#23 - Harleen Kaur - Exposing News Media Bias

29:26100%. There is one small other thing that happened. If you've heard of fairness doctrine, so fairness doctrine, and this is where I don't think legislation is always the right answer, But fairness doctrine was introduced by FCC, the Federal Communication Commission, in 1949, that whenever a newspaper, for example, at that time is writing about something, they are supposed to present what is a counter opinion. So basically the ground use of that time, like you are a journalist, it's your responsibility to provide the full picture. But it was abolished in 1987. So basically, networks, again, picking up CNNs and Fox News of the world in 1987, like Roger Ailes, if I'm correct at that time or whatever, go ahead, just take one side of the story and exaggerate it, and that's okay.

30:18It's not your responsibility. to. So I think news was more of a utility, just as you can depend on electricity or clean drinking water. And it was viewed as that. That really, really changed at some point in time and said, okay, no news and entertainment, perhaps the lines could be blurred. And it's very much the burden was put on the consumer to say, hey, if you want to get the full picture, if you want to tell what's right or wrong, you can do it. But again, that's 1987. But now, like, as you're saying, internet, it's not the problem came with internet, but got exaggerated so much because every single person can go and write what they want.

30:55And it's like, not just that the water was hot or cold, it's like, there's so much poison water and whose job is it to tell them what, what flavor or what, what kind of, whose job is it to regulate? Or again, as I said, not the regulation is not necessarily the right answer, but there was no incentive to be able to present that full, full picture. So yeah, I think some of the safeguards that were put in place having been removed as well didn't serve all of us. Do you have any stories or examples of people who have had their worldviews, their minds changed or their ability to sense make noticeably improved because of using your app or anything else that's sort of similar, trying to do a similar thing.

31:45Yeah, I smile because I think that's one of the things that keeps us going considering how hard it is. And entrepreneurship is such a marathon that it takes so long. We do get emails, reviews all the time that, oh my, I don't know, my father, my uncle, my aunt, my neighbor, that person was so far gone down the rabbit hole or some cases myself, Like I was ascribing to one side of the world you use so much and I felt so anxious and I started using something like Grand News and it just made me feel better about what's happening in the world. And yeah, to your point, like we, our perception of the world being such a bad place, I feel better about it after reading Grand News.

32:32and I think we do this so well and I would like to highlight this is because we are not passing any judgment. I think it's really, really important to have everybody's starting point. So regardless if you're reading Mother Jones today and going back to if you're reading Infowars today or Breitbart today, if you come to a platform like Ground News and if your starting point is missing, you're like, okay, these people clearly don't respect what I think today. Why should I really start with that? and just creating that environment that regardless of what your starting point is, come to Grind News, we are not going to say, hey, we are not going to shove it down your throat and say this is the right or wrong.

33:09We are just going to make it available. And what we see is in our analytics that to begin with, people come and read something like two or three their go-to news sources and that happens during the first couple of weeks. But then within the first three months, the number of news sources that people are visiting on an average triples. so which which is exactly what we are trying to do is making it accessible so easily that you are almost curious and say oh let me just click on this one and and see what what they had to say to begin with it's it's mostly fueled by skepticism and that's okay okay i think that's not a bad bad motivation but then what we find is it's very hard to then go back to a world of reading just one single perspective about anything um and and that's kind of the challenge for our product as well to begin with.

33:57It's very hard to train somebody to read news differently than it has been read since like Gutenberg Press, which is like one headline and one article to come to ground news and well, all this data is being thrown at you. But once you do it and once you get used to it, it's very, very hard to go back to just reading one view of the world. One, just going back on that, not just a personal story. We had a study that we collaborated with Duke University. And they wanted to see that if a platform like Ground News can actually change people's hearts and minds, to your point, if we have seen examples of that.

34:36And they did a study in which I believe close to 2 ,000 people participated. And how the study worked was they self-identified themselves as liberals or conservatives. And then they were given one version of story versus the other. And what people saw was just seeing the other side of the perspective.

35:03Overwhelmingly, people changed their mind. And that was for us very, very encouraging and rewarding to say that just seeing the other perspective is sometimes just starting at the same page is all you need to be able to have a more meaningful conversation. What's your average or most common demographic? As of now, it's mostly Americans, because I think the problem, although the product is available worldwide, and we have news sources from all over the world, it's mostly American, and it is mostly male. Unfortunately, I would love for more women to use a product like Ground News. Age is somewhere around 25 to 50.

35:44So people who are open, open to other perspectives, open to finding out more and want to do that in an efficient way is kind of who we are resonating with right now. Right. Because I imagine the slightly frustrating thing is the people who are open to using ground news are probably the people who least need it in the first place. I mean, I'm not to say that, you know, I consider myself pretty aware of the issues of media bias. I still have, you know, I still get gotten all the time. I still have my biases plenty of them and so on and like so it's definitely still beneficial for anyone to be using these this kind of aggregator this kind of meta information but how to solve the problem because it's it's the people who at the extremes who have the biggest sort of yes skew in the first place and they are the the least likely people to be interested in a kind of even though to be fair you present the data in a very palatable way and it is you know aesthetically it's just very it's it's nice.

36:47It's, it's like the trouble with data is it's just not, it's never that sexy to the type of people who don't need this in the first place. So how do we get, how do you overcome that? Like, is there a way you can like Gen Z-ify it? Or boomerify it, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's, it's very, very good question. And you're a hundred percent right. I think right now we have, we are very happy to have subscribers and people who support us, But I think these were people who were actively looking for a product like us. So we are patting ourselves on the back. But at the same time, yes, we haven't even scratched the surface.

37:21There are a lot of people who could use a product like Ground News. And probably your listeners haven't heard about Ground News until today because we are not getting out there. Yeah, it's a challenge, I think, especially if you are steeped in this one way of thinking. And you're right. I think both Gen Zs and boomers, for example, just picking on them for a second. I think Gen Zs and millennials, I saw this study, are more likely to fall for fake news, which blows my mind because we always end up blaming the older people. Oh, they can't tell. But I think Gen Zs and millennials are more susceptible to groupthink or following individuals and just listening to or to hanging off words of an influencer a lot more than, let's say, a boomer might be.

38:08so yes it is challenging and yeah on the other side of the spectrum yeah like oh i've i've i've heard cnn all of my life or i've read new york times all my life why would i need another another perspective to open up my mind it's a challenge for us that how how do we change change that one strategy we are using is actually going and speaking to these influencers or in some ways sponsoring these influencers as well to talk about ground news. Because what I find is if you can convince them, they are a great way of convincing their own audience and we borrow their credibility to be able to reach out to their audience and say, hey, I used this product and I really liked it.

38:52And I think the genuineness of that, even although it's sponsored content, really, really comes through to their followers and say, okay yeah I um I I believe in that and I think that might be one of the strategies and we sometimes do get questioned oh yeah you guys sponsored somebody who's extreme right or extreme left why did you do that because yeah the same reason because these people they're actually the ones who need a lot yeah exactly in some ways it's like vaccination like yeah no I mean it's like again as long as you sort of got a rough rough balance between you know left and right it's actually almost better to have some very extreme people.

39:33100%. That's exactly what you need to be reaching. Also, you mentioned you've reached out to influencers. That's how I came to know you guys. You reached out to me and you're like, hey Liv, can you check out this? This looks cool. Now, to be clear, I'm not being paid to do this interview. I just was like, okay, this is really cool. I haven't figured out how and if I want to monetize WinWin yet. So I haven't taken any sponsorships yet, but that seems to be the way most people sustain their podcasts. and I mean, who knows, long run. But yeah, like I was like, okay, I don't want to take any money from you guys, but I actually want to interview you because this is exactly what I've been thinking about.

40:08And we really appreciate that. We really, really appreciate that. Thanks for giving us the time. Yeah, no, I mean, it's definitely one of the solutions to, at least it's a contributing part to solving this media moloch problem. What other solutions do you think are promising? Like whether it's other platforms that are doing a similar thing to you guys or just a completely different other approach? Because you guys are kind of an education. That's how I see you. You're basically solving this through an education standpoint, a sort of bottom-up education. Are there any more top-down, whether they're regulation solutions or something completely different that you think we should be doing more of?

40:52In the beginning, let's just focus on news media and then we can talk about social media. I'm a bit wary of regulation because, again, it's like getting the incentive right is so, so important. And legislation gets it wrong so often. All the time, yeah. Which is why I'm wary of that. Not necessarily a media solution, but one thing that I certainly find is very important is it's outside the screen in real life speaking to people that you do not agree with. I think that is, it's very uncomfortable for us. And I think all of us have lost that skill of to be able to, it's like that Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas party or, yeah, just again, just being able to communicate with the neighbor or your in-laws or whoever it is like that would differently than you or have a different opinion than you and not shy away from that conversation and have it in a very healthy format.

41:49I think it makes us very uncomfortable these days. It shouldn't, but I think that's probably the best thing that you can do and surround yourself with those people on social media. Like, yeah, the ground news version of social media is go follow people that you know that you don't agree with. Go follow, yeah, accounts that just give out the counterpoint to what you usually believe. And as you said, all of us are susceptible to bias. And I'm the same. Like, I do this literally for a living. And I cannot say that it's like being a human being is having inherent biases and it's just challenging them all the time.

42:32What do you suspect your biases? I can't say that, but I'll share with you something telling. So we have a newsletter called Burst Your Bubble. And what it does is it takes eight different profiles of people, six of them Americans, like East Coast, Urbanite, West Coast, I think Innovator, it's called Midwestern Everyman, Southern Patriot. Like just think of stereotypical profiles. And we have curated news feeds based on what that profile might have read this week. And I'm surprised that although I consume so much news and I consume news on ground news every single week, there are news stories that I've completely missed with some of these profiles that didn't pass through my eyes.

43:18And they totally shocked me that I was like, well, okay, this happened. And it didn't make it to my, although I read news on ground news, I did not read it. So I think it's important to keep challenging yourself. We do give one tool. it's not very prairie right now, but it's a step in the right direction. We are calling it My News Bias. So what the tool does is it follows you not just on ground news, but you can install a browser extension. And what it does is it follows you on social media or wherever you're reading news. And it gives you your own stats. So think of it as Fitbit for news. It'll tell you that, hey, this is, you are leaning one way or the other, or has it changed over time?

44:00Are you getting more balanced? Are you reading more local news or international news? Or do you end up reading, I don't know, really depressing topics like whatever all the time? Are you reading enough good news? You can adjust whatever skills that you want. And it's again, just in the service of holding the mirror up to yourself and say, and recognising what your bias is. You know, you mentioned that it's overall, it's good to like expose yourself to things that you wouldn't normally see and I completely agree with that um however there was an interesting study that came out well I'll link again in the show notes to an article about this idea of the paradox of polarization which is you know we hear a lot about like oh the dangers of echo chambers and I completely agree like yes if you're just reading from one particular viewpoint over and over and over and you never hear opposing viewpoints and you're just going to end up like basically a mindless parrot of that and and and you just can't you just have a terrible what just a very incomplete worldview however there is some evidence that particularly on social media which because of the design of the algorithms which are again trying to keep people engaged you know they're about engagement keeping people online as much as possible one of the best ways of doing that is getting people outraged and angry and essentially triggering the limbic system to kick in.

45:30And the best way to do that is to actually show them counter, like inflammatory views that are completely contra their normal beliefs. And so to trigger them and make them angry. So that is an interesting thing, where that's basically, that's like kind of the inverse of an echo chamber. And yet that's also making polarization worse. So my little like thesis is that you have the mainstream media or the classic news media that sort of create the echo chambers in the first place. And to an extent, certain other old-school social media sites, I think, did this. I think Tumblr was very much like that.

46:06It would send people down these rabbit holes and that would become their whole world. But now you've got the more modern algorithms on things like X and Facebook to an extent and probably TikTok and so on, which in order to get engagement, will sometimes show you something really, really inflammatory. The bubbles splinters your echo chamber in a very uncomfortable way and then goes viral. So it's like they kind of feed into each other. You create the echo chamber and then you create something that makes as much friction as possible against that echo chamber. So I'm curious, would you agree with that?

46:45And what are your thoughts? Yeah, no, that sounds very right to me. That sounds because I think fear or rage is such a strong motivator or such emotions that, yes, to drive engagement and to drive virality, I think, of course, or to drive outrage. I 100 % agree with you, I think, showing something so, and I think the key word to use is inflammatory or exaggerated. It's not necessarily a very well thought through counterpoint that they're going to present it to you. that are just going to present something that is so outrageous that you're like, okay, no, I have to share this with my friends or I have to comment about it right now.

47:27Otherwise, I'm not a good citizen if I don't do it and drive that engagement up. So no, I'm with you. That counterpoints, I believe that, yes, that's how you start a conversation and bring everybody back to the same page. But outrage is not generated from counterpoints. So it's just generated from inflammatory kind of material that exists. Right. It's like algorithmically amplified straw manning. That's a very eloquent word to put it, yes. Because the way the algorithm works, it wants the most inflammatory thing. What's the most inflammatory thing? It's actually the worst arguments of the other side that will trigger you because you're like, wow, that's how dumb these people are.

48:13So it's picking the dumbest arguments of the other side and shoving them in your face, which further entrenches your existing views. So what we need the algorithms to do, and this will take us into the AI conversation, now that we actually have LLMs that can presumably extract, or at least AI that can get an idea of tone more effectively and more accurately than before, we need something that will look for. But it's a bad thing to give the straw man-y stupid counter views, but it's a good thing to give the most nuanced, good faith, steel man counter views. So I wonder if there's – that's not really something that the legacy media can do.

48:55That's not how their platforms work. But if I was the owner of X or a big social media platform, that would be the approach to go down. And I think that's what Elon and X are trying, at least that's what they've talked about trying to do. Do you have any ideas of how you would go about doing that? I can tell you about our efforts to highlight some of this. So yeah, thanks to LLMs, the things that we were only humanly able to do, like with the help of LLMs, we can do that. So one thing we started doing on Ground News is just highlighting these inflammatory language. So whenever there's a word that's been inserted into a headline that is like, oh, Dopey AOC did this or whatever, Sleepy Biden did that.

49:47But yeah, the rest of the headline is 100 % accurate. And you don't even think like, oh, well, this one word just changed the entire framing of it. We are using LLMs to do a couple of more things to help. And I wonder if this could inspire X or some of the bigger platforms that can help solve the problems. So one thing we are doing is we ingest all, we are summarizing what are the main talking points of the left, what are the main talking points of the right, and even comparing it. So let's say a left focused on, I don't know, cliche, I'm just picking on a historical example, Black Lives Matter march.

50:28so the left was really focused on the importance of it and the historical event it was or why it should happen right now or has been ignored and right was focused on the lawlessness of it or the property damage of it or whatever so just succinctly summarizing that and presenting it right next to each other i think is really really helpful again so doing two opposite things one is highlighting literally the inflammatory language and second is just trying to make those points as succinctly as possible and say, hey, this is what these both focused on. And both are right in the sense both of them are accurate that these both things happened, that it is the march is very important and people need to do that.

51:10But also, yes, there was property damage and there was lawlessness that the right sources pointed out. So, yeah, I think if the social media platforms where majority of people and do get their news and will continue getting their news, start doing something like this as just highlighting whenever they come across a news story where some of this is happening. I think that would be very, very helpful. Yeah, you need some kind of like clear identifier of what the current thing is, which to be fair, thinking on X, it's got the, you know, on the trending, that's kind of probably the current hot topic.

51:49So see what are the top trending things that seem to be related to some kind of political thing. And then next to that, you could present the two things. Yeah, that'd be cool if that was integrated. Yeah, the counterpoints of it. We do, again, we have no partnership with X and we are so small at this point. We do have a browser extension that if you are, as I said, if you have installed, it follows you around and on social media, every time you scroll across a news story, it'll tell you where the news source is, where what, again, gives you all the metadata and shows you, by the way, there are 20 other sources that are reported on it, or this is a counterpoint.

52:30So we are trying to do that on a very small scale just for the news stories. So not necessarily if somebody has written a long opinion rant about something, we can't do that. But if it's a news story, we are doing that through our browser extension. What are some other things that could be done with social media platforms. So one, I mean, Jonathan Haidt is one of my favorite people to read on this topic. He's just so amazing. I agree. And he gave a list of a few different things. So one is demetrifying. So, you know, right now everything is, by having metrics like number of shares or number of retweets or number of likes and so on that something gets, while it's true that that's an indicator that it's showing, it's a signal that something is good at triggering people into some kind of action.

53:27But it's not a signal of veracity. Exactly. It's neither a signal of veracity or of higher-mindedness or of nuance or any of those things. In fact, sometimes it's probably anti-corrected. It's just that, yeah, it triggered a reaction. Right, right. And so he proposes things like obscuring-like and share numbers so that things can actually be evaluated on their own merit. And I think that stands for some promise. But at the same time, the reason why like buttons and share buttons and retweets emerged and the number is because it gamifies it and increases, it's like a reductionist thing. And that's really what Moloch is.

54:06It's when you take a very complex concept and reduce it, oversimplify it down into a single thing, whether it's like, you know, dollars earned or so on. And in that reduction of complexity is where you lose, it's where you get the decoupling and you end up with these like good heart laws type situations. So that I think has a lot of merit, but it's going to take, it'll come at a cost because now again, the social media companies are in their own mullet trap. If like, even if one of them does this, now they're going to be losing out to all the others. They don't give a fuck. So that's the problem.

54:42100%. Like we are a generation or we are people who won't even watch a Netflix show without checking the ratings first. So why would we just look at a tweet or a post? I have to read the words and then further meaning and then judge them just purely on that. Exactly, why would I do that? I need a signal what I should think about it. Again, yeah, the critical thinking is the missing piece. We don't want to do that. It's hard. And so the second one he says, I think it just seems pretty obvious to me. which is like reducing bots or reducing the number of unverified accounts. I think that seems pretty no-braining given, again, we're in the age of generative AI and automation and we've seen the havoc that can be created by, what was it called, the Internet Research Agency or whatever that Russian troll farm was.

55:33I thought that was a kind of... I love the name, Internet Research Agency. I know, it's like, how insipid can you get? Wow, so official. But whether that one, even if you think that one wasn't real, the point is that the incentive is there to do this kind of thing, and it's very cheap and easy to do, so people will do it. That's just a really good rule of thumb. And anything that can reduce that is generally a good thing. That said, there is value in having, I do think there is value in having people have at least pseudonymous accounts, But there's probably a middle ground where you don't have to make people show exactly who they are every single time because, you know, people in oppressive regimes will never be able to speak out.

56:19But you can still have it so that you can prove that they are actually just a human being, at least for now. But again, it's a cat and mouse game because of AI. Yeah, because it makes sense. All bots are doing are amplifying certain perspectives or certain inflammatory things. And yeah, if you stop that amplification and it's one thought as one human being, then of course it should be helpful. But yeah, anonymizing, it still makes sense. And then the third one is re-adding some friction. Like, are you sure you actually want to post this? That feels like a slightly icky one. Like, I like how they introduced, do you want to read the article first?

56:58I think that's a nice little, I know that always gets me when I go to share something and I'm like, okay, fine. And yes, I'll read it. I don't want to be that person. But the trouble with when you have, and that's the thing, you'll be using an LLM, right? Or something like an inverse LLM to infer the tone of your tweet. That is already now such a loaded thing because it's like who designed the AI in the first place to decide whether your tweet is actually good faith or not. So if that can be done right, if we can truly have a perfect, good faith, sensing, highly wise language assessor that is an AI, great.

57:41But I am not convinced we are close to being able to do that yet, or at least. So that's another can of worms. But at the same time, if it's just a suggestion and it doesn't stop, as long as you don't get stopped from posting, that's when it gets really bad. If it's just another layer of information, then it's probably not that. That's like a kind of middle ground. So I'm wondering if another just on that idea, what if it converts your post into something that's more neutral and just putting forward the point, it just paraphrases it to instead of being emotional and triggering, it's just like, oh, this is the point the person is trying to make.

58:19Let me convert it into that. Would you rather? Is this the point you're trying to make in a way? Yeah, so just like a suggested edit. Yeah, suggested edit. I wonder if that takes the emotion out of it. It turns it into this very thoughtful place. Again, as long as it's not enforced. If it's enforced, then I hate it. And I think it's a net negative. If it's a suggestion, be like, just FYI, this is another way that you could word this. I don't think anyone will, if someone's writing a really inflammatory tweet, I think it's very unlikely that they will deliberately then change it to that because then they lose out on the virality and they were optimizing for virality in the first place.

59:00But just the showing to be like, hey, just FYI, this is what your angel would write. That's not trying to be a dude. I like that. Just your angel, you want to feel it right. It's like you could almost have like the angel and devil. Yeah, yeah. But again, it feels, that's the thing. With all of these things, there's going to, it's opening up also potential for abuse. At the same time, social media is so bad. And I don't, is it really making things worse? I don't know. But that's an interesting suggestion, actually. Another one I like is that I haven't seen anyone really talk about. It was, I don't want to take too much credit for it, but it was an idea I had.

59:43It was like basically the idea of a slide bar. Because right now, everything's so binary. Like, I either like the thing or I don't. I can't, there's no, there's no granularity. I'm like, actually, I really agree with this. Or actually, I'm not that sure. I'm like sort of seven out of 10. It's just like a little slide bar where you can kind of rate something instead of, you know, one, one or zero, you've got zero, one to 10, or something like that. Or the fact, again, going back to X, I don't want to keep picking on that, but it's just the one I spend the most time on. The fact that there isn't, there's only a like button, but there's not a dislike button, is what's actually driving a lot of language to be negative sentiment.

1:00:27Because the only outlet, when people see something they don't like or disagree with, their only outlet is to either quote tweet it and say, this is fucking stupid, which in many ways is then amplifying it and creating yet more friction, or to comment being like, this is wrong for this reason, X, Y, Z. And while I think it's, again, if people were just doing that in good faith in constructive nice ways then that's okay but most of the time people don't they don't have time for it they just want to tell you that you're a moron or that this is stupid and dunk on it and so the only outlet for disagreement right now is by adding more words so no wonder the ratio of words on the platform like x is like so heavily skewed to you're wrong fuck you you know negativity as opposed to positivity because there is no other way of getting that disagreement out by just pressing a button whereas you can just like it yeah so yeah it's just that's another like food for thought um that was my partner's idea yeah no i never thought about that because yeah they keep talking about like everybody talks about how dislike button is just never existed not to add negativity and but yeah you're right it's just been replaced by loads of words that are a lot more hurtful and adding to the noise so that makes sense um One idea we have toyed with and we think we can make work is as soon as you see somebody write that you don't agree with, that you can call us whatever tool bot or we want to call Grand News Bot.

1:01:56And it presents a counter opinion and a well thought through one. So you can just like, because nobody wants to take the time, as I was saying, to think about what exactly the counter opinion is apart from saying, yeah, as you think, you are a moron. like hey this is why not you're a moron but this is why i don't agree with you if we can just go we can call um call grand news and it just presents presents a counter argument that you're satisfied putting forward so i think that might be powerful enough do you think we can ever be truly non-polarized all the while that we're going to be communicating through digital screens without faces i don't think so because i think we as human beings can't be non-polarized right And I think going back to it's not that, and neutral is not necessarily the answer.

1:02:43I think it's just being on the same page is the answer. And we are human beings. And I think innovation and progress comes from not agreeing with each other. And at least I believe that. And that's what, but it's just having those arguments in a format which is helping us drawing forward and actually solve the problems as opposed to just shouting at each other and and getting madder at each other and hating each other is I think what the problem is and regardless if it's digital screen or without it and without it is just yeah as I said like we're just avoiding it at least through screens that we are communicating just not in a very efficient manner.

1:03:22What would in your mind a truly win-win media industry actually look like? Truly, win-win media industry is that where money can flow to the newsrooms, journalists can write and report on news that they believe is important. And it's not driven by, well, ads are just a mechanism. It's not driven by emotions that are not positive, like hate or fear or so. They actually can go back to writing that this is good journalism. And yeah, people read that and feel informed. And if there are arguments, they are presented in a thoughtful format, as opposed to, again, just pointing fingers at each other. I think that would be win-win.

1:04:10And at least we have taken the subscription revenue. And I think it's a very hard road to take. But if everybody goes back to finding value in news, I don't see why people would not want to pay for news again. Like, why do we have to rely on ad? Everybody, at least when I grew up and their family used to pay for newspaper, like that revenue existed. Why can't it go back to being that household where you pay for that news and get high quality news? And it's not that, oh, yeah, I'm okay paying for my video streaming subscription, but news, well, why should I pay for that? That's not an outrageous suggestion anymore.

1:04:57I would like to think so. at the same time, it's very hard. And again, because of the Moloch dynamic, it's very hard to make people go back to, to make, especially the younger generation who have, from their perspective, they've never had to pay for news. You're now making them pay for something from, in their mind, they've never had to pay for before. That's a very hard thing to sell to people. And again, anyone who then doesn't do it, it's going to have the competitive advantage. As I say, there's no such thing as free lunch, right? Sure. You're getting your news free, but where is it coming from and what is it doing?

1:05:32So it is, yes, you're listening to some influencers and yeah, giving benefit of doubt that a lot of influencers are doing, let's say God's work and telling the right things, but there are a lot out there that might not be or might have an agenda or might be mouthpieces of certain agencies or governments or whatever it is. Then are you doing your research, telling them apart? No, you don't have time to do that or you don't have tools to do that. I think unfortunately people might, And we have been learning through hard knocks and we might have to have a few more hard knocks till we learn that, yeah, we need to have reliable information.

1:06:12And for that, you have to pay. And yeah, it's not easy. And maybe I'm being idealistic, but I'll give you an example. one of the highest revenue days for ground news was January 7th, 2021, because there was a day after the insurrection and people like, whoa, what happened? There was information chaos. And certainly I, I did not, I can't make sense out of this, or this is not what the country I live in or this is not my reality. And people actively look for solutions. And I think then they come and open their wallets and, and say, yeah, and it's not like you don't have to pay a lot. Like I, I'm not saying, again, we are the solutions like your local newspaper probably doesn't cost that much another problem is um with industry is just like every single industry goes through this like if you want to read paid news you have to subscribe to 30 different things right again the burden has been put on consumers like oh yeah i have to pay more local newspaper plus i have to pay for i don't know wall street journal plus i have to pay for three athletic well because i like sports the burden has been put on the consumer again.

1:07:18So I think the industry has to go through the change where the burden gets taken away from the consumer. You have all the tools, you have reliable information, but you only have a single payment to make. Going back to the model of like, hey, my family got one newspaper, I read it front to back, and that's all the information I needed. I don't need to. So I think, yeah, the industry is going to go through that consolidation the same way it went through streaming. And unfortunately, on the other end, there's still fragmentation but um but yeah it's pay one subscription for news one subscription for music one subscription for for video and i think that's the world that we can go live in if we can deliver enough value to do that and provided that subscription of news has a broad enough range of and i would love we would love to be one of those a platform that provides that i think if we can convince news outlets to join us and deliver that paywall-free ad-free news, why can't you just have a good platform?

1:08:16And that's what we wanted it to be a starting point. Like Spotify won that race because not because it had all the content. Yes, it got all the content, but it was a great product to use it. The tech was great. There was no lags in streaming or you could make the playlist. It's the features why it won the race. And then content was important, but added on. So I think if we make good enough news platform and then add enough ad free, pay for all free news, then I think we have a winner product, which I would love to work towards. Yeah, because would you get the broader the political spectrum of outlets that is included within that one payable package, the more ideologically robust, provided again, like within reason.

1:09:11100%, right? It has. But you would want the CNNs and the Fox News in the same thing. I personally wouldn't build a product that doesn't have that robustness. Yes. Would they agree to be under the same umbrella is the thing. And how do you incentivize them to do that? Maybe if you say, look, guys, you can get everyone to start paying for your news again. You can move away from this awful ad thing. The win-win is like they get more revenue. Like, look, whoever's the CNN viewer or whoever's the Fox News viewer or the reader, whatever, they already have it. Like here, we can bring you additional people who don't necessarily go to CNN as a major source or Fox News as a major source, and we're giving revenue from that.

1:09:50So why won't you join us for that additional revenue share, market share? And that's how we want to view ourselves as the multiplier, that we take people to more news sources than they would have ever gone by themselves. Like, sure, if you would have never clicked on Breitbart yourself or never clicked on Mother Jones yourself, So we are going to take you there and give your revenue to them. So why won't you join us? Anyway, I think we are still very small, and I don't know how big we have to be before to be able to have these conversations with these big, big media publisher companies. But I hope that there is enough financial incentive for them to be able to say, hey, we are dying otherwise, and we are actually, not funding our newsrooms enough or not paying good quality journalists enough.

1:10:43So let's look, let's at least try out some other models in addition to what we're doing. So there we go. Huge thank you to Harleen for this conversation and to you guys for tuning in. Do check out Brown News. They have a cool website. They also have this like extension thing you can add to your browser. I personally end up using it the most on like Instagram where they just always have, whenever there's a big news event, you can just quickly swipe through and see what the left, the right, the center, etc. are all saying about it. Also, if you didn't get around to watching my media moloch film, The Media Wars, that I mentioned at the top of this episode, that is linked below.

1:11:22I highly recommend it. I dress up as, I do acting. It's a whole thing. But yeah, thank you again. If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends and I will see you next time.

1:11:38Thank you.