404 Media Live: NYC!

0:00Hey, everyone. This is a recording from our second anniversary party at Farm One in Brooklyn on August 21st. It was the first time all four of us had been in the same room since before we launched 404 Media. If you came out, thank you so much. We had a blast. If you couldn't make it, here's the recording. Before we get started, I wanted to mention that this podcast and the party was sponsored by Delete Me, who've been supporting 404 Media since the beginning and whose product we've used for years to keep our information off the internet. 404 Media listeners get 20 % off at joindeleteme.com slash 404media.

0:31Use code 404media. Here's our podcast. Fuck. I was playing. Oh, shit. Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. Like everybody here, thank you so much for subscribing. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments, gain access to that content at 404media.co I'm your host Joseph and with me are the 404 Media co-founders Sam Cole Emmanuel Mayberg and Jason Kebler Hello, hello Jason got the most woos which I didn't get anything So we have this big round of questions we're going to go through that thank you to everybody who wrote one but Jason you recently wrote well it actually comes out tomorrow so yeah preview preview so we wrote as we do every year I say every year as if it's regular this is only the second one but you know a blog post on what we've learned what we're going to do in the future how the last year has been do you just quickly want to summarize that and tell people what 404 has been doing for the past year Yeah, I think first, I just want to thank all of you for coming.

2:06Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah. And thank you for being jam-packed in here. We have had three parties, four parties, I guess. And the last couple, we've tried to do some sort of podcast talk, etc. And I think we're all shocked, stunned, surprised, thrilled that anyone comes to them. I think when we started this, It started as just like an idea among the four of us. And the fact that we now have a community and people who come out for something like this is just incredible. So thank you so, so, so, so much. Let's clap for you. Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. But yeah, I think that there's a post coming out tomorrow and it's a summary of what we've been trying to do with 404 Media.

2:53I think if you're here, you probably know a little bit about us. But we started this company with the idea that perhaps the last place we worked wasn't so good at business. And which I think was obvious probably to everyone. But being like inside that building, there's so many people doing such amazing, such amazing work. And they didn't seem to be able to figure out how to make. Well, they did figure out how to make money, but they spent too much. And so we were like, what if we just spent way less money? What if we stripped this down to the bare minimum? And so we started a blog. Aaron Shapiro over here helped design our website.

3:37Let's clap for him. Thank you for coming. And we started on Ghost, which is a nonprofit open source CMS. And then we started publishing blogs. And the entire hope and thought was that if we did good journalism, people would subscribe to it. And that was pretty much the business plan. And that has remained the business plan. And it's worked. It's worked really well. We're doing well financially. The company is existing and thriving. And I think that a year ago, we had a party at the woods. And I couldn't come to it because I had COVID, which was very upsetting. very devastating for me. But I was trying to put myself back in that place a year ago, thinking like, oh, what have we done over the last year?

4:26What has changed? And at first I was like, well, I don't know. I don't know what has changed. I can't remember because we've really been like heads down trying to do the best work that we can. But then you take like 365 days of blogging and just like small decisions and look up. And we started like very cautiously expanding. Rosie Thomas is here. She's our fellow. Rosie is here from Rose. So clap for Rosie. She's done really good work. We have Case Hearts, who is in Austin, Texas, who's been doing our social media three days a week. We have Matthew Galt, who's in South Carolina, who's been writing about the military industrial complex and been doing a really good job.

5:06You know, we've just been focusing a lot on doing good stories and expanding out from there. And I think, like, we have done work that has spurred congressional investigations. We've done work that's gotten people fired. We've done work that has caused really bad companies to change their policies and still do bad stuff, but like slightly less of it. So that's good, that's good. And I think a lot more, but up here in front of all of y 'all, I'm blanking a bit. So I don't know, do any of you have anything to add? That was a long speech for me. Should I rapid fire read our impact on the last year?

5:46some of the highlights. Okay, yeah. See, the people want to hear it. I'm going to read the URLs also. Never mind, kidding. So, okay, I'm going to read this fast. We revealed that ICE was tapping into Flock, which is a nationwide AI-enabled camera network. And since then, a police department shut off its external access to the cameras after learning they were being searched for immigration-related offenses. Austin banned Flock in its city, specifically citing a reporting. The company now says it has severed access to Illinois databases. It was also a story about Texas cops who searched Flock for a woman who had a self-administered abortion.

6:18Illinois Secretary of State is investigating the company, and Congress opened a formal investigation maybe a week and a half ago into Flock. Meta sued a Nudify app that 404 Media reported brought thousands of ads to Instagram and Facebook. It brought the news that TeleMessage, a signal clone used by the Trump administration, was hacked. The DOJ and Customs Border Protection paused its use of the tool. Civitai, repeatedly shown to create non-consuming adult content, banned all of its AI models that did that shit. We found that Coca-Cola was running an AI-powered ad that got basic facts wrong and fabricated quotes from authors.

6:56Coca-Cola pulled the ad in response. A public library e-book service said it was going to cull AI slop after a manual found low-quality books that were flooding the libraries. NVIDIA sued. NVIDIA was sued after it revealed the company was scraping YouTube and other sites like Netflix about its own AI systems. and like a bunch of other shit. I mean, it's just, it goes on from there and you can read the post tomorrow and click each of these. But it's a very long list. And on top of that, we've done a lot around like Doge and the, they can mingle, it's okay. And the things that the Trump administration has been doing online and off, especially around immigration and all the ways that tech enables surveillance surveillance and surveillance state.

7:42We established and I think defined AI Slop as a whole entire genre. If anybody has heard of Shrimp Jesus, that's probably because of the story Jason wrote. I think it's from the stickers. We have Shrimp Jesus stickers available at the merch table. There are very few, so grab them. Don't everybody run and mob it. And then we have a cake coming out later that has got a surprise on it, and the surprise is that there's AI Slop on it. Yeah, we've just been, I don't know, like I read that and I'm like, no wonder like my shoulders hurt. But also like, I would rather, there's nothing I would rather be doing more than all of that.

8:17So, and it's because you guys support us and let us do that work. It literally wouldn't exist without you. So this is a celebration of you guys. We wanted to say thank you. Come get a drink on us. Eat a piece of AI slop cake. Now I'm thinking I should have bought three sheet cakes instead of one. But yeah, it's it's all because of you guys. So that's, that's why we're here. Do you want to add anything? Comments, Emmanuel. Let's get the questions. No. Yeah, let's do questions. So we have, we have these, maybe we'll do a microphone question situation. We can also like, if you scream your question, we will answer them in real life, but.

9:01Let's have a jar. Let me, let me find, let me find a punchy one to start. A punchy one. Sun, moon, rising. Sun, moon, rising. Do you guys know your sun, moon, rising? I know mine. I really don't. I'm a Virgo sun, Pisces moon, Sagittarius rising. Very good. Very good. I don't know. And I don't want to say my birthday. Because I don't want to get hacked. Because why? I don't want to get hacked. It's just my personal day. I'll tell you that much. May 2nd, 8 p.m. 1988. Someone look that up. Let me know. I'd love to know. In Maryland? No. That is probably in here a lot. So, so someone here actually wrote this.

9:49Not a question, but a comment. More of a question than a comment. Sometimes I hear you all defending what you cover or how you cover, but I think all the reporting is nuanced and thoughtful. Don't waste your time defending against the haters. Thank you. Wow, that's a very, that's a very good comment. However, if anyone is mad at us, we have to respond. Even one person in great detail. It's a flaw, I think, that we mostly have. But only in the subscribers' podcasts. You have to pay us to beef with this. The subscriber podcast is a safe space where we can beef, basically, without consequence. Yeah.

10:31Do you think more employee-owned media can reinvigorate local news outlets? yeah hell yeah hellgate's doing it in New York hellgate the city fantastic local did everybody see the the crisp packet incredible story that you're not going to read in the times or you know a large paper they'll see that as a graph a single graph in a broader story no that's a fucking that's a great block Aaron sent a question that was how much would the money have to be in the chips to keep it well I would never take 50 million okay I was gonna say I would never take a bribe Joseph but fine I think uh yes Hellgate and the city have proven it I think New York City is a little bit of a special case but I do think that local news obviously needs reinvigorating and I think it's not just Hellgate in New York, but there's a company called Racket in Minneapolis that is doing it.

11:37Coyote is launching in San Francisco. I'm blanking on many other... LA Taco. I don't know if it's totally employee-owned, but it's very similar vibes and it's just running circles around people in terms of ice coverage in LA. So I do think that this model works. I think it can also scale a little bit because the costs of running something like this are extremely low now. Like the actual infrastructure of setting up a website and accepting payments and setting up all the business backend is essentially nothing at this point. And so I think that if these publications can figure out how to serve their readers, I hope that it can really help local media.

12:25And what they need to do, you just publish, publish, publish. You just keep going. You just keep finding stuff. You keep writing articles. And I think there's a danger in that people can launch an outlet, work for a long time on investigation, throw it into the world, which is a great thing. But only a few people may see that. So you just, you have to keep going. You have to be really, really, really aggressive. But those other outlets that Jason mentioned show that it's possible for local media. Absolutely. Emmanuel. So this question is, what are your thoughts on AI-induced delusions? Who is to blame?

13:02An easy one. I don't know. I think as we've talked about on the pod before, we, as people who are public and have our contact information public, We hear from people who are often suffering from some sort of mental health problems pretty often. People who think they're being stalked or hacked, but clearly they're just in the middle of some kind of crisis. I think we all have noticed an uptick in that type of communication to us recently. And all of it is themed around AI. So I don't know. I don't have an easy answer. It's like, clearly, there's some underlying mental health problem always involved.

13:48And it seems like AI is a big trigger. And it seems that the way that these chatbots are programmed to solicit more conversation from users and always hype them up and indulge every idea that they have is not the best idea. And you see OpenAI already kind of like trying to augment that behavior. So yes, the AI companies are to blame there, but they did not invent mental health problems. But that's a bigger society problem that we're not going to solve with a software update. Yeah, I've been talking to a psychiatrist in Silicon Valley who's studying this. I haven't gotten very far yet, but I'm talking to him about what he thinks is going on and trying to figure out like, I don't know, what do psychiatrists think?

14:46Like, is AI causing this? Or is it something where someone is like, already has mental illness and starts talking to ChatGPT or whatever, and sort of goes off the deep end? But I will say, the reason that I started looking into this is because the emails that we're getting from people who say like I'm being surveilled by ChatGPT or ChatGPT has sentience at this point like we have to show you this. The emails are very similar to one another in a way that I find to be like quite disturbing where it seems like there's some sort of pattern that it's pushing people down a specific road. But I guess more to come there.

15:27Next question. Do you ever worry about your own safety as journalists covering topics related to government and corporations. Can you share some of the steps you take to protect yourselves? No, we can't. Yes, we do have significant security concerns. We've all been doing this for a long time, 10 years plus. We have pissed off a lot of people across that time. And I'm not going to go through them like a laundry list. But I'll say a couple of things. You can only really do security proactively. You can't do it retroactively. So if you haven't done your homework and set up a mailbox or cleared up your online presence through various ways, if you haven't done that, then someone gets annoyed and comes after you.

16:19It is way, way harder to clean that up than if you were taking the steps in the first place, which is very, very difficult because you never really know who you're going to annoy, who you're going to piss off and who is going to get mad at you. Obviously, if you're just covering a certain beat, maybe you can figure it out that way. But it's very, very difficult. And sometimes the most random person is the one that you suddenly have to worry about. So I would tell people, try to threat model as much as you can. Try to do it proactively rather than retroactively. And you'll be better off than if you don't do that.

17:02Yeah.

17:07Hello, hello. I would just add somebody in the question they asked about the government And I would say we're like not worried about our physical safety so much with the government. It's not like, I don't know, I'm worried about a black bag, black helicopter situation. But the fear with the government, as we also saw this year, I think it was this year, is they just send you a subpoena or something like that. That's like our concern there. And that did. Yeah, there's an AG in Texas, Kim Paxton, who wanted to get our notes on a story about Google, which is not something that we ever want to do.

17:48And I think we'll ever do. And because of your support, we have a very fancy, very good lawyer and we fought them and we won. Yeah.

18:02That's very well said. And I think that, as Joseph said, security, you have to do it beforehand. And once your information is out there, it's very hard to get it removed. It's very hard to solve a security problem after the fact. And that's the same case with legal cases. And so thankfully, we had an experience at Vice where we got sued by a company called ShotSpotter for... I believe they wanted$100 million. $230 million. $230 million. Thank you. And that was, I would say, a year and a half long process that was, as far as legal situations go, quite easy. Our lawyer was never that concerned. It did get thrown out.

18:51And yet that was also horrible, horrible to go through. And so I think the same goes with legal as it does with security, where we try to be very proactive about how we report stories, try to understand libel laws, try to understand shield laws, try to understand all that sort of thing. And all of that happens behind the scenes. And it has to happen behind the scenes because, I don't know, you don't talk about your legal defense on a specific story in the story. That doesn't make any sense. but uh well this is broadly talk talking broadly so it's okay um but uh yeah there's a lot there's a lot of stuff that happens like that no one can see that uh i think we try to be as transparent about as we can because it is helpful i think for other journalists who are thinking about starting something like this um and so i don't know we haven't done like a guide about how to do this sort of thing, but it is very much like something we think about a lot.

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21:37How do we get people to think about and care about ethics and tech when they won't even fact check a Facebook post? I'll fact check it for them. But does anyone who wants to take this so I can do your mic? I mean, I'm going to talk about it from the perspective of the actual tech employees. And it would be very much a company culture thing. and I'm weirdly going to point to Palantir. Palantir is a very interesting company for a lot of ways, I'm sure you can imagine. But I got this big leak from Palantir recently that I'm sure some of you read and it was their justification for working with ICE.

22:19And in that, they went to great pains to explain that relationship, to explain almost the philosophical process of why they think it's good and right to do this work. I read Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, his book, and I can't square what he says in that book. We need to protect Western values. We need to protect America. We need to protect the West while providing the technical infrastructure for an agency that's actively undermining those threats and throwing people into vans without due process and all of that sort of thing. Which is to say, even when you have an internal philosophy department, which Palantir does with the Privacy and Civil Liberties board, I think, they might still come to the batshit conclusion, which is obviously wrong.

23:08So maybe more tech companies need to have sort of these internal philosophy departments. But even then, clearly, it has to come from external pressure as well, where they're actually going to make just not even the moral argument, the logically coherent argument because they're not even doing that essentially can i do a question can i do one of these okay so what's the most out of touch a story has made you feel uh so it wasn't a story but we had an extremely absurd debate on slack we were writing some sort of brain rot story and jason and i debated what giat means and like the etymology of giat because it's like i contended that giat basically refers to an ass like god damn look at that ass and you were like no giat has been removed from you your argument is like giat is removed from the original meaning and is now just like meaningless rot like what What are the other...

24:22I mean, like, what? Like, skibbity, et cetera, et cetera. I think, yeah, yeah. Things of this nature. I do think that yacht does mean ass, though. Is this the debate we're actually having? I said it meant ass, and you were like, no, it's something else. Oh, yeah. So I'm right. Okay. Once again, I win. I think I was maybe just being argumentative that day, possibly. So two almost 40-year-olds arguing about What gya means. Pretty out of touch. Well, under 40 over here. So I don't know about out of touch, but I think when I was doing some of the Facebook slop articles, I really spent many, many, many hours scrolling through bizarre AI on Facebook and reading the comments and seeing mostly older people, but not all older people, really engage extensively with fake content and things like that.

25:25And I don't think I've ever felt more upset doing a story that was kind of silly. It started kind of silly and I was like, oh, Debbie from Wisconsin is really arguing about this deck and whether it's up to code. And the deck doesn't exist. But like, John from Pennsylvania says that he is a building inspector and that the supports are not there. And it goes on for like many hours and days. And there's like millions of these posts. And I felt like pretty psychologically damaged from that, I would say.

26:06Shall we go to another one? Oh, you have one. Okay. You are number one. So I think Sam gave this to me because I'm the one that has overlooked the podcast. I'm seeing quite a few podcast episodes each week these days. How long does it take to produce each episode on average? Well, if some of you have been following us from the start and listened to the podcast from the start in August 2023, that took a long time because I was doing the audio engineering. and I don't know fuck all about audio engineering. I was opening it in audacity and being like, well, that waveform looks big, so I should probably make that small so it's not peaking.

26:48And editing out the ums and ahs and all of that sort of thing. So that took a long, long time. And then we brought on Alyssa from Kaleidoscope, who has done an amazing job where now we just log into Riverside, which is also full of AI slop at this point, all this turn your face into a baby or something or no I'm good I'm trying to run a business and we log on we record actually before that I spend about half an hour reading every story we're going to talk about making the questions writing the questions in an order that feels natural so we're not just rambling I try to keep people tight we try to keep it half an hour 40 for the free and we go up to 50 an hour for the paid.

27:36And then Alyssa edits it. And that takes a couple of hours, something like that. That is so much better than it was when we first started. And again, we can only hire and pay for Alyssa because of subscribers. So I'm really appreciative of that, because that gives me more time to go investigate a company or something like that. Oh, sorry. I caught your mic. Very rude. I was gonna say, clearly, we were very good at audio engineering. As you can tell. No, we are trying our best. I really like this device. However, we got a lot of complaints at the beginning about our audio levels and background noise and things like that.

28:16And we're clearly not good at it. So I am very glad that we've been able to pass it off to Alyssa. I think that a lot of our podcasts, as Joseph said, we just hop on and start talking. And the good news is we're talking about stories that we had just done that week. And so there is some pre-production from Joseph in terms of writing a document for us to talk about and things like that. But the format of our podcast means that we're able to mostly just hop on and record. which is important because I think if we weren't doing that, we would spend all week making a podcast and not doing the stories.

28:56And then maybe the podcast would be boring. I hope you like the podcast, but I like doing it. Let's do two more card questions and then a couple of audience if you want. Although you're all here, but... All right, I'll read it since my mic is on. What was the startup cost for 404? Asking for a friend. I mean, this is very well documented. We each put in a thousand bucks to start to start like to get the website set up. What else did we even need at that point? It's just the website. It was like all the lawyer, the insurance, like the stuff that we would need to actually start hitting the ground running and doing the reporting that we wanted to do.