Marty Baron: Behind the Washington Post’s Demise

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Because we find the right people for your roles fast. Which is our absolute favorite effort. In fact, four out of five employers who post on Zipper Cruder get a quality candidate within the first day. Fantastic! So, whether you need to hire four, 40, or 400 people, get ready to meet first rate talent. Just go to zippercruder.com slash zip to try Zipper Cruder for free. Don't forget that zippercruder.com slash zip. Finally, that zippercruder.com slash zip. Alright, hey everybody. We got a great show coming for you with Marty Baren. And I was kind of annoyed that he waited till we stopped recording to make fun of me. For the fact that he sees my clips on social media and I look like I just got out of bed. I'm just like, you know what? Okay. All right. Like this is, we're in a different world. All right. We're not buttoned up word word in Bernstein material. Sometimes I'm hungover and podcasting. Let me let a man live. But it was wonderful. And I think we'll give us a lot of insight into the corruption that has led to the crack up at the Washington Post. And I think there's a lot of important themes that are related to that in addition to kind of the media gossip element of it. So stick around for that. First, I just, I do want to flag about our live shows. Texas is going to be on sale. Pre-sale for bullwork subscribers. So become a subscriber to board plus. At the board.com. Pre-sale opens up today, Thursday. The tickets will be open up to everybody on Friday. And if the Minnesota experience is anything to guide us, they're going to sell it quick. So go check those out. Reminder we're in Dallas, March 18th. And Austin, March 19th, become a bullwork plus subscriber to get that early access to tickets. Get the best seats in the house. So you can get close to me. Throw spitballs at me, et cetera. As far as Minnesota is concerned, we added the bonus show on Wednesday, February 18th. There are a couple hundred tickets left. So go check those out as well. All the proceeds from those two shows in Minneapolis are going to go to second harvest heartland. It's doing great work, feeding people that are struggling. Food insecurity because of all the nonsense happening in Minneapolis. So look forward to seeing you guys on the road. And Minneapolis, Dallas, or Austin, up next, former executive editor of the Washington Post from Marty Baren. Hello, and welcome to the Buller Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller, delighted to welcome to the show, former executive editor of the Washington Post, author of Collision of Power, Trump Bezos, and the Washington Post. It's Marty Baren. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. You're welcome. I'm Mike Bauer. I'm a great host. I'm Mike Bauer. I'm a great host. I'm Mike Bauer. I'm a great host. I'm Mike Bauer. I'm Mike Bauer. I'm Mike Bauer. I'm Mike Bauer. I'm Mike Bauer. I'm Mike Bauer. It's Marty Baren. Thanks for coming on the show, Marty. Thanks for having me. Well, I think obviously I've brought you on to talk about the War on Ukraine. No. We're going to talk about Jeff Bezos doing self-sabotage to his own newspaper for some reason. You put out a statement yesterday that was blistering about the layoffs and what is underneath them. And so I was excited to have you on the chat about that. Let me just give us your kind of top line thoughts and I'll kind of go go into it. This is a paper with a deep heritage. It's about 150 years old, coming up on their 150th anniversary. It's been known for doing the most ambitious work, for holding power to account particularly government, the politicians at the highest possible levels. And now it will be a news organization that's severely diminished. I mean, they've gone through a round of cuts. But now the news organization will have fewer people than it had when Bezos actually acquired the post in 2013. We had expanded tremendously over the years. He invested. He spoke forcefully and eloquently for our mission, for the press in general. He resisted pressure at the time from Donald Trump. Tremendous pressure is not our fact. And now we're seeing something entirely different. And what I think is missing now is some clear contemporary vision for what the post should be. They're talking about a reset. It looks like more like a retreat to me. And I'm worried about that because we need reporters on the ground in this country and in a close zone community in the Washington, Missouri area, but also around the world. And they're going to have fewer of them. And that means fewer reasons to read the post. I want to go into kind of the president day in a second, but I just think it would be valuable for folks who are not close observers of the media, naval like all of us that are in the media. So just kind of do a little bit of a backstory about how we got there. So when Bezos bought the paper in 2013, you were already executive editor at the time, is that right? I was. I started at the beginning of 2013. It was under the Graham family. It hasn't been for 80 years. And then it was announced that summer about seven months after my arrival that Bezos would acquire it. And then the deal closed on the beginning of October in 2013. Yeah. So we're in second Obama term at this point. Right. At the time, there were critics who were obviously worried that the paper was going to be corrupted. Bezos had a lot of interest in the government. And you were very defensive of that saying that you allowed independence. Just kind of talk us through like your experience in that era, like kind of pre-Trump, like right when he bought the paper. Well, I don't think I was defensive per se, but I think what I was trying to do is tell what really happened at the post. And what really happened is that he wanted us to set a more ambitious course for the post. He wanted us to be national and international. He asked us to be fully digital as much as we could be to be creative about that. We proposed a lot of initiatives. He funded them pretty much. All of them succeeded. We then had six straight years of profitability, something like that. He kept investing. He didn't take the dividends. He put them in back into investing. We expanded the staff grew from about 540 when he arrived to, we were headed to about a thousand when I retired in February 2021. And he stood up for us during Trump's campaign in 2015 when he himself, when the post came under attack, and then he himself came under the attack. He said quite clearly and forcefully that there was no way for someone to aspire to be president of the Have. He talked about the role of an independent press. And he stood by that. I mean, look, you may remember that Trump talked about doubling, tripling, quadrupling, the postal rates for the delivery of Amazon packages. That sort of thing. It was numbers pulled out of thin air, of course. He hadn't done a study of any sort. And said that, you know, the post was just a lobbying organization for Jeff Bezos. It was a tax dodge. All this nonsense. None of it, none of it true, not even close to true. And then toward the end of his administration, Trump's administration, he actually interfered to make sure that a big cloud computing contract with the defense department, $10 billion did not go to Amazon and it did not go to Amazon. And then there was a lot of litigation around it. It was rebid and all this sort of stuff, but very complicated. But Bezos stood up to that. In fact, I mean, people forget, I mean, Bezos and Amazon, they filed a lawsuit against the defense department for the way that it awarded that contract. And they called upon Trump to actually be deposed, to be deposed. And they said that the interference by Trump was because of his animosity toward Bezos, because of his ownership of the Washington Post. Yeah. I thought that was all good. I admired him for doing that. I admired the support that he gave me. I admired the support that he gave my colleagues. I admired his support for the post and its mission and for the press generally. And so what I did is I told it like it was. That's how it happened. And now I think what I'm trying to do is tell it as it is today. And it's different. I wonder why that is. Like if you saw any signs back then, and you wrote in the book that one of the things Don Graham told Bezos, when he sold it was basically that when you own the post and the post publishes something to make somebody empower mad, they'll try to hurt you. I mean, did that sink in with him? Do you think I mean, at the time, did you have any conversations with him at the time that made you think that he was getting weak need on all that? And I'm just wondering what those conversations were like in the first time, first time around. Well, first of all, thanks for reading the book. Looks like you did read it. You can tell when you're when you're a podcast guest. Absolutely. I'm just going to I'm just going to come clean because you're being candid, I'll be candid. I didn't make it all the way through. Okay. I've got a lot of book guests coming on, but I'm doing my best. All right. I'm paging. Thanks. Thanks for reading some of the book. Okay. I remember I maybe a small portion of the book, whatever it might be. Any word you read, I'm grateful for. So as I mentioned in the book and you haven't gotten there yet, but the the first substantive meeting we had with him was about our coverage of national security matters. So we had just come off the Edward Snowton leaks that was hugely controversial. A lot of politicians and intelligence officials thought that we should have been prosecuted for that. We in the Guardian at the time, we want to pull it for that coverage, but those were the most highly sensitive documents in the US government at the time. But there was a significant intrusion into the private information of American citizens and we felt that needed to be published and I to this day, I believe it should have been. So he asked for a meeting about what our standards were. We told him what our standards were. He said he thought that should be codified. So we codified it. We wrote it down and he reviewed it. This was done in coordination with our lawyers and our publisher at the time, Catherine Wainloth. And he reviewed it. He thought it was fine. He never interfered ever again, even though we did publish national security information. Subsequent to that. And he never interfered in our news coverage. He didn't. Not even about Amazon. I never heard from him about it at all. I mean, we had a reviewer who didn't like a single Amazon product. I have to tell you or service. And he mocked him, you know, and I never heard a word from him. So that was good. I mean, I thought that was appropriate. And I appreciated that support and that he was willing to give us our independence. And so given that that's what happened, that's what I wrote about in the book. You also have during this kind of change over when Trump wins where, you know, you guys do the rebrand with democracy dies in darkness. You have that era. And there were some folks, I think, who thought, okay, is this like, is this a little cringe? Is it fake? Is this just window dressing like to try to make him look better? But then I, you know, during the first Trump term, whether or not you thought it was cringe, it was certainly legit that you guys were, you know, reporting in defensive democracy. And like now, with hindsight, some people look at it and wonder, I don't know, how authentic Jeff Bezos' feelings were about the tagline. We seem to be authentic at the time. I mean, he supported that with subsequent, subsequent behavior. As I said, he resisted the pressure from Donald Trump, called for Trump to be deposed. You know, there were people when they lost the cloud computing contract for $10 billion. The joke in the business was it didn't just cost him $250 million to buy the post. It cost him $10 billion, $250 million to buy the post. And I once told him that joke and he laughed. I thought it was pretty funny. But he just wanted one of that motto. We didn't even like to call it a motto. We called it a mission statement. And he said that it was an idea that people would want to belong to. And what I'd like to see today, I'm worried about today, is that maybe that mission doesn't belong to him anymore or he doesn't belong to that mission. So I've been concerned about his behavior since Trump re-entered the White House. And clearly, I think, Baylor's was concerned about reprisals against the source of his wealth, which is Amazon, and then the object of his passion, which is Blue Origin Space Company. Both of them have significant contracts with the federal government. Amazon has a lot. Blue Origin would like to have many. And so I'm concerned, but he's prioritizing these other business interests over the post. I don't happen to think that's quite the reason for the cuts or that all the reason for the cuts more recently. But it's something that has made the post financial predicament far worse than it needed to be. And that's what I'm worried about. I only get into that. It just I had to follow up on the question, Bezos wanted the democracy, Dyson Darkness motto. Yeah, he did. We spent two years on that, believe it or not. I was glad when it was finally over. I wouldn't have talked about it anymore. That was a phrase that Bob Woodward had used for many years. It was sort of an adaptation of what a judge had once said. It was not in the context of Watergate, really, but it came well after that. And the judge had talked about democracy dying behind closed doors. We had tried a bunch of others. I think many of us were skeptical of that as a model or mission statement. You know, you don't know many marketing people who say that you should include death and darkness in your motto. At a very few. We tried light, but it sounded too self agilatory or sounded cult like actually. So we avoided that. And we struggled with probably a thousand different options. And then finally, I think maybe an exasperation, Bezos said, well, let's just go with democracy, Dyson darkness. And I was fine. Let's we're going to have to talk about it anymore. And it was a huge hit. It was a real huge hit. And it got criticized in the way that you have suggested. And in other ways, one person talked about it as our new gossip vibe, but it was hugely popular. People can cite it all over the world. I've traveled all over the world. Everybody knows it. And that's what Bezos wanted. He did not want us to spend time coming up with a motto that nobody would ever remember again. Nobody cared. Well, it's kind of apt that it's come around to bite him a little bit. In that case, just one other thing for that area I just had to ask you because speaking of books, I didn't read all of Jared Kushner wrote a very long memoir. And in that book, one of the things he says that he writes about is trying to force Fred Ryan to fire you and issue apologies from the Russia coverage. What was happening with that? What's happening with little Jared? He did try to get Fred Ryan to fire me. He was very unhappy with our coverage of Russian intervention in the election in 2016. And he was under investigation. And we reported that. And he was very upset over that. He got on the phone with Fred Ryan and complained about it. And then subsequent to that, after the Mueller report out came out, I think it was he then called Fred Ryan suggesting that we should apologize and that there should be consequences for this. And clearly, he didn't say it explicitly, but that the consequence should be to fire me. How do you expect that coverage now? I'm very proud of it. I mean, I'm very proud of it. I mean, Trump is suing the Pulitzer Board for that coverage. But the reality is, and it's well documented in the Mueller report that Russians did intervene in that election. And there were communications between the Trump campaign and the Russians. That doesn't mean that there was collusion or direct collaboration or conspiracy the way it is defined under the law. But there was a lot of footsie going on. Trump openly welcomed Russia's intervention on the election. He did that, you know, he clearly did that. Just watch the video. And then there were other communications between people who were close to him and on his staff with the Russians and Jared himself had actually proposed after the election. He had proposed communicating with the Russians by doing it at the Russian embassy in Washington so that it wouldn't be detected by people in the State Department. And we reported on all of that and all of that was accurate and it was validated by the Mueller report. And now that's not the steel dossier. And I think we need to draw a distinction between the steel dossier. It wasn't actually a dossier per se, but a bunch of reports that was commissioned by the Democrats. And and that was a lot of under the science, the never Trumpers originally it was the never Trumpers, the commission did and then kind of passed it on to the right. But ultimately the Democrats inherited that's correct. So it was not verified. And we didn't publish a word of it, even though we knew about it, because we weren't able to verify the allegations and they're the sensational allegations that were in the steel report. And then it was Buzzfeed and CNN that actually published a contents and then the the dam bro and then Trump addressed it. And once he addressed it, we obviously had to say what he was talking about. But we never we never verified that. And that's different. There's two different things. And I think it's really important to draw a distinction between those two and we did draw a distinction between those two. Yeah, because there's a small cottage industry of assholes who are obsessed with this. I should just extend and revise my remarks when I said it was us the commission did at time. I meant the never Trump community. It was not literally me or the bull work that were involved in that in anyway. It was the Paul Singer crowd. They're all for Trump. Yes, they're part of the Venezuelan coup. So anyway, the people that commission that are now inside the house for that matter. Yes, yes, well, you're in a mentally familiar with that. So I am unfortunately. Hey, everybody, you can't manage your heart health if you're missing half the info standard tests. Check the basics, but they skip over key markers that could change everything. And one way to avoid that is with our friends at function. It's an astral heart month. 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Visit www.functionhealth.com slash the bulwark and use gift code, the bulwark 25 for a $25 credit towards your membership. All right, let's go to today. You said something that peaked my interest. Then I want to talk with just the economics of the post first, because I think that's an important backdrop to the politics of what we're seeing is happening. You said, I think that you were profitable for six years. Yeah, six years, basically. Look, from my background, I'm a free marketer. I understand sometimes there's creative destruction and things, you know, the market no longer is interested in a certain product and things change and things evolve and you see some right wingers doing that critique right now of people lamenting the firings of the post saying, well, it's just they weren't running good business. This is what happens. There have been firings in a lot of parts of our economy lately. But the distinction here is that the post was making money during the first term. The post demonstrated how to be profitable and it seems to me that they that the current leadership just made a decision to go a different direction that would make it unprofitable. What do you make of that assertion? Well, yeah, look, I mean, when Basil is bothered, he changed the strategy. The post was primarily a regional news organization. It was focused on the Washington and metro area with the exception of politics were covered the entire country. And Basil said, we needed to be national and we needed to be international and and then we needed to appeal to a younger audience because if we didn't cultivate a younger audience, we wouldn't have one in the future. And so he asked us to come up with a bunch of initiatives and we did come up with those and he approved pretty much all of them and pretty much all of them were successful and we innovated like constantly that people forget about that. I mean, in 2015, Fast Company Magazine named us the most innovative media company in the world. In 2018, it did it again. It named us the most innovative media company in the world. And by the way, the eighth most innovative company period in the world. And so there was a lot that we did at the time to adapt to the new the different media environment. Of course, the media environment, as you all know, keeps changing and it keeps changing at an accelerating pace. Your podcast is an example of that of the kind of new media that exists today clearly the post needed to keep adjusting. There was a difficult period after Trump lost the 2020 election although he doesn't acknowledge that but he lost the 2020 election and Joe Biden came in and and I like a lot of the public who had supported the post and in his work and particularly in holding Trump accountable felt like, well, the threads gone. We don't need to do this anymore and how many subscriptions can I afford. You know, what we hadn't done is we hadn't prepared adequately enough for a post Trump era. Although I had warned my publisher at the time that we needed to do so, particularly as we observed what the New York Times was doing, which was diversifying in a very determined way away from news into other things. So putting tens and tens of millions of dollars into developing a cooking app that is very popular, acquiring wire cutter product recommendation service where they make money through transactions, starting their games initiative, which came later up and I was aware of and I alerted my boss to that as well. That's been hugely successful and that's where a lot of their growth in terms of digital subscriptions is coming from and then more recently acquiring the athletic eliminating their own sports department and basically putting sports coverage in the hands of the athletic. We didn't do that at all. We diversified a bit but it wasn't at that scale and so we fell behind and that was a problem. Clearly it's true that the the posts needed to adapt, they needed to change. These days, given the impact that AI is having on the business, which is dramatic, we've seen a decline in traffic from search engines, the primary one being Google of course, but also prior to that, there was a decline in traffic from social media from Facebook in particular. And so you have to adapt and they should adapt and I would encourage them to do that. But I haven't seen a lot of innovation. They talked about innovation. The publisher there has talked about innovation and the need for it, but I have yet to see an initiative that shows that he knows how to execute that. So I agree with people who say it should be a sustainable business. I agree with people who say they need to keep innovating and make some dramatic changes. But I didn't hear yesterday of any vision of that sort. I did not hear a contemporary vision for the Washington Post. I heard the word reset. I heard the word restructuring, but all I saw was retreat. I think that all of that is good analysis. Obviously, you're from inside the business. You understand how it works. And I think that if they made these firings in 2023, all of that would have been particularly apt. But they did it in 2026 after Trump was back. So while they had an adapted, the original model of doing very dog-ed coverage of this administration, that there's a lot of interest in certainly could have been a patch on their problems. And they chose to go the other direction. News map Murray, a top editor in his memo yesterday, one sentence caught my eye. He said, we often write from one perspective for one slice of the audience, basically saying we're only writing for liberals or anti-Trump folks. And that they want to change that. And I just like think that's totally a wrong assessment. I mean, just from a business standpoint, if they think the thing they need to fix is, I don't know, be more accommodating to the party and power, where is the evidence for that? There's not really a successful newspaper that is doing soft on Trump coverage, hard news coverage. And that seems to be what they're trying to do to me. Well, look, I mean, we live in a very polarizing time. There's no question about that. I think for a news organization with the history and heritage of the Washington Post, it's aligned should be to the facts wherever they lead. And a primary responsibility, perhaps, I mean, the primary responsibility of a news organization, particularly one like the post, is to hold its government accountable, to find out what's happening in the government, to dig beneath the surface, to look behind the curtain, to do what the founders of this country expect to the press. The reason they provided for me, independent of free press in the first amendment, which was to examine its public characters. And so that's what the post is historically done. I mean, Watergate is of course a primary example of that. I think we did that well during the first Trump administration as well. And that's why we've got a lot of support from readers. We need to continue doing that. And it's not a matter of, I don't think one uses a political calculus. And for a news organization like the Post, I mean, there are many different kinds of news organizations, some more advocacy oriented, some leaning left, right, what have you. But for the post, I think it is, you know, you need to keep your eye on what's really important. And that is digging into what people of power in this country are doing. Because what they do can affect the lives of ordinary people and does affect the lives of ordinary people. And the single most powerful person in the world is the president of the United States. And so it's not a matter of using a political calculus in your news coverage. It's a matter of saying, are we fulfilling our responsibilities to under the facts that the public needs and deserves to know? And Matt Murray is saying that there's needs to be a political calculus there. And he says, we're only running for one slice of the audience. I don't know how else to read that. So to me, like what they proposed yesterday is we're going to fire a lot of people and come up with a new strategy. And the new strategies we're going to try to appeal to an audience. And I'm not sure where is the audience for hard news, mega hard news written, you know, I don't see it. Tucker Carlson said he tried to start that. He wanted to create the New York Times of the right with a daily caller that utterly failed. And they ended up doing opinion slop. Their state and strategy to me is trying to appeal to an audience that doesn't exist. Well, that may be right. I mean, you need to ask him about it. Maybe he'll agree to come on your on your program. We'll say, but I mean, we're seeing so you can speculate. We're seeing this with CBS. They're doing the same thing, right? Washington Post and CBS are basically doing the same thing, right? Sure. And I was about to mention CBS. And that's what concerns me about what's happening at CBS is that, you know, Barry Weiss has talked about, well, we want to get the people who are to the who are center right and the people who are center left and all that sort of thing. And I don't believe you should use a political calculus and running a news organization of this of this consequence and this size and this kind of history, whether it's the Washington Post or CBS, I think the job is to be an ally of the facts and to be an ally of the truth. And, and you know, that's a mission that exists whether the administration happens to be democratic or Republican. And that's the role that the Post has historically played. I know that the critics on the right say that's not the case, but the facts prove otherwise. I don't believe in using a political calculus like that. I believe saying, why do we have a free press in this country? It's a it's to keep watch on our government, whoever that happens to be in government and tell the public what it needs to know about how they're governing. And not I want to appeal to this segment of the political audience. I want to appeal to that segment of the political audience and to keep in mind some sort of political equation while you're doing that, I'd never did that. I would never do that. And I don't recommend it for any news organization like the Washington Post. Would you say like right wing people who said, well, you know, democracy that Dyson darkness was kind of trying to appeal to the left because democracy ended up being a left coded thing. Is democracy a left coded thing? I thought I applied to all of us. I thought that's kind of what we aspire to in this country and what we've talked about for this these 250 years. I don't see it as a left coded thing at all. I mean, you look, I mean, there were people on the right who when we came up with that, they said that was a we were targeting the Trump administration, but that is just not true. We spent two years on that. And not always were enthusiastic about death and darkness being in our motto anyway. So it had nothing to do with Donald Trump. And look, when Trump lost the election in 2020 and was out of office in 2021 and for four years thereafter, there were readers who contacted us saying it's time to get rid of that motto right now. And we said, no, there's a model that applies to whatever administration is in office at the time. And they've held onto that. And I think that's that's good. I just want them to be faithful to that motto to keep faith with the spirit behind that statement. And also, I think just for folks who can't remember it is hard. It's like time is a flat circle here, but that you guys did that in 2017. So it was, you know, four years before they sacked the Capitol and I just have to overthrow democracy. Suns up being pretty prescient in my view. Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board. But then all you can do is hope the right person comes along, which is why you should try Zippercrooter for free at zippercrooter.com slash zip. Zippercrooter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. 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It's going to survive a long time. 10,000 years. Yeah. Yeah. That's neat. But it's, you know, that's not cheap. And he is the right to spend his money on every once. But I do think that like when you combine that with what we're seeing from Blue Origin and other, and I guess specifically what you're saying with the Melania documentary, it doesn't seem to be like these are just purely economic decisions. Right. Well, you know, I joked in the book that I thought with the 10,000 year clock he should give the post the same kind of runway. He'd like to talk about giving us runway and I thought maybe 10,000 years would be about right. And he could afford it. That's true. On the other hand, look, I think that the post should be a sustainable business. I think that's the only way to ensure your survivability over the long run. And the best protection you have is that you actually make money doing what you're doing. I mean, Basil said at the beginning, it made clear at the beginning that he wasn't going to treat the post like a charity. And I told the staff many times that I didn't think he should. I thought that was good because we needed to use the opportunity of his investment to create a sustainable model. Because if someday he decided to sell us, we'd be in trouble shape if we were not making money at the time. And so if you got tired of that charity, then we needed to make sure that we were on solid ground. And I really do believe that. I just don't happen to think that what they're doing right now is the path toward achieving that. And if I heard them some clear vision about what the post ought to be, and it made sense if we're coherent, then I might have a different view. But I didn't hear that yesterday. And I haven't heard it for the last several years. I mean, they keep talking about research. They keep talking about an innovation. And I want to see, well, okay, well, show me your innovation. And I don't see much happening. So I do believe it needs to be a sustainable business. Of course, Bayzos can afford it. I mean, it's worth $25260 billion at this point. It was worth about $25 billion, a mere $25 billion when he bought a post in 2013. And yeah, he could afford to subsidize it forever. But I think it's good idea for it to be on it to be a sustainable business. And I think they should work with that. That is crazy. He's 10x to his net worth since he bought the Washington Post and all this other stuff. Yeah, the post didn't really contribute to that multiplier effect. But to the extent that it's attracted from it, it wasn't by very much. That's got some French revolution kind of vibes to me when he's gaining at that kind of scale during this period. Related to this, I'm sure you saw on Monday, Pete Hague Seth, Secretary of War, going at Secretary of War, now. He visited the Blue Origin facilities in Cape Canaveral. He was on his arsenal of free freedom campaign. They also do some cringe branding over there in the Trump administration. It's a campaign for promoting military contractors. Bezos was there, talking about how they're supporting the mission. And Hague Seth said Blue Origin was going to do plenty of winning in securing government contracts. I mean, like the conflict of that is just at such a different scale than what you were talking about with Amazon and Bezos in the first term. I like, what is your reaction to Hague Seth saying that the Bezos is going to do plenty of winning? Right. Well, first of all, let me say that I don't put democracy dies in darkness in the category of cringe branding, but okay. So just to get that on, just to get that on the record, you don't mind. I tried to sneak it in there. I just tried to sneak it in there, Marty. It wasn't very, it wasn't very sneaky. It was quite blatant. So I found it nauseating seeing that that encounter at Blue Origin with Pete Hague Seth being there, particularly given that Pete Hague Seth, and I'm going to continue calling in Secretary of Defense Sciences on that because that is in fact his official title because he's the one who had expelled real journalists from the Pentagon, including the post-owned reporters. He's the one who asked the Department of Justice to raid the home of Hannah Nathanson, one of the post-owned reporters, and they seized all of her electronic devices and they have extracted the information from those those devices as well. It's not clear that they've reviewed that information yet, but judges said they shouldn't, but I'd be surprised if they hadn't done that already, frankly. I doubt that Bezos spent a second taking Pete Hague Seth aside and saying, you know, that was wrong for you to do that. These journalists are doing the job as allowed for and is encouraged under the First Amendment of the Constitution. I doubt he did that at all. I'm sure he did. I found nauseating to watch that and very, very disturbing. I think that it makes clear why Bezos has been doing what he's been doing. He's trying to repair his relationship with Trump, and he's worried about contracts for Blue Origin. Clearly, it's finally beginning to get in shape so that it can get government contracts. He wants those government contracts. It's largely dependent on government contracts. Of course, Amazon has a huge number of government contracts as well, particularly in the area of cloud computing, and particularly in the area of national security. I think it becomes more evident by the day why he decided in 2024, 11 days before the presidential election to kill an endorsement for Kamala Harris, and declare that he wouldn't be making presidential endorsements ever again, even though in the two previous presidential cycles, they had editorialized strongly against Donald Trump, even to the point of declaring him to be one of the worst presidents ever. I think we see the reason for that. He's denied it, but I don't believe those denials frankly. I guess it, a Kanye West kind of mental break, I guess. I don't know. Well, sadly, he doesn't submit to very many interviews, and the interviews that he's done have been pretty soft. So if he wants to ask me to interview, it might be happy to ask him that question. We would gladly host that on our platform as you wanted. It's like, I don't expect it to happen. Like, what would you have done? And you had to have thought about this. I don't know. I get you had a lot of trust in him. It seems like at the time, but had you been still sitting there as an editor right now, this week, as he goes to having a co-build event with the Secretary of Defense, with Secretary of Defense, where he sucks up to him and does not address the fact that the paper can't even report on the department. Like, what do you do at that point if you're still at the paper? It's really hard. I mean, I would have hoped for an opportunity to tell him that I thought that it was hurting our brand, hurting our reputation and driving readers away, that they were going to be affected by that, by the sight of that, by the appearance of huge conflicts. And this is a paper that it flatly declares its independence, and it has a history of independence. And yet, what this is doing is demonstrating Bezos' dependence on the federal government and on the Trump administration. And so I would have hoped to express that to him. I certainly would have expressed it to the staff that what we needed to do is keep demonstrating through our work that we were fully independent, and that none of this behavior on the part of the honor was going to affect the kind of work we do. Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person comes along, which is why you should try Zippercrooter for free. Add zippercrooter.com slash zip. Zippercrooter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. It's powerful technology identifies people with the right experience, and actively invites them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So, while other companies might deliver a lot of, hey, Zippercrooter, find you what you're looking for. The needle in the haystack. 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We've mentioned CBS, we mentioned him, but ABC and Disney kind of buckled in a way, settling their lawsuit, there have been other examples. As you mentioned at the beginning, I trump threatened phasos directly and heard his business directly in the first term. I don't really quite understand. Everybody just worn out, trump wore everybody down. Is there something else to play here? What do you make of it? I think it's threatened some more credible this time, and that's proven to be the case. I mean, look what he did to law firms early on, and his administration, and this second administration. He threatened that firms, they wouldn't get government business, they wouldn't be allowed in government buildings. They were very worried that they wouldn't be able to survive as a business, if that happened. And so they caved to his demands. You see that with some of the universities as well. They caved to his demands. I mean, what we're seeing is that so much of the economy, so much of our society is dependent upon the federal government. It's striking just how much money comes from the federal government. And so he has used that as leverage, and he's not hesitant to do that. And certainly nobody in his administration is telling him that he shouldn't, that it's inappropriate or anything like that. They're just carrying out his orders and not just carrying out his orders, anticipating what his thoughts would be and trying to prove in advance that they are the warriors on his behalf. And so I think that Bezos truly feared that Trump would say absolutely no contracts for Amazon period, absolutely no contracts for Blue Origin. And keep in mind, I mean, one of Trump's big buddies, his big donor, was Larry Elson. Obviously now the financier behind the purchase of CBS and Paramount and all of that. And Oracle, his company, the company he found it, is huge in cloud computing and a big competitor, a big competitor of Amazon's on that front. And then of course, his best buddy at the time during the transition and then subsequent to that until a bit of a breakup, although they seemed to have made up, was Elon Musk and Elon Musk was his was a Bezos rival in the area of private space. And keep in mind, remember that when when there was that breakup between Elon Musk and Trump, one of the first things Trump said is a good way for us to save money in this government is to give no more contracts, cancel all our contracts with SpaceX. That's what he said. And that's what he would have done. I assume if there had been true enduring hostility between Trump and Musk. I think you get close to kind of what is an appealing answer to me, which is that this is that we're actually talking about ego. Because the thing that's frustrating with me is like, I guess Trump's sets are more credible. But he also says talk out a lot. And I guess you don't want to be the first company that has to go under because of threats from the government, but no companies have gone under. Like Disney could have survived Trump. Amazon could survive Trump. Apple and like these are some of the richest countries in the history of the world. And I know you get shareholders interests and all that. I get it, but they do that in the first term. And to me, you get closer to something that I can wrap my head around if it's like, I didn't want Larry Ellison and Elon Musk to beat me. Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are going to beat me in these spaces. If I don't suck up to Trump, and I can't handle that. What do you think about that? Well, you know, I mean, I think there was a real threat to them. I don't think that it's not that they couldn't survive because I don't really know that they really, so let me finish. So it's not that they couldn't survive, but they may not have been successful. And their objective is to make more money, to have higher profits, to watch their stock go up, to grow. And that would have been much more difficult if Trump had been their opponent. Definitely so. I mean, a big growth area for Amazon was contracts with the government for cloud computing period, particularly in the area of national security. If Trump had said we're not giving them many contracts, could Amazon survive? It could survive. Would it be as successful as it was? No. Would it stock tank? Probably so. Would Bezos still be wealthy? Yeah. Would he be as wealthy as he is today? No. I think there's a real threat there. And I mean, the taco stuff is mostly common as dealings with foreign governments. And that's a different field. I mean, he'd still be more wealthy than he was in 2013 when he bought the post. He was only worth $25 billion. I hear you. I hear you. I just say, nobody's tried. I guess I would like to see one of them try to stare down. Because I guess I just, I think he might taco in the economy. I think he might taco in the economic thing. It's like, sorry. I'd like to see one of them try to. Yeah. But I think they're fearful of trying. That's the thing is they don't want to, they don't want to test it. Yeah. And look, I mean, yeah, I mean, from the art perspective, we don't have 100 million. We don't have a billion. I don't know about you, Tim. Maybe. But no, okay. In any of that, yeah, I mean, saying, okay, what's a few tens of billions here? That way, or 100 billion this way or that way. But that's not the way people in that sphere really look at it. They feel they should be wealthier and wealthier. And they don't want to see any threats to their wealth. You're turning me into Bernie Sanders slowly. Marty, I've gone from being a Republican to Bernie Sanders. If that's, if that's that, if 260 billion isn't enough, you know, and so I've just, I've got a buck of the Donald Trump inside up to Pete eggs. But you're out first of all. First of all, I would not suck up to Pete eggs. That's for a single dollar. Right. Well, first of all, I didn't say it wasn't enough. I think it's enough. I'd be plenty for me. Yeah, I get that. But I'm saying that they don't see it that way. And look, you know, on Musk, what's his compensation, but his most recent compensation package with his company with Tesla, a trillion dollars, a trillion dollars. And guess what? The Washington Post on its editorial page shows you the direction that it's taken. Actually said that was okay. That was fine. It's another business model, actually. The Post could just decide to do kind of like center right anti-woke pro billionaire editorials. And maybe like Larry Elson would buy them for 150 million. It'll only be a 100 million dollar loss for Bezos. And that might be a path forward. So I'm going to think about, you know, one is wanting to maybe just send Jeff a note offering your, offering your advice. I'm sure that he'd be keenly interested in that idea. I think he'd consider it to be absolutely brilliant. Maybe. What is your advice? Let's end with that. What would you do? Jeff's like a sick of this. I'm tired of it. He sells it to a nice billionaire. They call it Marty and they say, Hey, come out or retirement for three months to write me a plan. What would you do? Honestly, I think I'd like to see right now as I'd like to see them. I'd like to see a put into a nonprofit. I'd like to see Bezos say, Okay, I can give you a billion dollars. That's not much for me. I can take a text deduction on that. And I'll subsidize it. It gives it runway. You'll have to be profitable over a period of time, but you have a lot of time to work that out. You have capital to experiment and innovate. I'd like to see a really good board that's truly independent. I think if we were independent, they can make a very convincing argument to many of the subscribers who have left the post that they're now on a new course and that they should come back. And I think they would buy the hundreds of thousands because they want that kind of, they want to kind of work with the Washington Post is known for doing. And so I would love to see something like that. And then of course, it would have to be a fundamentally digital organization. That's the way things are these days. That's the way people live their lives and get their information. They would have to experiment in all sorts of ways with podcasts like this one. Give you a little bit of competition. You could use it. And then, you know, in short form videos as well. So I think that's clearly the way that a lot of people are getting information and they would have to think in those terms. And so I would like to see that. I mean, I think that the post is capable of a lot of innovation. I think it demonstrated that in the past, but they still need to be true to their mission, true to their core principles. You cannot give up your core principles and be successful. I'd welcome the competition. That would be great. That's fine. I'm looking looking at the charts down. I can't find a Washington Post podcast here. It is 82. So that's not the, they're killing it. They announced that they're eliminating that podcast, that's why we're okay. Well, so 82 is going. All right. Well, that's good. I'm nice to see you keeping the steps really close. Yeah, more room to run for me. Well, you know, it's important to know what's out to know what's out there in the marketplace. Metrics for everyone. Yeah, I guess. There's limits to that, right? Like, just deciding to do everything by the metrics takes you to the Tucker Carlson message. I saw earlier the Daily Caller. You know, Daily Caller, it was good for moments. We could do that. I could come on here and, you know, I know what the people want, but if you just give people what they want all the time, there's a lack of sustainability to that. I totally agree. I think you have to have, you have to have a soul. You have to know what your soul is. You have to be faithful to your, your purpose in life. And once you abandon that, people know that you've done that and they abandon you. Yeah. Also, there's no point. What's the point of joining us if you can't exactly just do it to tell people what you think is true? All right. Did you have you taken any pass at Jeff on that? I guess that's one last question. And you worked with him pretty closely for a while. Have you tried to, tried to shake him or get any sense into him? He's talking about in the last few days or the last year or year. Yeah. More than a year ago, I sent him a note. It didn't, I didn't get a great response. So what are my former bosses with Susie Wilde? I sent her a note last week. I also didn't get a response. So, you know, sometimes, sometimes you have limited control. We have more in common than we thought. All right. Actually, I do one more last thing. You're an executive editor. We have a news outlet here. What's the story you would be assigning right now? You think it's getting missed? Is there anything out there that you're thinking that there's a big story that isn't getting as much attention as it should? I still believe that the corruption and this administration deserves a lot more attention than it's received. I think the New York Times has done a really great job of looking at that as well as others. The Wall Street Journal just did a really good story along those lines as well. So it's just a lot more to look at. I think that a lot of people in this administration are seeing this as an opportunity to profit. And the first family is right at the center of them. Well, if you have a former reporter, he'd think we'd do a good newsletter on the corruption beat. I might know home for them. So we can talk about that offline. Marty, I appreciate you so much, man. Thank you for coming on. Sorry, you know, I'm sorry for teasing. Sometimes I can handle it, really. Really? I know you can. I appreciate it. I welcome all teasing back and hope we can do it again sometime. All right. When there's better news. Sounds great. Good luck. Take care. All right. Everybody else will be back here tomorrow with one of your faves. See you all then. Peace. I get a feeling when I look in its light. You need a 180 billion. The board podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with Audio Engineering and Editing by Jason Bra.