New York Times’ Radical Distortions and Fabrications with Ashley Rindsberg, Author of “The Gray Lady Winked”
"The New York Times absolutely, 100% covered up the holocaust."
This podcast starts out with a bang. And it's an important question: What happens when media giants get it wrong?
Ashley Rindsberg knows the answers. Ashley is the author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History.
His book explores ten instances where the New York Times drastically got things wrong and how their misreporting led to or enabled tragedies and crises.
During our conversation, we talk about why the misreporting occurred, who was responsible, and what that means for media and readers in the future.
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Here’s what I learned from the episode :
Ashley wrote most of the book in 20s but wasn’t able to get it published for 15 years. Publishers were afraid of angering the NYT.
Recently trust in media has declined, and now this book's time has come.
Ashley stumbled on a footnote in "The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich." The day Germany Invaded Poland, NYT ran a story about Poland invading Germany.
NYT strategically and deliberately avoided writing about the holocaust, despite proof that they were aware.
Reporter Walter Duranty outright denied the Ukraine famine (which killed ~4 million people) when the country was under Stalin’s control. Duranty did so under direction from NYT higher ups.
Ashley’s book also covers NYT misreports about Cuba, the Vietnam War, the atomic bombing of Japan, and the Iraq War.
When NYT is wrong, they are really wrong. Ashley attributes their major failures to a toxic stew of ideological and economic interest.
The Ochs-Sulzberger family controls the NYT. They are the throughline of book: "In one chapter, they seem pro-communist. In another chapter, they seem pro-fascist. But they are actually just pro-themselves."
There are still heroes and great reporters in media. They are often unsung.
Ashley is working on a company building tools to monitor media. They are looking at stealth editing (when reporters go back and edit stories), how sourcing is used, metrics for reliability, and measuring polarizing language.
This episode is sponsored by Bread.
Bread is not your typical dev shop. They're like a technical cofounder team that you can add a whole product team as a pod. So, if you are non-technical founders or you want to spin up a new project, a new "swim lane" in your company quickly with very talented people, talk to Bread.
If you reach out to them, please tell them Eric sent you. It's madebybread.com. Check that page out. It's very cool. It's very well designed and will give you a sense of what they can do.
Learn more about Ashley Rindsberg
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
The Most Epic, Personal, In-Depth Balaji Interview Ever (Transhumanism, Investing, and more)
Growing Podcasts, Bookkeeping Biz, and Creator-Led Companies with David Senra and Mitchell Baldridge
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: Wait, wait, wait, before you put your phone down, if you love this podcast, please give it a quick review. Okay, here we go.
Ashley Rindsberg: So that first chapter is really about not just that one incident of the New York Times sort of reprinting Nazi propaganda, it was kind of the whole endeavor of The New York Times coverage of World War II and the Germans being corrupted by essentially a Nazi sympathizer who was running their Berlin Bureau and what that produced in terms of how they covered the Berlin Olympics, how they covered the Munich Accords, how they covered the antisemitism in Germany at the time. It was all tainted.
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, and welcome. I'm Eric Jorgenson, and I don't know much. I shake my kombucha just as hard as the next guy. But I have some very smart friends to help me figure life out. And if you listen to this podcast, then no matter who, where, or when you are, you do too. Today, we explore how technology, investing, and entrepreneurship will create a brighter, more abundant future. This podcast is one of a few projects I work on. To read my book, blog, or newsletter or invest alongside us in early stage tech companies, please visit ejorgenson.com. My guest today is Ashley Rindsberg. He is the author of The Gray Lady Winked. It has the most savage subtitle of all time, are you ready? How the New York Times’ misreporting distortions and fabrications radically alter history. This book talks about 10 different times that misreporting at the New York Times allowed or caused tragedies, massive global humanitarian crises, why that misreporting occurred, and what it means for media and for us as readers. In this episode, we talk about some of the background on him writing the book, what inspired him to write it, and predictably some of the challenges he experienced trying to get it published. And we also talk more broadly about the media, their responsibility for fair and unbiased reporting, and what the future of media might look like, how we can fix this problem. Our conversation starts shortly. Until then, here are this episode's sponsors. And if you're pulling out your phone to skip through the sponsors, that's another great opportunity to leave a quick review. It really does mean so much. Thank you very much.
Anyway, we have a new sponsor today, Bread, founded by some very good friends of mine. They are not your typical dev shop. Think of them like your CTO agency. They're like a technical cofounder team that you can add a whole product team as a pod. So, if you are non-technical founders or you want to spin up a new project, a new sort of swim lane in your company really quickly with really talented people, talk to them. They've been building companies together for a long time. They are founders themselves. They're incredible product people. They are good, kind hearted, hardworking souls. And they move very fast but very cleanly. They avoid the technical debt. They work closely with all the team members. And they don't have a lot of the typical agency bullshit. They're very focused on being value oriented, not margin oriented. They're thoughtful in how they construct their sort of engagements with you. And they'll help build you a company for the long term. They won't just bleed you dry and leave you with a half assed product in the future. They'll help you plan for the long term, build your roadmap, set your tech stack, and even recruit people to join your team and replace them as they step out and wind down. So if you reach out to them, please tell Eric they sent you. It's madebybread.com. Check that page out. It's very cool. It's very well designed and will give you a sense of what they can do.
Another sponsor for today is GiveWell, just in time for the end of year tax deduction season. I know you're getting those 1099s flowing in already. When you give to charity, do you know how much impact your donation will actually have? Most charities can't tell you, some won't tell you, but most can't tell you how the money will be used or how much good it will accomplish. And that's the problem that GiveWell solves. They spend 30,000 hours each year researching charitable organizations and direct their funding to the highest impact, most evidence backed opportunities they have. Six figures worth of donors use GiveWell, that's over 100,000 to donate more than a billion dollars over their lifetimes. The rigorous evidence suggests that those donations will save hundreds of thousands of lives and improve millions more. The best part is GiveWell is free. They just want to help your money do good. So you can go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter my podcast at the checkout. They will match your donation up to $100 as long as their matching funds last. You don't have to sign up. They don't take a cut. It's free. They just want to help you do good and increase your donation, channel it to a high impact charity. So please check them out. Thank you so much for supporting the sponsors who make this show possible. I'm careful to always pick sponsors whose products I enjoy and I think you will too. Now with both ears and everything in between, please enjoy this conversation arriving in three, two, one.
I'm so excited to talk to you. I found out about your book through Balaji. Because he talks about it all the time, as I'm sure you're aware. Has that had a huge impact on the book?
Ashley Rindsberg: It's had a huge impact not just on the book, yes, on the book 100%, and I think on my life. When he and I started talking, so initially I heard him on Tim Ferriss. I was driving my kids to school. I was listening to Tim Ferriss, an episode on the way home or whatever. And it was like, okay, this guy is like obviously really clued into media, among other things. So then I get back and I texted a friend, or actually, a friend of mine texted me, she's like, you got to listen to this interview about media, and it was the same episode. And she's like, you should reach out to him. I'm like, oh, that's a good idea. I DM him, and then like within a minute, he was like, whoa, this is- Balaji is like, for him, NYT is much more than a newspaper as it is for the rest of us. I think he has correctly identified it's not just a symbol of the news media, it's a symbol of a kind of power. And I think that's why it's so important for him and as it is the rest of us. He has just crystallized it in certain way as he tends to do. So, yes, it had a huge impact on the book. But like I said, it really- once he started talking to me about crypto, which had never entered my mind, like really, I mean, just in passing, and he recommended a few books that I read and then I started thinking about what this whole thing meant and where the intersection was between crypto and media and why someone who was- who is known as a pioneer in web3 and blockchain was so interested in a book about centralized information. And that really set me off down a different path.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, what was your kind of path into writing the book? When did you sort of stumble across this insight and decided it needed to get explored?
Ashley Rindsberg: I wrote this book, or I wrote really 90% of the book when I was in my early-mid 20s. And I was living in Tel Aviv. I just kind of had been there for a couple of years. I lived in Israel for about 20 years, 18 years or something. And I had just gotten to Israel. I was working at the Internet Archive in San Francisco for Brewster Kahle, the like web pioneer, amazing guy. And his idea was like saving the whole internet, which I found a cool mission, worked there for him on a literacy project. And then got a job on a sailing yacht, sailed from Italy to Greece helping a yacht owner move a boat. I was a deckhand. And got to Tel Aviv and was just kind of like casting around for like what am I doing? I got this book from a secondhand bookshop called The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, journalist, great, great journalist. And that's where he mentions this little factoid in a footnote that when hostilities broke out between Germany and the rest of Europe, the New York Times’ lead story for the day was that Poland had invaded Germany. And that's where I was like, excuse me? And I went to kind of like just do the research into that particular story. And that, which is true, the lead story of that day indeed did print that Polish guerrilla fighters had invaded a German radio station on the border. And in response, Hitler was just kind of like defending German territory. That's what the New York Times reported. The only source for that story was a German propaganda organ, Nazi Party propaganda organ. And that was, it turns out, a propaganda campaign designed by the Nazi brass to fool Western media into thinking that the Germans were just responding to Polish aggression. And I was kind of blown away by that. So I kind of sat down in this café, it was a Sega Fredo cafe in Tel Aviv, center of Tel Aviv, and just like plugged away for a year or going- then it was like pulling out other sources, of course, books of history, other pieces of journalism, and putting chapters- going chapter by chapter, not really knowing what I was doing, just kind of feeling it out. I then finished the book, recognized that it was meaningful, and tried to publish it or have it published. And then that's where like doors were just slammed in my face and people telling me we can't anger the times, and I was like, okay. So with a heavy heart, I put it in a drawer for about 15 years, something like that. I think I lost exact track of the timeline, but it was around 2005, 2006. I mean, I was probably my- I was probably 24, 25. I published the book eventually when I was 40. It was not a book that anyone has incentive to publish really. I mean, the entire publishing industry relies on the New York Times bestseller list to do the heaviest of their marketing lifting. And to anger the New York Times on behalf of a then young unknown writer is not sound business practice. I have to give them credit.
Eric Jorgenson: It's a light way to put it. Yeah. What were the reactions when you took this book to publishers?
Ashley Rindsberg: I think some of them, depending on who it was, so the like mainstream literary agents that I went to, like I went to someone at WME, William Morris Endeavor, the big, huge literary talent agency, and I went to a very senior person there. I was connected to that person through one of their stars who I knew through a friend. So I got there like the right way, basically, through the front door. And he's just like, yeah, he wrote me a nice email actually. He's like, sorry, we just can't. Literally that's what he told me, like I can't put my other clients at risk over this book that they might be blacklisted. Other publishers were just like, no, it's not for me. Some, actually one of them made an offer on the book before it came out now in 2021, he wanted to buy the book. He just gave me a flat out no back in the day. And he really wanted the book now. So I'm not sure if he- I don't know if that's because his position changed or the environment changed. And then a couple others wanted to like push their own agenda, like can you add this, can you add that? Because for them it was political.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. So what changed in the intervening 15 years that sort of loosened that up? It's very interesting that one publisher flipped. But how did you end up getting it published in the- when it did? What year did it finally get published?
Ashley Rindsberg: 2021. That was, yeah, May 3. Yeah, that was International Press Day, or something like whatever, the UN International Press Day. So what flipped, I think, was the question of media bias and accuracy and error and the role that the news plays in all of our lives went from being kind of a parochial niche issue into the thing everybody talks about all the time, like the question of how our reality is mediated, how our perception of the world is shaped by like 50 or 100 editors in New York and Washington and LA. People are kind of waking up to the full impact of what that means. Where before it was kind of like a blind trust. It was a trust in a cherished institution. And today, it's definitely not that. I know the last Edelman Trust survey that was released put journalism as the lowest level of trust among all American institutions, below Congress, and business was the most trusted actually. So that's a huge flip in that sense. So I think that's what basically changed. People started to understand that the media is not- it's not a undistorted lens. It's not an unshaped lens. It's definitely got some concavity or convexity, or whichever way you want to look at, to shape things the way that they desire them to be shaped, which is normal and natural. The problem is that it is that that lens and the distortion that it provides does not reflect the way most people in the United States see the world any longer.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. So I’ve got one more question sort of about the writing process. This is 15 years ago, you're in a coffee shop in Tel Aviv, you're in your 20s. You just encountered this one sort of aberration, this insane like the New York Times printing Nazi propaganda. How did that- because the- How did that expand? Like how did you find the other and choose the other things? Because the final book is sort of, for people haven't heard of it or read of it, set up like 10 different chapters, and each chapter is basically an entire case that is not quite on that. I think that's probably the most egregious one. You may have a different ranking, but like there's 10 different times that this has sort of happened, just egregious errors that changed the course of history, that cost lives and money and faith. And it's an incredible thing. How did you go from oh my god, this happened, to oh my god, this has happened 10 times? And how many did you find that then got like sort of whittled down to 10? Like, what was that research and writing process like? What else did you learn?
Ashley Rindsberg: I think it was kind of like those were the ones I really uncovered. To be honest with you, I actually have no idea anymore how I went from one to the other and why- what got me from this initial Nazi Germany thing to the second chapter which is Ukraine, the Ukraine famine and why the New York Times covered up the Ukrainian famine. I mean, that one, I think, was probably a little bit more well known because Walter Duranty is sort of a well known figure in the history of the New York Times and media in general. So that may have been more of one of those kinds of things you are like dimly aware of. How I got from there to Cuba, I think it was just like this really diffused kind of open ended research process that I had, where I was really kind of grazing. I wasn't hunting. I was browsing, foraging. I was going to bookstores, and living in Tel Aviv, it's not like living in an American city where you just go to Amazon. There wasn't Amazon. There still isn't. There isn't major bookstores. There was I think, probably it's still the case, probably one English bookstore at Tel Aviv. And if you want to go to another one, you've got to travel an hour to a different city. So I was in these shops, or if I would travel, which I was frequently traveling while writing the book, so then I would like see what was around. And you come across different sources, and then you make connections. And I think that's kind of how it went for me, really just sifting through a lot of the ephemera, through the books, through whatever else, and then, little lights would go off. And you track it down. That's the advantage of being whatever I was, 25 at the time, and kind of not having this like, I had no- I was on no deadline. There was no editor breathing down my neck. There was no one saying, where's the next chapter. So I would say like if it took me two weeks to track down a false lead, something that didn't go anywhere, that was okay because I would still learn something, and I would be able to just move at my own pace. So that for me was probably one of the best things about the book. It was hard to stomach the fact that nobody wanted it at that time. But the process was an amazing process for me. It was like just being in this cafe and writing and being very relaxed about the whole thing. I was doing some work on the side to pay the bills. Again, Tel Aviv in whatever year that was, 2005, was extremely cheap to live in. Today it’s very expensive. But at the time, I think I was paying like 400, 500 bucks in rent, something like that, maybe less, 300. So I was able to just keep that process very open.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. I would say like craftsmanship has no deadline. And sometimes those things where you can just keep working, keep polishing, and work at your own pace, and it's pleasant work and you're enjoying it pretty much all the time that you're doing it, like the end product just comes out better because of it. Do you mind giving us a quick sort of overview of the cases that did sort of make it into the book for people who may not pick it up? Like I think it's so important to sort of at least have the paragraph version of some of these stories in their head because as you say in your conclusion, it is so important to just internalize the fact that these institutions are not infallible. And some of these short stories are a potent inoculation.
Ashley Rindsberg: So that first chapter is really about not just that one incident of the New York Times sort of reprinting Nazi propaganda. It was kind of the whole endeavor of The New York Times coverage of World War II and the Germans being corrupted by essentially a Nazi sympathizer who was running their Berlin Bureau and what that produced in terms of how they covered the Berlin Olympics, how they covered the Munich Accords, how they covered the antisemitism in Germany at the time. It was all tainted by this man and a couple of his colleagues from the Berlin Bureau. The next chapter is the Ukraine famine. Why would the New York Times care? Or I should say, why would Walter Duranty? Walter Duranty being the New York Times Russia correspondent in the 1930s, a very famous, illustrious figure in journalism at the time, who flat out denied that there was a famine in Ukraine, which was then a Soviet- part of the Soviet Union. At the time, the Soviets had been in power just 15, 16 years, and Stalin kind of fomented this famine as part of his reign of terror, the great terror, and in order to consolidate power. And the New York Times goes out saying, contrary to other reporting, no, there is no famine, everything's okay. There's like, there's hardship, but there's not a famine. And you're thinking, we know that’s- we know it wasn't true. What I show in the chapter is that not only is it true, as we all know, Duranty himself knew it was true. There was a famine. He knew that. He admitted to it. Why would he deny it? Journalists don't really like telling you there's nothing to see here. They do the opposite. They want to tell you, oh, there's a big story here, and a famine that's murdering millions of people is a huge story. Why would he deny it? So, the chapter looks into the deeper story behind Walter Duranty, which is an institutional story about the New York Times, less about Duranty. They wanted to- they still want to pin that story, that failure on Duranty. It wasn't about Duranty. And this is I think what people really get wrong and what the media establishment loves to just say, oh, yeah, he was a rogue reporter. Not true on both accounts. Brilliant reporter, knew exactly what he was doing. He was taking orders from the higher ups at the New York Times who had a political interest in having the Ukraine famine covered up. I think the book then moves on. I don't exactly remember what the third chapter is.
Eric Jorgenson: Fidel Castro.
Ashley Rindsberg: Oh, it's Castro. Right, it's Castro. So, Fidel Castro, it's kind of like one of these things where you stop and think like, well, how did he get so famous? Like, there are hundreds of Latin American rebels over the years, most of them faded away before they could do anything real. And that was kind of the trajectory that Castro was on. In the late 1950s, he was kind of irrelevant. Like, he had no men, no guns, no money, hiding out in the mountains. And a New York Times reporter named Herbert Matthews gets ahold of this information, has this like very, in his mind, romantic expedition into the mountains to track him down, interviews him, and then like in the next day’s edition of The New York Times declares him to be this like Messiah of democracy that was going to save Cuba from the Batista regime. Obviously, he had no reason to think that Castro would be a Democratic leader. Obviously, of course, we know he wasn't. But the Times and through Herbert Matthews kept manufacturing this myth again, and again, and again, and again, pushing this idea that Castro is democracy, Castro is freedom. And it got to the point that there was alarm in the United States Senate on both sides of the aisle thinking like these guys are creating a myth on the world stage. And then there was a revolution, which Castro himself eventually went to New York partly to thank- in person went to the New York Times building, it used to be in Times Square, and thanked the publisher for what they had done for the cause. And Che Guevara similarly echoed that sentiment when he said that Herbert Matthews of The New York Times had done more for the revolution than any frontline fighter ever had. So that's exploring the myth that the New York Times made out of Fidel Castro.
Eric Jorgenson: That’s wild. That's the case where the, I don't remember if it was the White House or the Pentagon, but was like just beside themselves that basically a diplomatic visit had been totally usurped by the New York Times inviting Fidel Castro to like speak on a panel or at one of their events or something like that. And they were like his first visit to the US was like not a government sanctioned thing. It's just coming to speak on a stage.
Ashley Rindsberg: That's right. Yes, it was the American Society of Magazine Editors, which included like the New York Times publisher or the editor, the executive editor at the time, and like four other magazine and newspaper editors who were like, who should come to our conference this year? Oh, well, there's Fidel Castro, the New York Times has a great relationship with him. Let's get him on the stage. And they do. And that, like you said, that like precluded having this done through the State Department, which would have made it an official state visit by the new leader of Cuba, and that would have given the American government a chance to properly vet him in person, to have the meetings done, and to make that an actual state visit. And rather than that, it was just this kind of clusterfuck by the American media. And then more and more, like it just gets- the whole thing just becomes a complete and total debacle with Castro and the New York Times.
Eric Jorgenson: It kind of echoes the like Sam Bankman-Fried sitting on stage, like they had him booked as a speaker when he was like a glorified founder. And then he had this like fall from grace because he committed fraud, but he's still speaking on stage. They're just asking very different questions.
Ashley Rindsberg: Totally. I mean, I wrote a big piece about that when it all broke, how the media created SBF, the myth of SBF. And the New York Times played a huge role in that. I mean, you look at their coverage, and that was the sort of culminating moment where he's on stage after being exposed as a fraud. And Andrew Ross Sorkin is like interviewing him, so tell us about- it is like the most insane thing. But what was actually crazier is that for two years, they made, the New York Times in particular, not just them, they made this myth of this boy genius, altruist, and they did zero investigative reporting on who was he and what was this organization, and who was on their board, and where was all the money going, and where was the money coming from. Not one piece. And meanwhile, and this is something that I've been thinking and talking about recently, which is the concept of decentralized media. It took two days for Richard Chen on Twitter followed by CoinDesk and one or two other substacks and Twitter accounts, including CZ, to bring him down, two days. For two years, the media built this guy up. And in two days, decentralized media took him down. It's amazing. It's a complete watershed in the media. It's an absolute paradigm shift, but kind of a separate subject.
Eric Jorgenson: That's incredible. I want to spend some time on that on that, too. So maybe let's make like one or two more kind of short stories. And then we'll kind of get into the future of media because I'm excited about that, too.
Ashley Rindsberg: So we had the Holocaust I think is the next chapter after that, which is- or maybe chapter five. But the Holocaust is that New York Times absolutely 100% covered up the Holocaust as it was being perpetrated. So while they are sort of doing the rah-rah thing for the Nazis, from Berlin, from the Bureau in Berlin, in New York, they are covering up the Holocaust. That was for economic and ideological reasons that they did that. They printed Holocaust related stories on the front page six times in six years. They did a story once about 700,000 Jews murdered in Europe that they buried on page five, where they gave it like six inches of column space. And on the front page that day was a story about a single man in Iceland who had been killed. So you're thinking, well, that's a little bit of an imbalance there. And again, that was ideological and economic. And it always is with the Times. When they go really wrong, when they get it wrong in a historical scale, it's because there's this toxic stew of both ideological and economic interest at the same time. That's where things blow up on a big scale. Vietnam War is another one, how they bungled that to an incredible level. They're young reporters, Halberstam and Neil Sheehan coming in, really wanting to see the South Vietnamese government overthrown, which it was. And part of that was them printing stories that were not true about South Vietnamese abuses that, in fact, never happened and creating a narrative about the South Vietnamese government that they believe to be sort of true despite the facts. It was thesis journalism at its worst. So that's Vietnam. I think, after that we have, oh, the atomic bombing of Japan. That’s a fascinating, absolutely fascinating story. Because it's science journalism. You’d think science journalism would be free from this stuff. It is not at all.
Eric Jorgenson: That one was interesting because it started with, I mean, almost heroic journalism from Lawrence over years to like sort of bring about the Atomic Age and study that thing so closely, and then he sort of got pulled into the government and the government's agenda. And yeah, it just all got twisted up. So fascinating.
Ashley Rindsberg: Yeah, a brilliant, brilliant journalist, absolute visionary of science journalism. So far ahead of the time, he was ahead of the government on the development of a lot of the particle physics that was taking place at the time, nuclear physics, the development of potential technologies and tools, including weaponry. And then yes, from there, he's just coopted. The War Department recognized his brilliance. The New York Times also saw the opportunity. They made a backroom deal. He would carry a certain line about the nuclear bomb that was about to be dropped on Japan. That line being there's no such thing as radiation poisoning. There's only- it's just like the line was that this is just like a conventional bomb only much bigger. There's nothing to worry about, nothing to see here. And in return, he would get access to the planes that were- one of the planes he was actually on the plane. He was the only non military person on one of those planes on the bombing run that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, wrote in these beautiful, glowing poetic terms about the purple mushroom cloud and how majestic it was, as it just tore through people, homes, the whole of Japanese society, which is what it was, was what it was. But the lie that there was no radiation poisoning was very damaging, of course. And then we have a few more chapters about the Iraq war, about the 1619 Project, and about Jayson Blair, the young New York Times reporter who was caught fabricating stories about Iraq veterans. And there's a chapter, of course, about the New York Times creating this myth that veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan were coming home as homicidal maniacs, which was just not true. It's just full on lie. The statistics don't bear it out at all. So yeah, that's, I think, all ten of them.
Eric Jorgenson: I found myself sort of wandering chapter by chapter, and each one probably has a slightly different answer, but over and over again, I was like this is very disgusting, unbelievable. And I struggled to figure out where in each case like the responsibility really lied. I don't know how much that's something you thought about as you sort of see the patterns here. But some of them are clearly just very poor journalists or very idealistic, misaligned, sort of thesis driven, as you said, journalism. But there's supposed to be a whole system in place to sort of edit and vet and research and cross reference and get sources. That's what we see in the idealized version of media. Like you watch the Newsroom or whatever, you see these like cross checks and strict editing guidelines. Where do you see the burden of these sorts of failures lying throughout the organization and throughout history?
Ashley Rindsberg: In the case of the New York Times, on its ownership, on the family that controls the paper, the Ochs Sulzbergers. They're the throughline of the book. So you could say chapter one, it seems as if the paper's pro fascist. And in chapter two, it seems like they're pro communist. How- people would ask me this all the time, how do you reconcile that? And my answer is that it's not that they were pro fascist or pro communist, it is that they were pro themselves, Ochs Sulzbergers. That is what happens when the immense power and wealth of a single institution as important as the New York Times is placed in the hands of a single family for over a century. We have this notion of like the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers and like the dynasties of yesteryear of American power, and that's kind of not so much a thing anymore. But it is at the New York Times. These are people who've controlled this institution for, like I said, well over a century, and there is no end in sight. There's no- they have built this two tier stock structure. They have total decision making ability. The current publisher is named Arthur Sulzberger, the previous publisher was named Arthur Sulzberger, the previous publisher to that was named Arthur Sulzberger, and the previous publisher to that was named Arthur Sulzberger. There is not even a sense that one day the publisher could be not a male named Arthur Sulzberger, let alone a person of color, let alone someone who's not a member of that family. That is I'm not going to say necessarily corrupt, but I mean, if you want the all the ingredients for corruption, especially when it comes to an institution tasked with shaping our reality, the so called paper of record of the United States, you just got a huge problem. And one that moreover, this is a Balaji point, that you never see anybody speak about in the media. You see profiles and takedowns of Zuck. You see it on Musk, of course. The New York Times loves Elon Musk. You see it on you name it. You're going to find it. You will never see in the media a profile on a Sulzberger that has not been sort of pre scheduled by the New York Times PR department for their purposes. Never ever, never happened once. There's no check and balance on that particular power.
Eric Jorgenson: Another question that sort of sat with me through this is how much is the New York Times- How much is what's happening in the New York Times also happening at the other big papers or the other big media institutions? Should we assume that some of the cable news channels or The Wall Street Journal or other sort of big papers and big magazines are run more or less the same?
Ashley Rindsberg: Yes, yes and no. I mean, there is an agenda. There's an agenda everywhere. And especially because so much of the media is now concentrated in the hands of like, it's really like six conglomerates. So it used to be much more diffused. It used to be much more localized ownership. It's no longer the case. It is a high degree of concentration, so the problems get really amplified and optimized in a weird way. The New York Times is different because it is actually kind of, at least it's not owned by this family anymore because it's a publicly traded company, but it's still controlled by them. Whereas-
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, they did that when Google- Google has the same, they call it a dual class share structure. So there's like you can own shares, but you have no control, like public shares have no voting control. And I remember them attacking Google for like the unfairness of the dual class share structure while keeping a dual class share structure themselves for generations. Like yeah, that’s a perfect example.
Ashley Rindsberg: They love doing that. I mean, they go after people, other companies so hard on their labor practices, and meanwhile, half of their or most of the newsroom walked out a month or two ago because they're just shutting down the attempts to unionize some of their tech workers and to negotiate for better terms for their employees. Again and again they do this stuff just without shame. It's absolutely remarkable. But I think that is what makes a difference. I mean, of course, there are some cases where you have huge news companies and newsrooms that are owned by a single person or effectively controlled by a person. I mean, Murdoch, he has final say. Murdoch, however, is a founder. And I think, again, this is a point Balaji will make, a founder is somebody who had to build it himself or herself, which means they have some interest in the thing in itself and not the perpetuation of the thing. A dynasty is a really different thing than a founder who's controlling a company. And the reason being, because the interest of the dynasty is to continue to perpetuate its power and prestige. Whereas for the founder, it's to build it, to build the thing in a way that serves a market or a certain kind of customer. So, Murdoch, yes, has total control, he can serve his own political interests at a whim. But you think there's probably a little bit of a difference between the first generation founder and a company that has been handed down for like five generations at this point. And when you look back at Ochs, Adolph Ochs, who founded the New York Times in its current incarnation, he really did actually do something good. I mean, they call it the Gray Lady. And this is the title, the book is called The Gray Lady Winked. But they call it the Gray Lady because when he took over from the failing New York Times at the time, as Trump likes to call it, it really was failing in those days, that was in the late 19th century, he wanted a newspaper that just gathered the facts. Like that's it, gray, boring, like boring tone, as in contrast to the yellow journalism of that day, which was the exact opposite. It was like creating a spectacle. And Ochs did a fantastic job of engendering that kind of newspaper. But it degrades over time, and it degrades very quickly. So I think that is part of the difference between the Times. But when you look at NBC or ABC or whatever you want to identify, yeah, they have their own set of enormous problems. And I think this is what we're waking up to today, that it is not just about a single newspaper, it is about the media.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, ironically like we've come full circle into an insane peak of we don't call it yellow journalism anymore but sensational journalism, which is probably good starting conditions for the next gray, like origination of a boring facts only sort of newspaper. Have you watched Succession?
Ashley Rindsberg: Yeah, amazing show.
Eric Jorgenson: I kept being like- I'm like reading the chapters you're talking about, the Ochs Sulzbergers like making these very- these political or economic decisions in their own self interest. And I'm just like, I'm projecting the six scenes of Succession into that, like just a bunch of incredibly well to-do people in a hunting lodge somewhere that's a million dollars a night, being like, no, we can't let anybody know that we're Jewish. We're not even going to say the word Jew in our papers for years. Like we're going to repress and hide and maintain the bias. Like they need to believe that we're unbiased. Which is just such a like incredible statement. And to think that that's not too far from fiction is wild.
Ashley Rindsberg: Yes, it's a family affair. And I think there's an element, I think Succession looks to me like it's modeled on Murdoch. But the paper he tries to buy in the series looks more like it's modeled on the New York Times, this like crown jewel of polite society of right thinking America who have their own BS, who have their own agenda, and their own set of enormous biases that they're not willing to lay down.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, or values that they purport but don't live by. Something that Balaji talks about a lot is they attack tech for sort of the lack of diversity, but all of the media is massively less diverse than the tech industry. And that's been like proven in data that they refuse to republish. Another, just like the dual class thing, say one thing, do another.
Ashley Rindsberg: Yeah, and that was also a recent thing with the New York Times has really campaigned hard against forced arbitration. So, you sign a Terms of Service on whatever service you're using or app you're using, you're just unwittingly signing a clause saying you will be forced into arbitration, and you will not be able to sue in a court. And they really campaigned on this through their reporting. And then lo and behold, it turns out the New York Times New Terms of Service in all caps has a forced arbitration clause. So it's the same thing again and again and again, the hypocrisy that nope, it slides by because no one else in the media is willing to call them out because they are the New York Times and everybody wants to work there, and everybody wants those three words in their bio. And that's how it- that's the ecosystem. Pulitzer Prize is part of that ecosystem. And so is Columbia Journalism School.
Eric Jorgenson: I couldn't believe how often the two- as I'm reading a chapter, it's like this journalist got this completely, completely wrong and won a Pulitzer Prize for it.
Ashley Rindsberg: Yeah, that was Duranty won a Pulitzer famously that the New York Times has still today refused to give back and to acknowledge that it was- the three guys in the Nazi Berlin Bureau all won Pulitzers, Nicole Hannah Jones of 1619 Project, riddled with basic, basic factual errors, won a Pulitzer for that. William Lawrence in the atomic bombing of Japan scandal, which has never really made it to the top of the public consciousness, but nevertheless, won a Pulitzer. On and on and on. I actually wrote a whole piece for UnHerd, a British magazine newspaper, UNHERD, about the- I think it's like seven that I came up with, seven Pulitzers the New York Times like just- they just flat out- it is flat out malfeasance that they have retained those prizes.
Eric Jorgenson: We'll try to find some of the pieces that you've written, they go deeper into some of these, and link to them in the show notes. I was talking to a friend about this book and this interview coming up. And he was like, yeah, doesn't everybody know that they're not supposed to sort of trust the media anymore? And I was like, I don’t think so. I don't know, but I don't think so. You had a stat in the beginning that that has declined somewhat. But like what's your sense of how much trust the general- how aware the general public is of sort of some of these stories, some of these things, or the fallibility of the institution?
Ashley Rindsberg: I think they have a general awareness, an intuition that something is very wrong with the New York Times. And that's like across the board. Of course, you're going to have like conservatives who hate it. But what I'm experiencing on a personal level is like people coming up to me and being like, I was a lifelong subscriber of the New York Times, like that was like my Bible. And I've cancelled my subscription. I can't read it anymore. People who used to work at the Times telling me this. So I think we are seeing a very significant shift. And not just at the Times, but regarding most of the media, where people are like, I don't know, it just doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel right when they're telling me in the depth of the pandemic that if I go outside, I'm committing genocide. But if there's a protest for Black Lives Matter that I'm a terrible person if I don't go to it. You think well, hold on a sec, that doesn't- There’s just a logic error there that doesn't make sense to me. Where does that come from? Like, surely, they recognize there's a contradiction, stuff like that where you see it again and again and again. And you're thinking, okay, I cannot trust this institution. Can I even consider it credible? Is the next question. Because when you trust something, you do it with an element of blindness. You're saying, I'm going to deposit my sense of belief in this thing. But when you can't even consider it credible, it doesn't even pass your analysis, you have to like be actively analyzing whether or not it's worthy of belief. And I think for most people, that's where they are. They’re thinking this is no longer a completely credible institution on a whole.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. And I think, I mean, as you say, like the New York Times sort of, I forget the exact phrasing you used in the book, but when the spotlight shines the brightest, like the shadows you cast are the longest. I think that's such an interesting, like this is such a- the peak of it, for best and for worse, that it's not that it doesn't happen anywhere else, it's that it's worse here, and it's more impactful, specifically at the New York Times. And if they claim to be the paper of record, it is more important that they get it right than anybody else. They should be held to a higher standard; they claim to be held to a higher standard. So, I think it's a little tiresome to sort of just rail and rail and rail, like Balaji does it and I read a lot of his stuff because I've been working on the book, and I'm like, man, this is just dragging me down to just be focusing so much on the negatives. And the book is very, like it's 10 of the most tragic sort of misreporting at huge scale. It just, it like crushes your soul a little bit by the end. You are like fuck. What's the-
Ashley Rindsberg: That was my aim. I want to be soul crushing.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, you nailed it.
Ashley Rindsberg: I know I did my job if your soul has been crushed.
Eric Jorgenson: What's your personal sort of like more holistic view? Like, could you write like the yin to this book’s yang of like 10 heroic things? Like, are the heroics to go with the tragedies? On balance? Are we glad that we have institutions like this? Or do they do more harm than good because of that sort of inherent trust?
Ashley Rindsberg: That's actually a really great question that no one has ever asked in all the many interviews I've done about this book. And I think the answer is yes, there are. There are. Heroes, I think in general, are generally quiet heroes. They're unsung when they're genuine. Very rarely, once in a while you get like a Sully Sullenberger, whatever his name is, Sullenberger, who lands a plane in the Hudson, and everybody just knows he's a hero. But I think most of the time, people who are doing heroic stuff do it very quietly. That's part of it. And I think that's the case with journalists out there who are, they're just going to work and doing stuff. And they're probably taking a huge pay cut compared to what they might otherwise be doing. And they are not necessarily popular with their peers or friends, depending on how they're reporting and on what. I know that's the case in like some of the COVID reporting I've been doing a lot of. The great reporting has been- a lot of it just kind of- the stories don't make a splash. Cumulatively, they do, they make an impact. And then, of course, you have war reporters who are going to Ukraine or going to wherever it is, and like they're risking their lives. In some cases, they're losing their lives. And they're doing that to bring us this journalism that you can't get any other way. You can't have a blogger go to Kiev and figure it out. It's just not going to work. You need a newsroom. You need an organization. You need editors. You need all that stuff. You need photographers. So yes, I think 100%, there are many, many heroes in media. And there're also heroic news organizations. And there are also- it's like government, when you report on government, you realize the government's not one thing. It's like thousands of things, and they're all sort of at odds with each other. Factions are fighting. And the same thing in a newsroom and in a news organization, where you might look at part of the news organization and be like that's corrupt, and the other part is doing amazing. You look at the Intercept and like their COVID reporting has been like tremendous. You look at NBC, the reasons we have some of the Fauci emails that were obtained through Freedom of Information Act is because of NBC News, so we might think NBC News is like just corporate press release publishing, and that might be part of the job, but that's not all it is. So I think that's where we need to remember nothing that big and that important is just one thing. It's many things. There's a level of heterogeneity that we need to account for.
Eric Jorgenson: And I empathize with sort of the difficulty with evaluating something as big as the New York Times. How many reporters do they have? Thousands, like hundreds?
Ashley Rindsberg: Yeah, it's definitely hundreds, it might be around a thousand. I forget the exact number. But yes, on that order.
Eric Jorgenson: I can't imagine the challenge of like presenting a coherent, cohesive, single worldview that doesn't have conflicts amongst a thousand different voices writing about things happening all over the world. I mean, that seems like an impossible task. So I'm not surprised that there are conflicts and errors. But I do think that the point of the book is that these aren't small factual errors that are like slipped through the cracks through something that isn't perfect, it's that there's a sort slightly more selfish agenda at play, and that there's a through line through over 100 years now that sort of the same patterns have been playing out.
Ashley Rindsberg: Yeah, and you made a point earlier about like things- like the show, it's called Newsroom where you see this editorial process. And there's like layers and layers. And that's actually, in a lot of these cases, true. So when something hits the front page of The New York Times, or any page of the New York Times, it has gone through that process, and rarely does something just slip through. Most of the time, it's actually deliberately there. And that's kind of the problem. It's like when you get something as wildly wrong and offensive as the fact that American Veterans are coming back as homicidal maniacs who are killing their wives and girlfriends. And that's just not true. It was put there. It was not- it didn't slip through. It was actually placed there because it reflects an ideological bias. It reflects an agenda so perfectly that it almost could not have escaped being placed into the Times. It had to be there, like a manifestation of their priors.
Eric Jorgenson: That's, yeah, that's very interesting. And that kind of accident like of something that's so untrue doesn't really happen by accident. Like you have to generate that. You have to start with a different goal in mind then finding and sharing the truth to end up in a place like that. So knowing everything that you know about the media and how it works and how often it's wrong or misguided or mishandled, where do you personally read? Where do you get your information? What do you recommend as sort of sources of media?
Ashley Rindsberg: I basically try to- I mean, I definitely look at the New York Times every day. I look at Real Clear Politics because they're an aggregator. So what they frequently do is like they'll do like one blue, one red story on an issue so you can see that side by side. I think that's super helpful. I also look at independent outlets, UnHerd, like I mentioned, which I write for them. And I think because they're just like- it's a little bit different. Like it's a little bit of a different viewpoint. But in general, I think the key is that I try to search rather than browse. So if you're just browsing, you're letting somebody else curate your like intellectual field for the day or the week. But if you search, then you're doing the curation. So if you're saying, what's important to me? Okay, I'm super interested in Iran right now. So I actually just search for Iran, and I try to search for topics related to what's happening in Iran, and then you're able to sift through and be like I'm going to say, Al Jazeera, I think I might look at it, but it's owned and funded by the government of Qatar which is allied with Iran. So, I'm going to not go there as much. But I am going to find the five journalists who are covering it really well. And that's how I deal with that conundrum. And also, I think what people are best served by doing is going deep rather than broad. So like, reduce your media diet by like 75 to 80% or 90%. And then drill down on the remaining 25 to 10% of the topics that are truly important to you. That way you're able to compare sources, to dig, to be sort of like a meta journalist, that you are doing the kind of question asking that journalists do for their own subjects.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. And how do you see- we both have spent a lot of time reading and watching and listening to Balaji. So how do you see the future sort of unfolding for media? Like do you think that in our lifetimes we're going to see some of these big institutions fall or decline precipitously? Do you see the rise of a new type of media, a new institution of media, a new form? What is the next sort of couple decades hold? What are you- How are you sort of changing what you do to prepare for that?
Ashley Rindsberg: I think that we will see more huge brand names, fixtures, furniture of American news disappear, break down. I don't see- I know that the New York Times, their strategy is to be the last remaining one to like the entirety of it. I don't know if that exactly will come to pass. But we're already seeing how they are fighting for a much smaller piece of the pie. That Google and Facebook have taken the vast majority of the advertising pie. So, there's considerably less for the media. They're moving from their former advertising model to a subscription model. We'll see if that works for them. I'm not convinced. I mean, how many news outlets can anyone subscribe to? One or two or three at the most. What I do think is I do think we will see, over the coming decades, I do think we will see something that is much closer to a vision of decentralized media. I think we will see people using data in a different way as a kind of journalism if you're able to structure and visually represent information in a way that can be done not necessarily by journalists but by people who understand how to use data. You will give a new kind of power to people not only to be more accurate but also to focus on corners that just otherwise you wouldn't be able to investigate because it's too costly. It's too costly to go into like find out what's going on in the North East section of a neighborhood of Kansas City. Like if you can't do that if people have to physically go there and ask questions for four days to get a story. You can do that if you're relying on sensors and data that is scraped and structured in such a way that can be searched and then represented in very interesting meaningful visual ways that can then be distributed by social media. So putting together different pieces in a way that gives much greater spread, much greater coverage of the world, among many more people. I think that's kind of the future. And I think the interim is something that is a project I'm working on now, which is measuring media, but it's this one thing that we just all kind of forgot to do. We have technology, we don't need to rely on CNN to call out Fox and Fox to call out CNN. We can use technology to do that in a way that's much more scalable and reliable and in a way that actually tells us something about the subject of the journalism itself, not just about the journalism's reliability.
Eric Jorgenson: Let's talk about that. What are we measuring? What are the sort of metrics that you're pulling out of media today?
Ashley Rindsberg: We are working on building tools that will look at some stuff that's very simple, like we actually- we actually built a tool that looks at stealth editing. It's how much does it happen at the New York Times, for example. Nobody knows.
Eric Jorgenson: Something that gets changed after it's published.
Ashley Rindsberg: Yeah, so the Times will frequently go back and like edit stuff. And sometimes people catch it because they're paying really close attention to a particular story. They are like, hold on a second, that paragraph looks different. And in fact, it is different. So there is, in some cases, like this revision of history that's going on, revising the first draft of history that newspapers do to make themselves look either better or less foolish or cover a liability of some sort. But we have no idea how widespread that problem is. Nobody knows. And it's actually very measurable. That's one of the metrics that is being sort of integrated into the stack that we're building. Looking at how sourcing is used, measuring it, creating a metric for the reliability of the type of sourcing that a newspaper will use, a number of other metrics that are kind of intuitive. Some of them are less intuitive. How polarizing is the language in a story, that's something you can measure. How biased is that? There's a lot of research and a lot of good tools out there that can be used to measure these things in a very reliable way that tell you a lot about the coverage, and not just rely on what the coverage is telling you about the subject.
Eric Jorgenson: That's fascinating. That's something that certainly plays a role in the book that I've been working on that will come out soon. And it's one of, I mean, 50 things that Balaji said, why don't we have this? Why aren't articles reviewed? Why don't we have star ratings? Why don't we have bias metrics? Why don't we have how provocative they are? Like you can measure these things with natural language processing, and we should be able to see the rating or the likely effect of an article that we're about to take in. I think that's so fascinating. It's such a key piece of a well informed sort of reader and all of us should aspire to be that.
Ashley Rindsberg: Yeah, I think, again, back to what I'd said at the very beginning of the call, Balaji has had an impact not just on my book and awareness about the book, but on my thinking. And as I was thinking about where do you go next and what does one do next and thinking about I could write another book, and it would maybe have some impact, or maybe not, but it would never really have true scale. It would never have impact on that level. And that's where he changed some of my outlook. And that is the stuff that we're pursuing with this company that is now being created. And fortunately, we have support from Balaji, which is a-
Eric Jorgenson: That’s awesome. What's it called?
Ashley Rindsberg: The company is called Alitheum, a ALITHEUM. And it comes from the word aletheia, which is Greek, the Greek word for truth. The reason that we chose it is because we use a Latin based word for truth. We use veritas and derivatives of that, which is a noun. Truth for us in English is a noun as well, which means I can have it. And if I have it, that might mean you don't have it. And if I do have it, I can also use it to bludgeon you over the head, which we frequently do. In Greek, it's actually a verb. Aletheia is a process. It's a peeling back of the layers that get you closer and closer. When it's a verb, and it's something you do, it's not really something that can become a weapon as easily. Anything can be weaponized. But that's why if you think about truth as a process, a thing that's performed and practiced and perfected over time, I think that's a much better mode of working through trying to find something that's closer to the objective reality, closer and closer, even if it's kind of asymptotic. Like, you're never going to get pure, objective truth. But you're not trying to, you're just trying to get your best approximation while recognizing that there is some objectivity out there.
Eric Jorgenson: That's beautiful. I like the noun verb separation. It's similar to sort of the correct interpretation of science. Science is not a noun, it's not a fixed truth that exists in our moment in time. It's a process of getting a closer and closer approximation to our understanding of reality. That's very cool. What's the stage of the company right now? Where are you at? I had no idea you're working on this. This is a very exciting discovery at the end of the interview. It's so cool. We can do a whole nother thing on this probably.
Ashley Rindsberg: That'd be great. We are like just getting our ducks lined up in a row. We were at Davos just now, last week in fact, meeting people, not as part of the World Economic Forum, but just in the lots of different organizations come to the town of Davos to meet and talk and learn, which is exactly what we were doing. And we are thinking through the underlying metrics, really trying to understand like what are we measuring and why. And then we'll build out the technology from there.
Eric Jorgenson: Very cool. Are you envisioning, it maybe early to answer this question, but are you envisioning the sort of the customer for this is the media organization themselves? Or is this going to be sort of something that people layer on top or consult separately? Like, how do you see this fitting into the ecosystem?
Ashley Rindsberg: I hope that it would be useful to media. Part of me doubts that they would consider it. But in the media ecosystem, I think it's- I think, first and foremost, it's like just a valuable tool and like an overlay for anyone using- anyone relying on the media, media reporting for any aspect of their lives and to understand how reliable is that reporting. So that's kind of where I think it's- where it plugs in.
Eric Jorgenson: Fascinating. That's so cool. I'm so glad. I remember reading through that and putting it in the book and thinking about it and being like, man, I hope- throughout the book, there's dozens of ideas. And I'm like, man, I hope somebody picks this up and builds it, I hope somebody picks this up and builds it. I hope people feel inspired to build something to like make a better future or solve a problem that they see as a result of it. And it's so cool that you're sort of already on that curve. And that between your work and your background and your expertise that you're taking some of the Balaji mojo and building a solution to this problem. That's so awesome. So rewarding. I'm so excited to see it sort of get out there, and I can't wait to see metrics on all my articles and find out how misled I've been.
Ashley Rindsberg: Yeah, I mean, I want to see the metrics on the ones I've written and be like whoops.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh, yeah, very helpful for writers. So they can make sure they’re maximum polarizing. You wouldn't want to leave anything on the table.
Ashley Rindsberg: Right, exactly, blood thirsty, dripping.
Eric Jorgenson: Just increasingly aggressive emojis like Grammarly gives you for the emails. Yeah, I want a knife, going for the knife emoji. This has been awesome, Ashley. Thank you so much for your time. Is there anything we missed, anything you want to add, like what's coming next for you?
Ashley Rindsberg: I think that's kind of the meat of it. I'm on Twitter if anyone wants to reach out. I'm pretty open to talk, converse. So hit me up. If there's questions, I’m happy to answer them.
Eric Jorgenson: That's how we- we met through the DMs, sliding into DMs. I hope more and more people hear what you have to say and read the book or that we signed a petition to get you on to Rogen or whatever. Because I think this is such an important idea. And thank you for shining a light on it. I'm sure it took- I'm sure you lost some sleep some nights, and it took a great deal of courage to sort of put this out into the world despite all of the closed doors, roadblocks, and boogeyman.
Ashley Rindsberg: Yeah, well, sometimes it's- all that's like the invisible hand that's guiding you. And those closed doors were actually not the right ones for me to walk through. So I think that's an important thing for people to keep in mind is that it often does work out for the best, even though that's a platitude, but it's actually true. It was for me.
Eric Jorgenson: Beautiful. All right, sounds good. Thanks so much, Ashley. Appreciate it.
I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, you will also love my episodes with Balaji Srinivasan, who Ashley and I mentioned multiple times in this conversation. Also David Senra who talks a lot about media and about audio and it's just a high energy, amazing interview. Please check out givewell.org or madebybread.com and ejorgenson.com to sign up for the newsletter, get notes about this show. And keep reading about Ashley. His posts are really cool. He's on Twitter. And we left some links in the show notes with more of his articles. And one more time, please leave a quick review for the show or text this episode to a friend or coworker you think would enjoy it. It's an incredible way to support the show. Thank you very much. I love you.