The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Jason: 00:00

Hey, everyone. This is a recording from our second anniversary party at Farm 1 in Brooklyn on August 21. It was the first time all four of us had been in the same room since before we launched four zero four Media. If you came out, thank you so much. We had a blast.

Jason: 00:13

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 DeleteMe, who've been supporting four zero four Media since the beginning and whose product we've used for years to keep our information off the Internet. Four zero four media listeners get 20% off at joindeleteme.com/404media. Use code four zero four media. Here's our podcast.

Joseph: 00:36

I was playing. Oh, shit. Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to inner worlds both online and IRL. Four zero four Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. Like everybody here, thank you so much for subscribing.

Joseph: 00:54

To subscribe, go to 44media.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. No. I'm your host Joseph and with me are the four zero four media co founders, Sam Cole Yo.

Joseph: 01:15

Emmanuel Mayberg Hello. And Jason Kevlar. Hello. Hello. Jason got the most woos, which No.

Joseph: 01:24

That's not I didn't get anything. So we have this picture on our questions. We're going to go through that. Thank you to everybody who wrote one. But Jason, you recently wrote, but it actually comes out tomorrow.

Jason: 01:39

So Yeah, preview. Preview.

Joseph: 01:41

So we wrote as we do every year. I say every year as if it's regular, the same as 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 four zero four has been doing for the past year?

Jason: 02:03

Yeah. I think first, I just want to thank all of you for coming. Thank you so much.

Sam: 02:07

I think you.

Jason: 02:08

Yeah. And thank you for being jam packed in here. Yeah. We have had three parties, four parties, I guess, and the last couple we tried to do some sort of podcast talk, etcetera. And I think we're all shocked, stunned, surprised, thrilled that anyone comes to them.

Jason: 02:29

I think when we started this, it 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 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 four zero four media.

Jason: 02:53

I 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 I think was obvious probably to everyone, but but being like inside that building, there were so many people doing such amazing such amazing work, and they didn't seem to be able to figure out how to make Well, 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 strip this down to like the bare minimum? And so, we started a blog. Aaron Shapiro over here helped design our website.

Jason: 03:37

Let's clap for him. Thank you for coming. And we started on Ghost, which is a non profit open source CMS, and then we started publishing blogs and the entire like 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.

Jason: 04:03

We're doing well financially, like the 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 is 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? What has changed? And at first, was like, well, I don't know. I don't know what has changed.

Jason: 04:31

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 three hundred and sixty five 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, front row, so clap for Rosie. She's done really good work.

Jason: 04:53

We have Case Hartz who is in Austin, Texas who's been doing our social media three days a week. We have Matthew Gault who's in South Carolina who's been writing about the military industrial complex and been doing a really good job. You 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 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.

Jason: 05:32

And I think a lot more but up here in front of all of y'all, I'm 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.

Sam: 05:42

Should I should I just read should I rapid fire read like our impact on the last year? Some of the some of the highlights. Okay. Yeah. See, the people want to hear I'm gonna read the URLs also, so you never mind.

Sam: 05:53

Kidding. So, okay. I'm gonna read this fast. We revealed that ICE was tapping into FLoC, 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.

Sam: 06:07

Austin banned flock in its city, specifically citing our reporting. The company now says it has severed access to Illinois databases in response to a story about Texas cops who searched flock for a woman who had a self administered abortion. Illinois Secretary of State is investigating the company, and Congress opened a formal investigation maybe a week and a half ago into FLOC. Meta sued a Nudify app that four four media reported brought thousands of ads to Instagram and Facebook. We brought the news that TeleMessage, a signal clone used by the Trump administration was hacked.

Sam: 06:37

The DOJ and Custom Border Protection paused its use of the tool. Civitie repeatedly shown to create nonsensical 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. Coca Cola pulled the ad in response. A public library ebook service said it was going to cull AI slop after Emmanuel found low quality books that were flooding the libraries.

Sam: 07:04

Nvidia sued Nvidia was sued after it revealed the company was scraping YouTube and other sites like Netflix to fund 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 and surveillance state.

Sam: 07:41

We established and I think defined AI slop as a whole entire genre. If anybody has heard of Shrimp Jesus, it's probably because of the story Jason wrote.

Jason: 07:50

Shrimp Jesus from the stickers.

Sam: 07:52

Shrimp Jesus. Yeah. We have shrimp juices stickers available at the merch table. They're they're not there are very few, so grab them. Don't everybody run and mob it.

Sam: 08:00

And then we have a cake coming out later that is got a surprise on it, and the surprise is that there's AI slap 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. So and it's because you guys support us and let us do that work.

Sam: 08:21

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.

Sam: 08:39

So that's that's why we're here. Do you want to add anything?

Jason: 08:44

Comments, Emmanuel.

Emanuel: 08:47

Let's get to questions. No?

Sam: 08:49

Yeah. Two questions.

Jason: 08:50

So we have, we have these. Maybe we'll do a microphone question

Sam: 08:54

situation as well. I'll If show you scream your question, we will answer them in real life, but, let's have a jar.

Joseph: 09:03

Let me let me find let me find a punchy one to start.

Sam: 09:07

A punchy one? Sun, moon, rising.

Emanuel: 09:11

Sun, moon, rising.

Sam: 09:11

Do you guys know your sun, moon, rising? I don't mind.

Jason: 09:15

I'm sorry. I really don't.

Sam: 09:16

I'm a Virgo sun, Pisces moon, Sagittarius rising. Very

Jason: 09:21

good. Very good.

Emanuel: 09:22

I don't know and I don't want to say my first date because I want to

Joseph: 09:25

get hacked.

Jason: 09:28

Because why?

Emanuel: 09:29

I don't want

Jason: 09:29

to get hacked.

Emanuel: 09:30

This is my personal data.

Sam: 09:31

I'll tell you that much.

Jason: 09:32

Yeah. Alright. May 2, 8PM, nineteen

Joseph: 09:35

eighty eight.

Sam: 09:36

Someone look that up.

Jason: 09:37

Look it up. Let me know. I'd love to know.

Sam: 09:38

In Maryland?

Joseph: 09:41

No. We probably let it

Jason: 09:44

in here a lot. So so someone here actually wrote this. Not a question, but a comment. More 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 nuance and thoughtful.

Jason: 10:01

Don't waste your time defending against the haters. Thank you. Wow. That's a very that's a very good comment. However, if I if anyone is mad at us, we have to respond, even one person in great detail.

Jason: 10:16

It's a it's a flaw, I think, that we mostly have.

Sam: 10:19

But only in the subscribers podcast. You have to pay you have to pay us to beef with us.

Joseph: 10:24

The subscriber podcast is a safe space where we can beef basically without consequence. Yeah. Do

Jason: 10:31

you think more employee owned media can reinvigorate local news outlets?

Sam: 10:37

Yeah. Hell, yeah. Hellgate's doing it in New York.

Joseph: 10:40

Hellgate. Hellgate.

Sam: 10:42

The city. The city. Yeah.

Joseph: 10:44

Fantastic local did everybody see the Yes. The crisp packet

Sam: 10:50

Yeah.

Joseph: 10:50

Full of cash? Incredible story that you just you're not going to read in the time. So, you know, a large paper. They'll see that as a graph in a in a a single graph in a broader story. No.

Joseph: 11:03

That's a fucking Or

Sam: 11:04

they would keep the money. 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 50,000,000 Okay. I was gonna say I'll never take a bribe, Joseph, but fine.

Jason: 11:19

I think, 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. Coyote 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 like running circles around people in terms of ice coverage in LA. So I do I do think that this model works.

Jason: 11:55

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 and setting up all the business back end is essentially nothing at this point. And so, I think that if these, publications can figure out how to serve their readers, it it I hope I hope that it can really help, local media.

Joseph: 12:25

And 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, is a great thing, but only a few people may see that. So you just you have to keep going.

Joseph: 12:45

You have to be really, really, really aggressive. But those other outlets that Jason mentioned showed that it is possible for local media. Absolutely.

Emanuel: 12:55

Manuel. So this question is, what are your thoughts on AI induced delusions? Who is to blame? An easy one. I don't know.

Emanuel: 13:07

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 thinks 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, and 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.

Emanuel: 14:12

So, yes, the AI companies are to blame there, but they did not invent, you know, mental health problems. But that that's a that's a bigger society problem that we're not going to solve with a software update.

Jason: 14:29

Yeah. I've I've been talking to a psychiatrist in Silicon Valley who's studying this. I haven't gotten very far yet, but I I'm talking to him about like sort of what he thinks is going on and trying to figure out like, I don't know, what do psychiatrists think? Like, 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.

Jason: 15:13

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 it's pushing people down a specific road, but I guess more to come there. Next question.

Sam: 15:29

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?

Emanuel: 15:38

No, we can't.

Joseph: 15:42

Yes. We do have significant security concerns. We've all been doing this for a long time, ten 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.

Joseph: 16:04

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. It 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.

Joseph: 16:42

And sometimes the most random person is the one that you suddenly have to worry about. So I would tell people try to fret 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. Yeah.

Emanuel: 17:08

Hello. 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

Sam: 17:35

Explain that all of them?

Emanuel: 17:37

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, and 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.

Jason: 18:02

That's very well said, and I think that as Joseph said, like security, you have to do it beforehand and once be like, 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 like legal cases. And so, thankfully, we had an experience advice where we got sued by a company called ShotSpotter for I believe they wanted a $100,000,000.

Jason: 18:30

$230,000,000. Thank you. And that was, I would say, like a year and a half a year and a half long process. That was, as far as legal situations go, quite easy. Like, our lawyer was never that concerned.

Jason: 18:49

It did get thrown out, and yet that was also horrible, horrible to go through. And so, I think we 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 like your legal defense on a specific story in the story. That doesn't make any sense, but Well, this is broadly. Talk talking broadly, so it's okay. But, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that happens like that no one can see that 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.

Jason: 19:44

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. How 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?

Joseph: 20:10

I mean, I'm gonna 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.

Joseph: 20:35

And 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 of our due process and all of that sort of thing.

Joseph: 21:07

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. So 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 the logically coherent argument because they're not even doing that, essentially.

Emanuel: 21:49

You said, can I do a question? Can I do one of these?

Jason: 21:51

I can do one.

Emanuel: 21:52

Okay. So what's the most out of touch a story has made you feel? So, it wasn't a story, but we had an extremely absurd debate on Slack. We were writing some sort of brainwrought story, and Jason and I debated what giat means. And like the etymology of giat, because it's like I contended that yacht basically refers to an ass, like, goddamn, look at that ass.

Emanuel: 22:24

And you were like, no, yacht has been removed from your argument is like yacht is removed from the original meaning and is now just like meaningless rot. Like, what what are what are the other

Jason: 22:38

I mean, like, what? Like, skibbidi, etcetera, etcetera? I think Yeah. Yeah. Things of this nature.

Jason: 22:45

I do think that yacht does mean ass though. Is this the debate we're actually having? I don't I said it I I said I meant

Emanuel: 22:53

ass, and you were like,

Jason: 22:54

no, it's Oh.

Emanuel: 22:55

It's something else. Oh, yeah. So I'm right. Okay. I won Once again, I win.

Jason: 22:59

I think I was maybe just being argumentative that day, possibly. Okay.

Emanuel: 23:03

So, two almost 40 year olds arguing about what giat means. Pretty out of touch.

Jason: 23:08

Well 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 I really spent like many many many hours scrolling through like bizarre AI on Facebook and reading the comments and seeing sort of like mostly older people, but not all older people, really engage extensively with fake content and things like that. And I don't think I've ever felt more like upset doing a story that that is was kind of silly. It was like started kind of silly and I was like, oh, like Debbie from Wisconsin is really arguing about this deck and whether it's up to code. And the deck doesn't exist, but like, Sean from Pennsylvania says that he is a building inspector and that the, you know, supports are not there.

Jason: 24:09

And it goes on for like many hours and days and there's like millions of these posts, I felt like pretty like psychologically damaged from that, I would say. Shall we go to another one? Oh, you have one. Okay. You are number one.

Joseph: 24:30

So I think Sam gave this to me because I'm the one that over 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 in Audacity and being like, well, that waveform looks big, so I should probably make that make that small so it's not peaking.

Joseph: 25:05

And 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.

Joseph: 25:27

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 the order that feels natural so we're not just rambling. I try to keep people tight.

Joseph: 25:45

We try to keep it half an hour, 40 for the free, and then we go up to 50 an hour for the paid. And then Alyssa edits it and that takes, I don't know, 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.

Jason: 26:12

Oh, sorry. I caught your mic. Very rude. I was going to say, clearly, we're very good at audio engineering. As you can tell, no, we we are trying our best.

Jason: 26:24

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, and we're clearly not 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 like hop on and start talking. And the the good news is we're talking about stories that we had just done that week.

Jason: 26:49

And so there is some preproduction from Joseph in terms of writing a document for us to talk about and 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 like all week making a podcast and not doing the stories, and then maybe the podcast would be boring. I hope you like the podcast, but I like doing it. Let's do let's do two more card questions and then like an audience, a couple audience if you want. Although, you're all here, but Alright.

Jason: 27:30

I'll read it since my mic is on. What was the startup cost for $4.00 4? Asking for a friend.

Sam: 27:36

I mean, 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 was just the website. It was, like, all the 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.

Sam: 27:58

And that was the bare minimum. And yeah, we lived off of like our savings, for a while, but we were lucky that it like immediately people started subscribing and supporting and we didn't have to do that for very long because people just jumped right in and were like, yeah, of course, you're a real thing. Like, yeah, we're definitely gonna subscribe, which is the reason that we're here today. So, yeah, a thousand dollars each, but, like, we wing like, that's made up. We don't we didn't have like an accountant telling us this is how much money you needed to put in to start a business.

Sam: 28:29

We were like, that's probably enough. And that's kinda how we do it to this day. So, yeah.

Emanuel: 28:40

I can't find the card, but somebody asked if we're to be immortalized as a statue, what would be the statue and where would it be located? And I know that's hard, so I had some time to think about it. So, in the Presidio in San Francisco, I don't know if you're aware of the park, there's like a LucasArts campus there, and there's a beautiful bronze statue of Yoda. So, I guess, like, I would like to join him. It's also a fountain, and it's a very beautiful little area.

Emanuel: 29:08

So I guess, like, I don't know, put me next to Yoda as where I want to be immortalized.

Joseph: 29:18

Am I answering the statue question?

Jason: 29:21

Same question. Same question.

Joseph: 29:23

At Blizzard headquarters, there is a statue of Lilith from Diablo four. Sorry. I'm going down the geek hole. And all of the top 100 players who first defeated that boss in hardcore mode, meaning if they got killed, the character would get wiped. Their names are forever etched in the statue at Blizzard headquarters.

Joseph: 29:42

I wouldn't wanna be on that if I suck too hard at the game.

Jason: 29:46

I live pretty close to that statue. It's very sick. So journalism was a backup plan for me. Primary plan was left fielder for the Baltimore Orioles, Multi time world champion, so I think me with my arm around a crab at Camden Yards in Baltimore would be ideal. Ideal.

Jason: 30:10

But, yeah, that's my answer.

Sam: 30:14

I don't have a good answer

Jason: 30:15

for

Sam: 30:15

this. At the Bethesda campus, there's a statue of master chief. I don't know. Like fuck. It'd probably be one of those that, like, people, like, always, like, rub too much and, like, the butt is, like, down to flatness or, like, the copper is gone.

Sam: 30:32

I would like, interactive statue like that would be that's my choice. Either that or, like, a kick ass horse. Yeah. No specific horse. Is that a satisfying answer?

Jason: 30:45

It was good. Good answer. Should we does anyone want to ask a question out loud? You don't we can do more of these or we can do microphone into it. Okay.

Jason: 30:56

And also, you have to be close, unfortunately. I'm sorry. There's a lot of yeah. Okay. Here you go.

Jason: 31:04

Okay.

Audience Member: 31:05

Yeah. I'm wondering what your policy is if you have one company wide around animizing sources Because some of

Audience Member: 31:15

your stories really would require that.

Audience Member: 31:17

And as a journalist, I'm very curious if you

Sam: 31:20

have, like, hard set in stone rules around that

Audience Member: 31:23

or if it's very flexible.

Joseph: 31:29

Yeah. So it it's honestly mostly the normal journalistic standard, which is that you try not to have a source be anonymous because there are trade offs with that in that, well, this person's not gonna be publicly accountable now. So if you just have a bunch of anonymous sources bitching about somebody, that's probably not entirely fair. Right? But that said, and as you point out, so many of our stories rely on anonymous sources because we are reporting about companies who will fire their employees if they know they're talking to us.

Joseph: 32:01

And I think it often boils down to, okay, we'll keep the source anonymous. That's fine for their security for whatever reason, but we have to communicate whenever we can that reason to the readers. So we're not just handing out anonymity Willy Lily. It'll be like, we we quote the source, and it'll be say, four zero four media granted this person anonymity to protect them from retaliation. And that's almost boilerplate at this point, but you have to give a reason as much as you can.

Joseph: 32:35

Saying that, I published a story recently where I couldn't even give a reason because the source is that sensitive. But that's like last, last, last, last resort, essentially. It's just that we probably handle more anonymous sources than some outlets, basically. So that's why you probably see it disproportionately more on our website than others, I would say. Yeah.

Jason: 32:57

I think the big thing is just making sure the information is accurate, is like our north star. But the rest, Joseph is correct. Other question? Anyone?

Sam: 33:10

Hey, man.

Audience Member: 33:12

Looking forward to the next two years, is there something that you are not currently doing as journalists or as a business that you would really like to be doing when you next have this party?

Jason: 33:29

Great question. Not planted. It wasn't. It wasn't. We talk a little bit about this in the post that's coming tomorrow.

Jason: 33:39

I think that we are ambitious people. Like, we wanna do really impactful journalism, but we also want the company to succeed. And I think we each have things that we would like to see the company do at some point. I think planning out further than like tomorrow is very, very difficult for us at the moment because we're doing all the journalism, but we're also doing all the business. And bringing on people like Rosie and Case and Matt has allowed us to do some other, like, different projects sometimes, but also anytime we sort of like add a new thing, whether that's like like, we talked about maybe trying to do more interview podcasts, for example.

Jason: 34:26

But then, actually recording the podcast is perhaps not that time consuming, but the scheduling of it is, the like editing of it is, it's like there's a lot every time we like take out this is the wrong analogy. I'm going say it anyway. Anytime we take out a Django block, like there's another thing that there's a butterfly effect. I'll just mix all the metaphors. And then we have to like figure out how to how to like build that into our day.

Jason: 34:54

And so, but to answer the question, I want to do something in print. I really, really want to do print. Whether that is a zine, think we could do a zine, no problem. I want to do a glossy magazine because I think it would be cool. Coming for The Atlantic.

Jason: 35:15

That's what I want to do is like a magazine of some sort. And it'd probably have to be, you know, like once a year or twice a year or something like that, but that is something that I think would, I think our work would go well in a magazine. I think we already have subscribers, so it would be easy to send it to people if they wanted it. But yes, I will pass it to others as well though. Sam, I'm to pass it to you on the spot.

Sam: 35:42

This is something that we have been very transparent about working on and wanting to do more of, but I think by the time this party happens again next year, I am putting it into the universe that we are making something for film or TV that we're recording something or producing something or co producing something that makes it to the screen. Documentaries, scripted, whatever comes about. So yeah. And that's something that we're we've been interested in that since day one, so it's not a surprise, but hopefully this time next year. A

Emanuel: 36:22

regular interview series for the podcast. Once a week, hour long interview. We talk to a lot of interesting people. You see them in the stories we do, but I feel like a lot of the interviews, we can just publish them as is, and they would work pretty well. It's just like a matter of fitting it into our workload, but I'm committing to it here in front of an audience.

Emanuel: 36:41

We're going get it done.

Jason: 36:44

A year from now, we're going to have a documentary, a hit podcast and a hit magazine. And a

Joseph: 36:52

theme park.

Jason: 36:56

And whatever Joseph says.

Joseph: 37:00

Our own beer. No. We can't we can't you'll hear us talk about that on the podcast, but everything everybody else just said, especially the documentary stuff, I would love to do print as well. Even if it's like almost like director's cut version of articles or something like that where we couldn't pull it all on the site or well, we could because it's the it's the Internet. But, you know, we can add in extra details or whatever.

Joseph: 37:26

I like all of that. Yeah.

Jason: 37:30

Okay. Let's do one more because I feel bad for the people out there. No. They're having a horrible time. Does anyone have a question?

Jason: 37:40

Can you come up to here ish? Yeah. No. I had a

Audience Member: 37:45

question that's sort of about a lot of your work because ultimately, I think about the melding of systems and data that's private and public, and it all kind of keeps getting shoved together into repositories. And so I'm wondering, like, this is a little bit reading the tea leaves, but do you see this kind of continuing to the point where it's just like eventually everybody's data from every public and private source is just gonna get into some mega repository or like kind of how does that play out, you know, with the Flux, Palantir getting layered on IRS systems, etcetera, etcetera?

Joseph: 38:17

Yeah. So as many of you will know, so much of your data is out there and I do kind of hate it when people go, well, privacy is dead because everybody knows everything about me. No. Different companies know different things about you, so it's not all entirely futile. You're able to remove certain things.

Joseph: 38:35

Some stuff is more of an issue than others. There there there's there is actually great nuance there. But as the Trump administration has shown, it is now trying to meld together all of that data. And as you said, there's, you know, the IRS and the ICE stuff. There's this so called master database with Doge as well.

Joseph: 38:55

I would also point to this report in The Intercept where they're trying to launch a single platform to buy all of this commercial data at once. There's so much focus on Facebook or X or Snap, the big tech companies, when really there are really, really sketchy firms where you can just go and buy a CSV of people's data. Now all of that is going to be fed in and I mean, it's scary. I'm not I'm not going to sugarcoat it. And that is what we're seeing now, that marriage of data.

Joseph: 39:25

And that's what really fascinates me selfishly, journalistically, is that when you take a dataset which is usually innocuous and you pull it in a different way and suddenly it becomes a real fucking issue, we're going to see more of that. I'm absolutely sure.

Jason: 39:43

I also think that the AIification of these databases is really, really scary. And I think that right now there is I don't know. Not that many people are saying it out. Right? But I think that there's this idea that the AI ecosystem is going to collapse.

Jason: 40:03

And, you know, we are very, very critical of AI, but I think that there is so much money being poured into this technology by so many very powerful companies. And, you know, maybe it's not large language models, but it it like AI undergirds or at least machine learning, you know, they're all related technologies undergird facial recognition, undergird like all sorts of, you know, object recognition, social media monitoring, that sort of thing, that I do worry a lot about the AIification of surveillance and these databases, and like the melding of all these different data sets. And so, I don't want to be like terribly pessimistic about it, but I do think kind of like in the lead up to the, I don't know, like LLM, ChatGPTification of the word AI, there was a lot of reporting and there's still some, but there's a lot of reporting about AI bias and how facial recognition tech, surveillance tech is being disproportionately used against marginalized communities and people of color and and all of that sort of thing. And all of that is still happening, but we're not talking about it as much as we were three, four years ago because we're like laughing at the shitty things that these stupid machines are making all the time.

Jason: 41:22

And I think that a lot of these dumb AI companies will collapse, but I do think that what's left over after whatever bubble we're in pops is going to be used. It's already being used in like a really like freakish surveillance way. Even things like ad targeting and that sort of thing. Like, think that that is being underreported and it's sort of hard to tell the scale that this is happening right now because there's just like so much going on. Thank you all so, so, so much for coming.

Jason: 41:57

I think when we did start this, Well, actually, we haven't seen each other in over two years, the four of us all in one place since before we started four zero four Media. Today is the first time we've seen each other because I was supposed to be here for the party last year. I couldn't make it last minute. It was very, very sad. And so it was very nice to see us, to see everyone.

Jason: 42:20

But, yeah, we like We work alone in our houses, you know? Like, I'm in my garage. You've probably seen the backgrounds in our podcast, but it's nice to see people, and thank you just so much for coming. It means the world to us. I can't believe that so many people are here.

Jason: 42:40

We had to cut off the reservations because so many people were RSVP'd, which is amazing. And the last thing I'll say is I spent a lot of time setting up this photo booth over here. Please use it. The way that you use it is you go up to the iPad and you hit take picture. Start.

Jason: 42:59

Please use it. Please use it. But thank you. I'm I'm turning on everyone gets to talk. Everyone gets to talk.

Sam: 43:05

I'll turn my mic on. Yeah. I just wanna say thank you to DeleteMe who helped make literally all of this possible. The open bar, you're drinking DeleteMe's drinks. So they've been so chill and so awesome, really supportive throughout the whole time we've existed almost.

Sam: 43:20

They've been sponsors from the beginning. So sick company. Check out DeleteMe. That's also an answer to one of the early questions. How do you keep yourself safe?

Sam: 43:27

And DeleteMe is like the way that we've been doing that for way before we started this company is using their service. So thank you to them. Yeah. And also stick around. I'm gonna bring the cake out in like twenty minutes.

Sam: 43:39

So come get the cake.

Emanuel: 43:42

Thank you to our audio engineer, Jason Kebler. Thank you all for coming. We'll let you poor people go. Have a beer on us. Thank you again.

Joseph: 43:53

Do you have the outro music? As a reminder, four zero four Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to four zero four Media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.co. Get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about the bonus story each week.

Joseph: 44:15

This is the fastest I've ever ever read the outro script. This podcast is made a partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really helps us out. This has been four zero four Media.

Joseph: 44:28

We'll see you again next week. Thank you so much for coming. Go to the bar.

Jason: 44:38

Kaleidoscope did not do the live engineering of this sound. They they they will do the fixing afterward of this. Thank you.