Ben Smith on Trump, Anthropic & the Collision of Government and Big Tech

16:04Ben Smith:is a wild story as you say in much of the world they see it as kind of a cool technology they're eager to use and have their kids use to make more money and here the place where as you say we invented it and are making it um people yeah and people are very periods americans are in a sour mood about everything, by the way. Like they also think the economy is terrible, which is not really what the numbers say. So I think it is a moment where people are really angry about the way society is organized. They're angry about the pace of change. Both of those things in terms of the wealth accumulated to the AI companies and just the strangeness of it feels like it feeds that.

16:38Ben Smith:I guess having covered the social media wars and I remember writing a piece in 2017 saying like both political parties are coming for the tech companies, you know, and then watching for 10 years nothing happened i think that like you can overestimate i think that americans like technology more than you think that they like products that they use that there's a lot there it's gets feels very hard to regulate anything anywhere within a million miles of politics and political speech so and and that some of this and that some of this stuff involved you know the the companies behaved in ways that really no American has ever behaved, which is like, our product is terrible and dangerous.

17:21Ben Smith:It's going to put you out of work and poison your children's minds. And so like people believe that. And I think some of the companies are starting to behave more like normal companies, which is like our technology is nice and useful and you will like it. And we're going to sponsor your little league team. So you're so I guess I think it's going to normal. I actually interesting. I think that we're in a moment where a bunch of politicians like are going to come out and take these hard line out of the ass stands that in the year the story a little more complicated well gavin newsom is clearly trying to be a little friendlier i think news right i think newsom is is actually probably the this is to me the one to watch like he's a more among the democrats a much more experienced and kind of seasoned politician who is i think not who is really obviously running for president and thinking about where where are things going to be a year from now two years from now not where are they white right now and then i do think there's also a cool question of like so far ai has really really profoundly changed the last software engineers and then i think for white collar people like me have been kind of neat um but like and for kids been like kind of helping with their homework or made them lazy but it has been so it's like a really marginal for everybody who isn't a software engineer and i think i was talking to one of the frontier labs like i think you know is it going to cure cancer or is it going cause a massive catastrophe like those two things are really going to shape people's views and they keep promising huge particularly medical scientific breakthroughs you would get one of those that'll

18:46Eric Newcomer:really change how people see if they don't see it yeah i i think i generally agree with the story

18:50Ben Smith:you're talking about animals like they could maybe like pet health but then they said like they extend our dog it seems like a place you could move faster than with all the regulatory rules but apparently the idea that a frontier lab would also operate like a dog research facility They seemed, even for them, a little bit.

19:05Eric Newcomer:Well, Silicon Valley has this company, there's this company Loyal that's working on dog life extension. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, so it's not an AI company really, but it's premised on this idea that the CEO is very interested in life extension and you can move much quicker with dogs. So there's a lot of work to be done. But so you are predicting that data centers will not become a top five issue in the sort of major.

19:28Ben Smith:I think journalists love to write about it. People are spinning that up.

19:32Eric Newcomer:I don't know if we follow Charlotte Alter. There used to be a time as a sub stack. That's, you know, she calls it the new humanism. She's a little hostile to AI and she had a democratic operative on that. He was sort of saying, it's going to be, you know,

19:45Ben Smith:and I think it's weird. We love to talk about it so much. If you pull people, like if you, they're, you know, open-ended polling or what is the most important issue? The bucket of issues around government, not working corruption is like 30%. I think technology is less than 1 % of like, what are your actual top issues if you ask people do you want some weird humming warehouse in your backyard the same now but actually interestingly they whether whether you live near a data center or not has no impact on what you say about data centers it does not honestly it feels to me like sort of a fake issue the issue i think the kids stuff is different i think you talk to politicians the issue that they feel that they can connect on most that people are actually interested in their own lives, not as a 17th priority, if you ask me in the polls issue, but as I'm worried about this, it's kids.

20:32Ben Smith:They feel like they failed that. And then social media for various reasons, the US never managed to regulate it. The Australians and the British now have. But I think you see like Spencer Cox in Utah, you see Josh Hawley, you see Jake Oppenquist in the House, a Democrat starting to push regulations around kids and technology, kids and AI that I I think when J.D. Vance and Estes is running for president, when people like that, I think there's going to be a really well-developed AI platform that's going to be probably softer on the companies in various ways than people are predicting now everywhere except kids.

21:05Ben Smith:And I think that's the place that they're going to want to make the companies squirm and push hard. And it's the place that voters feel much more viscerally.

21:14Eric Newcomer:it makes sense i think most americans it's like where you know kids can't make decisions for themselves on they they deserve some government protection i don't i i do see that in resonant

21:26Ben Smith:and there's nightmare stories about kids hurting themselves after talking to chat but it's very unusual but unbelievably scary yes in a way that data centers are symbol i think are kind of a

21:36Eric Newcomer:symbolic issue yeah yeah i i think that's reassuring i think tech is getting well from the perspective of Silicon Valley, which, you know, I share in many ways. I guess I'm, as someone who's sort of, what do you think? I'm left leaning, right. But believe in technology and see a lot of this resentment online. People hate tech. They love tech products. Right. And I agree with your sense that it's like, if the government like mess with Amazon tomorrow, people will lose their mind. So I largely agree. The one footnote to that is, you know, right now, Anthropoc gives you this warning, like, you know, we don't have Fable anymore and people are not like losing their minds over fable the same way they might over like my uber not oh yeah he had

22:17Ben Smith:gotten halfway through making his chem presentation on fable and he has to redo it because it oh he

22:23Eric Newcomer:doesn't have like the record and everything or whatever yeah it was with with teachers permission so so yeah i i'm just personally worried about a situation where democrats has become super anti-tech and there's no history of that working in american politics right and so it's just so i don't i mean aoc i mean do you think aoc is the a top three democratic contender for president right now yeah i think if she decides to run she'll be

22:50Ben Smith:incredibly formidable and yeah there will be a real anti-tech voice and a real like and i think you know what the maybe it'll be nationalized the labs profits in some way it's maybe it would either taking a stake in the companies or a really heavy tax on them which by the way i think a lot of people in silica like favor right um or me and it may be i mean the data center moratorium is theoretically until we get some kind of regulation on the books and it's sort of meant is leveraged i don't really see how that makes sense in this dysfunctional congress but um like where this is but how this is supposed to play out but it's um and then that right and then below that there is a level of like ai iso scam you know it's not real it doesn't actually work we've all been fooled like the real stuff that is just not true ed zitron dominates this yeah

23:38Eric Newcomer:have you had him on your podcast oh my god bloomberg's having him on i feel like but there's such hunger in the media environment for an anti-ai voice but a lot of those folks

23:47Ben Smith:made predictions two or three years ago that he keeps yeah did not pan out yeah it's all that from my youtube commenters i'm sorry guys he's been saying it's gonna fail since like yeah 2024 at least what it means to fail keeps changing yeah definitely i don't know but i think that that is a real strain of politics but i think kind of more very online politics than real world politics i just think that people it's easy to overestimate when you are a few for me how much this is going to be a motivating issue for voters just seems far for me to believe i want

24:16Eric Newcomer:to silica valley is always obsessed with going direct andreese and horowitz has made a big push and what they're now in branding as new media they put out an essay sort of articulating this twardberg yeah eric twardenberg has come in that's sort of their marketing effort they have yeah monitoring the situation which is you know sort of a tbpn knockoff i mean open ai spending you know apparently hundreds of millions of dollars on open ai seemingly validating what is new business yeah exactly um the comps you know uh but um yeah i don't know i mean we've been talking about this for a while, but like, what, what do you make about of Silicon Valley's obsession with, with going direct?

25:01Eric Newcomer:I guess, I mean, I think, you know, Andreessen put it pretty well in just saying, okay, it's a realization that old school, old school marketing through the media meant you basically had to avoid saying anything stupid. Like they talked to somebody like you in the New York times and it's like, I'm important. They need to survive the interview. You're going to you know run some quote from them because they're important and they hopefully didn't say anything that's like yeah i'll decide i have total control over what how they appear yeah exactly so they need to play it super safe and now they build their own channels they actually have an incentive to be interesting which is something that you know i think the media class would root for right that they have to be spicy to get people to pay attention but you know it's to their own ends and they're not sort of using us i don't know what do you make of the story they're telling

25:52Ben Smith:room well i think there's just like an obvious truth that you may have noticed the media has splintered there's this whole digital space now the centralized platforms that control the broadcast towers and the printing press is no longer controlled like just sort of a at this point quite old and obvious technical story which means that people can i mean just descriptively you can speak to people directly um and so i don't and i think it's been incredible marketing this idea about going direct but every time they try to do it it doesn't seem like they quite nailed it with that magazine they did future and now with this new mts thing i was on it for a while it seemed fine but like it doesn't but and then the most successful media eventually i've ever done though was these was mark andreessen set up during the covid a set of private group chats that were incredibly good at kind of manufacturing consent and shaping opinion on the center right and kind of rallying support for trump in the end and i think were really meaningful and the idea and shirham krishna and and torenberg did that and it's actually it was a really successful media project.

26:52Ben Smith:I think the thing with, and I think the thing that actually I find I'm very, I'm truly an optimist here and in other spaces, but like, I think the thing that everyone is finding is that it turns out that asking hard confrontational questions is more interesting than asking like extremely boring sycophantic questions. And that I'm telling like interesting, true things, like where's better than lying to people. And that there's like a poll, even in the new, in these new media spaces even if they were set up to be heteropartisan like my favorite instance of this is that you know pete haggseth like threw all the normal reporters out of the pentagon because he didn't like them saying the war was going badly maybe it was a little before that but he wouldn't have liked it brought in a bunch of like quite far right outlets all of whom immediately started like who once they got their feet and figured out what you know where the bathrooms were started asking why the war was going so badly and like he was getting jammed up by a gateway pundit for instance like really you know there's sort of a and and you saw this with um you know dark hatches great uh cast amazing but also like he's moved he's become i mean he was more capable and willing

27:53Eric Newcomer:to stand up to jensen yeah and i think he's always been very very well prepared and thoughtful but i

27:58Ben Smith:think like you know like he's getting better at it as you as we all do as you go and that often means being a little tougher on his guests and like i just think that's that's that's not because somebody went to journalism school it's because that's more interesting did you go to journalism

28:11Eric Newcomer:school did not me neither but we both came up through media and learned media norms like in some ways you know media there's just a set of ethics that sort of that controlled it right and in a good sense right i mean it's like worry about conflicts giving people the opportunity to respond to requests for i don't know there are there are all these rules that i think every journalist who survived a couple internships had to sort of live and breathe and they and i think part of what was a threat to Silicon Valley is that they superseded capitalism, right? That it was sort of norms that transcended sort of your sort of business objectives.

28:53Eric Newcomer:Or do you see it in a way where like, I sometimes talk about it was like a priesthood of journalism in that like you're giving up sort of these sort of earthly concerns and you have these bigger moral rules that are guiding you. And I think, you know, there's something good about that in journalism, but I I think it almost required, you know, a monopoly power. You know, it's like to do non-economic things and to say we operate by this set code. You needed to not have the competition from people who are willing to do everything under the sun.

29:24Ben Smith:You know, I guess I see it differently. Like, first, I see those as things that anyone would want that are kind of like where the audience wants. They don't want you to be lying to them. So you have conflicts of interest. Like these are things that come out of your responsibility to the audience, not out of some priesthood. and I have the other things I've always seen it that stole this from my old boss Jonah Peretti but it's more like a trade it's like you kind of work for the company you work for but you also sort of work for the guild and like if like the you know the manager on site tells you that to do something that isn't like in keeping with the guild standards you're just gonna like put your tools in the bucket and go back it's like some medieval that's how it used to be that's how it is now like that's what that's the thing you're saying it's not exactly capitalistic it's like you sort of work for your employer but i remember somebody asking jonah like well can't you just get your journalist to do this and he was like no no you can't really get them to do things because like they sort of work for you but they sort of work for the guild and like if you ask them to do something that isn't in keeping with their weird self-regulating standards like mark andreessen

30:19Eric Newcomer:clipped this is the most validating this is like sort of like a poor thing you know sort of like

30:24Ben Smith:sort of like that's sort of like lawyers right like you can ask your lawyers at a certain point you ask a lawyer to do something and they're like no i'm not going to do that right but they're more regulated like journalists are self-regulating in ways that are good and bad but journalists really will just kind of be like no i'm not going to do that in a way it'd be quite frustrating for

30:39Eric Newcomer:people who manage them including me like you know write about cloud companies more there are sponsors

30:45Ben Smith:or what or just like whatever you know where you i mean you know you've you're a managed journalist you've been a journalist no more like hey would you write this story no i think it's boring there's not normal employees and you think that's not going away well the thing about journalism is that the best reporters are usually the ones who are worst at following the rules so it's messy

31:08Eric Newcomer:probably true in a lot of professions i mean to put pushback just on one of the points you made which i largely agree with what you're saying i mean i think in silicon valley people like these um media personalities who are like in the mix you know like they've invested i mean all in obviously most famously i mean they they're almost overselling how credible they are to to get um support from their readers so they their readers are their viewers want them to sort of be conflicted because it shows yeah that they get it that they're on the inside so this idea that the audience that you're serving your own business interests by not being conflicted i don't know right it's just a

31:48Ben Smith:spectrum of people who are right like just business people and political leaders are going direct people who are becoming something more like journalists and commentators while also i mean i think it's just that's just the nature of this ecosystem now and yeah but i think but i think the idea but i think within that there's just obviously a role for independent journalism people both would like to hear interesting opinions from people who might have conflicts and would be like to have people they trust all the what's going on like i don't think those things are really in conflict

32:13Eric Newcomer:with each other but it are we pursuing niche audiences for the rest of time like do you think people are going to build new reach all of america type publications or it's just this race

32:24Ben Smith:and i just think i think that's like fundamentally a technological story and all this stuff i guess my big i think all this stuff in media that we wring our hands about and is did the media get too left wing for too right wing for a bunch of social factors or because well it's hysterical

32:37Eric Newcomer:the business class on everything else would analyze the business based on their financial incentives and then in the media they're like it's all this cultural stuff yeah sometimes

32:47Ben Smith:Sometimes it is the cultural stuff, but I just think like when people say, well, trust in media collapsed because the way Dan Rather covered during which no four, it's like, I just think there are these big structural factors. And again, just it's so obvious that I think people don't pause to think about it. But for this long period in the 20th century, you could only reach a mass audience if you had a license to some television spectrum or an enormous printing plant near a city and a huge fleet of trucks. These are both like incredibly capital intensive and most people can't have them. The spectrum is, in fact, you know, is scientific, you know, is limited by physics.

33:17Ben Smith:And so that produced this media for a period in the 20th century, which had not existed before and will not exist again, that's consolidated into a handful of centralized outlets. But that wasn't because there was people wanted it culturally or didn't want it culturally. That was just technology. um like right now there's only one way to get satellite internet in malawi and it's star lake but that's not because that's not a feature of the universe that's just where we are and i think that sort of was true of there was only one you know a couple ways to get news in indianapolis there was the abc affiliate the cbs affiliate in indianapolis star and so like that creates a totally different environment than the one that america the hyper-polarized partisan fragmented one that had preceded it or the hyperpolarized partisan fragmented one now that doesn't mean that there aren't more mass proof the entertainment properties and always have been maryland maryland is great sadness but like but the um like she's on the margin with that but um but i just think it doesn't necessarily mean niche but it just that's just descriptive of a totally different technical universe yeah and i think that i think the anomaly was this spec the television the

34:23Eric Newcomer:invention of television really that we had technology that made it that we could just distribute widely but then it was still very controlled yeah that just required enormous

34:31Ben Smith:amounts of capital and in fact physical limits to and critically in the u.s where you have these cities that are really far apart from each other so you in britain you never had these regional these powerful regional newspapers in the u.s it's hard to get the new york times to indiana

34:45Eric Newcomer:i'm sure you've talked about it so i don't want to spend a ton of time on it but you know the collapse of buzzfeed over time is it fundamentally just a facebook story or it's like it was riding the social wave the social wave didn't sustain outside publications and that was that or is it

35:02Ben Smith:a more complicated story yeah i mean i thought about this a lot yeah book about it traffic yeah check it out we have our books are sold um you know from a kind of investment perspective because i see one of the things i didn't write a book but after the book came out a question i got a lot was particularly from investors was like, why did anybody put$500 million? And then Chris, he was on the board. He was Andreessen, the rep on the board. Like, what were people thinking? And there's actually a real answer to that that's interesting, which is that a lot of the early investors in BuzzFeed and Vice in particular had come out of and had their formative experiences in the cable era.

35:36Ben Smith:These were people who invested in MTV and the companies that came by Com, MTV, Comedy Central. And the core thing they'd learned was these entrepreneurs create a new technology, cable, new pipes, new wires. And then there's got to be content that's purpose built for it. There's HBO, there's ESPN, there's CNN, there's comedy, there's all these amazing new brands. And if you're the guy, if you're the cable operator, if you're Comcast, it's in your interest to shape a system in which content companies get paid, make great money, making great content for you so that people will pay for your service.

36:09Ben Smith:And so that was the analogy that they took into the social age, which was there are these new pipes now, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, whatever. And there's going to be a new Viacom that's going to be building new content.

36:21Eric Newcomer:Instead of, oh my God, all these people are going to do it for free this summer.

36:24Ben Smith:Yeah, and they didn't bet on, and I would say they did not only, like it wasn't that they weren't aware that user-generated content was a thing, but I think their bet was that these companies would, in their competition with one another, wind up licensing professional content. And by the way, like, I don't think that was an insane bet. It's not how it played out, but I think if you look back at, the declining Facebook blue app now. And you said, huh, like what if they had tried to become Netflix? They'd be better if they were Netflix than what they are, right? So like, I don't think UGC has always been like the right path.

36:57Ben Smith:And in fact, YouTube now is really build a business that people can build businesses on top of.

37:04Eric Newcomer:Right, that's what Mr. Beast is a company. Yeah, exactly. But maybe they underestimate how much it would be totally different. Individual creators.

37:11Ben Smith:And I think YouTube in particular, I think that my sort of personal experience is like creator is a word that was invented by these platforms to turn, to make sure that content creators couldn't actually agglomerate into media companies or any other organization. Like they want to deal with Uber drivers, not with taxi flights. And so that they have all the leverage, which is smart. But I think that, you know, BuzzFeed and these other companies didn't predict for the future wrong. But I don't think it was like a crazy prediction. It makes that the nature of venture, right? Right, right, right.

37:47Eric Newcomer:I mean, I think the customer, consumers, want human beings, right? I think part of what explains the creator phenomenon is just people now, whether it's sort of a mood or whether it's because they can get access to it, want vibrant, full people and not brands. Like they'd rather their brand mostly roll up to a human being.

38:09Ben Smith:People don't like institutions in this moment, but always have liked humans. I mean, the humans are, I mean, television has always been, you know, populated by humans. And now you're seeing like Kylo Scamblin went to CNN this week. Like there's a pendulum swing where a lot of the humans are being reconsolidated.

38:23Eric Newcomer:And all the, where you see the clips of like the TV shows that look like podcast studios where they have, they steal the mic silings of podcasts. It's like, it needs to look like just a couple of guys, you know, hanging out. uh so it's amazing the the sort of aesthetic uh copycatting of it all um what how do you personally like i mean one thing i'm you know i am actively struggling with is always how much i want to sort of be a media executive versus be you know the journalists in or themselves like i was doing an exercise and sort of like you know am i how much do i want to be the entrepreneur you know the writer the sort of media persona like having a podcast hosting events and then now the fourth is you know parent time and it's sort of like you know we wear these different hats like how do you think about um the hats you're wearing what ones you like and want yeah i mean i kind of

39:22Ben Smith:like it all although i would say i'm not i would never be a good ceo i'm not a good i'm not a good business executive like it i at buzzfeed there was a period where i was trying to be there interesting i just don't think i could i don't know i'm not strategic and that what like again and my partner justin smith to me is like one of the reasons i was i wanted to work with him is when i'd when i was really failing at this buzzfeed i i was talking to people for like what should i do and he gave me when i had lunch he took me out to lunch he gave me advice that i was like oh my god this is good advice and i'm personally unable to execute on this and so that's why i wanted to work with him no i mean i'm a journalist i'm an editor and like i love i love a lot of this you know the stuff around it and kind of trying to think of ways to do deals and shaping our events which i really consider journalism but the thing that i also love stories and you have an event you haven't even plugged it i understand this is why this is honestly why i have a bad executive

40:13Eric Newcomer:is if justin was on here the first thing i was like first thing he would have said it was somewhat competitive event i mean i think we're gonna be friendly no it's a friendly competition friendly

40:23Ben Smith:event but after you leave cerebral valley if you are lucky we will invite you oh my god if you know no we're having this event but actually circling back to the thing we're talking about the first like this contact between government and technology is just so the central story now there's also true that i think a lot of people in sin don't want to like spend a week in davos hobnobbing the politicians and so our theory was let's do an event like the sf standard called it Davos by the bed, but called Silicon Valley in the world, taking over the iconic hotel in Silicon Valley and bringing in a number of big tech leaders, Jensen Wong, Sachin Nadella, Lisa Su, a big long list of really key figures are on the advisory board or co-chairing it.

41:09Ben Smith:It is this collision of tech. The idea is that we'll invite political figures and world leaders to the valley because I think that they're more inclined to go to the valley and really try to figure out what's going on there and meet these folks than a lot of these people are to go anywhere else like people are really busy they don't necessarily always want to leave and so i think that we and so i think we're trying to and i think it will be the sort of premier conversation you know at a really really high level about that

41:36Eric Newcomer:intersection of politics and technology you talked your book um the uh as you see i get i get carried

41:43Ben Smith:away by like yapping about the stories and i forget how much do you see yourself as wanting

41:48Eric Newcomer:to be you know like in a media environment that demands faces and people wanting to be sort of one of the main characters of the publication versus i'll sort of pull the newsroom i actually

41:58Ben Smith:like love scoops more than i love being right and or like often you get your best scoops because you i'll say something i said that this podcast was idiotic and somebody will call you know this somebody will call you up and be like you got that twist you're on like here's the deal and i said

42:12Eric Newcomer:instead of just to be in the mix rather than right and i and i like love that feeling of like oh my

42:17Ben Smith:god that's amazing like what what did really happen and i think like that probably i don't know at some point that gets in the way of you're having a personal brand where you're really sure and right all the time but i don't know i love getting to that i love help i mean helping other honestly the best part of being an editor is like helping reporters get scooped the best way to be

42:33Eric Newcomer:the best way to be right is to know you know to have the scoop you know i think often the best takes are like you're talking to the people who are informed and so you write it like i think

42:42Ben Smith:oh for sure that's the direction and you do that a lot right yes i am reasonably informed but but but I just would say that I think like my personal motivations, I like, I love it for me and I want to know what's happening.

42:51Eric Newcomer:So you'd rather sort of push the issue to the level that somebody is calling you insane.

42:55Ben Smith:Yeah. Like I care. I really do. And I think this is probably to, I think it's probably why I'm a better editor than I am talent. But like, I would really rather get a scoop than advance my personal brand by being right. Like I'm addicted. You're addicted to the adrenaline of it. I don't know. I'm just, yeah, maybe. And I think it's like my, you know, and I think, and I love working with reporters who want to break news and want to figure out what's going on. your friend competitor, Reid Albergati, you know, very much among them. Like, you know, like it just, yeah, I think it's. Bali. They call it news because you want something, you want to know what's going on.

43:26Eric Newcomer:Balogy, you know, the network state on the other crypto guy. At one time,

43:30Ben Smith:media critic, maybe got bored of it.

43:32Eric Newcomer:He got boring. He's sort of lonely. Like he used, we got Taylor Loren. He was on with Taylor runs on monitoring the situation and he was almost like, nobody argues with us anymore. It's like, you block people. You like. It's just that's so boring. The tech media thing got so. but he he seems to be advancing this he is like an interesting thinker yeah for sure and is advancing a view i think that like basically we should only really care about people's online selves that like that there are sort of like offline selves should almost be off out of bounds and that we will live online and all that can be sort of scrutinized and then you know who cares you know where your house is i mean i mean him and a lot of people in silicon valley who some of of the more you know are fearful for getting attacked especially after the united ceo yeah really get mad when the media talks about where they live and you know obviously we saw with mom donnie the thing um outside what he ken griffin's house i don't know you get they're making sort of two points one it's sort of like do you see a world where like we change norms to sort of like we're really obsessed with what happens online but offline is almost like secret and pretend

44:41Ben Smith:I mean, it's not my personal favorite kind of journalism to produce, right? Like gossip and - Or like somebody's house. Did somebody break up with their celebrity girlfriend or did they buy a house, which by the way, maybe they also did enjoy taking New York Times with Diablo Furland and showing off Irish theory. Because really, what's the point of owning things like that? If you don't show them off, they seem otherwise quite inconvenient to own. But that's not my kind of journalism. Should there be laws or norms that put TMZ and the Daily Mail out of business? like probably not in the United States the first amendment's gonna yeah I guess I think there are

45:13Eric Newcomer:a lot of things offline besides I still think we live in a world where for the most part like one thing that keeps me up at night is just I feel like we hear so much about leaders where we really don't know much about them you know like I feel like if we lived in a small community like if I lived in a small town and like the mayor's kids hated them yeah that would be very important to me but we've created a culture on the national level where like rudy giuliani is like shouting at us on tv constantly and we we don't really care everybody's about their like inner their pride their moral life in their like community within their family and i think those things should actually matter a lot so i am constantly of the view one that there's a lot of powerful decisions that are made in like rooms and not online but also not people's houses and the address so some random person can go intimidate them but like the facts about like their how they live their lives really matter a lot yeah and i think you see that i know a couple of reactions

46:13Ben Smith:that one is that you certainly see that right now in this presidential administration more than a adoraba and a old somebody not a long time who works in the administration was saying to me you know very ideological conservative who was there to smash the administrative state in their view you know they and part of that and there's a whole claremont institute philosophy you have to elect a Caesar who's going to come and smash everything because who else can smash it but a Caesar but this person said to me well we didn't really consider that once you get the Caesar in they may have their own ideas right like they may not want to smash things they may just want to do other stuff and crypto and and that they felt like they're working for like a this is that fundamentally it's a personalist government and so I don't think I'm not sure the character of president has ever mattered more because Trump is so unconstrained by ideology and ideas and patterns and norms um the other thing i you know the story that what you just said made me think of though was that sort of i i mean i to me like invasive and awful story that everybody laughed about about christy gnome's husband's like unusual sexual preferences um and i don't know if you saw there's a times reporter who was happy who was in the town that week chase obviously chasing the same story when the mail broke it and then talked to people in the town and they were all like oh he's a nice guy like kind of who cares like leave this poor guy alone he's had an easy right hard enough for it in some ways that it was still sort of dehumanizing yeah but like that is the year but what you said like it is like you just get these sort of two-dimensional exactly totally politicized views of people that i mean that is obviously product and people love i mean not to get so

47:48Eric Newcomer:but it's i had um aaron de souza who's one of a teal acolyte the guy who uh helped bring down gawker on my podcast and i you know i disagree with him on he helped bring them gawker on your podcast no no i taught i had him on my podcast he was one of the guys you know i know i know he's rolling the dog yeah yeah yeah no not not i was unrelated and critical um but you know he holds up podcasting as this you know medium with no artifice it's like oh you're getting the real person and like you know we were talking before the show you know i don't think our conversation is so different than how we're talking before the show it is somewhat different and you know you're not getting like if we were having drink i don't i don't know like this is the most meta me question in the world but like do you see podcasting is like an authentic medium that is delivering an answer to this problem of like we need to stare into their soul oh okay like good

48:39Ben Smith:news yes bad news that's the problem it's like blogging it's like an amateur medium that is now professionalizing most people do not actually want like like whatever we're gonna talk for an hour 20 minutes will be the most interesting 20 minutes of that well this will be the middle and 20 minutes will be the most boring you're going to put the whole thing online but as this medium professionalizes and becomes something more like television your producers can be like hey we're going to cut the boring part and only use the interesting part it's going to be a 20

49:07Eric Newcomer:oh that's a great answer it's just like every new medium it feels authentic and real and then

49:12Ben Smith:remember blogging it's like real but it's also shaggy and unprofessional and parts of it are good and parts of it are bad and as it moves up this production ladder and in a very very intense completely competitive environment suddenly and there is you know there will remain an ability to reach smaller audience and higher value like obviously because it is different but to me one of the most telling things about this moment is that if you look at the list of top podcasters five years ago it was a bunch of like our weirdo podcast friends if you look at the list of podcasters now it is almost without exception not entirely um the cable news lineup of the 20 well that

49:45Eric Newcomer:Amy Poehler isn't she like one of the other boys and these are and you know unbelievable basically

49:49Ben Smith:like the most gifted broadcasters in the world like to me Piers Morgan like whatever you think of Piers Morgan is just an unbelievably like gifted interviewer like raw he's just his whatever you think of what he says and what he thinks he has like this technical gift and so no wonder his show is popular and why wasn't he doing it on the internet before because he was getting paid 50 million dollars a year to do on tv now he's getting paid something like that to do it on the internet So he does it on the internet. And I think there's this, this professionalization of these media that always happens.

50:20Ben Smith:They start as amateur and as games and you can't make any money out of it. It's really fun. It's really human and real. And, and then it professionalizes. And I think the, and then broadcasting to me is, I think it's, I think in five years, if you say you have a podcast, it will be like saying you had a blog. If I, if I said to you now that I have either it is bridge to becoming a show. Yeah. Or just like silly. Well, or it's like cute. like if i have a blog right now if i told you i have a blog it would be like like what would my

50:47Eric Newcomer:blog be about well i'd be like you can you know get all these email addresses with a newsletter you need to do it as a newsletter but yeah my my last question i thought that was a really um great take ai as it um sort of speaks to media consumption like i don't know and there's the geo like generative engine optimization i don't even know what the acronym stands for but it's some one narrative, maybe Pat is like, oh, it's going to be great for media because you need to get a story, especially in Semaphore with no paywall, because that's what's going to define what's going to be behind the model.

51:22Eric Newcomer:But I mean, do you think, you know, people are going to just read the news in ChatGPT and therefore not come to Semaphore? Like, what's your sense of how the models are going to impact news?

51:31Ben Smith:I mean, I think, you know, because we started Semaphore recently and in this era we think about a lot and i think a lot you know it'll obviously swallow commodity kind of commodity news the sort of rewrite of the press release very very fast so you have to think about what's you know what is what is it not going to it's not going to break original news um and it doesn't give you that kind of human connection and in some sense everything in the spectrum between those is very vulnerable so but um but but i think that those are have always been the most valuable parts of journalism and the most rewarding for journalists, which is to gather the information and then to really like in a way that you're putting your personal credibility on the line, even though at 7-4, I think we do try really hard to have a humility about our own perspective.

52:18Ben Smith:Like, here's my view, but here's somebody who disagrees with me. And that's how we structure our stories. But I think, so I think we're really interested in having great talented journalists speaking in their own voices. And then also in breaking news a lot i think those i mean those are the things that i think you know feel defensible they i know we use these twos all the time for everything in between one thing i feel like tech people don't

52:41Eric Newcomer:get about news is that they often see things as like a big data problem and so it's like oh you want like the best white house summary you just like take all the beat all all the coverage and just sort of like bundle it all together but i think like savvy news consumers often say well right now it's maggie haberman or i mean it's not right now she's writing a book but like you know whatever reporter of the moment on the beat they're like they're getting it and the scoops are assigned they're talking to the real execs if you're super savvy you're like this person really represents this camp but this person represents this camp yeah and like do you think that this sort of do you agree that there is that sort of singular nature where people think of media as like so large but they're often there's very small set and then do you think those really great takes then somehow get licensed to the models or the models miss them or what what

53:32Ben Smith:what happens there i mean i think that that's not something people would be under the models for anytime soon but i agree with you that he's like you know i mean times a lot of reporters but i will read maggie's story immediately and if it's whoever happened if like you know if i was at the times and somehow i got stuck covering the white house on a saturday because nobody else could do well he shouldn't read my search like i don't know more than anybody else you should read maggie's story and they're both in the new york times but they're really totally different kinds of thing and so I think it again pushes toward this you want to hear from an individual person.

54:02Ben Smith:The Times interestingly, I think we at some point have really thought a ton about building around these big individual voices and I think for startups and it's true of you too it's a big advantage to have started from scratch in this moment and be able to build around voices. I think the Times, despite having 1700 journalists and the politics internal politics has been incredibly complicated, actually have embraced this a lot more than I would expect.

54:24Eric Newcomer:I love Jamel Buoy's TikTok, like Ezra Klein's obviously doing a really good job. They just lost.

54:30Ben Smith:That is the problem for media companies though, is there's always a pull to become Eric Newcomer.

54:37Eric Newcomer:Ben Smith, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you.

54:53Eric Newcomer:of venture capital and startups at newcomer.co. If you still yearn for podcasts, I've got this Rubble Valley show with Max Schild and James Wilserman. Otherwise, probably see you in about a week. Thanks for all your support. That's our show.