The Man Who Helped Destroy Gawker Is Coming Back For The Rest of Media

35:04He is a president that had summoned his followers to put pressure on the House of Representatives by sort of coming into it to dispute an election result. But like a democratically elected president of the United States who won the popular vote, right? And a democratically elected Congress, right? Who fully in full compliance with the constitution of the united states has appointed the supreme court right i don't see anything undemocratic well they're right the idea you know this idea i think the washington post looking like democracy dies in darkness like and when basil's cut 30 of the wapos um uh newsroom like people felt like this was like the end of democracy right like be honest with yourself right media you are you are generating clicks by writing articles for billionaires you are not the guardians of democracy take the like get off your moral high horse the new york times story on caesar chavez like that that's one right that story doesn't happen without the new york times doing reporting it's on a leftist saying that he'd you know abused some of his followers i mean they're one the The biggest, like I've been canceled, I wasn't really canceled, but people were screaming me on Twitter was like the New York Times had broken the story on George Santos.

36:32And there were a lot of people on the left attacking the New York Times for failing to do it before he'd been elected. Yeah. And I guess from my experience as a journalist, there are lots of stories that just would never be published. That people, once they're published, people assume like this is part of our culture, this, we've learned this thing. And so these outlets like the Washington Post, New York Times are the ones most frequently doing those types of novel stories that without them would never have been published. And so we lose that when those papers lose capacity. Now, I'm not saying every reporter at the Washington Post was delivering that kind of story.

37:06The New York Times is a multibillion dollar publicly traded company. Are they losing capacity? No, they're gaining capacity. They are doing well. It was the Washington Post. I do think it's helpful to have multiple of these outlets that are doing sort of novel reporting. Well, it's like, do we really need like lots of local newspapers? Do you agree with this premise? I like to have lots of local newspapers. Do you agree with this premise that there are important things that society would like to know that don't just come online?

37:44um but does that mean that we have to like create a special privilege position for the new york times so you you agree you just think that i'm just saying it's part of what gives the new york times value if you don't give them any credit for the fact that like the core thing they do is this really hard thing that there are sort of facts about the world that are not online especially Especially as we enter an AI world, this matters more and more. I feel like... But like what Sam Altman is doing or like what I'm doing is like, I think, really important to our society. But we don't get a special constitutionally enshrined position in society.

38:16But you were defending the constitutionally enshrined position, right? No, no. I was noting that it exists. You don't think there should be a constitutionally enshrined position or... Well, I think with great power comes great responsibility, right? If it is for the distribution of facts, then I believe that there should be a constitutionally enshrined privilege. But then there should be a very high liability for libel, for invasion of privacy, to the point where I think it actually should be criminalized.

38:54Because it's the same thing with politicians. If you give politicians great power, right, in the corollary, if they are corrupt, there should be huge consequences. So this is what Lee Kuang-yoo did with Singapore. He said, yes, we're going to pay our ministers extremely well. They wield almost dictatorial power, and they were able to take a mosquito-infested swamp and make it the richest country in the world. He said, if you're corrupt, straight to jail, straight to Changi prison, right, brutal. and i don't believe that uh you know there has to be both sides of the coin sure there's a lot to unpack there but i want to i want to go back to objection okay be i guess first of all from the sort of i've been maligned by media side yeah why do they want to come to you like don't if i'm paying someone i've been maligned i want the person i'm paying to deliver like the result i want which is like i'm the good guy whereas you're saying we're going to deliver the sort of objective truth yes exactly and so um if you've been maligned by the media you would say the media got the facts wrong right they strung a bunch of anonymous sources together they selectively quoted um a bunch of people right so you know i think of you know the example i i frequently use is the ronin ferro article about sam altman in the new Yorker a few weeks ago, right?

40:19Ronan clearly went out and said, I'm going to write an article about how bad Sam Ullman is. He didn't say, I'm going to go gather a bunch of facts and then be an objective viewer of this. He clearly had a narrative and he found a lot of sources that would confirm that, some of which were on the record and some were off the record. But he admitted he spoke to 150 people and he distilled that down to deliver the narrative he exactly wanted to deliver and what was the consequence of that two days later someone threw a molotov cocktail at sam's house so that story should never exist because they're random crazy people that um number one ronin should be held to an extremely high standard because he's wielding monopoly power greater than one of the wealthiest individuals wait why is it monopoly power because he has an immense ability to distribute right in the new yorker yeah It's like a dying publication.

41:15That's laughable. The New Yorker has prestige, but it is certainly in no way a monopoly. It's like... Not a financial monopoly, but it is a cultural monopoly. No. There are other publications. You could run it like my sub stack. No, but running a narrative like that, you're a sub stack versus the cover of the New Yorker. The New Yorker in no way has a monopoly. I don't know how... It's a powerful cultural institution. It's a powerful cultural institution. But isn't like free press culture in America, like you don't even think it should be more speech like. No, it should be more accountability.

41:51Right. So every on the record source. Isn't this going to ruin the Internet? Because the most sloppy people with their speech are random commoners online. Right. Commoners. Commenters. Commoners. We're not supposed to say that. Whatever. Same difference. The elite media, you know, is far more intentional with what they say. They at least talk to lawyers. Random people like opining online are much sloppier. Although, you know, the corollary to that is, you know, you have a citizen journalist like Nick Shirley, who's just like a kid with an iPhone that did better investigative reporting than anyone at The New York Times.

42:34That's definitely not true. I mean, it's not clear. It's very hard to assess what he's presenting. Well, but it's also very hard to assess what Ronan Farrow and the New Yorker is presenting. So like, how can we make journalism better? But I mean, Sam Altman is going to be a figure of like many profiles. Like to me, the answer on Sam Altman is definitely Ronan Farrow like has a narrative. People, it is a, we call it a story. Like people want a story to have some, he talks to a bunch of people. and even if you were arguing in court opening arguments closing arguments they have a narrative you're presenting you organize the facts but you need to present evidence will you present evidence in a story you're like i talked about why i talked about this is what happened i go to corrections i go to court and i present my narrative it's adversarial it's adversarial and the documentary evidence must be presented so the average federal court case in the united states has a quarter of a million documents supporting it, right?

43:30Out comes a 50-page judgment. So there's like a 99.99 % compression ratio. The New York Times writes a big investigative piece, might be like 2 ,000 words long. On average, according to ChatGPT, they have 10 on-the-record sources. And if you assume they speak for an hour, that's about 100 ,000 words of information that is distilled down to like 2 ,000. So you have like a 98 % compression ratio. And so what I'm trying to do with objection is to fix the decline of media. So according to the Gallup poll in 1970, 70 % of Americans trusted the news media. That's down to 28 % today and 8 % among Republicans.

44:13And, you know, I'm here in New York City today. I'm going to talk to some of the biggest media proprietors in the world. None of them are really focused on solving this trust dimension. Like, you know, if you talk to journalists and say, well, why don't you just pay journalists more money? Right. That doesn't actually solve the structural problem. So how can we actually fix the structural problem of the decline of journalism? Number one, journalists need to show their work. Right. So if you're going to write a story and it's backed up by sources, like just upload the source videos. Right. Upload the source documents.

44:45I'm not against what you're saying necessarily. I just think that like practically my readers are not going to go and spend the time to audit. No, no, no. It helps you, like it helps another company potentially mind my work. But my actual readers are sort of deciding, do I trust him or not? No, no, no. I think that the trust will be higher if you presented all of your background material, right? So this is why podcasts are very powerful. It's like, you know, if they're consumed mostly through clips, like people, It's nice to have the whole thing, but most people in the core monetizable audience wants - They want the clip, but the clip is the opening wedge to watching the full unredacted transcript.

45:29And so maybe only a small percentage of your audience wants to go really deep, but that's very meaningful. And in the era of AI, our capacity to read is unlimited. it. So having an open public data room attached to every story would actually substantially improve the quality of reporting. And I don't think you can doubt this at all. I think it could be valuable. And I agree. I think journalism will be open to it if like the reader shows interest in this stuff. Like I think if you can convince journalism, you know, companies that people will trust them more because, you know, you can have a nice way to show like the sort of archives of their reporting that could be the case i'm somewhat skeptical you'll succeed in getting enough readers to like engage with it that it really changes their reputation i i actually i don't think it's about readers engaging for um generating monetization it's actually for ai training right so um 20 of all the data that chat gpt is trained on is news data but as I said it news data is like 99 % compressed and so if one had access to the you know unique first-party recordings this is a constantly refreshing source of data that could be used to train the most advanced AI model that it's ever existed.

46:52I want to get back into like the pieces of what objection is because so one is sort of you've been you know there's been a hit piece about you have an invent have a response independent investigation there's another piece which is i guess maybe not a profit center for you but i don't know if it's brand exercise or what but like uh we'll create a contractual agreement for whenever you talk to a journalist you should sign in advance so so one thing that's like really shocking about journalism is that jesus um one thing that's keep that in so yeah you're slick and who's not on this show Yeah. One thing that's really shocking about journalism is that we sign terms and conditions when we do everything in life.

47:41You know, when I go to the physiotherapist, when I go to the swimming pool, when I check into a hotel. But when we do an on the record media interview, right, there's there's no paperwork. Right. I came here to your studio today. I know I was going to laugh about this. I didn't say anything. Yeah. Right. And should I have said why? I mean, for a podcast, why should we say anything? Well, what are the usage rights of all this content? I guess I cut it all down. Yeah, like, are you going to, like, you know, shouldn't it be better to say, okay, you assure me that you will not, that, like, you will publish the full unredacted version of this, including you spilling water on your shoe.

48:17It's like, I want that in there. Because if I spilled water on my shoe, it would definitely go in there. It would be like, repeat, repeat, no. Yeah, exactly, right. So you have the full unredacted version of this publicly available on your YouTube channel. Right? Yeah. And like this should be. I just think media is such a shitty business as it is. Like it's going to be hard, you know, any more like burden. Like, oh, this is going to make it slightly more likely I get sued. But I think this is actually what structurally needs to happen is that someone needs to come through. and this is now my job to say, how are we going to restore trust in this very important institution?

48:56So subjects need to have contractual relationships with reporters. Reporters need to show their work. They need to show it in the most comprehensive way possible. Why do we trust courts? Why do we trust science so much more than we trust journalists? Even though 50 years ago, trust in these institutions was all about the same. And journalists have fallen and off the cliff. It's because in science, you have to show your work, right? It's peer review, right? So wouldn't it be better if the New York Times was going to publish a massive investigative piece that it goes to like Fox News first for an independent review to make sure that, you know, if they're using anonymous sources, it's been correctly done, that, you know, they've weighed both sides correctly, right?

49:45Because that's what would happen in science, right i want to dig in i mean a piece of this is you you don't like anonymous sources is that fair i mean are you coming around a little bit i think anonymous sources are a massive power asymmetry um and that there is a technological solution to solving it okay oh that might end i mean because like in tech reporting like a lot of deals are just reported anonymously before they're Yeah. And as someone who is a technology venture capitalist and founder, the quality of this is just so sloppy. But more often than not, if you report the valuation terms, they're right.

50:28And people want to know that information. And a lot of these rounds are widely known among lots of people who haven't even signed contractual agreements. No, no, but like, you know, I saw an article in the FD a couple days ago. It's like early open AI investors are criticizing Sam Allman. Sure. And then it's like, well, you know, there were lots of people who are early investors. Are they people who invested in a triple wrapped SPV? I'm just trying to point out that there are plenty of genres of reporting, whether it's like factual, like financial information, like where it's almost become part of the process that like even the people involved are leaking it sometimes people involved are leaking it but like ultimately there should be external verification of the use of any anonymous source yeah i think if you can figure out like verifying anonymous sources that come true we were talking about this i think if you can verify that anonymous sources come true those people should get extra extra credit yeah it's like because that's the hard that's good journalism and so one thing that we'll be releasing in a couple of weeks is the first ranking system i know i thought you're gonna have in time for me to know yeah where do you stand on the list um and uh you know journalists rank hospitals restaurants universities um you know uh every yeah i think bring it on journalists will love it i just think any fair list is going to put like reuters and ap at the top and reuters at the ap write stories that are boring generally when also far more favorable to like democrats than most you know like fox is not going to do well like fox got sued and settled for what a huge slime or the the dominion voting case yeah right there are many there right um and i you know i my first real job after i was a new york examiner but the reason why the new york times doesn't get sued is because of new york times v sullivan because there's such a high standard such a crazy high standard that was lobbied in for by the media industry but my point is just i've worked in conservative media like i was writing about like local there's the washington examiner covering dc city hall which was more even-handed just a little bit like we love cars and hate unbalanced budgets you know yeah like is like oh my god they're gonna you know kill they're gonna create traffic um but i just felt conservative media like pretty sloppy like i do think like print media is more buttoned up than tv journalism like the new york times is more buttoned up than i'm not sure that um okay so the new york times is an outlier because they have an economic model that actually works wapo doesn't have an economic model right there they're not doing great right now but WSJ.

53:17I mean, the Washington Post, what, just won, I think the public service Pulitzer for covering Trump's like administrative state. Like, I think those were good stories. No one cares. No one cares about this stuff. Like, I don't even know what a public service Pulitzer is. It's the biggest one. It's yeah. Great. But that's, I don't know what the argument embedded in that is. I do think the news consumer being sort of pretty low quality is part of the problem, right? We don't have a discerning consumer stupid americans aren't smart enough to read the newspaper it feels that way right now i mean that is such an elitist uh an elitist are you kidding me like i i admit that i'm an elitist but like you know i'm a capitalist like i don't i don't you know i don't apologize for this i like i i don't i don't apologize in believing the elite like yeah part of what makes the new york times work is those reporters are very sophisticated no way of practicing their craft but but then the the problem is there that you know it's this oppressive economic model right the average journalist in new york time earns like 120 grand a year you can't even afford like a a walk-up studio in the west village i agree let's figure out how to make them more money or i don't know what your point is is that that number one the economic model doesn't stack up right right and and you know my concern principally is that the media proprietors were caught off guard by tech 20 years ago.

54:39So the first unbundling of distribution, you know, people like Salzberger and Murdoch did not understand. Now they really understand that this unbundling of synthesis is happening and they're petrified by AI because ultimately the core task of journalism, which is the synthesis of narrative, is going to be completely unbundled. Yeah, I don't know that they actually get it yet. I don't think they get it. I just had somebody, I can't even remember who it was, but some journalist was like, I mean, AI is never going to get a scoop. I'm like, there are all these public records online where they just pull something out, distill it in a scoop of idea, but also a scoop of fact and public filings.

55:20AI is definitely going to get scoops in those domains. So I definitely agree with you. The AI is coming for not all of journalism. In fact, the key thing it's not coming for is the human anonymous source. you know the thing that's not getting put online so a lot of the things you don't like about media that's what media is going to need to become even more in the world of ai but this is the you know i'm actually like here in new york not to do podcasts but to meet with media owners is that media owners understand that the second unbundling is happening with ai and synthesis now what they don't understand is that the unbundling of research is going to happen and that's going to be the death knell in the coffin of traditional media, right?

56:06Because if the research component of news gathering, right, that empathy of sources and that very humanized element can become unbundled through technology, then the power of the traditional media apparatus is to clients completely. But what do you see? You see this as like Tegas type, like this sort of research, like we're going to pay people to make calls, like ai to make calls no no no i i think it's a combination of ai and humans to uh to work as a sort of like an expert network or hive so i know you're familiar with glg yeah yeah that's what i'm saying yeah that's genre yeah like glg but you know with a strong technology platform for doing unique first-party research so you say okay we want to research um uh if uh equinox is underpaying its employees right so instead of one reporter going there and like talking to every uh staff member about their pay rates what if there were like hundreds of people simultaneously working i know you confuse me because that's like extreme journalism it's like i love it like we need more of that yeah this is what i'm i'm not anti-journalism i'm my goal is to increase the trust of journalism so like it's it's just gone down for 50 years and so i will know if i'm successful if in like 10 years time we're like oh wow it's suddenly gone back to like north of 50 and i don't think anyone wakes up every morning trying to fix this problem like rupert murdoch doesn't the salzburgers don't well they try to do it by practicing the journalism that they believe in but no they're trying to make money right and i do not think the salzburgers are like optimizing for when they want to make money and i'm glad they figured out games but they're optimizing for But of all publications, they, I mean, sorry, of all industries, media has tried to hold on to some sort of principles, even as it's hurt their business model.

57:56They're just trying to patch the leaking ship, right? Most of them. But like, that's what they're trying to do right now. And, you know, they're not thinking about like this massive structural transition that is going on. Like, you know, there's probably like one or two like very good thinkers in the top echelons of these media companies who are thinking about AI and the synthesis unbundling. But I can assure you that no one is thinking about the research unbundling. The actual accumulation. Yeah. How information is acquired.

58:29And there's some elements of how human thought is used to adjudicate, rank, train, tag that information. biology has expressed this point of view recently that sort of like everything that should be written about is sort of the stuff we put online like that that is sort of like online is our self presentation yeah and that the stuff offline that's like private do you agree with that because i find it i feel like a key part of understanding how society works is like what's your life actually look like like to me i feel like we don't have nearly enough visibility into all these people we hear from all the time like don't we need to know what like do you need to know like i feel like we need more of a portrait we all become the part of what people like about podcasts is that they get a little bit more of the humanity but i want an even more extreme like let's give a real sense of like but i think ai is actually like very good at that so it's like um you know i was talking to a journalist and they were like oh you know what color is like peter teal's couch like and they're like i want to write this like in-depth very personal piece and i'm like don't you know how to use google like you know you could eat like if you knew what you were looking for and ai can do this very well you would be able to figure out where his houses are who his interior designer is and you know what his taste in art and well journalists don't want to be like probably right they want to know they want somebody who's seen the couch not like oh it could be no but like you could actually find all the stuff it's already all on the internet.

1:00:00I'll throw up the gauntlet. I don't think you can find Peter Thiel's couch. You might see a picture that is of Peter Thiel, but it'd be sort of hard to know. No, but AI is actually very good at that. You could, you know, get qualified. Come back right in the comments. Here's a picture of Peter Thiel's couch. Smart engineers out there. Can you figure out what kind of couch Peter Thiel has? I wanted to ask specifically the whole like Antichrist sort of thing. I mean, you made a point earlier in this discussion that the stuff that gets people's attention is, you know, sort of controversial. Like, do you think this the Antichrist thing is like an attention seeking strategy?

1:00:38No, no, no, no. I think, you know. This is Peter Thiel giving a bunch of essays about the Antichrist. So and it potentially being like Greta. Greta Thunberg. Yeah. So, no, I think what's more important is to think about the place of God in our society. and so um all great businesses are cults yeah right and like we know this from like apple and like ai is kind of this cult dimension to it the new york times is a cult uh media late media circles are definitely a cult um and it's amazing leaving a company and you're like oh my god i cared about all these like weird weird things weird things and then you're out of it you're like i don't care about that at all anymore yeah so i definitely agree with you i mean but but But called it a non-negative way.

1:01:21That's how humans work. It's how humans work. And so why do we work that way? And so Jean-Paul Sartre had this thesis is that human being that on evolutionary biology level, species that cooperate will outcompete those that do not cooperate. And the manifestation of this in humans is religion. It's like this social glue that pulls us together. and in every civilization for the entire history of the world up until the fall of the atomic bomb, we were religious. And then after the atomic bomb, we have become an atheistic society. And Satra called this the God-shaped hole. And so we now fill this God-shaped hole with things like the cult of carbon, right?

1:02:13Greta Thunberg is like this, you know, it's almost like praying to the weather gods. Oh, please, you know, if we sacrifice enough of ourselves, sacrifice our young, sacrifice our old, we will appease the weather gods. And, you know, Taylor Swift is a goddess, right? And there's a sort of cult of... Fairly innocuous one. Well, maybe the cult of Athena was fairly innocuous. So the point about Peter and the Antichrist essays is that I think that the God-shaped hole, the lack of religion in our society, is deeply under-theorized and helps explain why Taylor Swift has become a goddess because we lack goddesses in our society.

1:03:00but i don't think the answer is just then start believing in religion again because i mean the answer is the answer is maybe start building new religions an ai an ai god or what do you think it's going to be well like the rise of ai is according to professor peter franco pan from oxford um has the historic analogy of the rise of organized religion right there is this you know priesthood that understands the sacred text and that no one else does. Like, do you actually know how an LLM works? Somewhat, but certainly on the level of a Dario. Yeah, exactly, a general purpose transform. So there's this now priestly caste who has special access to the divine and that normal humans must prostrate themselves too to have access to the divine.

1:03:50Why focus on, I know you didn't write the essays, but you're maybe as close as, Maybe you'll help me get Peter Thiel on here someday if he can watch this and decide for himself. But, I mean, why focus on the negative instead of the positive? Like, I just feel like the Antichrist, yeah, it's the darkest thing in the world. Like, what we need is positive value. Like, what should we be worshiping, right? Yes. And I, well, but, you know, to understand what we should be worshiping, we must understand what we shouldn't be worshiping. No, I think it's easier. It's much easier. Like, humans love to, like, hate the other.

1:04:24It's easy to like come up with like hate them. Like, you know, that's sort of the problem. The challenging one is to come up with like who should we worship, you know. But if there's anything to admire about Jesus Christ is that he built the greatest narrative in the history of the world. Right. You know. So it's Ronan Farrow. He's a monopolist level narrative speaker. He's our new God. I mean, I want to end on that one. But I mean, I just think like my view of the culture is that like Sam Altman is going to be profiled endlessly. That Ronan has built a reputation with story after story that people can assess for itself.

1:04:59Like, sure, maybe if there was a lot of like skepticism, he could release more information. But I just think the answer is more journalism. Whereas your answer is scare Ronan out of doing that through like legal process. No, my answer is better structured journalism. I mean, one interesting idea you have is like have like the anonymous sources in some sort of like. Cryptographic hash. Yeah, exactly. So cryptographic hashes, data rooms, show your work, peer review. Like I think these are all tools that can be combined to raise the quality of journalism. And I can see it. Making up anonymous sources, I just don't know that it's like I don't think that's Ronan Farrow's like problem.

1:05:43I think your issue with Ronan Farrow is much more likely to be just like his selection of which, how to present the narrative. Exactly. And so if we now have the tools to judge the presentation of narrative, and that's what AI and keep things are. I mean, you're the guy who like brought down Gawker, which— I'm the guy who's done many things. Yeah, you've done many things. But I'm just saying part of—you're now building a company that sort of needs equally the people who hate the media and the media to like them. Like, what is your message for journalists when one of the things you're most known for is sort of what many journalists see as like a hostile act?

1:06:19Like, how are you going to get journalists to the table? But your own owners are very hostile. Hostile to? Journalism. Like Rupert Murdoch and the clickbait incentive structure of journalism today is very hostile to the art of journalism that, you know, you go to journalism school for. Yeah. Well, I mean, clickbait is sort of on the way. Yeah, that problem was a sort of Facebook specific. Yeah. And some of the clickbait stuff, yeah, it was more media reacting to the pressures of social media than something they necessarily wanted to do. The thing is that media is not in the driver's seat anymore.

1:06:54Right. Right. And it's because, you know, people like Rupert Murdoch and the Salzburgers 20 years ago didn't understand the unbundling of technology. And now that is, you know, it's ever present in their face. And they still don't understand it. Like it's so painful to watch these legacy media owners. Like, you know, years ago I was talking to them about AI and they had no clue what was going on. And, you know, they did these sort of cash licensing deals with people like OpenAI, but they should have done equity deals. But they didn't. I mean, my worry with you is just the sort of, you know, if I think a lot of what you're doing is like very interesting and I support.

1:07:31And I like this idea of like having actually like rank reporters and like assess them over time and trying to sort of figure out the objective truth online. And we're going to have all these problems like with AI, like right now they depend on the media in some ways to adjudicate like prediction markets and stuff like that. But I do worry that a lot of it, like what you're actually doing in the beginning is sort of just the like go after stories and sort of for hire, like we're going to, you know, figure out all the information we can to undermine like this. story. Yes, absolutely. But you want to undermine fairly, right?

1:08:05It's like undermine with the truth. No, no. It's an editorial process. It's like find all the information that could undermine the story. Because if I'm assigned to peer review a scientific publication that's going to go in like the journal of nature, I should do absolutely everything I can to find any flaws in the argument. Because if a major publication like the New England Journal of Medicine or the Lancet publishes even a modicum of false information that can have disastrous consequences. And in particular, I point to the MMR causing autism scandal, right, where the Lancet published that article.

1:08:45And, you know, in retrospect, they should have done a lot more peer review. And to this day, you know, I think if you talk to your average American, they would think that the MMR vaccine causes autism right and as someone who who got um measles or uh sorry mumps when i was in college oh yeah because there's not enough herd immunity i think that very seriously right and so you think about what damage has been done because journalists are not subject to that same level of peer review and scrutiny right and i i agree with you i mean i think sometimes and i'll wrap up soon i know i'm sure you have to go like the um you know reporters sometimes because their employees are at a disadvantage on these like online like talking about their stories like i feel like one thing that i've really had as an advantage is just like being self-published yeah this is the subject then i can actually like respond whereas the new york times is sort of like we want to publish the story and let that speak for itself that's our editorial process and so then you don't have this like a dialogue yeah whereas like for me it's like i need the dialogue i want more engagement i want Yeah, exactly.

1:09:48So I support a lot of these things. And I think some of it is just like the media industry shifting still to this online world where you have to be sort of like open for discussion and feedback. And I don't think the legacy institutions, you know, they're adjusting now to the first unbundling of distribution. But there's, they have no strategy. There's more coming. There's so much more coming and it's going to hit them like a tsunami. And they haven't even properly like thought about it. Aaron, thanks so much for coming on the show. Hopefully the first of many. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, absolutely.

1:10:19Thanks for having me. Thanks. That's the Newcomer Podcast. Thanks for listening. Please like, comment, subscribe. Check out my other show, The Struble Valley Show. Also on YouTube, go to the substack newcomer.co and read our coverage of startups and venture capital. I'm Eric Newcomer, a longtime journalist. Now I say I'm an influencer who exceeds expectations. I ask hard questions about the startup and venture capital industry. Follow along wherever, watching, reading, and even coming to our events. I host the Struble Valley AI Summit. Thanks for all your support. I love the comments. I love the likes.

1:10:49Please keep them coming. Thanks so much. I'll see you next week.