The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Can you handle the truth? What is the future of news? Are we at a Spotify moment? Do we even care about the truth?
Navigation:
- Intro (01:34)
- Mainstream vs Niche News (02:09)
- Are we Close to the Spotify/Netflix moment? (29:30)
- State or Government Ownership and Influence of Media (46:06)
- Polarization & The Truth (58:36)
- Year of Election (1:05:10)
- Conclusion (1:09:21)
Our co-hosts:
Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news
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Nuno
In today’s episode of Tech Deciphered, we will be discussing the truth. Can you handle the truth and the whole truth? More specifically, we’re going to talk about the future of news, where we are today. Obviously, a lot of discussion around fake news, polarization of news.
Nuno
We will go into a conversation on whether we are close to the Spotify moment of the news space, and whether how we’re caring for the truth is still actually true. Do we still care for truth or do we just care about our own opinions and to reinforce them over time?
Bertrand
That’s a big question. I think to start about this topic, we probably want to start from this big debate that has gone pretty big over the past 10 years, but maybe even more the past five years. It’s maybe the mainstream versus niche news and all the dramatic changes that have happened in a way, thanks to internet.
Nuno
There’s the mainstream versus niche, there’s the mainstream versus speciality. Maybe let’s start with mainstream. What is mainstream news? Is it just news or do we get news through mechanisms that sometimes are not news anymore?
Bertrand
Is it still mainstream?
Nuno
Clearly, there has been a decrease in viewership of the newscasts, the news programs that we used to watch in our own countries, in the US. Now people can watch whatever they want whenever they want it. In some ways, there’s still maybe some flagship national news shows that people listen to. Obviously, there’s dedicated news channels like CNN, Fox News, of course, as well.
Nuno
Is it really where we consume our mainstream news? My view is obviously with the decreasing of viewership across the top channels, one would say maybe less so, but clearly still there is mainstream news. Fox News represents a specific side of the spectrum, but it is mainstream. CNN is as well. What’s your view, Bertrand?
Bertrand
I was asking this question only jokingly because I don’t know many people who still watch some of these mainstream news channels. My impression is that actually, first, the metrics are pretty clear. It’s a significant decline in viewership. You talk about TV, but the price is the same. A few managed to, I would say, stay somewhat relevant. Take a New York Times, take a Wall Street Journal, but even that definition of relevant is a very small viewership.
Bertrand
The numbers are extremely small in terms of who is paying for a subscription to these services. We are talking about millions at best, so that’s very small. One thing I noticed, I think that is pretty clear across the board is that, most of what we call mainstream media is more and more watched by the older generations, meaning people who have very long habits of watching their news that way from a TV channel. And two, who have not gone to the internet for their news because they were stuck in their old ways in some ways.
Bertrand
Obviously not everyone is like this, but my understanding is that they are all facing growing, older and older generations. Of course, there’s a question, what does it mean in term of advertising? Because if you’re not able to target 30, 40-year-old mom, that’s a problem. That’s really, for me, a big question. It’s not only becoming less and less relevant and mainstream because of the smaller and smaller viewership, but it’s also a different kind of viewership.
Bertrand
There’s, of course, a question of, is this viewership going to stick or actually just going to die? Sorry to be very abrupt, but if your target audience is mostly 70 plus and everyone younger doesn’t want or care or consume their news that way, that’s a huge trouble for these companies. Obviously, they know that.
Nuno
On the TV side, I think a couple of things. One, local news, in particular, if you look at the US, still has a bit of a role. If you want to know what’s happening, if there’s a storm coming, I think weather is a great example of why you check the news. In principle, it should have some directionality. Obviously, national news is a different ball game.
Nuno
I feel there’s many ways of consuming news today. In some ways, actually, news channels, the classic mainstream news programs, are competing with things, for example, like social media. A lot of people consume news, shockingly enough. We’ll talk about Twitter later, but a lot of people even consume news on TikTok. The latest thing that came out on TikTok, and people will share things, for example, on Instagram, on stories, et cetera.
Nuno
It’s just these tidbits that have very little context. I think TV is It’s a bit under attacked with low attention span. To your point, maybe, certain older generations, they have more the appetite to trust certain newscasters in what they say, the George Stephanopoulos at ABC, whoever else at Fox, et cetera. There’s this notion of maybe there’s a couple of generations that trust the newscaster for presenting news in a way that they think represents either some neutrality or whatever.
Nuno
If we step back on journalism, journalism was always supposed to be a counterpower. It was the fourth power, the counterpower. It was about keeping the powers in check, the judicial power, the legislative power, et cetera, in check. I think that’s changed. It’s changed because of the internet. It’s changed because of rapid access to information. Radio, for example, in some ways has been totally under attack. Podcasts have taken over on that side.
Nuno
Press has been under attack as well. Who are the publications that are still thriving? The publications that relatively thrive are the big guys, New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economists, where there’s either a quality expectation in reading them, or there is a notion of the number of journalists that they can throw at specific articles.
Nuno
A little bit the opinion pieces and the investigative journalism piece of the puzzle is what I think still makes press work, because you have the time to put stuff together, the time to really go under the hood and generate newsworthy things out of it. In some ways, the clickbait thing has changed the world. It’s like, can you get my attention or not? If you can’t, I’m going to just tune out and go somewhere else, and I’ll consume my news in some other way.
Bertrand
Two good points. One, local versus national. The other one about the clickbait. Local versus national, that’s true. I register to my local newspaper to get the local news because I want to know what’s happening. Unfortunately, I find it biased, so I’m not always super happy reading that. The other piece that is clear is, I don’t care whatever they publish on national news.
Bertrand
For national news, I have my Wall Street Journal subscription, I have my Bloomberg subscription, and that’s what I will use for national or world news, actually. In the past, if we go back a long time ago, when you have to print newspaper and journals and stuff, there was some logic to combine national and local news because it’s not efficient to have different newspapers for everything.
Bertrand
I think now it’s quite clear that you won’t get the best quality, get national-wise, global-wise from your local newspaper. In a way, why bother? That has definitely been my approach. Clickbait, that’s a great point.
Bertrand
I also remember reading stories, not just stories, but data analysis about how the news in term of, not just what’s in the title, but once in the body of the news, how it has gone downhill in the past 50 years. The language has become worse and worse in terms of making it scary at every level, from car crash to the Earth is dying, the world is burning.
Bertrand
There was this famous comparison I think it was on German TV where they were showing a weather forecast basically on TV, it looked like everything was burning in Germany. If you take the same news report, weather forecast report five years back with similar temperature, there was certainly not this impression that was shared by making the graphics looks very dangerous.
Bertrand
There is definitely a change. My take is that, consumers are noticing. People are not as dumb as some of the people in the news seem to think. People might think by themselves, notice a change, notice when it doesn’t correlate with the reality they live. We might talk more about this, about the brainwashing that some news organization have been trying to do.
Bertrand
I think it’s also part of why mainstream media has been dying because that propaganda part is becoming more and more visible. It probably went overdrive and as a result has become more visible. I think that’s totally part of why people are looking for more, there niche source of information, or new internet platform to get access to consumer journalism.
Nuno
It’s a tale that is important. We define our own canons. We define what are the things that we trust and the journalists that we trust and the things that we don’t trust. I’m similar to you. I consume my per local news. Actually, I think it’s probably the only subscription I have. Obviously, we have some corporate subscriptions through our firm.
Nuno
My subscription that I subscribe to personally is a local review, which is the Half Moon Bay Review, which is the local newspaper. I consume it because I want to know news and what’s happening, et cetera. Then there’s canons that you build. You’re like, “What are the things that I trust?” If I want to read an in-depth analysis on macro, I can’t say The Economist is without flaw, but it’s pretty decent most of the time. There is actual research behind it. It’s well thought through, et cetera.
Nuno
Interestingly enough, if you’ve noticed on The Economist, those who have read, there’s no bylines. It’s like The Economist takes responsibility for articles posted. There’s a couple of exception on opinion pieces, but in general, The Economist, there’s no byline. It’s like I’m not saying it’s me or whatever. It’s basically assumed by the newspaper. The Economist looks like a magazine, but it’s a newspaper. That’s how they call themselves.
Nuno
Obviously, on Economic news, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, in some aspects, I’ll look at New York Times, actually, for example, in arts, et cetera, I’ll go to New York Times. I will still consume breaking news as it shows up in my Google Now feature on my Android devices or whatever pops up on my Google Chrome first page, what’s the news of the day and whatever, just for breaking news.
Nuno
I do like to spend more time reading in-depth analysis, research, opinion pieces that are clearly put as such rather than the breaking news stuff, et cetera. Because to your point, it is there to make us feel a little bit more depressed overall. In some ways we’re all creating our little canons, our little things that we trust and the things that we don’t trust.
Nuno
There was this professor in Portugal. He wasn’t my professor, he was a humanities professor in university, quite well-known pundit as well on TV. He once came to a small group of university students. I was a university student back then, and I still remember this to this day, which is he said, “I always do this exercise at the beginning of my class.”
Nuno
It was on something, some critical evaluation of journalism, whatever the subject was that he was teaching. He said, “I always ask my students at the beginning of the course, have you ever been in a situation where there was news in a moment that you’re in? There was a situation that you’re in, a car crash, whatever, and there was news out of it that you saw later, either on radio, TV, press, whatever.”
Nuno
A very significant part of the class always raises their hand. Then I asked them to keep their hands up, and I said, “Do you think that the situation was accurately described by the journalist once you saw it later described?” Almost nobody keeps their hand up. I was a university student, so this conversation happened 20-something years ago. It didn’t happen in the time of Instagram and TikTok and fake news and all that stuff. It’s absolutely mind-boggling.
Bertrand
At the time when it was still somewhat trustworthy.
Nuno
Yeah, it’s absolutely mind-boggling, and this was back then.
Bertrand
That’s very interesting.
Nuno
Just to finish the story, his advice was, “If you want to have canonical views on things, doctrinal views on things, it is my doctrine that I believe in this versus that, read books. Read books, inform yourself. And anything that’s very short term, the last six months, the last three months, suspend this belief for a while. Create that doctrine over time in some ways.” I found it fascinating, but I think it’s really du jour. It works today. Today, that could be a good advice that we could give people.
Bertrand
To jump on that, actually, and I will go back on The Economist, but that’s one thing I notice more and more, and in a way, it’s obvious. The more you know a space, the more you know an industry, the more you realize that generalist journalists don’t know much at the end of the day. A specialized journalist might know more, but even then you see up to a point. It’s so much true of the generalist journalist, how bad it is at every level.
Bertrand
Still, they are designed to make you feel that they know a lot, and they spread stuff a lot. I think that’s part of the issue. Just to be clear, 20, 30 years ago, before Internet, you couldn’t spread one-to-one messages or one-to-few messages. You had to go one-to-many and broad, and so that might make some sense.
Bertrand
Today, I think the paradigm has changed. To go deeper on The Economist, actually, I stopped my subscription as The Economist, I forgot how long ago, but I actually disagree with what you say. I find them, first, late to the news. On any interesting topic, I will get better information on Twitter quicker.
Nuno
They’re not in that business, Bertrand. They’re in the business of investigative journalism, research-based stuff. They’ve never been in the breaking news business, The Economist.
Bertrand
No, because they will always have news that is relatively relevant to what happened a week ago, two weeks ago, three weeks ago. They do once in a while some deeper research, but it’s still timely news. They are not going to talk about stuff that happened some time ago. The most important point for me is that, as you say, there is no byline, and that’s something that they are known for.
Bertrand
I started to feel that actually I was certainly not in agreement with some of The Economist position and The Economist perspective. For me, they were just wrong in terms of perspective and analysis, and therefore more and more useless as a paper to follow what’s going on over the world because I certainly think they don’t represent basically the world and the economy and how it’s truly working, but they have this fancy perspective on how they think things works.
Bertrand
Personally, I’ve been disappointed over the years. I used to read that every week, 10 years ago. For me now, I don’t want to say it’s super bad, but it’s bad enough that, from my perspective, has become useless information.
Nuno
Slightly different perspectives, and maybe that is an actual thought to be had. At the end of the day, to your point, speciality journalism versus generalist journalism. But even in speciality journalism, there is more and more the tendency to create mythology. It’s mythology cells, in particular, negative mythology. We’ve talked about the myths of Silicon Valley in the past and myths of tech.
Nuno
I think tech journalism right now is going through this ‘tech is bad’ notion. Founders, in many cases, are bad. These people that were maybe five years ago idolised, and they were the best ever, and now they’re the worst ever. Why is that? Because it sells. Because people click through, and they go and listen to the last story about Elon Musk and the board still fighting his package. It’s like, cool, but it’s in some ways we know this as human beings. The reality, the truth is normally much more nuanced.
Nuno
It’s where we’ve gone. A lot of amazing tech entrepreneurs have been edified as the new people that are going to save us all just to be thrown down a couple of years later because maybe it sells more, maybe because there’s more clicks on it, and that’s the tendency of the market at that stage.
Bertrand
That’s really one of my issue is that, it’s not about long-term trend analysis. Most journalism that we see in the mainstream media, for instance, it’s always being sensational. It’s the news of the day, “This one was killed,” and, “Look at that big bad trend,” when actually there is no trend. Actually, typically, they will either show no metrics or they show metrics that have been manipulated so deeply that it’s totally untrustworthy.
Bertrand
I would advise anyone, obviously, who is looking at any stats shared by journalist, analyst, to truly take time to understand what it truly really means, and how it has been changed and tweaked over time. Actually, on this one, there was a very interesting tweet storm from the ex-Harvard President, Larry Summers, and he was showing a GDP metrics as they reported religiously from a Wall Street Journal to a Bloomberg to The Economist over the past 30, 40 years.
Bertrand
He treated that data by showing, you know what? Actually, there has been multiple change how GDP is calculated over the years. Obviously, it has been treated only one way. Sorry, I’m talking about GDP I wanted to talk about inflation rates. GDP also, by the way, is being manipulated over the years by changing definitions. Tricks of how GDP has been calculated for 70 years is also very interesting.
Bertrand
Going back to inflation and Larry Summers, he was showing how actually, if you were to use how inflation was calculated in the ’80s, and apply it to what happened the last few years, we will not have picked at 6%, we will have picked close to 20%. We were at 20% inflation rate based on previous definitions of inflation.
Bertrand
That’s pretty insane, because some experts will run this analysis, some hedge funds will run this type of analysis, but the mainstream journalists, even the specialized one in economy, they didn’t talk about that. They had no point about that. I don’t know if they didn’t care, they didn’t know, or if on purpose, they tried to play that game and keep misleading their readers about where we stand, really, by just publishing without thinking too much, government statistics, and without trying to make sense out of them.
Bertrand
That would be what I would call true journalism in my mind. I don’t think we get much of that anymore from this so-called journalist, to be frank. We need to get to the true experts who dare to share the truth.
Nuno
In some ways, and this is maybe a good segue for us to talk about niche journalism and niche news, et cetera, it was broken by the internet. Let’s be very honest. The internet broke everything. The digitization of how things get transmitted in a much more meaningful way, taking away the broadcasting aspect of it, which was radio and TV, changed everything.
Nuno
It changed it so dramatically that now we are looking for a couple of things. We’re looking for specialists or people that we perceive as potential specialists in a certain area to have an opinion on it. Sometimes maybe even misguided. Sometimes, to your point, you might be looking for something that is trying to reinforce a position that you have. It could be an educated position, or it could be an absolutely BS position. It depends on the person, I guess.
Nuno
That is where niche came in. Niche came in with speciality, with blogs, with people recording their own stuff on YouTube, with small channels that immerse to become relatively big channels. If you remember The Young Turks in the US. Guys that went after specific demographics in terms of news, shorter news, bites, et cetera.
Nuno
Everything changed there. Journalism changed because in some ways, to your point, we know the people that back in the day had the big scoops, that told us that Watergate had happened, people that changed how we saw government, and rightfully so. Now that’s not it. Now it’s like, how many followers do you have? How much click-through do you have? How much money do you make out of it? If you have a YouTube channel, how much are you making out of that advertising? That’s what matters.
Nuno
In that world, to be honest, being very truthful implies doing a lot of analysis and research, which implies a lot of time, which probably implies not putting as much content out. For example, just content cadence is a big deal. If you can’t put a lot of content out, you’re at the disadvantage. Monetising stuff, we’ll talk about business models later on, but monetising stuff, what are you monetising? Is what I’m seeing news? Or is what I’m seeing an advertisement for a brand or for something?
Nuno
What is your conflict of interest? Conflict of interest used to be a big deal around journalism. Are you trading stock on this company or whatever? It’s seemingly disappeared. We don’t talk much about it anymore. I’m like, “Surely now there’s more conflicts of interest than ever.” I might do a hatchet job on a founder of a company that I want to short, and I might actually be super supportive of a founder that I’m long on his stock or her stock.
Nuno
Honest, I feel we’ve lost the counterpower. News is no longer counterpower. News is another power, and it’s being exercised. We’ll talk about it later because some of these media platforms are very clearly an exercise of power, not a counterpower, an exercise of power.
Bertrand
I think that’s always the question when you say a counterpower is, who is the counterpower to this power of mainstream news organisation? There was no one actually until recently, where now you have what you could call citizen journalism or analyst experts sharing their opinions, either through their own newsletter or through Twitter, YouTube. That’s becoming the real counterpower. I agree with you. I feel that the mainstream media of today is not the one who would have investigated or published the Watergate. It feels the opposite. It feels the mainstream media that would have hidden the story.
Nuno
But I would push back on the niche thing is always a positive thing. Obviously, we have found people that are very thoughtful about their analysis and numbers and all that. There was this joke going on for a while that in some ways the comedians that decided to go and relate to news like Jon Stewart back in the day, well, he’s back now. John Oliver, et cetera. All of these guys, by making comedy out of news, are the new newscasters and investigative journalists.
Nuno
They have their own skews, and we know what their skews are and some of the stuff that they’ve portrayed. John Oliver, I used to be a huge fan of his program, but there have been a couple of shows that I’ve watched that I’m like, “This is a clear hatchet job, and it’s not comedy. This is not comedy either. He’s just gone after a company, or he’s gone after a person.” Sometimes he’s right, sometimes he’s not. You could see that in the way it’s translated if you have some information behind the scenes on what’s going on.
Nuno
But the citizen journalism thing, there’s pieces, again, of it that are good, like breaking new stuff, what’s happening, people doing a little bit more in depth, going behind the scenes, figuring out stuff that was said before. All of that, I think, is very, very powerful. But honestly, not everyone is a journalist, and not everyone should be.
Nuno
During COVID, we had this. Everyone was an expert on what was happening in COVID. Everyone was a virologist. Everyone was an expert on everything that’s just going. That’s not true. There should be a number of specialists that know what they’re talking about.
Nuno
I work in venture capital, I see these posts posted by people. Some of them are not even venture capitalists. They have no clue. They probably have never even made an investment in their life at scale. Some that post are very young VCs. They’re like, okay, this person has been doing this for six months. Why are we reading this?
Nuno
I call the attention to this because, for example, at Chamaeleon, we share news between the team members just to talk about strategy every week, et cetera, and sometimes one of the team members will share something. I’m like, “Who wrote this?” “It’s very well-written.” It’s like, “Understood, it’s very well-written, and it’s very compelling, but who wrote it?” I want to know. I want to attach credibility to the buy-line. Who wrote it? Who’s this person? What experience does this person have in this industry? What investments has this person made? Why are we listening to this person or reading this person?
Nuno
Even in mediums like ours, and just to be clear, the mediums that people right now are listening to are probably mediums like ours, people that are more educated, more thoughtful, that are willing to listen, that have a degree of openness that is a little bit superior to the mass market, so to speak.
Nuno
Even us, we’re being subjugated now because of noise, because there’s so much noise like, “You should read this. You should read this.” Sometimes I’m reading, I was like, “Why am I reading this thing? Who wrote this?” That generates fake news. That generates the worst of fake news. It generates things that are just fundamentally flawed in their analysis and their research. They’re just well communicated, but they’re flawed.
Bertrand
Of course. You could argue that the definition these days, more or less of mainstream media are well communicated, but not well thought and sometimes pure propaganda piece, I would say.
Nuno
You keep going back to mainstream. It’s niche as well, right?
Bertrand
It’s niche as well. But the big difference is about freedom. You have freedom of choice, freedom of information, freedom of speech. This platform, like Twitter, mostly a YouTube podcast, you are free to listen, you are free to read, you are free to watch from many sources. It’s not coming from the top, it’s coming from the bottom up.
Bertrand
Where I agree with you is that, of course, there is crap, but I much prefer to be able to filter out the noise by myself, find reliable sources of information, check over time how these guys are talking, explaining things, and does it match what I’m seeing from the world? Does it match my understanding of the world? Does it have some predictive power? If it has, then you know what? I’m going to listen and read more of this person.
Bertrand
We just talk about Larry Summers. He was one of the first to talk about inflation risk in the US, and he was right. I was certainly following his perspective, but at the time, he was widely ridiculed by his peers. I much prefer a situation where there are multiple choices, multiple voices, and I can use my brain to search, match and ultimately select, than the other old traditional approach where you had little choice. You were stuck with it, and you could potentially discover some issues, but it was harder because less voices to give you a different perspective.
Bertrand
But totally, there is total bullshit that can come up. For me, that was especially clear during COVID because you could see globally how things were changing very fast in terms of how news was spread, how stuff was explained. Let’s not forget how from one day to the next, COVID initially was not a problem. “Don’t worry, nothing will happen in your country, in your state.” The next day, everything changed in terms of story. Not just one journalist, one magazine, but every journalist, every mainstream media would change their mind and opinion in 48 hours. You would see that change because I’m reading news from multiple countries happening. That was pretty disturbing to see that level of control and manipulation from state entities at some point. That’s what it is.
Bertrand
To go back to your point, yes, of course, I want to hear from infectious disease expert when it was time of COVID, I was looking for this news from different experts and collecting on Twitter names of people who were interesting, trustworthy, and were sharing news before others.
Bertrand
I never become an expert, of course, but I learned to search for the truth in a way. It’s obviously not easy, but it was amazing how early you would get ahead of some news. How early you would get in terms of government perspective on, “You should do this, you should not do that.” It has been in a way, for me, a wake-up time to realise that the government was not right on so many topics in France, in China, in US, in multiple countries, in Australia. And at some point, you need competition for source of news in order to make your own opinion.
Bertrand
It has been proven time and time again that many things, many decision were actually not only wrong, but were pure propaganda in the sense of not based on science. At the time where we were told to trust science, decisions were not based on science, were based on misunderstanding, political calculations, many things, but certainly not always about science.
Bertrand
You don’t want to hear and listen from any crackpot out there, but at the same time, I learned that mainstream media, government sources, were not as reliable as you would thought they were.
Nuno
Maybe just as a bookend to this section, bundling of news has happened. It’s done. We went from maybe listening to that radio show in the morning that we really liked and the news of the day in the evening to the channel that we prefer to a world where we consume news whenever we want, however we want it, video, short form, articles, whatever.
Nuno
Maybe the biggest shift of them all has always been social because we share news with each other. We share things. If I agree with Bertrand on many things, I’m going to listen to Bertrand when he said, “You should read this.” That becomes our focal point, the trustworthiness of the person that sends us those news. But in a nutshell, We’ve gone from a very bundled world, very massage into broadcasting to us into a super unbundled world, super noisy, with the pluses and minus that we just discussed.
Nuno
Maybe switching to where we are today in terms of some of these new platforms, are we close to the Spotify-Netflix moment? Are we close to having news providers to us that find interesting business and business models and products that basically attract us in the same way that Spotify was able to revolutionise music or the Spotify model was able to revolutionise music, where we consume whatever we want, it’s not prepackaged, we know the cues that exist, and that’s it? Are we there yet, I guess, is the question?
Bertrand
It’s a good question. I’m fundamentally not so sure. Don’t get me wrong, YouTube is huge, for instance. Facebook is huge, but the news part of this organisation is actually quite small. If I pick Twitter, it has gone through some changes. Ultimately, in term of revenue generation, I don’t think it’s that big, that transformational at this stage. Even if for me personally, as a source of truth, X/Twitter is definitely a reference.
Bertrand
In term of business model, personally, I’m not so sure a true at-scale business model has been found. Of course, we have heard about other solutions like Substack to let writers monetise, but it’s still at a relatively small scale.
Nuno
The platform still owned today. We have obviously Apple with Apple News, which is almost like a loss-leader for them from a product standpoint. They just bundled it in. Either you want it or not, but it’s cool, and it’s not that pricey if you have a bundle. Google with Google News, obviously. Google News itself has a little bit disappeared from focal point, but they injected it into Google Chrome page, they injected into Google Now on the left side of your mobile phone on Android, so it’s there. They are serving you news that they think you want.
Nuno
I think those two experiences, honestly, you could argue they’re not great, they’re not fantastic, but they work. You’re being given news that they think you want to see. Obviously, we know there’s issues with that as well because they might be skewing towards your last searches and the last things you did, and they’re obviously mining your data. They’re doing a bunch of things. But those experiences in some ways have worked, but the platforms are using them as loss-leaders. They’re not really using them as the next Spotify. It’s another product that you get through a bundle that you consume. In the case of Google, it’s free because we then get other stuff from you, advertising, search revenue, whatever it is.
Bertrand
They want to be the gateway. I must say, personally, I used to use Google News back in the days quite a lot. Apple News as well at launch, but I’m definitely much more on Twitter or X, and specialised newsletter. I feel what they are distributing through Apple News and Google News is really one limited view of the world, not really providing wide perspectives.
Nuno
There is a new generation of players out there that are trying to bundle these subscriptions for things that you really want. Some of them are very creative. They give you credits and you can spend your credits. Whatever publications is attached to it, it’s a use of one credit if you want to read through one news, and you have a bundle of credits and that’s how you consume it, you just choose.
Nuno
There’s others that are trying subscription-based models with a baseline for certain publications. Then above that, you need to pay per article, or you need to maybe extend your subscription. It’s complex. The problem is why it’s complex is because of what we just talked about. It’s been unbundled. There’s a lot of news sources out there that you want to consume. Even on mainstream, we talked about a bunch, let alone on the niche ones.
Nuno
If I really want something that’s adequate for me, I might be interested in something that the Wall Street Journal published this month, but maybe not want to read anything by the Wall Street Journal for the next two months. Then I read New York Times every week, I don’t know. Maybe there’s this one economist article that I want to read every three months, I don’t know. How do I bundle for that as a product?
Nuno
In that experience, I’ve seen some interesting attempts at it, but I haven’t seen the untapping of that. One problem I see on this is when it’s product. It’s just generally product. How do you make the product seamless? How do I interact with the article? How do I make sure that I access the article under whichever browsing experience I’m having or every consumption experience I’m having?
Nuno
It’s complex because every provider has their own app, and then what browser are you on, and then how are you going through the paywall, and how is the paywall treating you, and how you register? It’s not easy to make a seamless experience work. I think that’s a product issue, and I haven’t really seen beautiful solutions to it. Maybe Apple News is one of the more elegant ones, but I haven’t seen any beautiful solutions.
Nuno
The second piece is actually business model. It’s like, “What do I charge for?” I charge a subscription, which people understand. That’s how news has always been working, even newspapers back in the day. Do I get money out of advertising? Again, very well understood, et cetera. Sponsored content, which for a while was tricking us all. They started making you have to put that little sponsored content down there. It’s like, “This is actually not news. Someone paid for this article.” Mysteriously, the company that they’re saying good things about.
Nuno
There’s all these business models. In my opinion, subscription probably is the way to go if we believe this will go the route of other content streaming, like video and audio, but it’s still not nailed because of the multifaceted nature of the providers, very unbundled.
Nuno
Every time we look at the space as a VC, we have this doubt around market size. How big is the total addressable market? How big is the serviceable addressable market? How easy is it to scale to that level? Everyone’s like, “This is huge.” I was like, “I understand it’s huge if you put everything together, but if you put everything together, how fragmented is everything you just put together?”
Bertrand
That’s a big question. Let’s not forget, one big issue with all these models is that you have a wealth of free information, free news, either reading Twitter or YouTube or just browsing the web. The Reuters of the world, the CNN, ABC of the world. I mean, it’s free content. You have to fight against that. Of course, you don’t just have to fight against that. You have to fight against other opportunities from watching a movie, watching a TV show, listening to music. Many sources are fighting for your attention. It’s a tough place to be.
Bertrand
Maybe going back to the business model, obviously, there has been some tentative from some governments. We can talk about Canada, Australia, trying to force Google News and other platform like them, Facebook, to do some revenue share or direct taxation of their news activity, which has led to some of these companies stopping their product in some markets.
Bertrand
California looks like if they can pick any bad idea somewhere, they will. They are looking into that as well. It has been somewhat a trend, but I have the impression it’s not going too far in that direction. What do you think of this one, that revenue share?
Nuno
If the music industry is anything to go buy, if some of these news providers do have some strength, which to be honest, some of them are relatively big, as I said, the market’s quite fragmented, there will be more and more legislation around those ways because you’re giving content that we developed that we are charging for, for free to your users. While that’s wonderful to your users, we’re getting nothing ourselves, and we develop the content, we own the content.
Nuno
Interestingly enough, the problem becomes even more difficult with AI and with ChatGPT-like functions like Gemini, et cetera, because then I’m searching for it, it could tell me the source, and then what happens? Does it send me the source? Then the source has a paywall, but I just saw the result synthesised for me. It defies the purpose. How do you deal with that? I think we’re going to have even a next wave of issues, which is with AI and summarisation, and you ingested this content, and you couldn’t have ingested this content, and whatever.
Nuno
I think this is going to happen more and more. The big search providers, et cetera, we’re going to have to figure out a way of compensating some of the content developers and content providers, not just, to be honest, news providers, but also people that do their Substacks or whatever. I think we’re going to have a little bit of that going forward. I think this is the beginning, not the end.
Nuno
It happened in music as well. Music was less fragmented. Obviously, the big record labels were the big record labels, and there was more power. Maybe it won’t go that direction. It was very person-to-person driven. The issue with music started when people were just able to share stuff between themselves, the Napsters of the world, et cetera. Here it’s different. It’s the big players in the middle that are acting as the hub.
Bertrand
I would disagree actually with that perspective because music is pretty obvious for me. When you share the full song, high quality, you have to find a way to make people pay for it.
Nuno
But why is that news not the same? Didn’t someone spend a ton of time developing an article, and it’s shown by someone?
Bertrand
I will tell you why, because they are linking to free news. If the news on cnn.com is free and available to anyone, it’s free. You are not paying for it. I don’t see the problem. Obviously, you don’t get The Economist news from Google News because they have put a paywall. If you want to read their news, you have to go through their paywall. Whether you are Google or you are directly a consumer trying to get access to The Economist, and the same for Wall Street Journal and other sources.
Bertrand
If they are pointing to free news sites, I don’t see why they should pay for anything. If these sites want to close themselves down and put a paywall, sure, go for it. I have no problem with that. But I don’t see the problem when the base source is free and freely accessible, what is the issue?
Nuno
I think there’s two problems. One is years ago, maybe before today, the crawlers and scrapers that these guys were to get their searches were going into information that was not supposed to be publicly available.
Bertrand
I don’t think so.
Nuno
They did. No, that’s true. You can go back in history and see it. Google was showing you news that were behind paywalls for certain players. You could say, “Maybe they didn’t define their paywall in the right way. Maybe their security wasn’t done in the right way.” I don’t know, but they did. There have been cases in court because of that.
Nuno
The second thing is now, and we’re seeing the same thing now with AI, the building of these large language models, where are the data sets coming from? We already saw this issue with things like Getty Images, where you have images that are Getty Images being used, and there are specific licensing agreements to it that are not being respected because AI doesn’t care. It’s just basically putting that forward.
Nuno
I think you’re oversimplifying the discussion. “There’s a paywall, whatever.” The data set is a data set, and it’s getting just worse because you’re getting underneath these data sets, and you’re getting information that probably you shouldn’t be able to share.
Bertrand
First, I don’t think as of today, you have any trouble to put a paywall that would block Google Crawler to scan your content and publish it on Google or Google News. All news maybe, but today it’s irrelevant. Two on AI, I think it’s an extremely different topic and happy to talk about it. I cannot say I have a firm opinion at this stage on the AI side, except that you have to remember there are two questions. Are you training a model and are you trying to get paid for feeding that model?
Bertrand
I think from my perspective, it’s the same story. Do you have a paywall or not? If you want to block from a scraper, you should be able to decide to block and the scraper should agree to follow this direction. If Google Scraper has a clear instruction to not scrape, it should not scrape, and it should not use that as a source for its training and the same for OpenAI and others. For me, it’s pretty basic. Obviously, you can have a bigger, more complex paywall, and that should be even more clear that you cannot access it. If you go around that, there is an issue.
Bertrand
After that, as an IP provider, you might decide to say, “You know what? I don’t care if these people are scraping, even if technically they are not right, I let them do so.” Apparently, that’s what YouTube is doing. OpenAI seems to ingest YouTube content. We saw a specific approval from Google, and I’m sure Google could block OpenAI from doing that.
Bertrand
The other question is output. What type of output are we talking about? If we have an AI system that’s going to replicate a song, for instance, or a book, we obviously have an issue. If it’s not replicating, but following some styles or some approach, I think it’s a different story because you could argue that’s how humans are creative. They are not creative out of nowhere. They are creative based on their histories, their culture, by listening, by reading, by somewhat copying.
Bertrand
Of course, if it’s go too far, you’re in trouble. But there is a lot of inspiration done by artists, so you could argue AI is the same. It’s taking inspiration. We could say, you know what? Even if it’s a similar process as an artist, we decide we want to treat that differently because it’s an AI, and that would be a fair discussion.
Nuno
Maybe at some point we should have the news being done by AI agents. They have video, they look at it, and they make a decision, and they summarize what happened.
Bertrand
It’s coming. We are talking about months, probably, before we have, and I’ve seen already, some prototypes, I mean, some AI broadcaster taking a piece of news, ingesting it, and showing you a virtual news anchor, reading the news, presenting it. I don’t know which form it will be, but it’s for sure 100% coming.
Nuno
Going to happen, yeah.
Bertrand
Is it a good thing? I don’t know.
Nuno
We shall soon find out.
Bertrand
Maybe it will be forbidden. But from a technical perspective, it’s becoming possible. For sure, we are talking of months, potentially.
Nuno
We shall soon find out if it’s good or not. Actually, the reason why we decided to do this episode in the first place was we saw this emergence of incredibly talent once in a generation, twice in a generation kind of entrepreneurs going into this space.
Nuno
The more obvious one is Elon with his acquisition of X and Twitter. We could have an argument whether it was for free speech or whatever, but it is a key media platform, and Elon went after it. Clearly that’s number one, and it cost him a bunch to go after it.
Nuno
Noam was the original CEO from Waze that then sold to Google, is doing post news. Unclear how much money is raised. I know he’s raised some money from Andreessen Horowitz and Scott Galloway. Unclear how successful they are today, but again, a great, great entrepreneur, a great executive, an amazing person.
Nuno
Kevin and Mike from Instagram did Artifact, which actually was just bought by Yahoo undisclosed. We suspect it wasn’t an amazing acquisition. Also, unclear how much money they raised in the first place. But I mean, Kevin and Mike that did Instagram going after news was a big deal.
Nuno
Back in the day, Eve Williams, obviously, of Twitter Fame, did Medium, which is obviously still out there, probably the biggest evolution after Blogger that we can think of, and a bunch of other things that have happened in the space that I feel are quite exciting. You have people like Kevin Systrom, Noam Bardin, Elon Musk, going after this space. Back to the point we made earlier, it is the power. It’s not a counterpart to the power.
Nuno
I would be a mess if I had forgotten to mention Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for a bunch of money, 250 million, or something like that. Clearly, news, there’s interest in this. There’s interest in big media and news platforms.
Nuno
We would expect a lot more innovation by now. We’ll see what Noam can come up with, what Apollo acquired, Yahoo will do with Artifact, how does Medium scale further, Substack, and all these guys. It still feels for all this talent that we haven’t had that seminal moment, the moment that changes everything, which is interesting.
Bertrand
Yeah. To jump on that, Elon Musk acquiring Twitter, from my perspective, there was a lot of uncertainty, but I feel at this stage, there’s definitely some stability from the platform. From my perspective, getting a lot of value from X, I should stop saying Twitter. But in a way, it was the biggest billion type acquisition by a billionaire of a media organisation when you think about it.
Bertrand
At the end of the day, it has been very typical of extremely wealthy individuals, at least some of them, to want to have some impact in politics. Let’s call it that way. The way to do that has been through acquisitions of magazine, newspapers, TV station, that, quite frankly, if it was just from a cash flow perspective, would not be such a good acquisition, such a good investment.
Bertrand
My point that it has been happening forever. I can tell you that in France, for instance, most of the press of a significant size is owned by specific family who have been very successful in their business life. I’m not saying that was a good thing or bad thing. I cannot say I have a strong opinion on this topic, actually. It has been very typical.
Bertrand
When people were surprised of Elon Musk acquiring Twitter, yes, it was a lot of money, but at the same time, as you say, Jeff Bezos acquired the Washington Post and so many other magazines, press, TV stations have been owned by billionaires as, I believe, a way to influence politics. Is it for personal gain or is it just because they care? I guess it depends, and you will have to ask them.
Nuno
There’s political notions. If it’s weaponized in a specific way, it’s propaganda. It just drives people’s opinion, it drives how they vote, it drives how they do things, it drives their mindset and how they think through things. Obviously, it’s very powerful. We’ll talk about state-owned and government-owned and government-linked news and how that’s been used, but it’s historically been that.
Nuno
There’s a couple of dimensions. There’s the dimension of ownership and these big players owning them, there’s the dimension of innovation, big entrepreneurs that go into the space and try to innovate the space and create new products that radically look different.
Nuno
There’s also the people that are the journalists that write things. I remember Ignacio Ramonet was the Chief Editor of the Le Monde Diplomatique. I think he was the guy who actually spun it out from the editorial Responsibility of Le Monde. He wrote a book called Geopolitics of Chaos, I think I’ve mentioned in a previous episode. This notion that because of historical reasons, certain parts of the world might have media that is skewed towards a specific political preference versus other parts of the world. He was talking about most parts of Europe.
Nuno
There was a strong left-leaning view by a lot of journalists in Europe. It had to do with Europe having been under Nazi rule and having had a World War II that was devastating to Europe. That was the counterpower. The counterpower was left. Therefore, he had this notion of the gatekeepers. I think he called it the worst thing that I’m going to say here. But the gatekeepers, they tended, at a certain point in time, that might not be true today, but when he wrote the book, it probably was, that it would be much more lenient on left-wing governments in specific countries than on right-leaning governments in specific countries.
Nuno
That still exists. If your country, for example, is coming out of a dictatorship, or it’s moving from a quasi-dictatorship to democracy, et cetera, it’s likely that the journalists that are writing these articles, that are writing these pieces, that are putting them together on TV, et cetera, will have their own skews. It’s not mutual. It probably never was, but that is the ultimate piece of it. It’s the person who wrote it or who put that piece together.
Bertrand
That’s pretty interesting. I would say the big counterargument on this is the US because there was no dictatorship, there was no war, but still, we have a very left-leaning mainstream media and journalist in general. I’m not sure how Europe has really gone through a different, I would say, exercise. I don’t know if it’s left-leaning people being attracted by media or vice versa. I’m not so sure.
Nuno
Maybe talking about the propaganda and the fact that we have had some recent news that are bombastic on programs and entities that we thought were amazing and walking on water in terms of their neutrality. We’re coming to a conclusion that they probably are not like NPR.
Bertrand
I think that a very interesting piece for me is I’ve always been surprised being originally from France, how much the state owns still some media organisation. You have many French TV stations that are owned by the state, France 2, France 3, you have radio station. It has always surprised me, and it’s quite significant. I don’t know the exact percentage, but it’s significant in term of viewership. One thing personally I like about the US is that there is no such thing except NPR and the Voice of America.
Nuno
There’s a couple of others, like the PBS stuff, et cetera. There’s a couple of other things that are owned.
Bertrand
Yeah, there might be. I think in term of viewership, it’s just dramatically different to what you would have in France and maybe some other European countries. The Voice of America, I believe, has been more targeted about outside the US, so news from America to the rest of the world in a way.
Bertrand
NPR has been more very local. I had some respect. I’ve known some people from that organisation long time ago. For this news organisation, it has been a bombshell a few days ago, and we’re already planning to make this episode, so it was timely.
Bertrand
A journalist, Yuri Berliner, published a bombshell report about his organisation, NPR, where he has been a senior journalist for 25 years. It’s really damning. When we say it’s left-leaning, it’s like 100% left-leaning in the sense that there is not a single Republican in the news organisation on the journalistic side.
Bertrand
It’s very clear that you don’t dare to question the leaning of the organisation and the diversity of thoughts and opinion of the organisation. If you dare to question, then obviously you are going to close about the dirty secret about how it’s functioning.
Bertrand
Obviously, there has been, following this report, some digging about Katherine Maher, the new CEO. It’s pretty horrible, to be frank, to discover that such a person will be leading what should be being state-owned, a relatively neutral news organisation. She’s incredibly clear about personal allegiance. She’s incredibly clear that the truth doesn’t really matter. It seems for her an old concept, so it’s pretty shocking.
Bertrand
In some ways, for me, it’s representative of a lot of mainstream media news that I’ve learned to basically not think too much about because there is no point reading it, given how biased it has become. But to see that so clearly exposed, so clearly expressed in term of opinion by a CEO, and to have all of this, from my perspective, paid by taxpayer dollar, it’s pretty shocking.
Bertrand
If it’s private, their choice, their decision, me as a citizen, as a listener, viewer, my choice to read it, not read it, I have as long as I have options. But in that situation where my tax dollar should pay for that, it was always a big question for me in France. It’s now a question in the US.
Nuno
Maybe because of the tax situation, obviously, I’m coming from Portugal originally, and there’s that type of commentary as well. That we have a relatively state-owned broadcasting company, et cetera. Obviously, there’s now a lot more diverse ecosystem, but back then there wasn’t.
Nuno
We’ll come back to this topic when we talk about polarisation and the truth. There is fundamental polarisation. Some would allege that what we’re seeing with some channels like CNN and others is a response to the Fox News effect of going fully to the right and turning news in some ways, maybe into too much entertainment, some cases, maybe too less facts. Others would say, like you said earlier, that maybe the US is always very left-leaning on news, and Fox News was the knee-jerk reaction to that.
Bertrand
It is potentially true, actually.
Nuno
Which could be true I’m not sure. I’m not a Fox News watcher. I have difficulty watching it for a variety of reasons. I can go into in a more informal context, I think what’s happened to the news is that notion, the notion that it’s difficult to watch neutral news. I couldn’t really point you to many newscast, news programs where I’d say there’s an intrinsic neutrality. If there’s no intrinsic neutrality news, you have to go either to the edges that you’re more comfortable in.
Nuno
If you’re looking for reinforcement, you’ll go to my right-leaning or left-leaning news in terms of public opinion, policy, etc. Or if you’re more moderate, and you want to stay more in the middle, you have to find things on both sides that you can still consume and then educate yourself as much as you can to figure out, where do I lean on this? What do I believe in? What do I don’t believe in? What is important to me? What is not?
Nuno
Or you stop watching the news altogether, which is also a possibility. I have to be honest, I did it for a while. I consumed very little news for a period of time. It’s great. Your happiness levels definitely go up. The world is like, fine.
Bertrand
That’s a great point. My big issue is a lot of news from the perspective that if it’s not based on historical perspective, data analysis, for me, it’s not really interesting because ultimately it’s just an opinion. That’s why I don’t especially watch more Fox News than CNN, for instance.
Bertrand
To your point, I think more about Murdoch being a smart businessman. He probably saw that not as a knee-jerk reaction, but more like, “Hey, there is a business opportunity. This space is wide open. They are all on the left, or they all move to the left or to the centre left. If I go full in on the right, there should be an opportunity for me.”
Bertrand
I think it was more very calculated as rational, in a way, business decision, whether you like it or not. But again, from my perspective, it’s a private organisation. You are free to watch or not watch. You can subscribe for it, not subscribe for it. It’s an easier perspective. But to your point, I personally go back way more into, I want to find experts that over days, weeks, months, become more and more credible because what they say ultimately connect well to reality. That has been my perspective.
Bertrand
I must admit that X has been a great source for me of finding experts. From there, potentially subscribing and paying for newsletter to find not just news, but stuff that help me understand what’s happening in the world, what happened in the world, and potentially give me insights into where the world is going.
Bertrand
I want from my perspective, at least as close to the reality, because I care about the reality where I live, and I care about being able to predict where the future is going in some ways. That sounds maybe arrogant, but as someone who has a foot on the VC side, a foot as an entrepreneur, understanding where the world is going, I believe, is pretty important.
Nuno
Just to qualify a little bit, obviously, when we talk about left and right, these things are not magical things that we are pundits on that we can identify, but I would say there’s always a nuance on how we describe it. Left in the US is not the same as left in Portugal or France. The US, you cannot have a Communist Party. Full stop, done. Portugal, there’s still a Communist Party. They’re not very big. They’re not super significant.
Bertrand
Is it still true, actually? Is it still true? I don’t know.
Nuno
We’re talking about things in a nuanced manner, based on the history that they are. Again, we’re not political pundits. We’re not the best guys in the world to give views on this, but we’re just trying to frame the discussion in our perspective based on that, based on those nuances between countries and how we see them evolving, having lived in a bunch of different places all over the world, including, as you guys know, in China, both Bertrand and myself have lived in China. Maybe that’s a good segue for our next thing around polarisation and censorship and all that stuff. I have to be honest, I forget the name of the newspaper. What’s the name of the English newspaper published in China?
Bertrand
China Daily.
Nuno
China Daily, yeah. Everyone’s like, “Why do you read China Daily?” It’s like, “Because I know what their perspective is.” The great thing is once you know what the editorial perspective is, and then everything you see has a skew. It’s like there’s always a skew.
Bertrand
It’s like the old truth about the Pravda, the official magazine of Communist Russia. It could not be further from the truth in term of journal. I still remember that joke where they apparently made this article, I guess, in the ’80s.
Bertrand
Of course, it was well known that in Russia at the time, good luck finding bread. People would line up in front of bakeries to try to get some bread if you had the money to get some. At some point, they run a story about, you know what? It’s the same in France. They picked a very trendy high-end bakery where actually, indeed, people were lining up because it was considered the best bread of Paris. All the crazy is about bread. We go there and wake up early and get bread. But the Pravda version was, “That’s the same in France. They’re also in trouble to find bread, so they have to line up.”
Nuno
Yes.
Bertrand
From my perspective, yeah, China Daily is probably quite similar, unfortunately. But you’re right, at least you probably know what to expect.
Nuno
I know what’s the perspective. I think it would be great if everyone just published. This is most of our editorial team. This is how we’re leaning. That’s how we lean. Maybe they don’t put names, but like an anonymised data so that we have a view.
Bertrand
I actually have some anecdote I want to share about. You talk about stories where you have seen the news, and you have I have seen how it’s reported. I have seen that on China Daily. It’s pretty interesting to say the least.
Nuno
Obviously, news can be censored, and in many markets, it is. It can be used as propaganda. It can be even used as brainwashing. Totally changing how reality seen in certain places in the world. I suspect there aren’t many people listening to us in North Korea. Hopefully, we’ll be safe on that. Clearly, there is a specific line of what is being said and how they’re living versus the rest of the world. It’s a hard core brainwashing at the end of the day that the news can provide.
Nuno
I feel the more nuanced thing that’s happening nowadays is news is being used as a polariser, as something that pushes you to an edge or the other because of what we discussed earlier, because of that incentive to make money out of news that pushes you to go two extremes, you either really hate it or you really love it in some ways. Normally hate is more powerful. Normally a negative is more powerful. That is aimed at reinforcing your own beliefs.
Nuno
In the case that I was making earlier, either you’re moderate, and you want to read stuff in the middle, or you don’t read news at all because you don’t trust it at all. Or the other two extremes, you go one way or the other in terms of your view and what you read and what you listen to and what you watch.
Nuno
I’d say the one that’s winning is clearly the latter. That’s why, for example, this country is becoming so polarised because people want to listen and read and watch things that reinforce their views of the world. The pundits, the podcasters, the newscasters that play to that tend to win because it’s easier. It’s a path of least resistance.
Nuno
We talk about it in startups and consumer investing all the time. It’s the path of least resistance. Is this the path of least resistance for the consumer? Is this user flow, as we call it, the path of least resistance? News has figured it out as well.
Nuno
I think right now there’s a lot of stuff that just reinforces people’s beliefs. That dialogue in the middle is very difficult to find it, very, very difficult to find. To Bertrand’s point, then you need to have the people you follow on Twitter, see what we call Twitter is X now, people that have agreements, disagreements, maybe some more interested and instructed panels and discussions out there where you put people with very significantly different views with an amazing moderator and see what comes out of it.
Nuno
I don’t know, but certainly that is less and less. What we have more is more and more the pedalling up of animosity, extreme views, polarisation.
Bertrand
Yeah, it’s a good point. It’s very tough to see some very good, intelligent questioning discussion with strong moderators who are smart enough to really understand both sides of the equation and to understand that sometimes actually each side could have a point. To be clear, I think there are some truth that in some ways are self-evident based on maths and physics, and it’s pretty tough if you start questioning that.
Nuno
Even science changes, though, but yes.
Bertrand
You’re right. The definition of science is that you have to keep questioning it. At the end of the day, if you stop questioning it, it’s probably not science anymore. To be clear, it cannot be just dumb questioning. It has to be with relevant arguments, relevant experiments, relevant data, making sure that all of this is right. Again, personally, I think that way because that’s who I am, but that’s also who I want to be, and that’s also the world I want to live.
Bertrand
From my perspective, the truth matter 100%, but there would be, obviously, some points where people have to disagree. If you take religion, for instance, some will have strong opinion based on religious belief or lack of religious belief, it’s very tough to argument at some point. You have your opinion on this. It might be tough to say that is an obvious truth.
Nuno
It’s not that people can’t have opinions and strong opinions at that, I think my hope is that there’s just more dialogue than we’ve had in the last maybe 8-10 years. It feels like there’s less and less capacity for people to just stop and say, I’ll listen to you. I currently don’t agree with you, but I’ll listen to you. Let’s have the conversation.
Nuno
There’s less appetite to do that, and it’s a shame because I agree with you, the truth does matter, and in some cases, there is a truth that you can get to. Either because you were there, you saw it, or because you have enough data points to make that call. Sometimes it’s a little bit more tricky to know what the truth is, but the truth does matter.
Bertrand
To this point, I think you want to strive to find the truth. Ultimately, you talk about dialogue, and I totally agree, but I think dialogue has to be informed as much as possible. Part of being informed means running experiments or talking about the results of experiments or having deep data series on some specific topics, trying to understand carefully the data, trying to make sure the data is as clean as possible, and base your discussion on that. Because it’s okay to disagree about what should be done about some topics, but if at the root, you don’t even have the same data to comprehend, to share, to discuss, it’s hard. It’s very hard.
Bertrand
I’m always surprised when some topics have actually data available, but it’s not going back on that. On the contrary, when there is very few data, where there is questionable data, but this data is constantly put in front as if it was the truth.
Nuno
Yeah, the manipulation of data, the cherry-picking of data. There’s the famous book, the How to Lie Using Charts. Just change the perspective on charts and how you present it-
Bertrand
Totally.
Nuno
-and numbers. There’s many ways to do it. It’s getting worse because now we have deep fakes. Now you’re like, what do I trust?
Bertrand
There is manipulation and there is a fake. But data series is a great example. You can tell a story if you pick data for the past 20 years, if you pick data for the past 50 years, if you pick data for past 100 years, and you will have another story for the past 200 or 2,000 years.
Bertrand
For me, this one is really amazing because it’s very interesting how right now, for instance, I’ve noticed, I won’t go into details, but a lot of instances of data manipulation just based on how far back are you looking at? I would strongly suggest people listening, look at how far back is the data going, try to go as far as possible. From going as far as possible, usually you will be quite shocked by what you discover.
Nuno
Maybe just to end, what is the new counterpower? What are the checks and balances to news that has been hijacked by clickbait and other things out there? I’m not sure. I’m not sure I have a great answer. I think it’s hopefully more educated people over time. I don’t know.
Bertrand
I think it’s certainly part, as I was going to say, it’s you using your judgment to do that. People have to be educated and want to be keen on looking for the truth. I also believe that some platforms, if they are free of censorship, can be a solution for that. Personally, I see X as a solution for that. YouTube, partially, but there has been more censorship on this. Facebook as well, I seem to have had more censorship. For me, it’s combined with freedom of speech. If you don’t have freedom of speech, ultimately, very quickly, it might take you don’t have freedom of thought either.
Nuno
Very interesting. Education seems to be the key to this, or a founder that comes up with the ultimate solution that shows us news in probably not its raw state, but probably showing the cues that news have, what’s the balance of opinion. I think there was an app trying to do that. I’m not sure they’ve done well. Hopefully, maybe there will be some technology solution to this as well. Year of election in the US is always a bit of a tricky thing.
Bertrand
I think every election seems to have some story related to the spread or actually the blocking of news, depending on where you look at. I guess this year will be somewhat the same. I think from my perspective, it goes back to freedom of speech as a solution for that. It goes back to you doing your own judgment and analysis about the news. I think these two parts are critical because as you say, there is a lot of stupid thoughts out there more than before, and you have to filter more.
Nuno
I just had a conversation with a very good friend of mine who was someone very connected to public administration, public sector throughout his career, and actually owned a couple of local publications. I was telling him, this year I’m so concerned about what’s going on. My only wish is there’s no violence, that nobody dies, I think was the exact words I said, that nobody dies because of these elections.
Nuno
It was interesting the way he put it because I was quite concerned up until the election. He was like, I’m quite concerned on the after the election. I’m less concerned on the up to the election. I’m very concerned after the election.
Nuno
Obviously, January 6th and what happened last time. We were discussing the scenarios. Trump wins, Trump loses. I’m like, “I don’t see a good scenario here at all.” I still keep my wish that I hope nobody dies because of this thing, because an exercise of a democracy that should be relatively mature. Again, young country, but relatively mature democracy, hopefully. I hope not. I hope certainly that the news and media don’t have special effect on that. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking.
Bertrand
I don’t know. I feel it’s definitely critical I agree with you. I don’t know if nobody dies. I expect the US to be a quite stable democracy. I think at the end of the day, there is also, obviously, it’s not just news. If you go further in term of election, a big question for a lot of people, obviously, is around, is the election safe from interference?
Bertrand
Talking about interference, you can interfere with the news, with the discussion and all of this, but you could also interfere directly with the election. From my perspective, there is always a question of how safe is it from this, from interference?
Bertrand
I’m always surprised you cannot vote in France. I don’t think any other European country or Japan without a state-issued ID. The fact that it’s even a discussion is really a big question mark for me here in the US. I don’t really understand.
Bertrand
Obviously, we have more and more technology, counting vote, machines to convert. Being a computer engineer, I know stuff can be manipulated. Unfortunately, hacker can do stuff. I hope we are careful enough as this is important enough, make sure that we don’t just trust machines, but we can have a separate counting on paper to confirm anything coming.
Bertrand
Maybe the last piece for me it’s also, again, always a question mark, why don’t I get the results? I’m clear and certain the next day. This is what happened in most democracies, Western democracies, so I’m not sure why we cannot get that in the US. It feels like each time it’s adding to an additional layer of uncertainty that, again, I don’t feel I’m having in Europe.
Nuno
Indeed, and hoping for the best in the elections, at least, that the news doesn’t influence it too dramatic. I’m sure it will influence it, but not too dramatically, hopefully.
Bertrand
Going back to election, I think news is one part of the story. News are always influencing. The question is, do we have a nefarious actor or not? I guess some will always try, but the vibrancy of a democracy is measured to how it can withstand attacks, so I’m certainly hopeful.
Bertrand
In term of news, for me, the mainstream media is, if not totally dead, certainly a former shadow of itself. But that’s okay. That’s life. That’s evolution. There is not a single reason why one industry should be preserved from technology.
Bertrand
Technology enable, as you say, it’s not just about broadcast anymore. We can go one to few, one to one. That’s what happened with technology. I think ultimately it’s for the better. I feel I’m a more informed person now, today in that situation. I have to put more work, but by putting more work, I’m better informed. Sometimes the truth might be harder to take, but I prefer that.
Nuno
Very good.
Bertrand
Thank you, Nuno.
Nuno
Thank you, Bertrand.
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