defensible and so on and so forth. And I think that not just with Edward, but like many of the best reporters on the internet these days are like I've worked with them in some way, shape or form. And that's something that they've always had in common is having a deep interest in a specific topic or beat and like really specializing in that versus trying to write everything about every possible topic that there is. because when that happens, that's how you get like these surface level articles that are all the same. I think it's, I agree fully.

35:31And I think just pondering this as you speak, there is another level that I found with the show, which is to do this job, right. You also have to be like a business and financial general, like Ed's, Ed Nguese O 'Gini is one of the most gifted writers I've ever worked with. I'm so fucking happy to have him at CES because he is very good on socioeconomics. He is able to look at something and go, this will affect real people like this. That is not just the skill. It's like an actual talent that can be fostered, but it's tough because you have to start looking at the world in just this completely different way.

36:03I know a lot of listeners, and I'm just as critical of the media as well, have this thing where they look and they're like, how could journalists write like this? How could they just eat up the slop? It's because we're, what, 20 years into tech journalists being educated to believe these guys and we're finally breaking that down and saying oh could Elon Musk lie yeah would Sam Orman lie yeah would they and I think that's it's weird because in almost every other every other journalist field you're kind of built like that yeah I feel like I woke up one day and I was like oh I'm like old now um and by that it's like uh every day for me yeah I mean I and I think that because I was always kind of like I always looked at myself like oh I'm kind of new to journalism like I'm just feeling things out like I'm I'm asking people what experts should I talk to how should I do this blah blah blah and I would say around the 3d printing bubble that we were just talking about is when I realized I'm like oh wait these like hype cycles where every VC every company everyone does the exact same thing and says it's going to be the future of everything and there's like tons of money thrown into it it doesn't always come true like it yeah like and so like you know there was like vr and then there was 3d printing and then there was you know crypto and then there was the metaverse and there's vr again and vr again and blah blah blah and like at some point i was like oh i have been doing this long enough to now understand this cycle where uh the cool new thing is not going to change everything it's going to be or even happen or even happen and it's it's going to be full of fucking grifters all of them are full of grifters um and it's under like understandable why that is because many many people have made a lot of money by rushing into a technology hyping it up selling their company or whatever and you know living in a mansion for the rest of their lives um but i think like as a journalist i was like oh once i understood that that was the cycle that that is uh that was really helpful for my own work i guess is what i'm saying i think for me it was kind of crypto but i think it was remote work i think remote work was the thing that fully jokified me because i had a few articles i had an article turned down by jalopnik in like 2015 where i was like hey elon musk is lying like it was actually kind of present he was like look he said this about the model x didn't happen isn't happening completely different said this about autopilot hasn't happened and even then i wrote like a positive piece about autopilot because it was kind of cool like that's the thing if they didn't over promise they could point to things and people like shit this is really cool but i think it was remote work because you just got to see this schism between reality and journalism but for real it was crypto it was the 2021 crypto craze where just people were lying it wasn't even like they were half true they were just straight up like we will do this and what they were saying was not possible like not even and then they never did it and then the companies were just dumping money and all these people were getting rich for nothing and i watched as quite a lot of journalists just kind of wrote it up because they were like well money good yeah money money large money good money real i think also crypto i've edited many stories about crypto and i've written a handful of them and it's fucking complicated it's like if you want and because it's because it's so complicated it's a space for tons of grifters and i guess what i mean by that is like when you start talking about things like smart contracts and like dows and like blah blah blah all that stuff It's a really hard thing to parachute into and understand the lingo and like what people are talking about at all.

39:58And then you go try to write an article about it because your editor says, this company made$3 billion in the last two days. Like what's going on here? Go write about it. It's like the amount of brain poison that you need to be to understand what they are attempting to do here whether they were attempting to or not but like to to explain why it is a fraud was like a very difficult thing and i feel like only a few journalists were ever like very good at doing that but even then the thing that got me like to be completely right i was writing about it at the time and writing about it was occasionally exhausting because you'd spend the first quarter of the article being like okay this means this this means that this also means this okay now you've learned all of this bullshit i can get to the thing i want to write about right i think that the other thing is is it was when i realized so many journalists assumed that all of these people had good intentions that was when i that was what cracked it for me it was the kevin roos latecomer's guide to crypto or the article about helium and all of these things where it was just like oh they said they got this partnership did you fucking check oh no why would they wouldn't lie to the New York Times.

41:16Yes, they would. They did. They literally lied. They literally lied. And they all lied all the time, and they're still kind of doing it. And I think that I definitely had the experience of waking up and feeling old as well, because I've been doing PR film since 2000. I've been doing PR since 2008, film since 2012. And thus, I've been the hype man. I still am, to some extent. But even then, in like mid-2010s, with the Indiegogo craze, listeners, if you don't remember this time, there was a time when indiegogo and kickstarter started out and it was like every single company that on there got press regardless of whether it was real or not that was one of my that was one of my favorite types of articles to write because not not like hey there's new kickstarter hey this kickstarter that raised like three million dollars and was written about in like 80 publications didn't make the thing, didn't try to make the thing.

42:13Never tried. Or they made it, it was just completely fucking broken. But I remember at that time also saying to new business things, like, how are you making money? And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we are. And that's never, you don't want to hear someone being like, yeah, sure. A little bit. And you're like, are you profitable? No. You're going to become profitable? Yeah. But I remember even having clients that would go to journalists. I'd take them to journalists even. And I'd be like, yeah, they're profitable. And they'd be like, who cares? Not necessarily, but they'd be just like, whatever.

42:49Whatever. Everyone's scaling. And then over time, thankfully, I've got clients that are mostly profitable. Because suddenly journalists are like, huh, if a company makes more money than it spends, that's a good thing. And if it loses money, well, that's a bad thing. unless it's open AI.

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46:13And I think that that's the other thing that's frustrating me as well. It's like, and maybe you can actually give me an idea of this because I have a few thoughts, but why do they keep fucking falling for it so many times it's like three hype cycles straight and this ai one is insane yeah that's the so we we've been painting with a very broad brush you you've added some specifics i've definitely been painting with a broad brush and i'm just like oh yeah like i apologize no it's fine i'm just saying that i think with ai journalists the ones that i read are more skeptical than any technology that we've seen in a long time.

46:53However, the question is, how many people are they actually reaching and what is that reach? And then you sort of have some of these Kevin Roos articles that we talked about in the New York Times where it's like, I was seduced by an AI or whatever it was. Told me to leave my wife. Yeah, things like this. It's like, those are really, really harmful articles. And they go out to a lot of people and I think that it's just like it's really tough because I think on balance, journalists have been like really tough on AI companies. The ones that I read and the ones that I like where I'm like, oh, like Brian Merchant, you're really good on this topic.

47:37At Zitron, you're really good on this topic. Kylie Robeson, you're really good on this topic, so on and so forth. And then, but then I started thinking, oh, but like the New York Times often isn't very good on this topic. like the wall street journal often isn't very good on this topic and these are the sort of like mass market publications that whose audience size dwarfs us um i have to wonder if there isn't some degree of like them wanting to seem positive because they have a broad audience i just don't know why yeah like they want to be excited about the tech yeah i i think that um I've not worked at a big publication like that, but I know a lot of people who have, and I've seen people I know freelance for them and things like that.

48:25And I think that a lot of these publications have many, many, many levels of bureaucracy and legal and so on and so forth. And I feel like a lot of articles get focus grouped to death. I don't know what, I'm blanking on the term but it's where there's like 80 people are looking at a thing and then by the time it comes out it's like oh this is like a quote-unquote down the middle it's like yeah you're just giving publicity to whatever and it's like okay this is not actually like i i have to wonder if it's also a solidarity issue again because swisher for example the reason i find her so loathsome is that she pretends to be what she actually should have been which is if everyone nilae patel joanna Stone, who I love in general, Kara Swisher, who I find detestable, Casey Newton, who I find almost as detestable.

49:21The problem isn't that they're not getting these interviews. It's that when they have the person in front of them, they don't ask them the questions. They ask them, do you train with YouTube data? And they go, eh, and it's like, okay, that's an answer for me. Versus, and the British media has a litany of problems. But one of the things they do very well is harass Powell. And I think that there could just be this most subtle change in the world. When you get Sam Altman in front of him, don't accept whatever answer he gives you immediately. Don't be like, well, seems reasonable to me that you have no answer for revenue or how this stuff will become AGI.

50:00I'm just going to keep going. But it's also, if everyone started doing that, they would have to start answering. That simple. If the only option they had was to get, like, Devin Coldway, and I'll give him credit, Devin Coldway at TechCrunch Disrupt, actually fucking asking the question to Aravind, the CEO of Perplexity, about plagiarism. Could have pushed hard or whatever. We can quarterback that later. But nevertheless, the fact the question is getting asked is so phenomenal. And Devin, fucking respect to him. If everyone did that, these worms would have to run. if everyone just fucking and it doesn't even need to be rude you don't have to be a dickhead you don't have to be as i would be very rude well okay i actually i take that back i will get one of these people and you'll be shocked by how not rude i am because that actually doesn't get results ask them questions right what does that mean i think that um i so i don't like listen to every episode of nilai patel's podcast but i think this is something that he started to do a lot better he like talked to the CEO of Intuit the other day and was like you know badgering him on Intuit's lobbying about like why we still fucking have to use TurboTax more or less which they've spent millions and millions and millions of dollars doing and then pushed him on lobbying as well and I think that I mean I thought that that was a good example I think that I just wish he'd have done that with Sundar Pichai with Sundar he did give him his phone that was a nice moment that was a nice moment i like that moment it was i didn't listen the whole thing though the google ceo's touching my phone ask him compound questions the whole way down now i'm not gonna yeah i'm not gonna i'm gonna pull that back a bit though the intuit thing was an exact example of what everyone needs to do he wasn't rude at all he just kept asking the fucking question and that's why it rocked that's why it was good well so what i was gonna say is i i agree with you 100 i think that um what has happened is you have fucking like mark zuckerberg going on joe rogan and going on lex friedman and going on like all these other podcasts and pretending like they're like the media is a problem and i agree with what you're saying i also think that tech pr has gotten a lot smarter in the last few years in like keeping their executives away from anyone who will ask them hard questions.

52:30Yeah. And that's very calculated in my opinion. I also think that, I think you're completely right. I don't know if I'll ever say that PR people are getting smarter based on any of them, but I will say, I think that they have just learned the lessons from celebrity PR because the tech media has allowed these people to be treated like celebrities. like that is, I think I'm very critical of Nilay Patel but really the Intuit one was great because he treated him like a businessman he treated Sandar Pishai like a celebrity and I think that the problem is and this is me, like genuine empathy for a while they were for a while we laugh about the 2015 Indiegogo era but it was fun things were happening, these people Elon Musk wasn't just an inveterate racist he wasn't talking about the 14 words he loved the most he wasn't he wasn't just retweeting active nazis he was just like posting my lunch rocket go boom cargo fast and everyone was like cool even i was and i can understand why everyone kind of oriented themselves in that way but these people aren't celebrities they're fucking business people yeah that that was something about so i've seen elon musk speak a couple times uh while i was reporting like i went to the giga factories opening and sort of covered that uh when they started making batteries in nevada and something and i i thought i did a good piece actually this was now many years ago but i wrote i think the article was called like the cult of elon and it was about his like very cultish fans who are just fucking obsessed with him even then uh and he's a horrendous public speaker he's really bad at it he's not gifted he's not gifted he's very awkward up there.

54:16And for a while, that was actually quite alluring is the wrong word to me. But I was like, wow, this guy must be really smart because he's so bad at talking that he must just, and yet he's still like the CEO of all these companies and a billionaire and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, but he can't string two sentences together really on stage. So he just must be like engineering behind the scenes all the time, like building rockets himself. And I think that we really did a very bad job, not just with Elon, but with like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and all these people treating them as geniuses who did all of this stuff themselves from a garage and not as businessmen who had thousands of people working for them, like building on the backs of - More money than any of us would have combined.

55:09Yeah, and building on the backs of like a million other inventions by a million other people. And it's like, fine, like you built the smartphone, like, cool, I use the smartphone all the time. That's very cool. But like, Steve Jobs is not the inventor of the smartphone there there or the iPhone. It was like, thousands of people at Apple leveraging like 1000s of years of, you know, not 1000s of years, but many, yeah, dozens of years of, you know, like Wi Fi chips and touchscreen stuff and blah, blah, blah. lot and i think that in treating steve jobs as the singular inventor of the iphone which is it's the subject of my friend brian merchant's book the one device like all the sort of stuff that went into it we made these people celebrities we made them celebrities because we're like genius inventor vibes versus like business ruthless businessman did like made big company by taking government subsidies and i've written about this quite a lot it's a little easier to swallow that way when you see someone who's so otherworldly rich who's so powerful who can do all of these things in their normal life that we never would not about them being smart or good just that they have that much money and power it's much easier to look at them and say damn they must be so much different to me they must be they must know something i don't and i think what we're seeing in the media now as this kind of cynicism feeds in is people beginning to realize that was never fucking true wasniak was a genius is a genius yeah like jobs was a great marketer and a good operator i mean wasniak also uh like i don't know him personally but he strikes me as like quite humble relatively speaking and like still like i don't know what he's doing now but i ran into him once and the thing that he talked to me about for half an hour was a 20 year old browser called like icab icab i think it was yeah the taxi it's some like low face like it's the only one i use and it was adorable and he seems to like tech and maybe that's the greater thing that i don't know how many people who are popular in the industry actually like technology.

57:24You talk to yourself about you're excited about some things. There is still tech that excites you. I don't know if that's as common within the industry as it should be, both in the executives and some members of the media. And I want to be wrong because I think if everyone was actually excited about AI, if that was really driving them, then that would be cool. That would be interesting. i we would have some interesting shit come out of that i just don't even think it's about it's like i'm excited about what everyone else is excited about well it's very interesting that the the crypto to ai crypto to web 3 to ai pipeline of like oh this is going to change the world wait no metaverse is going to change the world wait no uh ai is going to change the world and it's like okay cool like uh you're into the thing that's going to make you a lot of money regardless um yeah I don't it's funny you say that I'm not that into tech and at motherboard we were a website of people who were super skeptical of tech and didn't which I think is fine by the way I know I know I'm just saying that um I am not I'm not really excited about tech I think I'm excited about what some people are doing with technology i'm very interested in community i guess um which is diving into those communities of people who are excited about things like i i recently wrote about the people who are taking the red box dvd kiosks home from walgreens and i'm like sitting in their discord watching them figure out how this thing works and like flashing new software to it and stuff and it's like that is very exciting to me not because it's going to change the world but because i like seeing their excitement about learning how this like obsolete device works and i i don't want to be a part of that community myself because frankly just like i don't know i feel like i'm a busy guy i don't i don't like and i i'm very like uh short attention span for hobbies, I would say.

59:29I don't want to reverse engineer a kiosk, but I want to watch you do it from afar because you are finding out lots of weird stuff about it. I like writing about that sort of thing. There's many, many, many micro communities around the internet still that are very exciting to me because they found a place on the internet or using technology that is not so fucked up and terrible all the time. I like looking at that. That's what makes me optimistic. And I still think that that is a perfectly valid thing to be excited about. And that is still being excited about tech. Some of my favorite moments in tech have been Cydia and the original homebrew community and the iPhone.

1:00:13The homebrew community around the PlayStation Portable was fucking cool. I don't even mean the piracy, which may or may not have been cool. I wouldn't know. even then going back to like 2006 the homebrew community with the Xbox the shit the people you could like just rip games and games you owned to the Xbox and they would run faster play Def Jam the fighting game there is still cool shit like that happening and I feel like that does give me hope as well that people are still doing this shit like why are you ripping up a Redbox thing because I can yeah yeah and I've written a lot about like right to repair and people you know trying to fix their iPhones and so on and so forth.

1:00:53And the thing that's been really interesting about following that world is that the guy at the mall who puts the iPhone screen on when you break it, he knows more about how that fucking iPhone works than probably most people who work at Apple. And I find that to be really interesting. There's been a couple massive Apple scandals that have broken because these repair people who are just looking at a bunch of broken iPhones have realized there was like an engineering flaw that Apple messed something up on. And it's like, that's cool. Like this is just some dude who works at the mall in a kiosk. And he has just like discovered a flaw in the iPhone that is going to, in a just world, cost Apple billions of dollars.

1:01:39In the real world that we live in, everyone gets like a$50 refund, maybe. If we're lucky. Yeah, if we're lucky. Or there'll be like a class action lawsuit where you get$12 in 14 years. But I like that kind of thing too. So as we wrap this up, and this could be the final question, what is next for 404? Are you going to scale it much further? Are you going to do a conference? Is that in the cards? Or are you going to keep it small? We're going to do conferences. We're going to pivot to video. We're going to speed run. For real. So 404 Media has been around for a little over a year. It's me, Emmanuel Myberg, Sam Cole, and Joseph Cox.

1:02:27I personally wanted to do it because I spent a lot of time editing the last few years of my life. And I really wanted to get back to writing. And I've really enjoyed doing my own reporting and writing again. It's been amazing for my brain, I feel. I would like the company to get bigger. I think that we probably will hire people at some point. But I think that the tricky thing for me is, if we do that, will we have time to continue doing our own work? How will that work? And so that is, you know, that's stuff that we talk about sort of like behind the scenes. Like right now we are the four of us doing everything in terms of just like we're doing our socials, we're doing the business stuff, you know, we're talking to our lawyers and I'm printing merch and like mailing it myself.

1:03:23And I really like that hands on aspect to it. But I think I'm trying to think like if we grow, will that give us more time to do the work or will it give us less time to do the work because we're then sort of like managing other people which is a blessing in many ways because the company is starting to get close to a place where i think that we could financially justify hiring more people but it's also does that fundamentally like sort of change what we're doing on a day-to-day basis and if so how does that work and doesn't make it better is that what our readers even were want and i think that like any people that we'd bring on would have a similar ethos to us and would be able to uh cover like i'm sure they would be fantastic at whatever they're reporting on and would allow us to have like more breadth of topics on the site which is something that we want because you know i've written a million articles about facebook's ai and there's like a lot of fuckery going on that we should be covering across many topics but um sort of like what does that look like i think is something that we talk about a lot um but the good news is is it's going well um i think that we will grow at some point we're being very careful about it because we worked at vice and they hired a bunch of people and it seemed like they had money and then you know they did something bad like nothing specifically bad happened it's just like grow this way grow that way and then it's like oh shit we don't have no money and we're bankrupt now um so yeah i don't know i think it's been very hard to plan long term i'd say because i'm very heads down most days just like interviewing people and writing articles but we we want to do more like we want to grow we want to be bigger but we want to do it like very very slowly and also do you even have to yeah i mean that is a big that's a that's another question that we ask ourselves because I do think that we've been able to do impactful work with just the four of us and there's many people that I would love to work with more and again and in addition to but at the same time it's like is that something that I want to bring on ourselves not because it would be bad but because it would be additional it's like there's only so many hours overhead more shit to manage more personalities yeah where can people find you jason so we're at 404media.co uh we're a subscriber funded publication um give them money i pay give us money thank you we really do appreciate it um and then you know i'm on every fucking social media platform if you search my name you'll find me and then it will be in the episode notes jason thank you so much for joining me.

1:06:20You've been listening to Better Offline. I'm Ed Zitron. You know all the shit to find me. You'll be following this with a really nice non-acerbic little speech. Thanks for listening.

1:06:37Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matasowski.com, M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

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1:08:49disappearances, legendary heists, the whole nine yards. So check out the Stuff You Should Know True Crime playlist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did it occur to you that he'd charmed you in any way? Yes, it did, but he was a charming man. It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story, because this ties together the Cold War with the new one. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all? Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want to hear the secrets of psychopaths, murderers, sex offenders?

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