The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Joseph: 00:03

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: 00:31

I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are two of the four zero four media cofounders. The first being Emmanuel Mayberg Hello. And Jason Kevlar.

Jason: 00:40

Hello.

Joseph: 00:41

And then we're also joined by our regular contributor, Matthew Gault. Hello. Alright. So we are officially back for the new year. I hope everybody enjoyed the replays of our interview episodes.

Joseph: 00:57

It was mine with the head of signal. Sam had one about Pornhub as well. Definitely check those out if you haven't already. And I think those were good because a lot of stuff has happened in both of those broader stories when it comes to AI encryption, backdoors, age verification, porn, and everything else. So I thought those were good to carry us over, but we're back.

Jason: 01:21

It's good to be back. New content. New content, please.

Joseph: 01:25

Exactly. And we actually published a ton over the holiday break. Obviously, we wrote a lot of this beforehand, and that one of those is the first story we're gonna talk about. That is Matthew's one. The headline was Research is a Hunting America for Hidden Data Centers.

Joseph: 01:44

I'm actually gonna read the lead because I thought it was really, really good, and then I think that'll set us up for the rest of the discussion, if I can read it on my tiny screen here. A team of researchers at Epoch AI, a nonprofit research institute, are using open source intelligence to map the growth of America's data centers. The team pours over satellite imagery, building permits, and other local legal documents to build a map of the massive computer filled buildings springing up across The United States. Matthew, this is really, really interesting. It came in pretty late in the year, right at the end, and then we published it, as I said, over the holiday.

Joseph: 02:24

So we'll we'll get into the map and the specifics and your experience with it. But what is this organization? What is EpochAI?

Matthew: 02:34

It's a it's sometimes I struggle with what to call these things. So it's like a think tank, basically. It's a nonprofit think tank that is just tracking the growth of the AI industry. And having talked to them, think that they are ambivalent to pro AI, quite honestly, but they are serious about like understanding the impact of this technology, especially with regards to like the infrastructure that it's going to take to build it out. And so you can kind of think of them as like they're collecting a bunch of data to explain to any kind of anyone that would come to them about, like, what's going on in the country and the rest of the world, quite frankly.

Matthew: 03:19

But the like, one of their main focuses is America. They are looking outside of The US as well.

Joseph: 03:25

Sure. So what is just to expand on that a little bit, what is this motivation for building this map? It's just, hey. We think more information is better, or why specifically focus on this? Like, what's sort of the drive behind it?

Matthew: 03:40

Because because we don't know a lot about it. I wouldn't say that like data center construction is a secretive industry, but it is just something that's kind of sprung up in the last couple years in The United States and is affecting a lot of communities. People don't always understand how it's affecting the communities and like what's being built exactly and who owns what. So it is just an attempt to like get a baseline knowledge of what's in the country and like what it seems to be costing in terms of like energy infrastructure and like what exactly it looks like, how big it is, and you know, who owns it. Yeah.

Matthew: 04:25

It's like sometimes sometimes you live I've I've been talking to people the last like six months, and sometimes you live down the street from like a woodland area, it gets cleared out and like buildings start being constructed, you have no idea what the hell's going on.

Joseph: 04:39

Right. Jason, I feel like you've brought it up a few times about how we want to cover data centers or AI data centers more and more. Matthew has been doing that with, I think, three or four articles at this point, something like that.

Matthew: 04:56

There's another one in the hopper too.

Joseph: 04:58

That's gonna be coming. Super super interesting. Great. So what's the context here, Jason, of, like

Jason: 05:04

I mean, this is this is the entire American economy at this point. It's like it's I mean, it's it's pretty shocking if you actually look at the numbers, which I do not have in front of me right now. But if you look at the jobs numbers, it's like there are two places where there is job growth in The United States right now. It's like nursing and health care because they're an aging population and it's data center construction. It's like construction jobs, like HVAC jobs, like, yeah, like electricians and things like that.

Jason: 05:35

And so one, it's like the entire American economy is, like, betting on this. Two, data centers are, like, really controversial in the places that they are being built and set up for a variety of reasons. One, often they're, like, pretty loud. Two, and more importantly, they use a shitload of energy. And so there is, like, quite a lot of discussion about how we are powering these things.

Jason: 06:05

You know, in many cases, they're powered by fossil fuels. In some cases, very rarely or not often enough, would say, are they being powered by renewable energy. And so there's there goes like a hand in hand, like, how are these things being powered, and also what are the impacts on the local community because of that. Because in a lot of places, these data centers have come in and people's electricity bills have gone through the roof because there's, you know, the the actual, like, power generation, there's, like, not enough of it to go around, and so the price of it goes up. And and often, I mean, these things are well, maybe the map shows more, but I I would say the ones that are quite controversial are ones that are being built in relatively poor areas.

Jason: 06:56

And so they're being built in places where people can't afford to pay more for their electricity. And that's happening because a lot of times, you know, the city governments, the state governments are giving tax breaks to these companies to build these things. And so they're they're getting put in places where there's not as much, like, NIMBY type pushback. There's also a lot of them being built in, like, Northern Virginia, which is a pretty wealthy place, and there's, like, a there is a lot of pushback there because that's a pretty rich part of the country, and it's just become like this huge political issue in in those places. Like, we probably should do this at some point, but there's a state representative in Virginia who ran essentially on like an anti AI, anti data center platform, and he was elected.

Jason: 07:49

So, yeah, I mean, that that's like the broader context. And I bring up Virginia because it's close to DC. It's also close to where the the Internet, like, enters the country. There's, like, all these different places where the undersea cables enter the country, and so you have, like, a lot of Internet, like, throughput capability there. And so that that's, like, one of the reasons that that's that's happening there among others.

Jason: 08:13

But, yeah, it it's, like, hugely important at the moment.

Matthew: 08:17

Yeah. Also, water.

Joseph: 08:19

Right.

Jason: 08:20

The water. And then one other thing is like once these things are actually built, they don't bring that many jobs. It's like there's a lot of jobs in actually building them, but then once they're up and running, it's like there's not that many people who who work on them to keep them up and running. So it's not like it's some amazing financial boon for these local communities. There there's kind of like a lot of promise, and then once they're up and running, it's like, okay.

Jason: 08:42

We have, like, seven people working there or whatever. I don't know actually how many people it takes, but I think I I mentioned this on a recent podcast that we recorded, but I went to a Bitcoin mine in Upstate New York that that was causing some of these problems like a a few years ago where they it would the Bitcoin mine was built there because they had really cheap hydropower, and the Bitcoin mine sucked up so much of the energy that people's bills were going through the roof. And the Bitcoin mining company was like, oh, but we brought like, we're bringing jobs back to this town that doesn't have that many. And it's like, there was actually only two people working at the Bitcoin mine. Because it's just like they they needed someone to, like, turn on the light and they needed, like, security essentially.

Jason: 09:25

There was once it was actually, like, everything was installed, there was nothing going on there. And it's like, that is not the exact same as these data centers, but it's it's similar in Vibe where it's just like you just have a bunch of computers running and you just have to make sure that the computers don't blow up.

Joseph: 09:41

Well So for this, it's probably even worse because once it's built, the AI is gonna be running in in the data center. It's like, cool. Now we have the AI to take even more jobs, which aren't even physically located here. Obviously, I'm generalizing. Matthew, what were you

Matthew: 09:54

gonna say? There's just a similar situation happening in West Texas in a city called Clarendon where it's got like a population of 10,000 people, and it's mostly retirees. It's people that moved out there because it was cheap to live there, and this is like they wanted to retire close to the plains, and just like that's this is this is the final place they're going. Well, guess where they're building a data center, and guess what's happening to everyone's electricity bills? And they're giving the same line.

Matthew: 10:23

Well, like, we'll bring jobs to the communities. Like, we didn't need it was a bunch of retirees. We didn't need jobs.

Joseph: 10:29

They literally got more jobs.

Matthew: 10:30

Yeah. And the other thing that I think is one of the other things that I think is really interesting about this stuff, and one of the things that worries me about how they're how it's propping up the community is that it's an enormous gamble that people think is going to pay off in in like five, ten years. Outside. So like in West Texas, again, near Amarillo, they're gonna build four big nuclear reactors, suck up a bunch of water from an aquifer that's already not doing great to to kind of to fuel them. The reactors probably won't come on for at least five years, probably more.

Matthew: 11:12

So to get the data center up and running that they want to power with the nuke plants that will be constructed before the nuke plants are, they're going to build a bunch of like natural gas plants to to burn everything off. It's going to spike everyone's energy bills because none of that's going go back into the community. And what happens in five years, ten years if there's a contraction on LLMs? If this AI stuff doesn't pan out, and now we've invested billions of dollars in all this infrastructure that's just going to be unnecessary overnight, no longer profitable to build, what happens then?

Joseph: 11:55

Yeah. You know? Totally fair.

Jason: 11:56

I mean, this is like the huge trillion dollar question. It's like, are we going to have these husks of data like, these abandoned data centers? And I think Emmanuel, to put you on the spot, is a little bit more bullish on this that sort of, like, kind of regardless of what happens with AI, like, there will be some need for these data centers eventually at some point. So, like, perhaps the risk of this is not as as high, but, you know, nonetheless

Emanuel: 12:25

We will compute something whether that's generating, you know, images on Grok or something else is to be seen. Or it doesn't mean it will be a good return on investment, but I don't think they'll sit there empty, like, abandoned gold mines or something.

Jason: 12:43

Streaming video games. Right? I mean, it's like Anything. Yeah. Xbox can put their servers there or whatever.

Joseph: 12:49

Have we all They'll be they'll be dead in five years.

Jason: 12:52

This happened right before we went on break, and it I I hesitate to, like, open this Pandora's box, but have we followed the data centers in space debate From a typical It doesn't make it doesn't make any sense to me, like, from a from a logistical perspective.

Matthew: 13:07

Well, again, it's one of those things where it takes too much money to build it to get any kind of return on it in anything under, a hundred years. Right? Like, it's a it's a great idea because it's cold up there, etcetera. But like to get everything up there and get it running and then beam everything back, it's just like that's that seems like a pretty tall order.

Emanuel: 13:26

I thought we were putting them in the ocean.

Jason: 13:28

I think the ocean is better. Well, don't clip this because I I don't I mean, I'm not the negative externalities of having them underwater could be many, but ocean is also very cold and is a lot closer, and the Internet's already down there.

Emanuel: 13:46

And they've done it. They did one test. I remember Microsoft

Jason: 13:48

Microsoft has or had one. Yeah.

Joseph: 13:53

Well, speaking of maybe there's one under the water. Is that on the map, Matthew? Or rather, let me rephrase the question to bring it to the story. They have this map, and you can scroll through it and zoom around and and look all of these different data centers across America. How is EpochAI actually building this map?

Joseph: 14:15

I touched on this by reading out the lead, but, like,

Emanuel: 14:17

how are they how are

Joseph: 14:18

they making this app this map? Are they just on Google, like, Google Street View? Like, what are they doing?

Matthew: 14:25

I mean, they're using slightly fancier things than, you know, than than Google Street View, but yes, they're using like they're looking at satellite imagery. They're kind of tracking news stories about the announcement of data centers, and then you go and you look at the satellite imagery for the location. You pore through like local filings at the county level and at the city level to see like what people have declared that they are building. And then one of the things I thought I thought was really fascinating is looking at the satellite imagery for these construction projects and looking specifically at what cooling infrastructure is like. So they look and they see if something's uncovered, which a lot of stuff is, like how many fans are they building, how big are the fans, and then that well, they they kind of have like a formula that they go through and say like, all right, so they've got, you know, this number of fans, and that tells us that it's using this much electricity, and that it's generating this much like data, right, and kind of working backward from the problem.

Matthew: 15:32

Because a lot of this stuff is, you know, Google doesn't want to necessarily tell you how much gigawatts like a deep mine facility in New Albany is using, right? So they they look at the outside of the thing and and work backwards that

Joseph: 15:48

way. Right.

Matthew: 15:49

It's all it's all open source and open information.

Joseph: 15:53

I mean, actually sounds like a fair bit of work, you know, like bringing it all together. What is your experience scrolling through the map? Is it pretty intuitive? Is it informative? Like, what's it like actually to to use this map?

Matthew: 16:07

I think it's really good because it's it's it's all like, you just look at the map. It's all right there. You got your bright blue circles. You click on a blue circle, Go into it, and then it's all annotated. Like I'm looking at this one for Google that's in Oklahoma, and it'll kind of walk you through all the little individual pieces like I was talking about.

Matthew: 16:29

Like this is where the backup power is, This is where its fans are, and then you can even click through dates to see what it looked like as it was under construction. You get a lot of information about what these things look like and how they work just by going through these maps. Interesting. How how busy

Joseph: 16:52

is the map? Like, are we talking like a few results? Dozens? Like because it can't be a massively populated map, or maybe I'm wrong.

Matthew: 17:03

No. No. No. It's only got in The US, it's only got a few results right now because they kind of have because there's kind of an arbitrary line that they've marked where it's like you could technically say like everyone's PC is a is a data center, right, because it's it's doing compute. It has a GPU in it.

Matthew: 17:23

At what point do you have enough GPUs strung together that you consider it a data center for the purposes of this map? Right. And right now they're kind of only looking at like bigger, more massive projects, and that's what they're charting out. And also, don't know about everything, they haven't run the numbers on every little thing that they've found. So that's just stuff kind of comes up as they as they have the time to like get it up on the map.

Matthew: 17:45

Yeah. So, right now it's like a dozen things. In The United States, they've got some other stuff in other places in the world. They've got some in Oman and one in China that they've found, but I I imagine the map is going to grow as the year goes on.

Joseph: 17:57

Right. It's not cataloging every DigitalOcean and AWS data center because, of course, they're all over the place and have been for years and years and years because everything is obviously moved to cloud infrastructure and that sort of thing, but it's not that. It's very specifically stuff about AI.

Matthew: 18:13

Right. This is very narrowly focused on, yeah, the stuff that is powering, like, DeepMind and x AI and Anthropic stuff and like even an Alibaba data center that's here, or in China rather. So, yeah, it is very narrowly on those kinds of things. And they also have like some stuff that's like we think that this is what it is. So, yeah, that that is kind of what's going on.

Joseph: 18:40

What I think just to round it out, what happens now? Are you gonna, like, keep an eye on this map and and return to it? I mean, I guess that it's not really gonna break news probably. Like, I don't think this map is gonna reveal a new data center because it's gonna be picked up in local or national press presumably before it's on the map, but do you think you'll come back to this? Like, is it resource

Matthew: 19:03

This is gonna be a resource resource for me this year, and it was especially interesting because we this is one of those that like I I kind of stumbled on this at the end of the year because I was talking to some guys about some nuke stuff and some like some OSINT stuff they're doing with with with like nuke watching, and they were like, have you talked to these data center guys? They're doing something very interesting, and that's kind of how I got onto this. And I was interested because, like Jason, I think data center and resistance to data center is going to be a pretty big story this year, And I kind of wrote this without, like at the end of the year without super thinking about it, very hard talk to the guys. And I came back, and I had so many emails and messages from people that were like, they're building a data center here, like, this thing is going up, and like it just like any kind of anytime I write about this stuff, it really will people are paying attention, and it really like you know, I always get a lot of ton of messages.

Matthew: 20:04

So it just, again, it tells me that like this is something that people really care about. So as I continue to like carve out a data center beat this year, I think this is going to be a resource for me for sure.

Joseph: 20:15

Hell, yeah. Yeah. That sounds great. And you're right. People do people do care about it.

Joseph: 20:20

Jason? I have

Jason: 20:20

a very quick update on the Microsoft data centers. It's very funny. Mhmm. The underwater ones. So in 2020, soon after they were launched, the headline on a Microsoft press release is Microsoft finds underwater data centers are reliable, practical, and use energy sustainably.

Jason: 20:37

And then it says, more than half the world's population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting data centers underwater near coastal cities, data would have a short distance of travel leading to fast and smooth web surfing, video streaming, and game playing. Here is a headline from IT Pro, which is a trade publication that writes about data centers and other things from 07/19/2024. Microsoft scrapped its Project Natick, which is what this was called, underwater data center trial. Here's why it was never going to work.

Jason: 21:10

And it was it's basically like they had all sorts of issues with it. They're not running it anymore. The main issue was that it was, like, hundreds of feet under the ocean. And so if they needed to do any sort of maintenance on it, they needed either scuba divers or to haul the entire data center back up to the surface, which was extremely expensive and did not work. So perhaps underwater, maybe not the best.

Joseph: 21:35

Which makes you think, it's also quite expensive to go up to space as far as I know. Like, it's not super cheap. You know? So

Jason: 21:43

As I recall when we had to service the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, that was, like, quite quite an undertaking.

Joseph: 21:51

Right. Right. But why didn't they call it project Atlantis? Like, that would have made way more sense.

Matthew: 21:57

Too on the nose. Yeah.

Joseph: 21:59

I guess so. Alright. We'll leave that there. When we come back after the break, we're gonna be talking about, frankly, the complete shit show that's happening with Grok and its AI image generation. We'll be right back after this.

Joseph: 22:25

Alright. And we are back. Jason, this is one you wrote by I know everybody here has thoughts on this, so please jump in. But just to get it started, the headline was Grox AI CSAM shit show referring to child sexual abuse imagery or material. Sorry.

Joseph: 22:46

Jason, to get going, what did people realize over the holiday that they could have Grok do?

Jason: 22:54

Yeah. So I mean, hey at Grok has been become a big thing on x, like, hey at Grok, like respond to this person, blah blah blah. And people realized that they could ask Grock to put women in bikinis who had posted their photos on Twitter on x or to do all sorts of things like spread her legs, take her clothes off, so on and so forth. And it became a meme for the last, I don't know, like, two weeks at this point. It's still happening to some degree where anytime you see an image on Twitter, there's, like, often someone under it asking Grock to, like, manipulate the image in some way.

Jason: 23:41

And what was happening was people were doing this to images of underage girls. And so there was, like, a stranger things actress who I think is 14 who was put in a bikini and people just doing, like, you know, really fucked up things to underage people, which is crazy. It's, like, very, very bad. You know? You don't even need to, like, explain why it's bad.

Jason: 24:04

Just that it's child sexual abuse material being generated on one of the biggest social media platforms owned by the richest man on the world in the world. And this started, you know, another round of discussion about why x is a bad place and why it's like an irresponsible place. And, I mean, I feel like we have entered a period where I think it is important to sort of point out what is happening, but it's not like it doesn't seem like there's any sort of hope that there's going to be some meaningful regulation of this by the US government, of course. And it and there certainly doesn't seem to be much self regulation occurring by Elon Musk. It's it is like, by and large, and anything goes shit show, cesspool, that

Matthew: 25:00

Have they even released like a statement or said anything at all?

Jason: 25:04

I mean, I think that Twitter public relations has updated its autoresponder, the the press autoresponder for a while. It was just sending the poop emoji. And then there was, like, a brief period where they were maybe answering some people, like, very brief period. And now I think it just said as an autoresponder, that's like the media lies. And so

Joseph: 25:29

I haven't seen that one. I haven't seen that one yet either. Yeah. The one I remember is that it was we're looking into it. We're busy.

Joseph: 25:36

And this was sort of around the Doge time, I think. They changed to that after the poop emoji, but I hadn't seen the the media lies one. But you're right in that look. This is the sort of stuff we've seen AI be used for for literally years at this point. Obviously, Emmanuel and Sam have done a ton of coverage on it.

Joseph: 25:54

What's different here, saw two things. It's happening on a major tech platform, which has been acquired by, you know, a tech be it a billionaire, a tech mogul, all of that sort of thing. And the second component is that it's very much in public, like the Telegram groups that Emanuel goes to and finds, oh, this is how they're doing images of Taylor Swift or whatever. That's yes. It's on Telegram, but it's somewhat private or at least, you know, semi public, I guess.

Joseph: 26:25

This is just fucking out there, and they're just doing it on this platform. Emmanuel Yeah.

Jason: 26:32

I mean, well, let's throw it to Emmanuel in a second, but Yeah. Just some of the background here is every social media platform has been taken over by AI slop. We talked about this a lot. But Right. All all of that almost all of that AI slop is being generated elsewhere and then being posted onto the social media platform.

Jason: 26:50

Meta has tried to integrate AI into its platforms and has done so in, like, a pretty shitty way that people don't really use. And so this was, like, a hope of Mark Zuckerberg that people would, like, use Meta AI to to auto generate shit, and, like, you would sometimes be talking to a robot, but sometimes be talking to a human. And, like, hasn't worked very well. Meanwhile, with Sora, Sam Altman and OpenAI have tried to make, like, a fully AI generated social media platform. And it's like that had a flash in the pan and it didn't really work.

Jason: 27:22

But now, like, what has happened with Grok on X is that the AI, as you say, is integrated into the entire experience, and it's it's not great. Don't like it. I'm curious what Emmanuel's thoughts are on it. But, yeah, it's it's like Elon Musk has kind of succeeded at this, like, making people interact with AI alongside of other people goal of some of these tech scions.

Emanuel: 27:49

I think you're one of one of the best observations in the article is what you just said, where everybody's doing AI, but as is often the case, it really matters what the specifics are and what the UI is and what the user experience is. And in this case, it's not only that the AI generation is happening in the same feed as everything else with nothing in between, you just tweet grok and it puts the result in the feed. It's not just any feed, right? It's like historically, also as you mentioned in the article and you link it back to what happened just before we came back from the holiday break, Twitter used to be the place where you go to catch up with what's happening in the news or what's happening around the world in near real time, right? Like, I don't know what Twitter's slogan is now, but it used to be it's what's happening, and now you go to Twitter to see what's happening, and it's like non consensual bikini AI generated shots of minors.

Emanuel: 29:04

And that just kind of, you know, collapses the information environment and what is happening in the darkest corners of the web into one place in a really awful way. I also wanted to talk about something that I think I will probably write soon when I get a minute, But I wrote in May this story that is basically identical, maybe a little worse, but less known, and the headline for that story was Elon Musk's Grock AI will, quote, remove her clothes in public on X. And it's the same thing, people just discovered an accident or by trial and error that you can reply to the image of usually a woman, any woman on an X, and it will produce a nude image of her. And that process of, you know, Twitter's millions of users suddenly discovering an exploit is just a it's very similar to the process that I see in those telegram communities, where people produce non consensual porn and try to produce it with very mainstream tools by finding loopholes in the guardrails. And I feel like looking at those communities today is like looking into the future of Twitter.

Emanuel: 30:43

And what I'll say about that is, this is like a pretty primitive way of producing bad content with Grok, and I'm seeing people produce way, way, way, way, way worse things, and I'm also seeing x, to their credit in real time, responding to the exploits, like, they see what people output and they fix it, but then, you know, there's thousands of people in this Telegram group, and they immediately shift to a new exploit, and it's like, it's this cat and mouse game that I've been following for months, and there is just no stopping it. You're not going to be able, I think, to fully end this problem, because as we've said a million times, the nudity is in the training data, and as long as it's in the training data, it's going to be impossible to completely prevent it from showing up in the output. The only way to stop it would be to go into the training data, extract it, or redo the training data from scratch, which would be really expensive and realistically not something that these companies want to do anyway. So I would just say it's like we are only a couple of years into this, but unless something fundamentally changes, whether it's the law or the technology, we're just going to be doing this like every few weeks.

Emanuel: 32:11

Every few months, it's just going to be something like this.

Jason: 32:14

Well, I think another thing about X also is that it's like Grok is doing this to real images that people are posting. And there there I mean, I guess you can do that with other AI image generators and other AI tools, but it's like one of the kind of jarring things at least to me is that, like, a major world event occurred last weekend, and I am on the West Coast. So it was like two in the morning West Coast time when people started talking about explosions in Caracas. And that's not like a very active time on the Internet, the American Internet. And so I went to Blue Sky.

Jason: 33:02

I was like, there's not like that much going on here other than people freaking out, understandably so. And so I I don't spend like a whole lot of time on x anymore, but I was like, well, all of the fucking Trump administration has accounts on x. Like, is DHS bragging about this? Like, is the is Pete Hegseth bragging about this? Is Steven Miller talking about this?

Jason: 33:24

Like, what's going on? So I went there, and there were videos, like, being posted of, you know, like, Instagram stories that people had taken from the ground in Caracas, like, allegedly. You know, it was videos of, like, explosions and helicopters and things like that. And it's like, okay. You know, breaking news event has always been really fraught time on Twitter, on on the Internet in general.

Jason: 33:54

Like, whether it's a mass shooting or a hurricane or an act of war or something like that. It's like you have some real information and you have some fake information and you have people trying to fuck with you and you have, like, old you have, like, real images from other things that are not actually happening now that are being, like, recontextualized and just, like, posted to fool people. And so you always sort of, like, have your guard up. And, like, I was scrolling through this and I'm like, okay. Like, this seems, like, plausibly real.

Jason: 34:24

Like, maybe this video is plausibly real. I I was just, like, looking for my own interest. I was very interested in what was happening. Like, we were going to war or something. I wanted to know what was happening.

Jason: 34:33

So there's like that, but then there's also, like, AI generated images of Maduro that look really real because they're getting a lot better. They're they don't have seven fingers anymore and also they have like this blurry effect on them because it's nighttime and it's like, I don't know. This could plausibly be real. I have no idea. I bet it's fake, but it could be real.

Jason: 34:53

And then you have that image someone's put him in a bikini and added nipples to him and shit. And this is all happening like in the same timeline and it's just like, dude, this is so fucked up. Like, this is just like such a such a mess. It's just such a mess. And it's, like, always been a mess, but now it's a mess in a way that is, like, like, brain exploding, essentially.

Joseph: 35:15

Yeah. I'm trying to get the news. I'm trying to extract some value from Twitter or X like it used to be. It used to be a genuinely good source of information, and now you'll get the government propaganda from there and Maduro in a bikini as well, and then a bunch of actually, like, straight abusive images as well.

Jason: 35:35

Yeah. And I mean, for the people who are just like, just leave x, it's like, have functionally left x. Like, I don't really post there. But but, like, during a war and through in in this information vacuum at three in the morning knowing and, like, as a journalist, I'm like, okay. Let me go look what this is like at the moment.

Jason: 35:56

Like, who is posting there? What's going on? And, like, this is what's going on. It's like a mix of, like, non consensual sexual imagery, government propaganda, Elon Musk, like, stoking some weird fears, and then, like, Grock taking, like, women's clothes off. And then also, I saw AI generated image of Charlie Kirk that I can never unsee where he had comically long nipples.

Jason: 36:21

And it's like, cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool.

Jason: 36:23

That's what we're doing now. Got it.

Joseph: 36:27

Matthew, what were you gonna say before I ask Jason about something else?

Matthew: 36:31

Just do we ever think that this will get to a point where there is more of a mass abandonment of these platforms? So at a certain point, it is just filled with garbage, and we can't suss any like, it's not worth it to even go.

Joseph: 36:45

I mean, don't have the numbers, but anecdotally, I think just based on everything Jason has just said, like, there's gonna be less and less value for genuine users. There's gonna be continued value for the blue tick grifters and all of that, and they're absolutely not going to leave until they have their incentives removed. But, yeah, it's absolutely less of a a less valuable environment. Like, for me, when it was the the Venezuela stuff, I think I got up and I check Apple News because that I can sort of aggregate Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, sometimes New York Times, all in one, and I basically use that now as my Twitter feed. Whereas years ago, we would scrolled Twitter and got some, like, good information for some good OSINT accounts.

Joseph: 37:30

It's like, I'm just gonna wait for the Wall Street Journal report or something, you know, and scroll through that feed essentially.

Matthew: 37:38

I got added on a bunch of Discords at, like, three in the morning.

Joseph: 37:41

Oh, right. I'll find out.

Jason: 37:44

Yeah. I mean, I I think that for, like, daily use, like, yes, these things are I think people are abandoning them to some extent, at least, like, people who wanna protect their peace and their mental health to some extent. But I think that when there is an act of war, a mass shooting, like, something like that, you can't really solve the information vacuum that occurs between the time that something happens and the New York Times reporting on it or CNN reporting on it or or whatever, where it's like, okay. Here is, like, a source of information. And the solution is that, like, there's not that much you can do at three in the morning laying in bed that, like, wait till some of the facts become clear.

Jason: 38:28

But I think that human nature is such that it's like, no. I wanna I wanna see what's happening now, especially I mean, god forbid, but, like, in in a mass shooting situation, it's like often people are trying to figure out what's going on, and then a lot of the stuff ends up getting scrubbed at some point. Like, maybe it's just because I am a journalist, but it's like, wanna see this stuff from the Internet, like, before it gets deleted. Wanna I wanna, like, know what's going on. And it's just like, unfortunately, I don't I don't think it has to be Twitter, but it's like, there needs there is we're used to a world where you can post something instantly and see it instantly.

Jason: 39:12

And, like, that is not how the news media works for, like, understandable reasons for the most part. Although, the

Matthew: 39:21

New

Jason: 39:21

York Times took, like, five hours before they said, like, The US did this, which was, like, crazy, especially because there's reporting from semaphore saying that they were tipped off this beforehand. But it's just like that there is people are gonna wanna try to solve the information vacuum that exists, and I don't know how you solve it other than with some of these microblogging platforms or, like, clicking around Instagram. Like, it's it's not not great. I don't know.

Joseph: 39:47

Yeah. It's

Matthew: 39:48

funny because I was kind of experiencing this yesterday because there was the gunfire at the presidential palace in Caracas. Did you guys follow this at all? Did you see this? So it was it was a like, there was gunfire at the Presidential Palace in Caracas, and like, I was saw it happen in real time. I was like looking at the posts.

Matthew: 40:08

It's getting posted on Reddit and like some Discord groups I'm in, and like people started to kind of work themselves up into a fur, and this was like, all right, this is it. Like, this is the military coup. Like, here's the fallout from all of this. And people kind of You can already see people designing the narrative in their head before we know like anything about what's going on based on a couple guys' posts. And then come to find out like a drone had gotten too close and they'd shot it down.

Matthew: 40:35

And like that's it. It was just like a quadcopter, and that was like the whole of what had happened. But for thirty minutes, you know, in real time as we're we're watching these videos, we've worked ourselves up. And, yeah, I don't know how you I I don't know how you solve that problem because that's that is human nature. We're always gonna be jumping to those conclusions.

Joseph: 40:56

Yeah. The the thing I'll just add is that, I mean, that's like the old problem. The current the the ongoing problem. Like, it's that's the problem of journalism. Right?

Joseph: 41:04

There's this kind of unrelated thing, and and it'll be a tangent, but you'll bring it back to the AI in that and sort of the the grok problem as well. There was a post on Reddit recently over the holidays that claimed to be from a developer at some food delivery app, you know, a Uber Eats or a delivery or or or whatever. Right? And it was making all these very bold claims that there's, like, desperate pricing for certain drivers, etcetera, etcetera. We didn't cover it because we were, you know, on break at the time.

Joseph: 41:39

I think we all we all needed our break. Other people did, and they determined, various outlets did. I think platformer, maybe the version as well, that it was likely AI generated text. The thing I'm getting to is that one of the reporters engaged with the poster and said, hey. Can you verify you're an employee or whatever?

Joseph: 41:59

And they provided an image of what purported to be like an Uber employee badge, which was also likely AI generated. That terrifies me as a journalist in that maybe one day somebody's gonna try and do that if they haven't already, and that just makes our job so much harder. Like, yeah. The combination of the problem you're describing, Matthew, and now just somebody can just whip up something that looks kinda like an Uber ID in, like, thirty seconds or less.

Matthew: 42:35

Yeah. How long until you get got? Because it's probably gonna happen one day.

Joseph: 42:38

Everyone's gonna get got. Everyone's gonna get got in a personal context. You know? It's not an age thing. It's it's not a education thing.

Joseph: 42:46

It's not whether you're online or not. Everyone's gonna get in a personal context, and everyone's gonna get got in a professional context at some point as well, essentially. Jason, sort of to to wrap it up just briefly, what and this was in the piece sort of towards the end. What was it with journalists trying to get Grock to apologize for this behavior or behavior's wrong with people?

Jason: 43:14

I mean, I'll try to be quick, but, like, basically, people ask, like, Grock, hey. Are you sorry that you're generating this? And Grock was like, oh, yes. This happened for x y z reason and, you know, we're working on it and we're sorry, etcetera. And this is like rule number one about reporting on AI is that AI is not sentient.

Jason: 43:41

AI cannot apologize. AI cannot really explain why it did something, and it especially is not a stand in for the company and created it. This has happened, like, a lot of times, and and I I feel like I was gonna write a story about it one time, but there there was some horrible, like, the Meta AI bots that they launched. And there was a few journalists who started interviewing these Meta AI bots and why they were, like, not diverse enough, something like this. And the the Meta AI bots were explaining that there was, like, an internal problem at at Meta that they were, like, exposing all of this.

Jason: 44:26

And it's like, that's not how an LLM works. Like, the LLM does not work. The LLM does not know what is happening at the company. It doesn't speak for the company. It can't apologize.

Jason: 44:38

It can't go in and and, like, expose corruption within the company. And this is the most common email that we get from people

Joseph: 44:48

All the time.

Jason: 44:49

Overall. It's like, Gemini told me something about Google. Here's my chat, and that is a sign of AI psychosis if you're doing that. Don't do that. It's not good.

Jason: 45:03

It's just not how it works. But anyways, like, CBS wrote that Grock apologized. A bunch of outlets wrote that Grock apologized, and it's like Grock didn't apologize. X didn't apologize. I haven't seen X apologize unless unless something has changed in the last few minutes.

Jason: 45:19

Like, Elon Musk was having Grock take turn him into take off his clothes. Like, this is not something that they're sorry about.

Joseph: 45:28

Yeah. Grock regurgitated a series of words that look like an apology shaped object, but it's not an apology. You need intents behind.

Matthew: 45:38

Well, it gave you it gave them what they wanted. Somebody prompted it to apologize, and it did what LLMs do. It gave them what they wanted.

Joseph: 45:45

Yeah. I mean, you ask it to not apologize, you'll probably not apologize. Exactly. Yeah. Well, we'll leave that there.

Joseph: 45:53

If you're 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 how we finally bought four zero four media dot com, you know, with an m of a fully fledged .com domain. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. Don't don't go to the.com. I mean, you can.

Joseph: 46:14

We'll redirect. Anyway, just go to 404media.co. We'll be right back after this. Alright. And we are back in the subscribers only section.

Joseph: 46:35

The headline of this one, I I was about to say I wrote it, but I didn't. We all wrote it and I kind of forgot No.

Jason: 46:41

You wrote and then put our names on it, which is we we we went through and looked at it and cosigned cosigned.

Joseph: 46:48

Cosigned as we often do. Yeah. So the headline was we bought 404media.com. Where were where where were each of us when we did this? I guess Sam's not here, but she was in Diego.

Joseph: 47:05

Yeah. She was at the girls do porn sentencing. I was in an Airbnb on holiday. Jason, where were you?

Jason: 47:14

I was sitting right here in this seat.

Joseph: 47:16

Eating

Jason: 47:17

a Eating a bagel. Yeah.

Joseph: 47:20

And Emmanuel, where were you?

Emanuel: 47:22

Also home.

Joseph: 47:23

Okay. So I this was really, really stressful. We started the process of buying 404media.com because well, first of all, we couldn't afford it when we started. Right? It was just the sorry.

Joseph: 47:43

I made my standing desk go up by accident, and that was really funny.

Jason: 47:47

When we launched 404media.co Yes. We wanted to buy 404media.com, but it was like $20,000 or something. Wasn't it? It was, like, many thousands of dollars.

Joseph: 47:58

Because a PR firm called four zero four Media, I think it was a PR firm, owned it. And we're like, oh, well, that's annoying. We can't get the .com. And, damn, there's another company.

Jason: 48:09

There was not but they they were not in, like, an active company. No. Like, they had the there was nothing at that web address. It was just owned by someone else. And Yes.

Jason: 48:19

As I understand it, like, four zero four Media, when we looked it up before we started this, there was a weird PR firm in Georgia because the area code for Atlanta is four zero four. Oh. It was defunct for, like, quite some time. Yes. And there was potentially one other one that was, like, four zero four media as in objects, like materials.

Jason: 48:51

They were they sold like pipes. Yeah. They sold like pipes of some sort.

Joseph: 48:58

So I I remember there was also I think the LA Times had a social team They used four zero four brand, which is obviously doesn't matter for the domain because they're gonna use latimes.com. But I remember that as well.

Jason: 49:09

Yeah. They still have that as their Instagram. It's like Gotcha. V four zero four by LA Times.

Joseph: 49:16

Gotcha. So, yeah, we couldn't afford .com at the time. As you said, it was very expensive. Somebody else owned it. Then last year, some point in the the middle of the year in the summer Right?

Joseph: 49:29

We well, I get emails from our domain registrar registrar saying well, I get them all the time. It's like, hey. 404.press is available. 404media. Some other TLD that you don't wanna buy is available.

Joseph: 49:45

But then I got this email saying dot com is available because the previous owner let it lapse, and it was coming up for auction. And then we also got a bunch of emails from readers who pretty much saw the same thing, you know, and they they kindly told us. So this was different to buying a domain where you just go and you're like, I would like that, and then you pay a fee. An auction is a lot more of a stressful experience because, obviously, you're gonna have to try and and and beat other people. So the way I remember it, we were starting.

Joseph: 50:24

I have the account, so I was sort of handling the process, and then I think we try to put in some bids, and it and it does work. But then when I try to put in a more sizable bid and we eventually get it for something like $1,200, but I couldn't place the bid for some reason because we had to verify the account or something. And then, Jason, you started recording. I mean, should we actually play that audio? Obviously, I'll

Jason: 50:54

get in touch. Let's play it. Let's let's play it. It's like five minutes long. We maybe we'll cut it down.

Jason: 50:59

But

Joseph: 51:00

We'll cut

Jason: 51:01

down a bit.

Joseph: 51:02

And we'll put it here.

Joseph: 51:03

The 12 o seven right now is 15 o seven placing bids. You were still the highest bidder. Interesting. I couldn't do like a big a big leap. Like, maybe GoDaddy doesn't like that.

Joseph: 51:18

It probably keeps it fair, you know? Right. Right. So people don't bot it. I'm I'm still trying to increase bid just

Matthew: 51:27

for safety,

Joseph: 51:28

but it just says, yeah, your bid failed, but you're still the highest bidder.

Emanuel: 51:31

Dude, four four interactive dot com is available for 100 also.

Jason: 51:35

Let's just get that and call it a day.

Emanuel: 51:38

Dude, I keep

Joseph: 51:39

I keep getting emails for four zero four media dot press

Joseph: 51:42

and I'm like, that's a terrible domain. I don't want that.

Emanuel: 51:46

44interactive is when we get

Joseph: 51:48

into game development. Uh-huh. But what's our like like, the virtue equivalent? Vice. I

Emanuel: 51:58

mean, there's 202 media that's for sale.

Jason: 52:00

I know. I think we should just get two zero two media if this doesn't work. It's it's just half of half of us. Okay.

Joseph: 52:13

Under one minute until the five minute extension's over.

Emanuel: 52:17

Should we do a countdown?

Jason: 52:19

Dude, we're gonna dump this one.

Joseph: 52:21

The church bells are ringing. Intended. It's noon here. I could actually hear this. Okay.

Joseph: 52:29

Well, it's now five minutes have been extended. It says you were the highest bidder. I mean, we're still waiting. I guess I should check my email.

Jason: 52:40

Well, we're still waiting. Did

Joseph: 52:41

I extend it again? I just have them again? Another buy? Oh, no.

Jason: 52:46

Wrong.

Joseph: 52:47

I don't I don't I don't have a confirmation

Joseph: 52:49

from GoDaddy that we've won.

Jason: 52:51

So Well, it's still going twenty five seconds.

Emanuel: 52:54

Yeah. Twenty five seconds.

Joseph: 52:54

Oh, I

Joseph: 52:55

don't I don't see that countdown.

Joseph: 52:56

Okay.

Jason: 52:57

Are you serious, dude? We need to see that countdown.

Emanuel: 53:00

Gonna count down I'm gonna count that to ten when we get there.

Joseph: 53:03

Please. We'll get it. Okay.

Emanuel: 53:06

Okay. Here we go. +1, 0987654321.

Jason: 53:18

Auction ended.

Joseph: 53:19

Auction's your

Emanuel: 53:20

bid won.

Jason: 53:20

Our bid won? Yes. Yes. We did it. Okay.

Jason: 53:24

Oh. Oh, thank God. Thank God. Okay. Okay.

Jason: 53:28

That's good. That's good. Holy

Joseph: 53:32

shit. I I took a screenshot of it. Oh my God.

Jason: 53:37

What a fucking stressful experience. Also, what a bargain. Yeah. What a steal.

Joseph: 53:43

What a steal.

Joseph: 53:45

Alright. So that was some of the audio of the very, very stressful experience as I remember Jason saying. Jason, how did you feel at the time about it? And sort of it sounds silly, but, like, what were the stakes here? Because, you know, it it does kinda matter to us.

Jason: 54:05

I think the stakes were actually pretty high because the only other person the only other, like, reason that someone would buy 404media.com would be to fuck with us or to extort us Yeah. In my opinion. Like, why why else would someone be buying it, be paying attention to it? I think what probably happened was that there was, like, a bot bidding against us, which maybe then it doesn't matter or maybe it wouldn't have been bad. But I could imagine someone bidding for the our site or bidding for 404media.com and then, you know, parking some, like, harassment site there or something like that or, like, just using it to kind of fuck with us in some way.

Jason: 54:49

Or I could imagine someone buying it and then trying to get us to pay a lot more for it. And so I was very stressed because we had this, like, one opportunity to do it, and we had some technical difficulties with GoDaddy, like, with with actually, like, registering our accounts to bid on it, or at least I did.

Joseph: 55:13

Yeah. Because because after a certain amount, you have to be fair. And I can't actually remember what the workaround was. I seem to remember doing smaller incremental bits. And, again, it wasn't like we bought it for $10,000 or anything like that, but there was some sort of verification issue, which is like, I feel like you should have told me that when you alerted me to the fact that the auction's ongoing, not in the middle of it.

Joseph: 55:39

Because, it would have fucking sucked if we lost it. I mean, the other one was that maybe a kind reader or subscriber would have bought it and then later given it to us. But like, we're not gonna know that in the moment and it's gonna make my blood pressure fucking skyrocket.

Jason: 55:54

Yeah. I was stressed. I don't know. Emmanuel, were you you were you were stressed. I think we were all stressed.

Emanuel: 56:00

Very stressed. For me, the main concern similar to what Jason said about squatting it and harassing us in some fashion is when we launched, we put up a thousand dollars each. So overall, $4,000. And I remember the price for .com was like 15,000. So like more than triple our entire budget, and it just like did not make sense.

Emanuel: 56:32

You know, like our whole mission statement was to be responsible with money and like build a sustainable company, and I can think of nothing dumber than, you know, tripling our budget for like one letter in a URL. It reminds me of this story I wrote about friend.com, this guy who made an AI assistant, and he got like, I don't know, a few million dollars in seed funding, and he spent an entire million on friend.com, and it would have been a silly thing to do like that. Then he spent a

Jason: 57:06

lot more on billboards later.

Emanuel: 57:08

Right. That's true. Yeah, in New York that everybody hated, yes. But something that does happen, unfortunately, understandably but unfortunately, is when people email us, sometimes they'll do emanuelf44media like dot com instead of dot co, and I do miss emails that way, and what really worried me is that somebody would buy the .com domain and then use that to like, I don't know, basically get emails that I'm supposed to get and abuse that in some fashion. Yeah.

Emanuel: 57:40

That would be wild. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the main thing. So I'm happy we took that option off the table.

Emanuel: 57:48

I believe we still need to set up the email forwarding addresses. Right?

Joseph: 57:52

Well, it should be working. I'll explain.

Emanuel: 57:54

Okay.

Joseph: 57:54

So, again, I say it should be working. So we use Google Workspace because, you know, it has Gmail and Google Drive and Google Docs and all of that, and what you do is you add your domain to that. Obviously, our primary one is .co. You can then add other domains you own to your Workspace account, and you do this by taking information from your registrar, and you enter it in there, and our .com is now is now connected to our Workspace account, and you set up a redirect in there as well. You just say, hey, Google.

Joseph: 58:31

Please handle the redirect, and that mostly works. There's some people who say, you know, if you're trying to do a force h t t HTTPS one, you might get an error, which is because maybe I can just tweak the redirect or something like that. But I've also added email forwarding as well because, as I said, Google handles our email. So that should work. You know?

Joseph: 58:56

And if it doesn't, I'll figure it out and tweak it. We were gonna do something fun with the redirect, but then, of course, well, you need to run a second website to put the fun thing there. You know, you can't just buy a domain and because what's it gonna a domain is a signpost. It's not the the location. Right?

Joseph: 59:17

But, yeah, we have it. It's redirecting now. We should be getting emails. If not, I'll I'll tweak it, but I'm very, glad we got it. Matthew, what do you think about What us getting

Matthew: 59:30

I I wanna know I want the picture painted for me just a little bit clearer. Like, what day was this? Like, how close was it this to Christmas? What time

Joseph: 59:37

of day was it? So it wasn't Christmas. It was actually a while ago, and I feel like we just sat on it for a while because we were too busy, frankly. But then also when it came to holiday, I was like, oh, that's a fun thing to publish over holiday break. But for me, yeah, I was in this Airbnb.

Joseph: 59:54

It was probably, like, 02:00 in the afternoon, like, 01:00 in the afternoon, maybe something like that, maybe a little bit earlier, and just very, very pepped up on coffee and, like, ready to do this and probably a little bit hungover as well. But, like, I was trying to be offline and then this

Jason: 01:00:14

It was a Saturday. It was a Saturday morning, and I had planned, like, a little bit after the auction was over. And so I had to leave, like, immediately following the auction, and my wife was like, hey. What are you doing in there? I was like, I'm buying a website.

Jason: 01:00:34

I'm buying a website. It was it was very stressful, and I had to leave, like, the second that it ended. But it was yeah. We got on we got on the phone call because we were already on well, were already on the phone to watch it together because we were like, this is gonna be intense. It's gonna We be

Joseph: 01:00:54

had to discuss. How much we were How

Jason: 01:00:56

much we're gonna spend.

Joseph: 01:00:57

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I can't remember what figure we sit in the heads.

Jason: 01:01:02

I mean, thankfully, we were willing to pay a lot more than this even though we knew it was gonna be a big expenditure. But I think that the risk of someone taking it and, like, messing with us, we were like, well, we'll spend a few thousand dollars on it if we have to. Right. But thankfully, it didn't get to that point. Yeah.

Jason: 01:01:24

I did see someone yesterday because I I I posted about this. Someone yesterday was like, you should you should just migrate your site over to the.com. I like that word 404media.co, but they said it would be better if we did it if we did that. Actually I don't know how much it matters these days

Joseph: 01:01:40

I

Matthew: 01:01:40

for

Joseph: 01:01:41

Yeah. I I disagree. Like, there are multiple years of us saying go to 404media.co on this podcast. There are multiple years of SEO built up in our articles. Like, I really I don't think it matters unless and maybe it was only me that got this email, maybe others did, but, like, .co is what?

Joseph: 01:02:01

The TLD of Colombia. Right? And there was something about, well, if Trump takes over Colombia as well, and then that TLD is totally screwed, maybe we lose our website and

Jason: 01:02:11

Well, now we have a backup against some horrible world events.

Joseph: 01:02:15

Right. Right. Maybe one day we'll get four zero four media dot gov somehow. If if you're in the cybersecurity infrastructure security agency or whatever it's called and you you can assign .gov domains, do what you want. That's what I'm saying.

Joseph: 01:02:31

But, yeah, I I I don't think we should move to .com. Like, I think it would sort of burn the work that we've put into it, really. But, again, I'm not an SEO expert.

Jason: 01:02:41

Yeah. I I don't really wanna do it. I don't think that we should, but if you are some sort of expert and there's some compelling reason for us to do that, I guess, like, let us know. But I I don't plan on

Joseph: 01:02:51

doing it. I don't wanna do it.

Joseph: 01:02:53

Yeah. Alright. Let's leave that there. And with that, I'm going to play us out. As a reminder, four zero four Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers.

Joseph: 01:03:09

If you do wish to subscribe to four zero four Media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You 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 Kaleidoscope and Alyssa Midcalf. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast.

Joseph: 01:03:36

That stuff really helps us out. This has been four zero four Media. We'll see you again next week.