The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Joseph: 00:04

Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. Four zero four Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. 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.

Joseph: 00:29

I'm your host, Joseph, And with me are the four zero four Media cofounders, Sam Cole

Sam: 00:33

Hello.

Joseph: 00:34

Emmanuel Mayberg

Emanuel: 00:36

Hey. What's up?

Joseph: 00:37

And Jason Kebler.

Jason: 00:39

Hello. Hello.

Joseph: 00:40

You wanna chat about merch quickly, Jason?

Jason: 00:43

Yeah. So a few things. One, if you're watching on YouTube, we have new merch. We have the horse t shirt in white. We have a death metal hat that I'm wearing.

Jason: 00:52

We have another hat. And if you had wanted to order merch, most things are back in stock. So you can find that on our website. Use the merch button at the top. I'll make sure I ship it out as quickly as possible.

Jason: 01:07

I've also got a few people asking what the four zero four horse is. Have do we have an explanation for what the horse is? I mean, I know what it is, but yeah.

Sam: 01:19

But there's

Jason: 01:20

there's new maybe new listeners. Yeah. It was the four zero four page at motherboard, which is Vice's tech website that we all used to work at. And it was this galloping cyber horse. And so it's a nice little homage, I believe, and we've we've taken control of the horse.

Jason: 01:42

I also have a a tattoo of the horse to bridge bridge the gap. But you can now get the the shirt in black or white. The other very quick things is we have just launched a referral program, which there's information about in the email that we sent today. There'll be more information on the site about how to do that. What this is is, like, if you send a link to your friends, you get credit for that, and then I'll send you merch if you send it to enough friends.

Jason: 02:16

We really hope that this works for us because we found that sort of, like, person to person recommendations has been the best way to grow our website and to grow our podcast, so on and so forth. And so we wanted to gamify that a little bit. We're using this software called Viral Loops, which seems to work with our CMS, but it's a little bit buggy. So if you find any bugs, just, like, email me about it. And then the last thing, and Justin will say this before we get into it, but we published an article today about how we're navigating the recession.

Jason: 02:50

And we're gonna talk about that a little bit as an independently owned journalist funded news website in the bonus section this week. So for people who like behind the scenes stuff, you can get access to that by subscribing to this subscribing to us. Go go to 404media.c0 and subscribe to us. There's also an article there about some of this stuff, but we're gonna get more in-depth in the bonus section at the end.

Joseph: 03:16

Yeah. Sounds good. I'm not gonna do a full segment on these because we already spoke a lot about ICE last week. I just wanted to briefly mention two stories. One was I got a leak from inside Palantir, the data analytics company, and the work they're doing with ICE.

Joseph: 03:32

Go check that out. I'll put in the show notes. And another one is a document describing an ICE tool, the plans to get health, labor, and housing agency data. Again, not gonna go on about them too much because we did a whole segment last time, but it felt worth sort of closing the loop on those, and we're gonna keep an eye on that broader story as well. But for this week's stories, we've got a huge one here from Jason and Emmanuel.

Joseph: 03:59

The headline is this college protester isn't real. It's an AI powered undercover bot for cops. So let me very briefly summarize. This company called MassiveBlue has developed this tool and it's marketing to and in some cases selling to police around The US, and it's basically deploying AI bots online in various places, and then they will engage with people in an undercover capacity. That's obviously wild.

Joseph: 04:33

Was that a fair summary, Jason and Emmanuel? And what are some of these personas that we're talking about?

Jason: 04:40

Emmanuel, why don't you talk a little bit about how we did this story and and sort of like what what this company does?

Emanuel: 04:47

Sure. Yeah. That's a fair summary from Joe, though I think as listeners will find out as we continue to talk about the company, part of the problem slash interesting thing about it is that it is very ambitious and has all these sprawling features of stuff that it says that it can do. But, yeah, at its core, it is a company that monitors social media, somehow identifies suspects of various crimes via its scanning of social media, and then critically creates these AI generated personas with specific personas for specific purposes. And those AI generated personas talk to suspects to gather intel.

Emanuel: 05:43

So if, for example, the software recognizes someone that it suspects is involved in human trafficking and child trafficking specifically, in a presentation that we got, it has a child trafficking AI persona called Jason, coincidentally. That's great. They have a little it has a little AI generated image of this kid, which, you know, it looks like a pretty high quality AI generated image of a child. And there's a backstory which says he's 14 years old, he's from Los Angeles, his parents immigrated here from Ecuador, he's an only child, he has a bunch of hobbies like anime, gaming, comic books, hiking, then it has a bunch of personality traits, that he's shy, he's self conscious, he has difficulty interacting with girls, and then also it says, I think it was pretty interesting, his parents don't allow him to be on social media, and he hides his Discord account from his parents, which are just very little interesting details of the biography that the police is choosing to to say that this kid has.

Joseph: 07:03

Very, very elaborate. Very,

Emanuel: 07:05

very elaborate. Then so this is a slide in the presentation that Massive Blue is showing police officers. And on one side is this biography that I described, and then on the other side are screenshots that are giving you an example of what a chat might look like. So someone and and this is like a green and gray chat exchange as if they're texting. Right?

Emanuel: 07:35

So someone reaches out to this JSON persona and says, your parents around? And he responds, it's gonna be difficult to quote this directly.

Jason: 07:46

I'll I'll read the part of Jason.

Joseph: 07:50

Okay. And we're gonna we're gonna reenact

Emanuel: 07:52

it now?

Joseph: 07:52

Wow. Okay. Drama time. So but but the but the the implication is that this is a chat between the AI persona, which is pretending to be a child and some sort of suspects presumably in a child trafficking sort of thing. Right.

Joseph: 08:07

I'm just giving them the context. Okay? Emmanuel, you'll

Jason: 08:10

be the child trafficker.

Emanuel: 08:11

Okay. Cool. Can I get in character? Sorry.

Jason: 08:15

Okay.

Joseph: 08:16

No. No. I'll I'll

Emanuel: 08:17

do it straight. Your parents around or are you getting some awesome alone time?

Jason: 08:23

Just chilling by myself, man. My mom's at work and my dad's out of town, so it's just me and my vid games.

Emanuel: 08:35

You on any social? Any other social?

Jason: 08:38

Nah. My rents don't let me use SM social media, but I do have Discord, tongue out, smiley face emoji.

Emanuel: 08:48

Right. And then he asked for his Discord handle and he gets his Discord handle and, you know, this is supposed to illustrate that this AI bot, you know, is able to, like, honeypot someone who is reaching out and alleged not allegedly, but you would assume like preying on kids in some fashion. This is what it's meant to show.

Joseph: 09:09

Yeah.

Emanuel: 09:09

And sorry, just to back out a bit since Jason asked that we explain how we how we found this. Someone reached out to us, said they got a presentation. This was like the type of thing that we saw and then we filed FOIAs at a bunch of do you know how many police?

Jason: 09:36

I filed 67 freedom well, public records requests in Arizona and Texas because we knew that they were operating in Arizona. And then through basically, like, I started getting documents back. And one of the really interesting things about this was that the company really didn't want us to have any documents about it. Like, a lot of the records that I got back were emails from Massive Blue to the police departments in question saying, don't release these documents more or less, which is complicated and we don't need to get into it. But basically, like, some states allow the third party subject of of public records requests to say, like, hey.

Jason: 10:25

Don't release these. These are trade secrets or these are confidential or something like that. So then I learned that they had pitched the Texas Department of Public Safety and some police departments in Texas because they were mentioned in these other documents that I got back. So I went and filed a bunch of FOIAs there, and over time, we were able to get a lot of information about how this company works and then also some of the presentations that they were giving to cops, which explain like the types of personas that they were making. And in this case, like as Emmanuel said, the the personas are basically like social media accounts that will interact with people out in the wild, but they'll also interact with people one on one.

Jason: 11:07

And they come with like a profile picture. They have the ability to generate images using AI if like, I don't know, a child sex trafficker or an alleged child child sex trafficker says like, send me a picture of yourself. Like, the tool can nominally do this.

Joseph: 11:26

Let me let me summarize sort of why this is different. And I think it's obvious, but also things worth spelling out is that we've covered a lot of social media surveillance companies. You know, ones such as Shadow Dragon bought by DHS or whatever or or, you know, there's DataMiner as well and a bunch of others, Fivecast, that's come up recently. And what those companies will typically do is they will scan social media for certain activities. So maybe they're looking for keywords that they believe are linked to drug trafficking like slang terms or whatever, Or maybe they're looking at posts from a certain physical location, so maybe they can find out where protests are gonna be or where protests have moved or something like that.

Joseph: 12:11

It's sort of passively monitoring social media even though there could be some selectors or keywords or variables or whatever. And with that, you know, a police officer could just collect the information and then maybe use it. And, you know, you can imagine if the secret if someone tweeted like a threat to the president or something, the secret service might see that then go act on that information. That's very, very, well, normal. I think it's just standard that happens all the time.

Joseph: 12:41

And a police officer could also potentially, you know, see something on social media and decide to go undercover themselves. What's different here is like it's doing the whole thing. It's identifying, it seems, potentially a target. It's then deploying this persona so they could be that child that you were describing a minute ago or there's a college protester one. I think there's another protester one where it gets into a bit more detail.

Joseph: 13:08

There's a pimp one as well. And this tool from the company MassiveBlue will then go and deploy that. It seems autonomously, but I I guess that it could be semi autonomously, and maybe they decide to go do that. But the point is it's going another step further, and I haven't seen the company do that before. Like, is that what stood out to you, Jason?

Jason: 13:28

Yeah. I mean, we also haven't seen cops in the past create these fake profiles. You know, cops have gone undercover a lot, but this was this is basically a company saying, like, we will create an AI with a backstory to interact with potential suspects. And then it seemed like they also sort of proactively go out and try to identify potential suspects because we got some emails where the one of the people at the company was asking the police for a list of words that they wanted to monitor on social media. So, you know, things like protests, things like, you know, drugs, I don't know, just like different keywords that then would trigger these bots to go interact with them.

Jason: 14:15

And crucially, it's like they can interact in a group setting, but they can also go one on one. So, you know, a lot of the screenshots are like, you might start on Twitter and then join a Discord and then, like, continue that same persona across different social media platforms. We haven't gotten into it yet, but, like, this is interesting and sort of makes sense for, say, child sex trafficking or drug trafficking or like some pretty bad crimes. But then they also have a list of potential uses and this ranges from traffickers, money launderer, and then they also have on here escorts, juveniles, college protesters, really notably, and then they also say external recruiter for protests, such as like

Joseph: 15:10

What does that mean?

Jason: 15:11

I mean, it's people who I guess are like taking out I mean, like Craigslist ads to recruit protesters. Like, the vibe I got was like George Soros is paying these people to protest.

Joseph: 15:22

Right. The myths. But they're actually building a project around it almost. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason: 15:27

Yeah. And so one of the, like, wildest personas that we saw was this, I mean, again, fake woman named Heidi who they call a protest persona and they call her a radicalized AI persona. And her backstory is she's 36 years old. She's from Texas. She's divorced.

Jason: 15:47

She has no kids. So like a childless divorcee whose hobbies are, quote, activism, leader of a local group, and baking. And then her personality is body positive, lonely, outspoken, and seeking meaning. Then the

Joseph: 16:06

got me. Yeah.

Jason: 16:08

The the social media platform she's on are Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Reddit, and 4chan. So we have this, like, divorced mom protester on 4chan or not mom. Divorced childless essentially like cat lady is what they're going for I think.

Emanuel: 16:30

And that's an image of her. She has like a tattooed arm, her hair is dyed purple and it looks like she's at a protest, maybe.

Joseph: 16:39

Maybe maybe this isn't entirely clear from the documents, but do you know if like that persona with all of those brutal characteristics, like Jesus, okay, were they made by somebody inside Massive Blue working on this tool with, like, I'm gonna make this persona and here's all the the characteristics I want, or was that made by the AI? I I read it as the former, but, like, do we actually know?

Jason: 17:05

So these are from like a pitch deck to cops, and so they're example personas. And so I if I had to guess, these attributes were like are like represent the prompt that is given to Heidi.

Joseph: 17:20

Right. You are this. You are that. Yeah.

Jason: 17:24

Yeah. And then there's another one that's a 25 year old from Dearborn, Michigan, which is a really, like, a heavily Muslim place in The US. And they say that her parents are from Yemen, she speaks Arabic, and she's active on Telegram signal, and her phone has access to international SMS, which is just like I guess what I'd say is like almost all of the personas that we saw are like people of color, leftist coded, like protest type people. Or

Joseph: 18:01

a Yeah.

Jason: 18:02

Or a child. Yeah. But even the children are almost all, like, Hispanic or black. Like, the ones that we've seen in these in their slides at least. Right.

Jason: 18:17

Which I think is just notable because, like, I guess we'll talk more, but the the people behind this company, Massive Blue, come from an a border patrol background. The the most public facing person in this is a guy named Chris Clem, who was a border patrol agent for I think like twenty seven years, a long time, and he was a border patrol agent in Arizona. He's testified before congress about border security and illegal immigration. And then over the last few months, he's been posting on LinkedIn almost daily with images of him with RFK junior, with Tulsi Gabbard, with, like, high ranking Trump administration officials. So he's very interested in this in, like, illegal immigration, border security, so on and so forth.

Jason: 19:11

And so that's, like, the type of people that they're trying to catch more or less. Like, that that's sort of what he says in an interview with Theo Von, who's really popular YouTuber. He says that we wanna work with border security on this.

Joseph: 19:24

Yeah. That makes sense. And as far as we know, who is buying it or at least demoing it? You mentioned, I think, department of public safety. Can you give us a quick rundown of who has bought it?

Joseph: 19:39

Who has tried it out as far as we know?

Jason: 19:42

Yeah. So Yuma County in Arizona tried it, which Yuma is near the border. And then the other one is Pinal County Sheriff's Department, which is also near the border. It's like I think it's where Tucson is. And Yuma ended up not buying it, but Pinal did using, like, a grant from the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

Jason: 20:04

So basically, like, Arizona State Police gave them a $360,000 grant to use this software. They've been using it. It's deployed. It's been out there for about a year. And so far, they have it's led to zero arrests, which is really notable.

Jason: 20:23

And something that we were able to confirm with the sheriff's department, but then also there were like city or county council meetings where, you know, local politicians are like, what is this software and why are you using it and what does it lead to? And very interestingly, they don't say a lot about it because they're trying to keep it more or less under wraps, like how it works and what it is.

Joseph: 20:46

Yeah. I will say 360,000 is actually quite a lot for a software tool. Like, when you look at the stuff like Babble Street or the other social media monitoring tools. Sometimes that can be like 5 k, 10 k per user license or something like that. 360,000 is a hell of a lot of money for this sort of thing.

Joseph: 21:10

You mentioned that it hasn't been linked to any arrests. So is it effective? Does it actually do what it says on the cover or do we not know? And that's kind of the point.

Jason: 21:26

Well, we don't know. I mean, we really don't know. There's a there's a recon report that was put into this presentation, which again, these are numbers directly from Massive Blue. We, like, have no idea sort of the effectiveness of this tool, but they they basically said that they scanned Dallas, Houston, and Austin for potential suspects. And it says that they identified 418,000 unique human traffickers in Houston, One Thousand Three Hundred And Twenty Seven in Dallas, Five Hundred And Twenty Two in Austin in one day.

Jason: 22:03

And those numbers seem crazy. Like, numbers are really high. And I think the expert that we spoke to said, you know, the potential for sort of like false identification of people is really high. The other thing is that, like, college protesters are doing a First Amendment protected activity. Like, that that isn't it's not a crime to protest on colleges no matter sort of what the administration is trying to say.

Jason: 22:29

And, you know, people are getting their student visas revoked for protesting, but that is not supposed to be happening. And so I don't think it doesn't seem very effective. And then also in their marketing, like when they've done interviews, they've talked about this tool being a, quote, cyber wall and using just, like, crazy buzzwords that at one point in an interview, they said that it could be used to hack like, take money back from hackers who had broken into your four zero one k, which is just a completely different use case from cop surveillance. And so there's a lot of red flags here, I would say.

Emanuel: 23:10

It's we can keep going down the list of all the features that the company is capable of, and the further down the list we go, the more crazy will sound because it goes into like, it's Web three. It does cryptocurrency. It can actually use the AI for good for doing community outreach and stuff like that. So there's no end to what it says it can do. I think the point is not if it's effective or not because we can't say for sure.

Emanuel: 23:42

If I was to go on a limb, I would say it probably is not effective because it's just hard to imagine a chatbot being better at undercover work than a human investigator at this point. Maybe you're able to do more at scale if it's all automated, but I don't know. I just like I I struggle to imagine the the criminal who is volunteering incriminating information to chatbots that they met on the Internet. Regardless, the point is, whether it works or not, people are paying for it. Like, people who live for Arizona who who live in Arizona are paying for this kind of technology and they're paying for it while the company refuses to tell the city council how it works and refuses to tell us how it works.

Emanuel: 24:36

So regardless of whether it's effective, people are paying for it and that I think is really important. And it may never work and still, we know for a fact that, you know, the government will pay for projects that go nowhere. And this project, I think, also has the potential to be very dangerous as as Jason says, like, can it actually detect thousands of human traffickers in in in Houston by looking at Twitter? Probably not. But you might get investigated for for being flagged as as one of those people.

Jason: 25:17

Yeah. Sam, I was wondering if you could give, like, does that pass the smell test even remotely vibes where, like, this tool detected a thousand, quote, unquote, human traffickers in Houston in a twenty four hour period just as someone who's covered sex work a lot better than than I have a lot more thoroughly?

Sam: 25:38

I mean, definitely not from my first, like, impression of it. I don't have the data on how many sex traffickers there are in Houston, Texas. But I do know that, like, sex workers, especially, like, at like, working at massage parlors, for instance, like, these gray areas of, like, the legal business doing possibly technically illegal things. They often get raided and called sex traffickers because cops go in there and they say, oh, you're running this business. You have people here illegally doing sex work and you're profiting off of it, you're sex traffickers.

Sam: 26:21

And this is something that sex workers have been concerned about for a long time is this constant surveillance of them online, of this automated version of surveillance, which is like the next step in police surveillance online that I think we're seeing growing where it's just like you get scooped up into this bucket of trafficker, quote, unquote, and then they can kinda pursue you in that way. But, yeah, I mean, trafficking is always kinda like a red flag term because it gets a lot of things get caught up in it that aren't really strictly trafficking, sex trafficking in particular. There's a lot of trafficking that happens in The United States, and a lot of it is labor and, like, food industry and things like that. It's like there's trafficking happening that's not sex trafficking all over the country, but I think in this case, you know, you can always count on the cops to buy a new toy and use it stupidly. So, hopefully, they don't use it at all, and they waste a bunch of money.

Sam: 27:27

That's kind of the best case scenario here, which I think is really dark. They just waste people's taxpayers' money on something that's just a a toy that they think is cool and flashy because it's AI. And people's you know, they have these pitch decks that you guys just described. And they're like, yeah. Sure.

Sam: 27:48

Pay for it. And we'll see. We'll find a way to use it.

Jason: 27:51

Yeah. I think last thing is human trafficking is a buzzword, and it's been used it it is used a lot of times by, like, nonprofit groups, by cops, etcetera, to say as, like, a euphemism for illegal immigration and a variety of of different crimes. And it's something that's easy to get funding for, like in like, this tool was part of a human trafficking grant. And so that's one of the reasons why got why Pinal County was able to get money for it was because there was, like, a human trafficking grant from the Arizona state police that that went to them. But sort of reading between the lines, I think that this is supposed to partially be a tool to identify undocumented immigrants.

Jason: 28:48

Like, that is my opinion, but that is extremely the vibe that comes off when you were, like, looking at what they're pitching and then also what Chris Clem has said publicly and his background as a border security as a as a border patrol agent and also everything that he has he goes on Fox News constantly to talk about illegal immigrants and about border security and that sort of thing. And he's like the most public facing person here. But historically, state and local police don't, like, go after undocumented immigrants, but they do go after human traffickers. And so when I talked to Pinal County, they said, oh, we don't do immigration cases. We do human trafficking cases.

Jason: 29:37

And so I don't know. Like, surely there's some experts out there who who probably know a little bit more about the use of the term human trafficking for undocumented immigration, like the the sort of dichotomy there. But that's sort of what I got while reporting this story.

Joseph: 30:01

Yeah. Totally. Alright. We will leave that there. Maybe we'll explain a little bit more how we got some of these documents later on as well.

Joseph: 30:12

But when we come back, we're gonna talk about one of Sam's stories where I read the headline. I have literally no idea what what it means or anything. Hopefully well, we will when we when we talk about it shortly. We will be right back after this. Alright.

Joseph: 30:43

And we are back. I was gonna go in completely blind on this one. Sam, I was like, no. No. I do need to refresh my memory and fully understand what's going

Sam: 30:51

I went in completely blind to the experience. So it would have been appropriate. Yeah.

Joseph: 30:55

Okay. But I read the headline and then my my brain starts to cross wires. But the headline is, I went to go see God's influencer, the millennial saint Carlo Acutis? Acutis? Sorry.

Joseph: 31:11

You're gonna have to help me

Sam: 31:11

with that. I don't know. Acutis?

Joseph: 31:13

I don't That's how I mispronunciation of the week. I'm really sorry. I haven't done one of those in a while. So as I said, I have literally no idea what it's about, and then I did go and read it. But who is Carlo exactly?

Joseph: 31:25

Like and I know you're not going to give me the full biography. How how how about this? How about this? How did you first hear about this? Like, you just happened to be in the area?

Sam: 31:36

I don't know how I first heard about Carlo, Saint Carlo, Blessed Carlo. Sorry.

Joseph: 31:41

Saint Carlo. Yeah. My bad.

Sam: 31:42

Yeah. Please. I think it's

Jason: 31:45

like Is this like is this, like, topical because Pope died also?

Sam: 31:49

It is now. Yeah.

Joseph: 31:50

It is now. Post.

Jason: 31:51

That's why we're covering it.

Emanuel: 31:53

There's like a more specific connection between them. Sam, I don't know if you realize this.

Sam: 31:58

I mean, he was gonna Pope Francis was gonna, like, make him officially a saint, I think, later this month.

Emanuel: 32:03

Well, there's that, but there's also he was the the shrine for the saint is in Assisi. Right? And Pope Francis is named after Oh, yeah. Saint Francis of Assisi. Yeah.

Sam: 32:17

I realized that. Yeah. I went to I went to Francis' Basilica also. Pretty sick place. But, yeah, I don't know.

Sam: 32:24

I don't remember how I came across this at first. I mean, it's it was in the news a lot is kind of the the answer to that, and then I happened to be in Italy for a conference.

Joseph: 32:33

Yes. So you happen to be in Italy for a conference, and then you decide to go and see Carlo and his body that's on display. How about this? Why is he, like, God's influencer? Is it, like, he's really young or or he wears unusual cloners for somebody who's called a saint?

Joseph: 32:56

Like, what's the attraction here?

Sam: 32:58

He so he was born in the he was born in 1991. So, technically, he's a millennial, and he's considered the first millennial saint. But he died when he was 15. He died of leukemia. It was pretty sudden, I think.

Sam: 33:13

It went downhill pretty fast. But before that, he spent fifteen years of life being extremely, extremely into God, extremely pious, extremely dedicated to the Eucharist, which is a part of Catholicism. I just disclaimer. I know almost nothing about Catholicism. I grew up evangelical.

Sam: 33:37

I did not ever attend a Catholic mass in my life. So, hopefully, I did not offend any of our Catholic subscribers writing about this, but people seem to be chill with it because Carlo would've been chill with it because he's a millennial and cool like that is the marketing that Catholic church is putting out with Carlo's sainthood. So that disclaimer out of the way. Let's stumble through an explainer of Carlo, I guess. But, yeah, he I think so just to kinda sum it up, like, without going on too long about his life, He he comes from a pretty wealthy Italian family.

Sam: 34:20

And he I think the way you get into sainthood in modern times is connections, it seems to be. So you can't just be, like, really good and holy in your life. You have to have people noticing it and then kinda submitting that for you to to the church. Like, hey. This guy deserves to be a saint.

Sam: 34:40

So that's kinda what happened with Carlo after he died. But during his life, he was pretty pretty normal as far as teenagers go, as far as, like, Christian teens go, I guess. He played one hour of Xbox a week because he didn't want to be addicted, quote, unquote, to gaming. He didn't wanna dedicate too much time to gaming because he was dedicating rest of his time to God. But oh, and he was, a programmer.

Sam: 35:15

He made his he made websites that, like, were for the church, for volunteering websites, things like that. So he, like, had these kinda, like, cool talents of the tech age that he applied to the church.

Joseph: 35:31

So

Sam: 35:31

And that's kinda like what made him like, made people pay attention to him after he died. And then after he died, there were a couple of miracles that happened around his death that then kind of rose his case to higher up in the sainthood ranks,

Joseph: 35:52

I guess. Well, I'll say alleged miracles there. Let me let me just give that caveat.

Sam: 35:57

It's all a legend.

Joseph: 35:58

Okay. Sure. So sorry to be cynical and almost to bring sort of the tech side of this because when I was going through, I found this particularly interesting. So the cynical side of me is, like, it's almost like a marketing thing. Right?

Sam: 36:12

%. All sainthood is marketing.

Joseph: 36:15

Sure. Wow. Say. That's a good that's a good line.

Sam: 36:18

All sainthood is marketing.

Joseph: 36:19

Sure. But then specifically, like, there's a YouTube connection in there. There's an eBay connection in there. What what's this YouTube video that you put in there? It's like a pretty well produced piece of, like, marketing, or, like, what is it?

Sam: 36:34

Yeah. So since the church has decided to raise Carla to the status of, like, millennial sainthood in an effort, like, to kinda radiate reiterate what you just said about marketing in an effort to get young people into the church because the church is having a real crisis with young people. Young people aren't replacing the older generations fast enough. People are leaving the church, not joining it, etcetera. So part of this is the marketing of his sainthood is really interesting.

Sam: 37:08

So what you're referring to in the story is a trailer for a documentary produced by the Eternal World Television Network, which is such a sick name. I'm jealous of it, which is the Catholic church is, like, state television equivalent. You know? It's like the Catholic church pays for this. They made a documentary about him and about this group of teenagers, I think they're in high school, going to a sissy to see him and to kinda make this, like, pilgrimage, so to speak, to, like, get into the lore in person.

Sam: 37:50

And, you know, it's like the documentaries documentary is, like, interviewing these kids, and they're like, I'm excited to eat pizza. And at the end, they're like, my life has changed. You know? Okay. But it's it's all kind of part of this big, like, marketing push to get Carlo in the news, which has worked really well, by the way.

Joseph: 38:11

Well, you went?

Sam: 38:12

And, yeah, I went. I logged it. Yeah. It's like I logged it. Aftermath logged it, which was great.

Sam: 38:18

Lots of other like, every other news outlet is, like, written about Carlo, the millennial saint. So it there's, like, SEO power behind Carlo at this point.

Jason: 38:28

Right.

Sam: 38:29

And there's also a livestream of the church. So you could watch. So you didn't even have to go anyway.

Joseph: 38:34

Yeah. He went all that way, and he didn't actually need to. I could I could have done it from here. What what was it actually like in there exactly? Just describe the scene a little bit.

Sam: 38:48

So you you're you're kinda walked down like this. It's almost like it's not quite a dead end path, but it kinda looks like it. But, like, get the end of the street, and it's a city, which is a very, like, old stone work, stone streets, stone buildings kind of place. So you kinda walk down this narrow alley, and you come up to this church. And it's like a small church.

Sam: 39:07

It's really not a big deal, like, place. There's not huge decorations or anything. There's a little poster on the wall outside the church of Carlo and Jesus, which is sick. It's like a Photoshop. Obviously, it's Photoshop.

Sam: 39:20

Carlo wasn't really with Jesus, and nobody took a picture. But it's like you walk in, and there's signs everywhere that are, like, this way to it's like Disneyland. It's like you're following kinda like a path, and you're in line with people. But it's a little tiny church, so you're kind of going in and out of the pews to get in line. And then you get in line, and people are waiting to approach the tomb, which is like stone and then glass on the front.

Sam: 39:49

And he's in there dead and, like, it's strange. It's this is majorly the reason why I wanted to go. It just like, I have to see what the body itself looks like because part of sainthood is they dig up the remains years later because it takes years to get, you know, to the point where it's like church says, go for it. They dig it up dig him up and move him to Assisi. And they kinda say, oh, did the body decompose the way bodies normally do, or did it not?

Sam: 40:24

Because he's a saint, and they they're special and don't decay. So got in line. I was really curious. There's a big no photo sign. Everyone was taking pictures.

Sam: 40:36

No one was respecting the no photos. Yeah. And then you kinda walk up and you kinda shuffle by. You get up to the glass. And there are people, like, kissing the glass, like, kissing their hands, kissing the glass, kneeling, doing, like, the rosary, praying.

Sam: 40:53

Lots of stuff was happening. Most people were there just gawking like me just to see it. And it was kinda mesmerizing because, like, the people are all very focused on looking at his face, and his face is wax. If there is a body under there, which supposedly there is, they covered it with wax and made it look like him because, obviously, he decayed

Joseph: 41:21

normally. Passed.

Sam: 41:22

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's dressed in, like, sneakers and, like he looks like he's straight out of, you know, 02/2006. Like, he looks like a kid I could have gone to high school with.

Sam: 41:33

This is just so eerie that his face is all over posters and magnets and everything else.

Joseph: 41:41

I think I think that's just the last thing I wanna ask kind of related to the the marketing is so people are selling all this memorabilia about the same to sort of a a as a, you know, marketing SEO tech play for for the religion. Like, what are people selling them?

Sam: 42:02

What are they selling? They're selling magnets, rosaries, keychains. It's the church is selling them. Like, it's a setup inside the church. There's a gift shop that you can go through after you're done gazing lovingly into Saint Carlo's wax face.

Sam: 42:20

And and I was also in Rome for a bit, and there's tons of just, like, street vendors and people like that selling off off market black market Carlos stuff. Yeah. It's people all over the city, all over Italy, I'm sure, all over anywhere anywhere Catholics gather. I'm sure there's Carlo merch being sold. Yeah.

Sam: 42:42

It's it's a wild it's a wild thing. They also kinda yassify him. Like, in the pictures, he looks How

Joseph: 42:48

do you mean? Is it AI or something? Or like

Sam: 42:50

Not AI, I don't think, but, like, he looks, like, hotter than he does in the pictures of him as a normal 15 year old. It's like he looks very like, his hair is very good. And, like

Joseph: 43:02

Right.

Sam: 43:03

You know, it's like his eyes are, like, a little bit eyeliner. I don't know. It's like it was very the pictures of him are very striking in a way that's like they they want this to look I mean, obviously, if you're gonna make a saint, you want him to look good. So they're appealing to that part of it, I think.

Joseph: 43:19

Yeah. But they didn't they didn't the pope as far as I can remember. So, you know, seems pretty unusual here.

Emanuel: 43:27

Did you read about his did you read about his miracles at all?

Sam: 43:30

Oh, little bit. Yeah. I didn't really go down that road too far. It was they seemed pretty pretty decent. It was like somebody got into a bike accident and he

Emanuel: 43:38

Oh, I missed that one. So maybe that's the other one. Because I was trying to figure out because you need to have two miracles attributed to you in order to achieve sainthood. Right. And I was like, how how how has this child how did he do two miracles?

Sam: 43:55

So he didn't while he was alive.

Joseph: 43:58

Right.

Sam: 43:59

It's like someone pray like, someone's mom who was in a car accident prayed to him, and there was a relic involved, which is like a piece of your body after you die.

Emanuel: 44:12

Or clothing. Or clothing.

Sam: 44:14

Or hair. And then they say, oh, it's because I prayed to Saint Carlo that my daughter is recovered from this bike accident. And then it's like, oh, chalk that one up for Carlo.

Emanuel: 44:27

Right. And then the other one was similar story with cancer from with some kid from Brazil, I think. Yeah. Same thing. Yeah.

Joseph: 44:34

Yeah. Well, Sam, you're now officially on the religion influencer beat. No? Oh, okay. That was that was a one off a one off a one off opportunistic piece.

Sam: 44:45

Maybe. There's so much of this going on that's very mundane and modern. And I think this stood out to people because it's sainthood, which is a big fucking deal. It's like the last saints that were made saints were born and died in the eighteen hundreds. So it's the first saint in a minute, and it's also a a teenager, which is, like, cool.

Sam: 45:11

So I think that's why people are interested in this. But there's a there's just I mean, listen. I went to a lot of youth groups. It's just everywhere all the time within Christianity where they're trying to make religion and Christianity cool. And this, I think, is probably decently

Joseph: 45:29

Probably working.

Sam: 45:30

It's working for sure. And it's also like the virtues that he is that people are into about him are like, don't game too much and be nice to your friends. You know? It's

Joseph: 45:40

like, okay. Cool. I agree with half of that. Yeah.

Jason: 45:45

He he only allowed himself one hour of gaming per week.

Sam: 45:48

Yeah. He was very, very

Jason: 45:51

he was definitely not playing any Dark Souls. Yeah. He played Halo, Mario, and Pokemon. So it's pretty hard to, like, catch them all on one hour

Emanuel: 45:59

the eco. So

Sam: 46:00

I would not yeah. But yeah. But it's also at the same time, it's like the like, these influencer things are happening all the time. And with this, I think it's a big deal because it's working. And colossism is kind of back.

Sam: 46:14

Like, JD Vance being an adult Catholic convert? Crazy.

Joseph: 46:19

Silicon Valley and stuff as well.

Sam: 46:20

Silicon Valley, like the trad stuff that teens are more and more into, the modest y movement, things like that. It's like this is all very much happening at a moment that is ripe for this kind of thing to be popular. And I think a lot of that is very insidious in terms of, especially, like, women's rights, reproductive rights, things like that. So, yeah, it's like, part of me wants this to be like a like, I really resisted this being, a cynical story. I wanted to have fun and go on a field trip.

Sam: 46:58

But, of course, all that is, like, in the back of my mind the whole time exploring this stuff. So I don't know.

Joseph: 47:06

Yeah. I think tying it to sort of that rise, as you say, with JD Vance and then the tech industry. Well, I think that's a really good place to leave it and sure shows why this matters.

Sam: 47:18

JD Vance

Joseph: 47:19

is the

Sam: 47:19

last person to see the pope before he died, apparently.

Joseph: 47:21

Yeah. One off. Right? Day before. Yeah.

Sam: 47:24

The last visitor perhaps. Yeah. Just throwing that out there.

Joseph: 47:28

Throwing that out there. Alright. We'll leave that there. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying four zero four media subscriber, we're gonna talk about the state of four zero four media briefly, the the business, and so called economic headwinds, whatever that means.

Joseph: 47:46

I mean, you're gonna see what we mean in a second. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. We'll be right back after this. Alright. We're back in the subscribers only section.

Joseph: 48:11

This is one that was initially behind the blog, which if you're a paying subscriber, you you get every Friday in your email or it's just on the site or in your RSS feed if you're one of the people who uses that. But we decided to expand it a little bit. Jason did a bunch of additions, and then we published it more widely because I think there's value in more people seeing this as well. Did I already say the headline? I didn't.

Joseph: 48:41

Did I? Okay. It is how for a full media is navigating quote economic headwinds unquote. When we all worked for a big media company, specifically Vice, although this will apply to media all across a ton of different companies, we kept hearing the term economic headwinds. Jason, why is that and why is it probably bullshit?

Joseph: 49:08

Like

Jason: 49:10

Yeah. I think every email that we ever got after a certain period of time, I think probably starting around COVID from Vice executives that was about layoffs or pay reductions or try super hard because we're failing. Those sorts of emails all included the term economic headwinds. And it became this meme that was not just used at Vice. It was it's used in, like, every CEO's layoff Zoom call.

Jason: 49:45

Like, we we wrote about a lot of those during COVID where we obtained a lot of stuff and we're covering labor, and they all blame economic headwinds. And what that means is, like, the larger macroeconomic situation made it such that this individual company could not survive without firing a bunch of people. Like, it's it's basically a term used by CEOs and by c suite executives to say, because of everything that's going on, gestures broadly at everything, you lose your job now. And it's never like, I fucked up. It's never we mismanage this company.

Jason: 50:27

It's never like, I'm taking a pay cut. I'm firing myself. It's always we're firing you because of the broader situation that's happening.

Joseph: 50:37

Yeah. And taking basically no responsibility for it. Because, you know, well, if it was all of this stuff over there, which is completely out of our control, like COVID or one I mean, wasn't just COVID. Right? There were all these other ones.

Joseph: 50:54

And can you remember what

Jason: 50:55

some of the

Joseph: 50:56

other ones were?

Jason: 50:56

Some of the other headwinds that occurred was like Facebook changed its algorithm. Like, things that a media executive probably should have been able to predict. Other things was like, we lost a big investment. Like, things of this nature. Like the Russia Ukraine war was one somehow unclear like why that was had anything to do with, you know, a media company

Joseph: 51:23

It's anything business opportunity because this is important stuff to go report on.

Jason: 51:27

So that's the thing also is that, I mean, as Emmanuel really smartly points out, it's like during COVID, traffic was never ever better, like ever, because people were stuck at home and there was a huge, like, thirst for information about what's happening. So it's like, nominally, it should have been a time that where the business was crushing it. It wasn't because, like, the uncertainty of the situation in the early days caused a lot of advertisers to pull out, like, right right away because all these companies thought, oh, we're not gonna have money to do advertisements, so they pulled out of deals. And so there it's it's not to say that, like, nothing that happens in the world has any, like, any impact on a business. It does, and that's what we talk about in this article.

Jason: 52:12

But headwinds just means like fucking anything. It's like any mismanagement

Emanuel: 52:18

Anything. By us. It's You mentioned a few. Some other ones that like have always come up is Facebook and Google are eating up all our advertising dollars. When Trump won, even though media companies surged because there was, like, more interest in the news, that was an excuse.

Emanuel: 52:35

Like, oh, Trump is president in 2016. There's a lot of uncertainty, so everybody's laid off. It's a surprise. Yeah. It's just like yeah.

Emanuel: 52:46

Just like Jason said, it's just like it's hot outside, layoffs. You know what I mean? It's like I have a tummy ache, layoffs.

Jason: 52:54

Headwind.

Sam: 52:55

Headwinds. Dude, price is still everywhere. Like, lots of other places are still saying it. Like, I'm looking at the news headlines about headwinds. It's like Netflix post strong earnings despite economic headwinds.

Sam: 53:06

These are things that are, like, in the last couple days. Providence freezes hiring, warns of economic headwinds. It's just such a fucking buzzword that means nothing.

Joseph: 53:14

And it's funny. It the the Netflix one you just mentioned, the term is even getting mentioned when the company has been Right. Like,

Sam: 53:21

even more headwinds.

Joseph: 53:23

Yeah. Even more successful, like, to an unprecedented level. And I mean, the current one, the current headwind, I guess, is tariffs and the general craziness. Like, is that why part of the reason why, Jason, you wanted to add to this and then publish it more publicly? Because it's

Jason: 53:43

it's I mean, it's it's Emanuel wrote a lot of this because I think he was having some of the initial thoughts about it because, like, Emanuel sees the messages that people write to us when they cancel their subscriptions because it hurts my feelings too much even if it's nice. I don't have the That's not for it. So, like, Emmanuel can talk a little bit more about that, but it's like the general fear in the economy right now caused by terrorists, trade war, you know, like US picking up people off the street, which leads to less tourism, which leads to less people buying American goods because of boycotts and stuff like that. Like, right, Emmanuel?

Emanuel: 54:23

Yeah. I mean, we're joking around about extremely not real things that we were told are going to kill our company back when we worked at Vice, but there is something very real happening, which is Trump is starting, like, a trade war that we don't really understand why, and and there doesn't seem to be any logic to any decision that he's making around the economy. And stocks go on a nosedive, and then people do actually experience layoffs at big companies because they're trying to cut costs. And then I think on a way easier to understand level, it's just like there's been massive, massive layoffs across the federal government, and that's just thousands and thousands of people who lost their jobs. And from both ends, or I don't know, for all these reasons, we're seeing people cancel subscriptions and people are very nice about it.

Emanuel: 55:29

I appreciate that they give us a reason when they cancel because it does help us understand why people it's great to see why people subscribe, it's also very important to us to see why people unsubscribe, if it's a story they didn't like, if they're not reading it enough, if they have a problem with one of the features on the site. In this case, it's like we're seeing a lot of people who lost their jobs because they work for the federal government. We're seeing people who lost their jobs because they are experiencing layoffs in the same way that we experienced layoffs in vice. And we're also seeing people being like, hey, I'm making a budget and I'm really worried about how much money I'm going to have given everything that is happening, and I'm looking to cut costs, and I'm going to cut costs here, which is completely reasonable. Right?

Emanuel: 56:15

Like, on the one hand, it's like existentially important to us that people subscribe to our website, like this is how we're able to do what we do. On the other hand, I completely understand why people would unsubscribe if they don't have enough money, and we never expect anyone to give us money if it causes them such financial hardship. And, you know, I was sitting there and I was seeing all these unsubscribed notes, and definitely, like, that doesn't feel great, especially coming off of I think we've been real about the fact that the top of the year was very good to us because people were very interested in what we were publishing about Elon Musk and what's happening in the government, and we just had a bunch of scoops and that's how we get subscribers. So we were coming off of that high to like things really slowing down and a lot of people canceling. And while that is like not my favorite thing, I was also extremely relieved.

Emanuel: 57:24

Like, I sort of had like a I hate to use the phrase, but like a PTSD trauma response where it's like, oh, something is wrong financially, big picture. After being advised for almost ten years, whenever that happens, you're like, immediately you're like, okay, when is the layoffs? I remember when, you know, in this period when COVID happened in 2020 and our traffic really surged, we had like a really good few weeks because we were like publishing really good stories about what was happening, I think Jason was like, okay, when are we losing our jobs? Right? It's like any minute now we're going to lose our jobs because the company is not going to be able to withstand the economic uncertainty, the economic headwinds.

Emanuel: 58:10

And here, at FourFourMedia, because we built this company and because we decide exactly where every dollar that we make goes, we can absolutely withstand the headwinds. We've been very, very conservative with how we spend the money that our subscribers give us And one of the reasons that we did that is exactly this, it's like, it's nice to have a period of time when there's a lot of subscriptions and there's a lot of money coming in and it feels like you're just going to go up and up and up and up forever, but that's just like not how the economy works. Like, there's going to be slowdown and we know that because we've lived through it cycle after cycle and we're running the company with that in mind. And there's like a lot of slack in our system in general, and I think sometimes that makes us anxious because we're like, no, we need to push forward and we're like, we need to grow and we want to do this and we want to do that, but there's also there's that instinct there to to play things pretty safe. And I think when something like this happens, I think that really justifies our strategy.

Emanuel: 59:24

Yeah. But what do what do you guys think? Like, how how are you guys feeling about the macroeconomic situation?

Joseph: 59:31

I mean, all I'll say is that because, look, I haven't been in the managerial position, obviously. At motherboard, I was just a writer, reporter. Sam was an editor. Emmanuel was managing editor, and Jason was editor in chief. So you you obviously have a lot more experience around the job side, that sort of thing.

Joseph: 59:51

This is all very, very new to me. But all I'll say is that I would feel fucking awful if we like hired somebody and then Trump for his tariffs screwed up the American economy or something, and it somehow did have like a tangible impact on our business to the point where we had to lay somebody off. Like, I don't I don't wanna I don't wanna do that. Like, we're in charge now, and we don't have to we don't have to play by those rules or whatever. And, yes, we may be very, very cautious with expanding very, very slowly and carefully, but I really wouldn't have it any other way because if we just end up hiring a ton of writers and you open up an office here, I'm not saying like even that is just ridiculous when I say it out loud.

Joseph: 01:00:38

But like, the idea of doing that and they have to take away people's jobs from them, it's just that I I don't even wanna offer it in the first place, really, you know?

Emanuel: 01:00:47

Yeah. There's that aspect of it, which like I definitely agree that would be an awful thing to have happened. Hopefully, that never happens. But there's also a benefit it's not like we have it's not like the company has fuck you money or anything, but there's kind of like a confidence that it's like, we can pay ourselves to live, we can pay our lawyer, we can pay our insurance, and if subscribers go down for a while, if a bunch of people cancel because they lost their jobs, that's not going to stop that. And we need to always always have enough money for those things, right?

Emanuel: 01:01:27

And it's like, we all know that the reason that we left is we worked at a company where literally, like, suddenly there was no money to do this. There was no money to send people out. There was no money to pay Pacer and Yeah.

Joseph: 01:01:40

No money to buy a court record for 10¢, which again

Jason: 01:01:45

I think a good example of something that happened at Vice, like a very specific example was they had this show called Daily Vice where Verizon had this thing called Go 90, which was like a Verizon streaming service that people on Verizon got to their phones.

Joseph: 01:02:04

Never heard of it.

Jason: 01:02:05

And Verizon gave Vice millions of dollars to create a daily documentary series called Daily Vice. And so Vice hired an entire team of people to work on Daily Vice and they made like incredible stuff. They made like they went out into the field, they had money, they made a bunch of cool documentaries, and then Verizon lost interest in Go 90 because it was a fucking stupid idea. Like, the the entirety of Go 90 was a stupid idea where they were like, you know, what if it was Netflix but only available on Verizon phones, only mobile and there was no other way to get it? And so they lost in Verizon lost interest in Go 90 as a product.

Jason: 01:02:50

They got rid of Go 90 as a product, and then the next day, Vice had to lay off everyone who worked on that. And it's like those things happen, of course. Like, I think if someone came to us and said like, hey, we're gonna give you a bunch of money to make a television show. We would think about that and how to staff that and how to execute that. But the way that Vice did it was like, we are going to hire these people as full time employees.

Jason: 01:03:15

This money is gonna last forever, definitely. And you have a job here. And then one day, they just like didn't have a job there because they had no backup plan and there was like no slack in the system, like Emmanuel said, slack in the system. So it's like when that money went away, all those people lost their jobs like immediately. And they were really good people and that like yo yoing of people's livelihoods is really really a tricky one, especially if you're, like, hiring them from another company or taking them out of some other, like, relatively stable position, putting them at your company, and then that then, you know, you you're unstable and you have to fire them.

Jason: 01:03:57

Like, you fuck them over really hard. And so I think we don't want to do things like that.

Joseph: 01:04:04

Sam, what do you think?

Sam: 01:04:06

I mean, it's it's it's also I think this goes without saying, but it's definitely not like vice is our experience, but it's not a vice problem. I've been laid off from many other places, multiple other places, and it's a the economic headwinds thing is across industries and across journalism, especially gets hit with it because for whatever reason, working really hard at a big outlet does not mean necessarily you get more money or job security or anything. So it's not I mean, we we talk about vices. That's what we know, but it's so it's happening currently, like, real time at so many other news outlets right now, and it's fucking painful to watch. Also, I think part of the purpose of being really transparent or the the nice thing about running our company is that we are able to be really transparent.

Sam: 01:05:01

And part of the purpose is to make subscribers feel like because they are, like, in something for lack of a better word, that they are keeping afloat personally, which is true. It's like, you know, we that's that's not to say don't cancel if you don't have the funds. Obviously, we wouldn't make anybody pay for something or ask for anyone to pay for something that they can't afford. But, like, if you're paying for it, you should know what's going on. And, like, you should kinda see what we're spending money on and what we're what we're confronting in the future down the line.

Sam: 01:05:37

I think people are really curious, and people really wanna know how we're doing. And we try to be really transparent about it. So, yeah, that was kind the was the purpose of it to me. It's also like and this is why we made it available to and, like, this the story is not paywalled, obviously, because it's a state of the union, basically. But there are a lot of ways to support us that aren't paying a monthly subscription or yearly subscription.

Sam: 01:06:07

That is what keeps the lights on literally, but there are lots of other things that you can do if you're in a position where you're like, I gotta cut my budget. I gotta cut out all my new subscriptions, whatever it is. I hope if you're in a position that you have to cut all your new subscriptions that you do ours last because we literally need news work. But, yeah, it's like there are lots of ways for people to support us that aren't just that monthly chunk of change. And if you're paying that monthly and you're like, I could afford to do more, it's like buy some merch.

Sam: 01:06:41

Upgrade your subscription. Whatever it is, it's like you can do lots of other little things to kinda help us move the needle. But, yeah, it's got it's been I don't about you guys, but it's weird asking anyone for anything after years of not having to do that and also years of asking for things and saying hearing no.

Joseph: 01:07:02

From from the company and Yeah.

Sam: 01:07:04

And it's like, now we can we can not only just do things, but it's like we ask our subscribers for help, and people are like, yeah. Sure. I would love to do that. That would be I love you guys and I love what you're doing and I think you should keep going. So I'm gonna say yes to what you're requesting, which is like fantastic.

Sam: 01:07:21

Let's get better than that.

Emanuel: 01:07:22

I think it's super difficult. It's one of the most difficult, like, big problems that we deal with on the reg. And I think the place we keep landing on, which I think is right, is like be as transparent as possible, which is why we did this. Like, I realized that it's like a a difficult message to deliver, but it's like, please support us if you can, and if you're one of those people who canceled because you're like, I'm really worried about my money, then it's like, I don't know, obviously no hard feelings, you know what I mean? It's like, I totally understand.

Emanuel: 01:07:55

You can still read the website. We try to make it worth it for the people who pay and we try to make it worth it for the people who don't.

Jason: 01:08:01

Yeah. I mean, I think that we try to explain our reasons for doing things as best as we can and trying to, like, explain, like, here's why we need your email address. We need it so that we can send you our articles directly because of algorithmic, like, fuckery on social media, etcetera. I think that there are a lot more things that we can do that other businesses do that we haven't tried yet because it's felt like we don't need to do them because y'all have been so good to us and so good at, sort of, like, proactively telling people about us and things like that. But a lot of those things have to do with, like, growth hacking, which is a term in the newsletter and podcasting business, which is, like, not something I'm even opposed to necessarily because it's not sketchy.

Jason: 01:08:59

It's just like a lot of work, and it's also kind of like, the returns on it, it turns you kind of into a slightly different type of business. So things that are, like, our growth hacking are, like, buying Instagram ads that target people that would, you know, subscribe to your newsletter. And there's a bunch of I've listened to, like, a lot of podcasts from other newsletter businesses and podcasts and stuff where you can arbitrage those, where it's like, you will make more money by the number of people who sign up to your newsletter than the amount of money that you're spending on Instagram ads or ads in another newsletter or ads on YouTube or whatever. And I'm not I'm not personally, like, opposed to that because I want people to be able to find our stuff regardless. And it's like, don't feel super great about, you know, giving Mark Zuckerberg money, but, like, as a business on the Internet in 2025, like, ad advertising is an important part of most businesses marketing strategies.

Jason: 01:10:06

It's like almost all businesses spend some amount of money to market their business, and we've spent $0 marketing our business. Like, we have not tried that even at all.

Joseph: 01:10:19

Yeah. Yeah. And I and I mean, yeah, you you you'll be scrolling online and you'll see, like, an ad for the New York Times or something or semaphore, for example, or whatever. And I think that's what you're talking about. And I mean, just to stress.

Joseph: 01:10:32

It's it's not talking about taking our user data and then targeting ads that way. It's it's not that at all. It's more

Jason: 01:10:38

It's like advertising our ourselves. Like, us paying money to advertise ourselves on other newsletters, YouTube, whatever. It's like, that might be good for us. It might be good for our business. There's probably a way to do it where it would be like a net positive, But we haven't done that yet because we have we felt like we well, first of all, it's like we don't know how to do it.

Jason: 01:11:02

Right. Second of all, like, you know, we've been conservative with our money. We don't wanna spend a bunch of money on ads that might not work. But that's a long way of saying, like I mentioned at the top of this show that we have a referral program now. And, like, every time that we've ever been involved with a newsletter in the history of journalism, we've talked, we, meaning the people working on it, been like, let's try a referral program.

Jason: 01:11:27

And I don't know if referral programs work. I don't I like actually don't know if people are going to do this.

Joseph: 01:11:32

Can you just explain what it actually is exactly? Because this is honestly the first time I've been I've like seen one. You know?

Jason: 01:11:40

So our referral program is when one of your subscribers, they get a unique link and then they send it to their friends. And then when their friends sign up for the newsletter, you get a point, essentially. It's like you've referred someone to four zero four media. You've told them about us and that person has signed up and then you get you get one referral bonus point. And, basically, it's like if you refer multiple people, if you I believe it's five people.

Jason: 01:12:12

If you refer I think it's if you refer for four people, I'll mail you socks in the in the mail. If you refer, like, eight people, I'll send you a tote bag in the mail. And if you do 20, I'll send you a hat. So it's like, if you put your unique link in your group chats and those people sign up for four zero four media as free newsletter subscribers, I will send you stuff. And the the reason that we're doing that is because this company called Morning Brew, which has a bunch of newsletters, famously did this.

Jason: 01:12:45

And now everyone, like, points to them because it was a huge success where they were able to, like, grow their newsletter list from, like, a hundred thousand people to, like, 5,000,000 people because they were giving away, like, cool merch through their referral program. So I don't know if people are gonna do this. Like, I have no idea if anyone's interested in this. But the reason that we wanna try it is because it's, like, a lever that we can pull to try to to grow our business and, like, increase the number of people that we're reaching, which has a bunch of benefits for us. It's like more people are gonna then listen to this podcast.

Jason: 01:13:19

More people might become paid subscribers. More people might buy merch. Like, that that's a mechanism for us to grow. And that has nothing to do with our journalism, frankly.

Joseph: 01:13:33

But it's like We just let it and it goes, hopefully. Right? And we just then have well, maybe the more well, we just have the same amount of time to do our journalism, hopefully. Right?

Jason: 01:13:41

Hopefully, yes. And it's like, hopefully, this works. I have no idea if it's gonna work. And if it doesn't, we'll just, like, stop doing it. But I guess it's like because we are seeing a downturn in the economy.

Jason: 01:13:56

It's like, well, maybe it's time to try a few of these things to see if any of them work because we wanna make sure that we're able to, like, keep growing our subscribers overall so that the business stays in a good spot.

Emanuel: 01:14:12

While we're pleading and begging, I will say the article ends with a bunch of stuff that people can do that doesn't cost money to really help us. And Joe, I think, says this every week on every podcast, but if you're listening to this in the paid section of the podcast and you're listening here to the end of the podcast, it's like you're pretty deep in. I would consider you like a pretty big fan of the podcast if you're listening to this right now. And it really doesn't take a lot of people to write a review or share the podcast for that to have a huge impact on how popular the podcast is, and that is because of, like, the way the algorithm reads that as a signal, you know, this is the type of thing we report on all the time. It's like, if 10 people listen to this right now and write a review and that shows up on iTunes, like, that's a huge boost for the podcast, which is a huge boost for our business.

Emanuel: 01:15:11

So, yeah, that's like a very easy and like admittedly annoying and time consuming thing. But if you're listening to this and wanna help without spending a dollar, just doing that for thirty seconds is like huge, huge, huge for four four media.

Joseph: 01:15:29

Yeah. The the only thing I'll just say is that you'll have to give and this is just the annoying part of how podcasts work, but you can't leave a review on the paid feed because that's a unique RSS feed for your podcast player. You'll have to go to the free part the the free version of the polls, which doesn't have this bonus section and leave a review there. And that I think that's part of why it can be so hard to ask people to leave reviews. But if you're just wondering, you go to the podcast, you're like, well, it doesn't let me leave a review.

Joseph: 01:15:59

That's why. Because you have to go on the correct feed. Jason, did you have something to close out or you could?

Jason: 01:16:05

No. I just thank you. And I know that some of this stuff, like, is annoying. I'm subscribed to and listened to a lot of other publications and podcasts and stuff. And often when I hear this this these types of things, I really appreciate it when they're like, here's what actually helps us.

Jason: 01:16:22

And then half the time, I don't do it, but that doesn't mean that I don't love them and, like, wanna support them and stuff. So I guess I'll just say that I will try to be better about this because I know how much it means to other creators. And it's like, yeah, if you're listening on your run or in the car or something, it's like a pain in the ass to go back to your computer or to find the other feed and, like, leave a review and share it and stuff like that. But it super really does make a difference. So thank you if you do that.

Joseph: 01:16:52

Yeah. Alright. I will we will leave that there, and I will play us out. 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.

Joseph: 01:17:14

You'll 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 a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleid oscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really does help us out.

Joseph: 01:17:33

This has been four zero four Media. We will see you again next week.