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And there's no better way to enjoy the DSR network than by becoming a member. Members enjoy an ad-free listening experience, access to our Discord community, exclusive content, early episode access, and more. Use code DSR26 for a 25% off discount on signup at thedsrnetwork.com. That's code DSR26 at thedsrnetwork.com slash bye. Thank you and enjoy the show. 9, 12, 10. 28, 2, 23. This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, DC, and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to Need to Know. I'm your host, David Rothkoff, and I am joined this week by two of our very best guests, slash friends, people who can shed light where light leads to be shed, particularly when we're looking at the world of media and what we used to call in this country journalism. And those two are Dan Froomekin and Jeff Jarvis. How are you guys doing? Getting breathed. Remember journalism? I wonder whether I should. It's just gonna break your heart. But I went to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. That's what we were calling that stuff back then. They were actually teaching stuff there. Let's not forget the Pulitzer started it to make up for his many sins of so-called journalism. Yeah, well, I was there for a few months, and I realized it was a complete waste of time, although I did learn to type faster. And the very first class I had was with a professor named Melvin Mentcher. It was kind of a legend among professors. The very first thing he said was, follow the money. And that was the very last thing I learned to value there. Yeah. But it was useful. I mean, it was a useful thing. What was your first job after that, David? I was a press secretary for congressman Stephen J. Solaris in Brooklyn. I mean, that was the first legitimate job. I spent seven or eight years directing theater, but we're not gonna get into that. Why? Yeah, yeah. That was a whole different. And TV shows, I produced a TV show that won actually a couple of Emmy Awards. It was a whole thing. Anyway, this is not about me. It's about you. And you're right. Let's follow the money, or I said follow the money. So let's start with Epstein. And I'd just be very interested in your perceptions of how the Epstein case has been covered by the media. Because sometimes I think there isn't the investigative journalism that I thought there would be about this now. I mean, there was, you know, Julie Brown and the Miami arrow did some great stuff. But since then, not so much. But you may have a different view. Let's start with you, Dan. No, I kind of agree. I mean, a lot of it has been, I mean, I think people spent a lot of time going through the documents. It's been a fairly large investment of resources in a handful of newsrooms. But they certainly don't seem to go past what's in the documents. And I think they're not maybe covering, being alarming enough about what's in there as far as what it really represents about what people knew. Yeah, I mean, it seems, Jeff, that, you know, every day that there's a release, you know, 10 things come out that are fairly big stories, some of which somebody could have figured out how to ask a question about. Like, we know who was hanging out with Epstein. We've seen past records. Don't people go to those people and say, hey, you were hanging out with Epstein. What was that about? And what did you talk about? Did that influence anything? And, you know, Epstein spent a ton of time at Harvard and with academics, and they seemed really happy to be with him. And what does that mean? Or, you know, I mean, it just seems like there was a lot of stuff there. One thing I did notice is we haven't had any big media names on the Epstein list, have we? Was he just trying to avoid all that? Obviously, it's Woody Allen, if you call it. Well, I meant journalism. Oh, journals, yeah, no. Thank you. Yeah, I think we avoid them. I mean, I think a few things. One, the headlines when the drop was made said, you know, DOJ releases Epstein files. What the headline should have said, DOJ does not release Epstein files, right? There was a, what is still missing is a story that's not being ignored. Number one, number two, I don't think there's been any systematic way to dig into them and to build pictures of what we know about Trump, particularly. And some of it is just accusation. Okay, fine, but put that out there. It is public, it's out there. There have been stories about the incompetence of the release, what's not been cut out. But I think the story that they're missing is to go to the victims and ask them what's not been released. I've heard a little bit of that on the mess now. People saying, you know, my transcript of my interview in there, who's not there, what's not there, what's still missing? Then I would also be going to the right wing nut jobs who made this a story in the first place. And I have really seen reaction from them to say, are you still pissed off? You still suspicious? Is this still a conspiracy theory? Or have you taken the pill? Excellent, that's good advice. Let's keep going with good advice for journalists who wanna cover this. Well, they don't want it from us. They don't want any advice from us. Well, then let's talk down at them and criticize them. Dan, what else are, I mean, apparently there's 5,300 references to Donald Trump. Presumably one might do a story saying, what does that tell us that is different from what Trump is telling us? But what else do you wanna know, Dan? I mean, there have been some of those stories about Trump, just about the fact that he's all over the place. I think that some people were hoping there'd be a smoking gun in terms of putting Trump having sex with one of the girls in Epstein's trafficking ring. I suspect that would have come out by now if that were true. But this notion that he knew what Epstein was doing is very clear. And I think that should be taken as an assumption now rather than a speculation. And in general, the whole, the psychology of this, the incredible allure of money and power and sex and this community of people who didn't just tolerate it but really were excited about being a part of it, the psychology of it. And the devastating things it says about human nature is a lot more to be written. I think there is a lot more to be written about this. You know, I'm like anti-conspiracy theory. I'm just a natural skeptic about conspiracy theories. But Jeff, as you said, there is many pages not released as there are released here, right? There were six million, they released three million, heavily redacted, there's another three million they didn't release. There's almost certainly no grounds based on the law that was written for them to withhold those three million. They're not three million pages pertaining to ongoing cases here. And Trump is desperately, desperately trying to cover this up. And, you know, I mean, there was something interesting in the one of the Epstein, I mean, there are a lot of little tidbits that were interesting. Trump met Melania through Epstein according to one of the pieces. But one of them was an exchange between Epstein and Peter Thiel in which Epstein says, Trump doesn't feel he can release his taxes. What should he do? And I thought, you know, Trump is all about hiding stuff that he thinks will destroy him. And when you consider the stuff he doesn't hide, you gotta think, is there a dead body someplace? I mean, what's going on here? And I don't know, you know, maybe you think I'm falling for the conspiracy theories. But I'm just like, every day that there's more that's covered up than there is released is a day that I think this is a bigger story than we thought it was. Yeah, I'm also not a believer in conspiracy theories in that the world is not that well organized. And it doesn't work that well, it's not that smooth. And so conspiracy theories, all pizza pedophiles are ridiculous. But by the way, the Clinton's testify, that's gonna become the story wrongly. There, that swirl moment, and it's gonna be ridiculous, but put that aside. The conspiracy you're talking about is not some grand opening conspiracy that the Tri-Lateral Commission and the World Economic Forum and... Please don't leave out the world Jewish conspiracy. I feel that we should be included in... Yes, go walk with us, you've just presumed to be in charge of everything. Do you know by the way that at one point, like 20 years ago, when the internet was a thing, I went out and purchased the domain name worldjewishconspiracy.com because I wanted, if somebody looked it up and say, who's the guy behind this? I wanted them to say, it was me. I've still got it. So if people have good ideas for what I can do with it, please let me know. Anyway, starting in a row. Well, anyway, the conspiracy you're talking about here is within the White House and within the Trumpist world. Those are conspiracies. Absolutely they're there. And no one should have the slightest faith that they have done this release in any good faith. And so it's up to Congress to try to figure out a way to get a special master, to sue them, to find the smoking guns of what they haven't released, to go again, go to the victims and say, I know there are these things that exist and they're not there. So you guys screwed up. So we need someone independent to come in and find out what the hell's going on here and look at all six million pages. Yeah, well, we have heard that the victims are gonna stand up and say, here are the names that you should be looking at. And I wonder what they're waiting for Dan, do you know? So I got the knocked off line for a bit there. Apparently this was really a huge lift for the DOJ and they were putting all sorts of line prosecutors on looking through these documents and so on. Although they did a terrible job. So I think part of it is just incompetence. But yeah, you do have to wonder. Well, okay. Let's shift our focus to another set of stories. If you're grading the media this week on how they've covered the story in Minneapolis, Jeff, how do you think they're doing? I think there are some very good moments, unquestionably, but I think Rachel Maddow was at her best last night, as we're talking on a Tuesday, when she did that compilation, she does. And the larger story is that Minneapolis and then the nation has stood up to Trump. And the demonstrations everywhere, the know you can't build your warehouse prison here, that that's a story. And I think Minneapolis and Denmark, and maybe Harvard have a lesson, don't stand up to the bully. And so I think there's something bigger happening in the country and media, I think, are waiting for the next no kings in the count heads. There's a counter revolution going on now that matters. And I don't feel that we have the pulse of it. Yeah, I agree, Dan. In the case of Minneapolis, one of the things that's most striking to me is that Alex Pretty went to a memorial rally for Renee Good. He was acutely aware that what he was doing could lead to his death. And he said, I'm gonna keep doing it anyway. And I think that that is a different kind of resistance. I think that is Americans standing up and saying I will risk my life to protect these fundamental freedoms. I think that's a big story. How do you think the media is doing covering all this? Good and bad. I mean, when the national organizations do pay attention to what's going on in Minneapolis, they write wonderful stories, but they're not doing it every day necessarily. I mean, if I'm on social media, I'm seeing that the enforcement and the harassment of observers is going on daily. And so it ought to be a continued story. And of course, what happened last week was that they all wrote these articles saying Trump had changed his tone. And there is something there in that sense that you could see that for the first time on immigration, they were on the defensive. They actually, they asked Bovino, they basically backpedaled on their accusations about Alex Preeti, but fundamentally nothing changed on the ground in Minneapolis. And I don't think that message has come out in the media nearly strong enough. And so I think your average headline scroller is left with the impression that things have calmed down. Yeah, now, Jeff, a part of this story is that they decided to arrest a couple of reporters for covering the event. And that says direct an assault on the First Amendment as I remember in my life, but it's part of a pattern that goes back to the beginning of the administration, keeping people out of the White House, keeping people out of the Department of Defense, lying to the public, being the least transparent administration in history, trying to intimidate the members of press successfully doing it with CBS, around the CBS. News purchased successfully doing it with ABC. I've never seen an assault on the First Amendment like this. And yet, you know, Don Lemon was let out and they're like, okay, next story. Yeah, amen. I think it's a paraphrase Martin Niebuhr. First they came for the immigrants, we didn't say enough. And then they came for the trans kids, and then they came for the law firms, and then they came for the professors. And they finally came for the journalists. And I would have thought that we'd have a hue and upcry in defense of journalism, everywhere, every publication doing editorial, not that editorials matter, but at least use the tools you have to cover this like crazy. And they're not, the squirrel of the story is amazing. And once you see the pieces being put together of the attack on every institution in the country, add in RFK and medicine and science, add in education, add in all these other elements as well. There's a story developing here that's very clear, that's very Han'e Arant, that they are just ignoring. That's just a large picture. You think again that in the small picture, they would at least want to defend journalists. I think part of the problem is that some of them don't think that Don Lemon is a journalist anymore because he doesn't work for a big company anymore. And because Don Lemon said what he thinks and they don't know what to do with him. And Georgia Fort is a local person so they don't know who she is. Though she's an excellent journalist. So it's disheartening that we haven't seen journalists as a whole and news organizations as a whole rallying around Minneapolis like our own field. Yeah, I'd say it's disgusting. Yeah, I mean, Dan, Dan, yeah, I think, go ahead, go ahead. I was gonna ask you a question, but you're gonna answer anything. I wrote a post on Friday saying, this is a major assault on freedom of the press and journalists have to cover it that way and have to get outraged about it. And I thought the column was stupid because obviously it was so obvious. And then the articles come out and they're, they made a big splash, Don Lemon arrested, but then it says basically, here's what he was charged with and here's what he was doing. And the articles didn't even mention freedom of the press. They didn't mention the First Amendment until maybe way down. So the news articles were outrageously credulous and scenographic as opposed to contextual and outraged. And then my God, the lack of editorials is inexcusable. It is outrageous. It is basically aiding and abetting this movement. Sure, you can go and criminalize journalism, arrest two journalists doing journalism and you can throw them in jail and we will cover it as a one day story. It's absolutely infuriating. And yeah, I think the fact that they aren't affiliated with the major news organization is a factor. The fact that they have a sort of an activist tinge them is a factor. The fact that they're black is a factor. And somehow the journalism community has not rallied around these people. And I am just horrified by that. Call my wife. Calling UK wildlife. Voice assistance not working for you. BlackRock Investment Trust has a lot working for you. Get to know them at blackrock.com. Capital at risk, marketing material. BlackRock Investment Management UK Limited. Authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand. Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time. From startups to scale ups online, in person and on the go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Well, you know, the journalism community, that's an interesting expression, Jeff. Because it certainly ain't what it used to be. And I think a huge part of this story, you know, these things come in chunks, but you know, the X being bought by Elon Musk and the Washington Post being bought by Jeff Bezos and the LA Times falling next and the next domino being CBS News going to the Ellison's and then Barry Weiss and then ABC News, bending the knee and then TikTok, what more recently has, you know, gone over into the Ellison camp and all the major pillars of journalism have looked like they've succumbed. Some, you know, CNN looks like it's, you know, on the block possibly. NBC is trying to distance itself from some of its news operations. You know, who the fuck is the journalism community? You know, who are there other than these independent voices? So I think we're at a moment of rebuilding. In my new book, Hot Type, coming out in June, available for pre-order now, it's a history of- What was the name of that book again, Jeff? Hot Type there, David Thurresky. Yeah, no, that's, I just want people to be able to write that down. So it looks at the history of the line of type, which is the mechanization of media, the made media mass up and through the end of it with PostScript and it's a cultural history of all that. And what fascinated me in the research is that if you go to the late 19th century, it was not at all clear which media would predominate and in what ways. Newspapers started publishing magazines. Sunday newspapers became cheaper than magazines. They were killing magazines. Magazines were dying because of it. Magazines then finally came out and came up with cheaper editions, which started the attention economy and the advertising economy. Books were scared of magazines. Magazines were scared of books. They were all trying to figure out what was what, meanwhile they enter in the telegraph, confusing everything and changing the national voice. And it took a while before we got some kind of stasis there. And then of course, the long comes radio and broadcast and changes everything once again. I think we're at that kind of moment now when I don't think that the survival of magazines or newspapers is at all certain. Broadcast television is at all certain. There's all kinds of independent mechanisms now. Voila, what we're doing right now. Newsletters, blogs still exist. People on social media also witnesses, witnessing what they have from the whole public and performing active journalism. I think there's a new structure starting to sprouts up from the ashes. I'm figuring this out. And as Clay Scherke would say, or did say back in the day, what's gonna come next is chaos. It's chaos for what we thought of as journalism, chaos for media, chaos for what power can get away with without organized journalism there. But I think there will be a demand for journalism. I think there will be a demand for investigation and public information. But I think it's gonna take forms that we can't yet predict. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. Back in the day, and you get to be my age, everything is back in the day, but back in the day. You don't know old. Well, yeah, maybe. But I do remember that I've always been interested in what's coming next. And so there was a period there, late 80s, 90s, where if you wanted to know what was coming next in media, you'd go to the MIT Media Lab. And there was a guy there named Nicholas Negroponte. And he would write about something called the Daily Me. And the thing he meant when writing about the Daily Me was that everybody was gonna be able to tailor the flow of information into them so that it would be super customized. And that's happening now. You find it in your news feeds. If you go to ESPN, they keep trying to sell you. Here is the sports news feed, do you want? But you know what he didn't get, Dan? That the Daily Me didn't, what happened wasn't, the Daily Me wasn't about the consumer. It was about the journalist. All of a sudden, everybody has a platform. Everybody is a journalist. Everybody is in the media. I saw an article the other day saying the most important people in political media are people who don't ever talk about politics. And I was like, fuck. But there was a point which is people don't want it shoved down their throat. So when the guy that they call in and listen to about wrestling says something about politics, then he's like, no, that must, that just stands out and must have some resonance. So I think Jeff's right. We don't know what the final form is. But it sure does seem like there has been this kind of takeover of mainstream media by the oligarchy. And- The dying embers of mainstream media I would have. Right, right. And then a sort of a cooperation among some people who still have platforms within the media, maybe self-interested to say, yeah, okay, I'm not gonna write about that. And so you just sort of miss that. I mean, my biggest concern is that journalistic values won't last, won't survive. I mean, I think as long as journalistic values do survive and are present, that truth telling, that accountability, first hand accounts are valued on the internet. That's good. I worry more about sort of AI slot and these pink slime news organizations sort of messing it up. I think that it's not clear where people will get their journalism in the coming decades. But I'm hopeful there will still be journalism. I think that what journalists do is a valuable thing for the internet, culling information, contextualizing it, telling you what you need to know. So- But just to, I didn't mean to interrupt, but it seems like there are 80 million Americans, and probably 150, 200 million Americans who don't have any interest in going to the sites that say this is what you need to know, and would rather go to the sites that say this is what you want to know. In other words, they want news-ish that makes them feel comfortable. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm terribly worried about that. I'm terribly worried about that. I still hope that the value of journalism will be perceived over time and by a significant chunk of people. I think we're definitely losing, folks. I'm sorry, so Jeff, go on, please. Yeah, I think we are, and Jeff, just before you launch into this, one of the things that strikes me is kind of a weird development in the context of all of this, or maybe a consistent development is, you have Barry Weiss at CBS News, we'd love to talk about her, but Barry Weiss at CBS News, she has an all-hands meeting last week, and she says, well, this is what we're gonna do. And at her all-hands meeting, she lists a bunch of people who she wants to have join them as commentators, because really what we need in the media is more fucking commentators. And she's treating it like she's launching the bulwark, that she's launching a blog. It's the bulwark for dummies, I think. Well, yeah, whatever, but that's, it would seem to me that the door is wide open for somebody to come in with the radical idea that what they're gonna do is just produce news, that they're just gonna have reporters go out, report what they see, only run facts that are verifiable, because that would be like, holy shit, really? That isn't there anymore. There's no business about it. One of the things we're working on in New Jersey, where I'm calling in from, is a content sharing network, similar to one that exists now in California, where we take the people who are on the ground in lots of small, independent organizations, and share news among them, and it becomes kind of a new news service of this. So we get more attention to what exists. I wanna go back to what you said at the beginning of our conversation, David, about follow the money. It's not just the money of power, it's also the money in our own industry. In the research for my book, Hot Type, out in June, available for pre-order now. Wait, I'm gonna write that down. I'll always be selling, always be selling. Oh, yeah. I found that when technology entered into our industry, when the line of type was made obsolete by hold type, and then computers, and postscript, and all this stuff, what happened was that it did not affect newsrooms at all first, it was all to get rid of the composing room, it was all to get rid of production costs, it was all to reduce staff and reduce labor, and it was not one bit for innovation. And there was this great scene that I came across of the man who's doing what I'm forgetting right now, who supposedly creeped him up with a word automation, who lectured American newspaper editors, and tried to tell them, there are these things called computers, and they're gonna tie together information in ways that you can't figure out right now. And they admitted that, well, we're still blue penciling articles and hooking paragraphs like we always did, we're always doing what we always did, cause we always trying to preserve what was. And I think that we've come to complete bankruptcy of the old mass media business model, and everything that comes along with it. So to your other point, when I talked to my students, I would tell them to dance point, question everything we tell you, everything we did, and understand everything we did based on following the money. Why do we have a food section? Not because there's news in asparagus, because we get ads out of it, and on and on and on, right? Understand it in the economic terms, and then question it, hold on to that which is worth holding on to, hold on to those values of independence, and verifiability, and fairness, and so on. But throw the rest out, be prepared to rethink it entirely. And I see things from the Engage for Journalism program I worked on with my colleague, Kerry Brown, where it becomes more bottom, journals becomes more bottom up, less top down. Before the mechanism, this is my last little history moment, before the mechanization and industrialization of print in the United States in the late 1800s, the average circulation of a daily newspaper in the US was 4,000. It was a middling, sub-stack newsletter, because that's all it took, it was the human power to pull the press, and to set the type. And it was only when mechanization and industrialization came in, that scale came and capital took over, and you had to have the capital to buy the machines, to buy the buildings, to buy the staff, and the trucks, to get to the point of scale in media. And so what I welcome here is the opportunity to return to media at a human scale, that's so different for our brains to figure out, because we think if it's not huge, if it's not big, if it's not a best seller, it's meaningless. But, but, and that's the mistake. But Dan, here's the problem. We may not need capital, we may not need to own the presses, we may not need to own the means of distribution. But if you wanna be influential, you need to own the algorithm. And the algorithm is a black box. But most people don't have the time or the inclination or the ability to build, at this point, the agentic AI, that will go out there and find what they want and give it to them in a credible form. And even if they did, they would not know what the algorithm underlying the agentic AI was, so they could not control its biases. And so we've gotten to a point where the biggest, most important part of the journalistic equation is the most opaque. And that is the great sorters out there who have replaced editors, who are long strings of code that say what ends up at the top of somebody's feed in the middle and at the bottom in what's left out. Springs Blooming at Starbucks. A new season calls for new discoveries, like our iced uber vanilla matcha latte. Smooth, creamy and nutty, balanced with notes of vanilla. It's a treat for the eyes too, with vibrant lilac cues to brighten your spring mood. Hot or iced, there are so many ways to love this stunning serve. Uber vanilla, pouring now at Starbucks. Subject to availability while stocks last. Offer ends March 2026. Conditions apply. Visit mg.co.uk. Yeah, it's not just opaque, it's actually sorted. I mean, what we know is that violence and sex and clashes and celebrities, that the algorithm favors sort of the lowest common denominator stuff way too much. And I think the way that some news organizations are dealing with the algorithm is they're sending their headlines to chat GPT and saying, how do I make this headline viral? Or how to make this story more viral? No, at this point, it's a very, very depressing algorithm. I'm hopeful in the long run that the algorithm will reflect the value of independent journalists and trusted brands. I'm not giving up on trusted brands, Jeff. But right now, it is absolutely, the algorithm is in charge and it's doing very bad things. Well, it's just, go on. So I have an unpopular opinion here, not for the first time in life, which is that I think what I see happening now with AI coming in and agents coming in, as you say, David, is that we see news organizations sticking their heads in the sand and saying, leave us out of your AI, keep us out of it. Well, how are they gonna be discovered? How are they gonna be found? If not through the AI? And meanwhile marketers are dying to be an AI, propagandists are dying to be an AI. If you haven't gone to MOLT book yet, it's an entire social network filled with nothing but agents, they'll be filling all of this. We haven't, I think, understood how to deal with this next generation at all. And it's a suicide mission on behalf of the old companies, led by their lobbyists who care about nothing but protectionism as if they have something worth protecting. And so they're gonna kill themselves by hiding from the mechanisms by which people, for better and worse, are informed of the future. I'm on the podcast, Intelligent Machines, Leo Laporte as the host is much more technical than I am, played with Claude for a week or two and created his own agent, a little more than you or I could probably do, but it's getting simpler and simpler and simpler. Where it went to all the headlines and he found them all and he could go through it and create a feed of the headlines that he cared about. I think we will be at a point where you're not at the daily me, per se, but I think people will be able to have more power over what they get and how they get it. The question is how do we make ourselves available to them? I've argued that we need to have APIs for news. We need to have a discussion based around that. It's not a popular opinion, but that is not used to having such things. We've had this discussion since the internet started and at the beginning of the internet, newspapers wanted to charge Google for links, right? I mean, they were against people linking to them. And what we learned over time is that that's valuable. Having the eyeball is valuable. Getting the person to come to your website, even if they don't start it website, is valuable. And is marketing. It was valuable, but it was valuable. It was valuable. Was it anymore? It's not anymore valuable. Now my question is, is it still valuable? Because you just get, AI just gives you the material and doesn't send you to the original website. I mean, that's what happens. We'll go to the website, we'll look at the sources. So, the Google model. What's this supposed to do? The Google model that everybody thought was the prevailing model that was gonna determine how these questions would be answered two years ago is dead. Because. The links are dead. When you ask a question, you get an AI answer at the top and nobody looks any further. And it gets to a core question that's related to what Jeff is talking about, what you're talking about. Which is not, you know, what is, I mean, it's partially what is value added. But there's a, at the Harvard Business School, they talk about something called the job to be done. And the question is, what is the job to be done for the average person? And the job to be done for the average person has nothing to do with what you or I or, you know, a lot of people listening might think of as the core tenets of journalism. The job to be done for a lot of people is, tell me what my friends are gonna know that I need to know about. Or tell me what is gonna make me money in the stock market. Or give me an idea that's gonna, or it's, but it's not, tell me the facts and let me draw my own conclusions. Right, so I want to come along in Minneapolis and said, I'm gonna create a wire of all the verified videos of witnesses there. I'm gonna put all that together. Any news organization could have done that. Any independent could have done that. Because we now have witnesses sharing what they witness, participants sharing what they witness as well. There's an opportunity to bring more together. And to add value to that in a way that AI is not gonna do. No, I think that that's right. And there is another problem, which is when I go and talk to Zoomers, they hate AI. Hate, don't want to be associated with. Don't trust. View AI as another spoiled, fucked up institution created by a prior generation. Bunch of assholes. But yeah, but because it was created by a bunch of assholes. Because fucking Bill Gates got syphilis from some Russian woman and then tried to put antibiotics in his wife's morning coffee. I mean, allegedly. Allegedly, yeah, okay. Allegedly. Come sue me, Bill. And then the discovery will be fantastic. But it's just, we're at this turning point. And every time the three of us talk, we get to this, but we're at this turning point, but we don't know where we're turning to. And it's really hard to say. The only thing we know for sure is that the direct access, the average person slash voter in the United States has to fact-driven news has decreased via their primary channels of news gathering. Not by news channels. There is available by new channels. But the question is, are they using, I mean, I'll tell you something, just give you a final thing, and you can both comment on this. So I have my dumb little, the DSR, that's not dumb folks, love that you're here. But so we have the DSR network, we've been around for 10 years. We started out doing Deep State Radio. We do podcast in Deep State Radio. We get 10, 15, 20,000 people for each one of the podcasts. Given the world of podcasting, that was pretty good. We then started doing several podcasts a week. So we'd end up doing 100,000, 150,000, 250,000 downloads a week. So we would get to a million downloads a month a few years ago, and that was like pretty good. The primary mechanism being podcast delivery platforms. In the course of the past six months, that model has blown up. We continue to deliver those things, but all the growth is in YouTube. All the big growth is video like this in YouTube, broken into one in two minute things that end up also on Instagram and TikTok and elsewhere. That people can look at, and if they wanna click more, they can, but our subscriber base is up 900% this month. Model. On YouTube. Ah. On YouTube. Not so model. Well, no, no, it's model. You can make money off of YouTube. I mean, it's monetizable. But the point is, and when you look at some of these people, if you look at Joe Rogan, or you look at some of the big influencers, even the progressive influencers, I do at least one a week on the Daily Beast. Daily Beast has 520,000 YouTube subscribers. The typical podcast I do, which becomes a YouTube, gets three, four, 500,000 downloads. It's bigger than morning Joe. It's bigger than almost anything on MSNOW. I wouldn't have told you a year ago that YouTube was the winner, and it may not be the winner in a year, but it's a big change. Each of you provide whatever you would like as your closing con. Dan? Oh, dear. I don't know. I mean, I think that the things are definitely changing, and the attention span is getting shorter and shorter. That's another element of it. I wonder, with all due respect, how many of those downloads are watched to the end? You know, the way things are going is unpredictable. I have nothing particularly interesting to say about this, except that we're all watching to see where it goes next. Yeah, by the way, there is data on how many are listened to to the end, and the shorter ones are more listened to. But our podcast, when we would do a podcast, and still the average downloaded podcast, ours are listened to 95% of the way through. Wow. I think on YouTube, people have YouTube, people have YouTube up on the screen of their cell phone while they're doing something else. I think it's kind of intellectual music, but I could be wrong. This is the problem with the... I generally don't demonize the algorithm, but I will catch about it. So I'm laid up a bit, because I'm stupid and injured myself. So when I try to go sleep at night, or the pills I'm on, I go to YouTube and say, okay, I'll watch something that I don't care if I see the end or not. And because I looked up and paid for watching Nuremberg's a movie, now it thinks all I want is Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. And this time when we have Hitler around us, I don't need that. I think that there's a lot to be done in the recommendation structures. I think that people believe the algorithm is all powerful and all wise and impenetrable. No, it's pretty stupid. So by the way, it was Nuremberg the movie, but keep going. There's that too, yes, yeah, it was a bit overdone. But so I think there's lots of opportunities still to figure this out. Yeah, I think it's gonna evolve. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We just don't know, but it sure is different than it was. And by the way, the answer to your question is the Graham Norton show. That's- Exactly, I freaking love the Graham Norton show. Great. It is the best, they have a live compilation, it's all great, and I just keep it on. Yep. It's just, it'll just calm you down, folks, after you listen to this and you're wound up, and you don't know what to do, listen to the Graham Norton show, you'll laugh, you'll have a good time. He's brilliant. Yeah, he is good. He's good, and we don't have that anymore in America, you know, all that stuff. No, Colbert is going away. Well, exactly, Jimmy Fallon's unwatchable. Oh, oh. So anyway, Dan seems, he doesn't even watch this stuff. Late at night, he's sitting there reading, you know, the great Tomes by Montesquieu. Dan, you do have a television, don't you? I do have a television. And I'm- Nobody wants television. And somewhere else, because I think what he does is essential. I'm hoping Colbert leads somewhere else, because my son-in-law is a writer for Colbert. Wow. And so it's really important to my daughter and their kid. But my daughter works for John Oliver, so, you know, that show is still going, so. She would be a DNA powerhouse. Yeah, no kidding. Thank you. Well, I'm not responsible for my son-in-law's DNA, but- It's a magnetic attraction. Yeah, although he is now directly related to someone, you know, my grandchild. Anyway, I've, which I have too. Anyway, far more information than anybody needs, but it's this chatty quality that makes people turn to this format instead of, I don't know, real news. Very wise and torridicople. Yeah. Oh, God. God. Oh, God. All right, look, you guys are great. It's good to talk to you every few weeks, very therapeutic. Jeff, I hope that your broken body parts recover quickly, that Graham Norton helps with that. And just one more time, what was the name of that book? Oh, Nut Type. Hot Type. The Magnificent Machine that gave birth to mast media and drove Mark Twain mad. Excellent. You don't have to newsletter. I just think and heads up news, so. Visit those two. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Go to those things. In the interim, please continue coming here as well, whether you're listening to it as a podcast or subscribing to it on YouTube, we hope you do both. And we will see you around campus for all the other things we're doing every day, every week, here at the DSR network. Until then, thank you, Dan. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, everybody. And bye-bye. So you want to start a business. You might think you need a team of people and fancy text kills, but you don't. You just need GoDaddy Arrow. I'm Walton Goggins and as an actor, I'm an expert in looking like I know what I'm doing. GoDaddy Arrow uses AI to create everything you need to grow a business. It'll make you a unique logo. It'll create a custom website. It'll write social posts for you and even set you up with a social media calendar. Get started at godaddy.com slash arrow. That's godaddy.com slash A-I-R-O.
