Fred Vogelstein, Co-Editor and Co-Founder, CrazyStupidTech

Fred Vogelstein wanted to be a Moscow bureau chief. He did manage to get to Berlin as a student in the months after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but he still hasn't been to Moscow. Instead, Fred became one of the most influential technology reporters of his generation, with stints at the Wall Street Journal, Wired, The Information, US News, and Fortune. Today he and fellow tech legend Oh Malik are the Co-Founders and Editors of Crazy Stupid Tech, the newsletter on innovation that's quickly building a big following. 

Fred joined us recently to discuss the true definition of innovation, his laments about the death of the traditional newsroom, and why he won't be covering the hot topic of tech and politics. For this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media influencers in B2B Tech. I'm Dave Reddy, Head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old -fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B Tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Fred. Here's our chat with Fred. Enjoy.

Transcript

Dave Reddy (00:00):

Fred Vogelstein wanted to be a Moscow Bureau chief. He did manage to get to Berlin as a student in the months after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but he still hasn't been to Moscow. Instead, Fred became one of the most influential technology reporters of his generation, with stints at the Wall Street Journal, Wired, The Information, U.S. News, and Fortune. Today, he and fellow tech legend lik are the co-founders and editors of Crazy Stupid Tech, a newsletter on innovation that's quickly building a big following. Fred joined us recently to discuss the true definition of innovation, his laments about the death of the traditional newsroom and why he won't be covering the hot topic of tech and politics. For this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's, top 200 media and influencers, including Fred. Here's our chat with Fred. Enjoy. Fred, thanks so much for joining us on the pod today. Real pleasure. You may have had the most impressive career of anyone we've had on.

Fred Vogelstein (01:25):

I'm delighted to hear that.

Dave Reddy (01:28):

Well, thanks again. So you grew up in New York City, which borough?

Fred Vogelstein (01:32):

I grew up in Manhattan. My dad was in the investment business and then moved to California to go to college and then have gone back and forth over the years between California and New York.

Dave Reddy (01:45):

Yeah, you went to college in Pomona. We'll get to that in a second. One of the Claremont Colleges, what was growing up in New York? I'm a beach boy and grew up in Cape Cod. I got no idea what it's like to grow up in New York. I get hives after three days in New York. I like it, but after three days I'm done. So what was that?

Fred Vogelstein (02:02):

It was all I knew. I spent a lot of my growing up living on the 19th floor of a 40 story high rise with 10 apartments on a floor. And so Halloween was great. I could get more candy in about 15 minutes than most people could get in an hour and a half. But when I think back about it, it seemed completely normal to me at the time. But when I think back, the idea of growing up in what would've been a good sized town in the middle of Wyoming that took up one city block is kind of an odd way to exist. There were 10 apartments on a floor figure, like 40 stories, three people per apartment. I mean, that's what, 1200 people, that's a lot of people going in and out of one space over the course of a day. But it was all I knew

Dave Reddy (02:55):

That would be some interesting math to do. How many Manhattan apartment buildings does it take to equal the 300 odd thousand population of Wyoming?

Fred Vogelstein (03:04):

I think it's about 550, but I mean, I guess the answer is what, a hundred, right?

Dave Reddy (03:14):

One long block. All right. So you grew up in New York. You mentioned the dad was an investment banker. What did mom do?

Fred Vogelstein (03:25):

She stayed home in many ways. I had a pretty traditional upbringing that way. She actually spent a lot of the time going back to college while I was growing up because she had graduated and gone to art school instead. So a lot of the time I was growing up, she was getting her degree at Columbia as an adult. But no, she stayed home. And when my dad traveled on business a lot of times she went with him and it was a pretty traditional upbringing for the 1960s and seventies.

Dave Reddy (04:03):

So speaking of shuttling back and forth, I know you live in Berkeley now, as you mentioned, you went to college at Pomona, which for those who don't know is one of the Claremont Colleges. Those are in Southern California, LA ish, but not la. And then you went to grad school at Columbia. So your mother's alma mater, a lot of reporters I know actually did focus on poli-sci. Of course, most of those got into political writing. Was that what you were thinking of at the time, either a political or government career or political journalism?

Fred Vogelstein (04:32):

No, I was, well, I was always thinking about journalism. I went through a period of time in high school where I took a law class constitutional law class and thought I wanted to be a lawyer. And before realizing that what I really wanted to be was a Supreme Court justice and decided, decided it takes a little time, well, I also decided that I also realized that was the only thing I wanted to do, so I didn't really want to do any of the other stuff. So I quickly ditched that. No, I was one of those kids that would rather read newspapers than books.

(05:14):

You walk by old news racks on street corners, and I was the kind of person that bought a newspaper out of every single one. There's a famous scene in an old movie called Broadcast News where Holly Hunter walks by 10, 10 or 15 news racks somewhere in Washington DC and buys a newspaper out of every single one of them. That was me. And for a long time, I wanted to mean early on what I really wanted to do was be Bill Keller, who was the, at that point, the Moscow correspondent to the New York Times, because

(05:51):

I was just fascinated by the Soviet Union as a place and the nuclear standoff that we were in with the Soviets. I mean, remember when I was a freshman? I was a freshman when Ronald Reagan got elected and ramped up the Cold War. And so the Cold War and the nuclear and the possibility of nuclear Armageddon became a very, very, very talked about thing when I was in college. So that was sort of where it grew from. Oddly, I wasn't one of those kids who wrote for the high school newspaper from the earliest days. I really had a terrible time writing when I was young.

Dave Reddy (06:49):

Really?

Fred Vogelstein (06:49):

And yeah, in fact, the first English class I took at Pomona College was remedial writing. So I'm kind of a classic example of how writers are not born, but taught. It was at one of these before classes start fairs, my academic fairs my freshman year, and I ended up talking to an English prof who asked me what I like to do, what I was good at, what I was less good at. So I told him that I had lots and lots of ideas, and I had really a hard time expressing them. And he said, well, then you have to take my class. And so I just said, sure. Not really knowing until I got there that what I had signed up for was remedial writing. But actually he had us write, but it was great. He had us write something every single week and for 12 weeks, and by the time I was done, I suddenly realized, oh, it was like a key had been, had unlocked something in me, and that was just amazing.

(07:57):

So I guess I became addicted to journalism a because I'm just endlessly curious, but also because when I was younger, all I wanted to do was know how to write well. And so for me, I had gotten over this hump and that was immensely satisfying. But yeah, I drove my parents nuts because in the early days, now, if you're a kid that is endlessly curious and asking your parents why about almost everything, they can just send you to the internet or chat GPT, and there are actually answers there. Whereas in the pre-internet days, it was just incredibly annoying. But I always had a question for, I always had a question after a question, after a question after a question. It was just the way my brain worked.

Dave Reddy (08:52):

I think it's hard for me sometimes to explain to my own children, the oldest of which is 24, that there was a time when you would ask a question and there was really no way of finding out the answer.

Fred Vogelstein (09:07):

I've actually thought that it would just be a total gas to go back to college, not because I want to be 18 again, although that would be nice. But I just would love to imagine, I would love to experience what it would be like to learn in an environment where there was almost zero friction to acquiring information, meaning nobody, our kids' generation has underspent an entire afternoon with a bag of dimes in the library, xeroxing pages out of a book,

(09:42):

Or realizing that the perfect book that you need to write your paper on doesn't exist or has been checked out or just zillion. A lot of the process of learning when we were kids involved, just managing that friction of actually getting access to the information itself. I mean, think of the card catalog, right? I mean, it's like all these things that just don't exist anymore. And honestly, when we were in school, we're kind of a pain in the ass. So if you had ideas about things and while you were learning and thought, oh, I've always wondered about this, you can actually take that crazy idea and do a bunch of research super fast and actually get almost a first base on it. Whereas I can't tell you how many ideas I had about this, that, or the next thing when I was in school, but the process of actually going to some library and then actually learning about it, just too daunting to take on.

Dave Reddy (10:53):

Yeah, I'm one of the lucky ones. I graduated college in 1992, and as you know, the internet went nuts in 1993. So I, like you was a microfiche guy. Now you wrote it two papers in the nineties before you went back to, or in the eighties actually, before you went back to get your master's at Columbia in New Haven and in Huntington Beach. What'd you cover there? Everything.

Fred Vogelstein (11:16):

I mean, so those were, in those days, that was how you advance as a journalist. I mean, there were certainly some journalists who were smart enough to kind of raise their hand and had the LA times that the New York Times hire them. I wasn't one of them. And so what you did was you worked your way up. And so the first place you went to were small local dailies and weeklies. And so my first job was covering was doing the police log for the Daily Pilot, which was the local daily paper out of Costa Mesa, Newport Beach. And then the Daily Pilot bought the Huntington Beach Independent, which was the weekly newspaper in Huntington Beach. And I went over to be the single reporter for the Huntington Beach Independent, which meant that I went to every single city council meeting and every single school board meeting and wrote about every single police thing and high school

Dave Reddy (12:11):

Football.

Fred Vogelstein (12:11):

I didn't do sports,

(12:14):

But it was pretty much everything else. And it was a gas, I mean, and then I moved to New Haven again to kind of work for the local paper there, which I guess meaningfully bigger than the paper that I was working at in Newport and Huntington in New Haven, even though it's a small city, I mean, new Haven has what, 120,000 people in it. But New Haven is a microcosm because of a whole bunch of unique characteristics about New England and New Haven itself. It's kind of a microcosm of a big city. So it has all the problems of New York just on a smaller scale. So as a place to report stories, it was pretty amazing. But it had corruption, it had mafia, it had police brutality, it had drug problem, it had just drug problems out the wazoo. It had obviously town gown issues that exist to this day. He started on Yale.

(13:36):

One of the things I was surprised, well, okay, I'll say two things about that. One of the things I was surprised about when I was there was that how incredibly standoffish Yale was to the rest of the community. So somebody like me who had never been to New Haven but thought, oh my gosh, I'm in the backyard of Yale. I can maybe take some classes there. Wouldn't that be really cool? Or basically told no, unless you're actually been admitted as a degree student, you can't interact, you can't go on campus, you can't interact with anybody at the university at all. And I always found that kind of puzzling, especially because places like Columbia, which is also private or much more engaged with the community, and obviously the uc system out here is very, because it's public, is super accessible.

Dave Reddy (14:32):

Early nineties, I was on a trip home with my girlfriend and her best friend, her best friend lived near New Haven, and we went to a Yale bar, and I clearly remember the best friends, the local saying to both of us, don't tell anybody you don't go to Yale. I was like, okay.

Fred Vogelstein (14:53):

But I loved all that stuff. I mean, I was 25 and it was, there was a certain amount of old world, I don't know, it felt like I was kind of back almost in some days. Some days I felt like I was back two or three generations. What was also just amazing was because of the way the news business worked in those days, most of the people who were working, most of the journalists who were working there, we were all like 25 to 28. And all of us had come from somewhere else, and all of us had actually shown up in New Haven not knowing anybody. And so it became the center of your social life as well. And so one of my colleagues for the first six months was Brian McCrory, who went on to be the Editor-in-Chief of the Boston Globe. I mean, people have gone from there to do all kinds of super interesting things.

Dave Reddy (15:53):

It was a launching ground, and you took a break from writing at least, or at least, well, I guess this isn't a break from writing, but a break from professional journalism. You got a master's at Columbia, and of course most, I've had plenty of people on the show who've gotten a master's in Columbia in journalism, but you got yours in US banking and Soviet economics, which I think hearkens back to your earlier desire to be the Moscow Bureau chief for major paper.

Fred Vogelstein (16:21):

I didn't actually, just to be clear, I didn't get a master's. It was a fellowship actually. So in those days, well, actually it still exists. Starting sometime in the mid eighties, Columbia University, the journalism school started something called the Night Badget Fellowship, which was essentially a year of business school to help educate young journalists about how business worked and to make them better reporters. And so that's what I was doing there. And so I was taking classes. So as a result, it was administered out of the school of journalism. And so technically I'm still an alumni of the Columbia Journalism School, but I really didn't spend any time there. I spent all my time either in what was then called Yuri Hall, which is where the whole business school MBA program was being taught or across the street and the School of International Affairs. But it was the coolest thing, one of the coolest things I've ever done, because basically they say, here's free tuition plus a stipend to live on. Go take whatever you want. I was like, oh my God. So a lot of Badget fellows do stay an extra year and get an MBA. And I didn't to, I actually wanted to go back to work and thought, because the difference between staying and getting your difference between going back to work, which would've been nine months, and getting your MBA, which would've been almost two years, was kind of enormous. So I just didn't feel like taking that much time off.

Dave Reddy (18:14):

Your academic year at Columbia was 19 89, 90, and for those of you who are either young or are not into history, something really important happened that year on November 9th of 89, which was the fall of the Berlin Wall. And so I'm curious that you're thinking about going to Moscow since you're thinking doing Soviet economics. Was that a reason not to go, or did you just end up somewhere else?

Fred Vogelstein (18:41):

I'm saying that only because it led to what I think was probably in retrospect, a mistake. So I had actually planned to go to, so the second semester while I was there, there was some trip to Moscow, there was some go live and work in Moscow for the summer that was being run out of Columbia, the School of International Affairs. And I had signed up for that, and that just seemed like an amazing thing to kind of go do, especially at that time, the Berlin Wall of fallen in November. I can't remember exactly when the Soviet Union fell, but it fell fairly shortly thereafter that

Dave Reddy (19:27):

That's after.

Fred Vogelstein (19:31):

But I got a job and I was frankly insecure enough about myself at the time that I decided to put off the Moscow trip and take the job. And if I were to do it again, I don't think I would've done that. So as it was, I actually, instead of going to Moscow for three weeks, for three months, I went to Berlin and Prague for a couple of weeks where that was itself pretty incredible.

(20:07):

I was in Berlin in mid May of 1990. The wall was still there, the DMZ was still there. A close friend of mine had moved there shortly after graduation. And so he spoke fluent German and had been living there with a woman that he ultimately ended up marrying. So I went to visit and just had what remains one of the most incredible weeks anywhere. It's like imagine it's hard to actually explain to anybody who's never seen the Berlin Wall and the DMZ, what that was like, but it's like, I guess the best to imagine it is take any city block in any city and imagine just leveling something a city block wide, two city blocks wide in any city center around its center, and then putting up a DMZ in walls and barbed wire. And I mean, it was just incredible.

Dave Reddy (21:14):

But just to be clear, for those listening, the wall and the DMZ were there, but they were no longer East Germans were allowed to move back and forth.

Fred Vogelstein (21:24):

And I went back and I went back and forth while we were there. Of course, they still required you to have your passport stamped, but no, when I was there, you could freely move back and forth. And what was incredible was that I got a chance to kind of see East Germany as it really existed, the way that most people probably never got a chance when you went from West Germany to East Germany, it was really going from two entirely different places.

Dave Reddy (22:00):

Remember the Old East Palo Alto before they cleaned it up and East Palo Alto to Palo Alto? I'm sure it's not quite that crazy, or pardon me, I'm sure Palo Alto's not quite that crazy. But I also, I always used to think that, wow, this is quite a change from

Fred Vogelstein (22:16):

What, yeah, Palo Alto, Palo Alto is East Palo Alto definitely was the freeway. The one-on-one freeway was definitely the other side of the tracks

Dave Reddy (22:30):

That one block Whiskey Gulch, which was,

Fred Vogelstein (22:32):

But I was kind used to those kinds of changes. If you grow up in New York City, one of the things that you realize when you grow up in New York City is that you're a block away from being in an entirely different neighborhood. So that's just part of it. The idea, most people grow up in neighborhoods that are super far away from other kinds of neighborhoods. And in New York, everything was on top of each other. So it wasn't so much that it definitely felt like you were going to an entirely different country. The construction looked different, the people looked different, the smells and sights and sounds were different. And you're really talking about something that, I mean, you really felt like you were an entirely different place. Anyway, I'm kind of going on too long about that.

Dave Reddy (23:28):

No, no. It was about the worst ad for communism and the history of communism

Fred Vogelstein (23:33):

Without question. And my kids actually were in Berlin two years ago. My late mother-in-law was from Berlin before the Wall, and they actually went and found her old apartment building, which had been in what would've been East Germany, but there was, when they were there, there was no sign of any of it.

Dave Reddy (24:08):

35 years later, things

Fred Vogelstein (24:09):

Right, well mean. Yeah, a lot happens in 35 years.

Dave Reddy (24:13):

Before we get into crazy stupid tech, what was the first gig you took when you got home from Europe?

Fred Vogelstein (24:19):

I'm embarrassed to say, relatively speaking, I got a job at a place called the American Banker, which actually, which at the time, I mean in retrospect, it just looks like the most ridiculous decision that I've maybe ever made in my life. But at the time, after being in the Night Badget program for two semesters, I'd really become enamored of finance and that world. And while all this was going on in Europe, while communism was falling in Europe, the banking industry in the US was kind of going through its own twists and turns, and the American Banker was pretty well known as a place that you worked a couple of years as a way of getting hired by the Wall Street Journal of the Times Business section. And so being the ambitious turd that I was at the time, I thought, I'll take this job. It's working on this super current topic that everybody's reading about, and it'll help me get hired by the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or some other place, big place that I want to get to.

Dave Reddy (25:35):

You did eventually get to the Journal as well as many other titles, but while I normally go chronologically through Folks' Career, given what you and the legendary Malik have started recently, I wanted to jump ahead and then perhaps come back, tell me about what you're doing with Crazy Stupid Tech, which is a great title, by the way. Is that a takeoff of crazy stupid love, or did you just

Fred Vogelstein (25:57):

Yeah, of course. Very good. Well, I mean, it's a takeoff of crazy stupid love, which gives it sort of obviously a little whimsical side, but there's actually some serious, there's actually something serious about it too, which is that it's an innovation newsletter. And so any entrepreneur who's starting something new understands that for the first 2, 3, 4, 5 years that they're doing that everybody they know is going to say, what you're doing is crazy and stupid. And so that was kind of the root of that, right? I mean, you sort of think about, if you go back, I mean, I've been writing about tech long enough to remember when Jeff Bezos had just started Amazon, when the Google guys had just started Google, and when those guys were just getting going, people really thought that they were nuts and that what they were doing was absolutely crazy and could never succeed.

(27:02):

And same with Facebook. It's actually why entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg and Bezos in particular develop sort of a degree of arrogance in hubris after a while, because aside from the fact that they become multi-billionaires, and that in of itself has a degree as a way of warping your view of the world, but on top of that, if you've started a company and spent five or 10 years listening to super smart people that you ordinarily would've listened to quite carefully tell you that what you're doing is a mistake and you turn out to be right and they turn out to be wrong, your willingness to listen to just about anybody on anything after that starts to be worked a little bit. Because the earliest days of starting a company are super, super, super hard, and you have to be incredibly determined and almost messianic about it in order to kind of get it going.

Dave Reddy (28:15):

So how's it going so far? You and Om obviously both have an incredible pedigree, but it's a newsletter and there's a lot of newsletters out there. It's not a newspaper, it's not a magazine, it's not an online site. So why a newsletter and why now?

Fred Vogelstein (28:28):

Well, I mean, it's not as much of a departure as you might think a look at Substack, right? I mean, Substack has become this enormous thing because lots and lots of journalists in part and other writers have discovered that it can fuel become an entire business and career. And so starting a newsletter for a journalist these days is, I mean, I think we're almost at the point where if you're a journalist and you are not connected to any of the big brands, the question that you are inevitably going to get is when are you going to start a newsletter? Because it's just really become an important part of any mid-career and late career journalist's career especially. So we like to think of, we don't think of ourselves necessarily as writers versus big magazine writers as much as we just think of ourselves as columnists writing about innovation in technology and the fact that we're at this amazing and interesting inflection point because of ai, but it's going much better than I thought it was going to go. Honestly, om probably thinks it's going exactly as he predicted because om, I mean, for me, it's kind of a new thing, but om, when you think about it, om created one of the first newsletters,

Dave Reddy (30:17):

Gigo

Fred Vogelstein (30:18):

And technology,

(30:19):

And actually, it's how I got to know him a little bit. I mean, when I was one of Silicon Valley's fortune correspondence, and he was one of the writers for Business 2.0, this is like 25 years ago, and his office was next to mine. And so I actually got to hang out with him and watch him kind of get giga own going and watch him grow it. And it was really something to behold. So we'd stayed friends for a long time, and then we kind of got into an argument about something not serious, more just like he likes to poke it, wired for what he says is losing its way. And so he did that, and I kind of sent him a note going, oh, come on. It's like, you're just not making any sense at all here. And so we met in South Park and had a good laugh about it, but we also realized that we both had, there was something very much in common with where both of us were.

(31:34):

We thought we met in South Park and realized that we actually had something in common that we both wanted to do together. And so that's where it grew out of. We both realized after kind of chewing through where we agreed and where we didn't agree about what wired should be covering versus what wired shouldn't be covering, we realized that two things, one, we're at this amazing inflection point in the development of technology that's akin to the period after the iPhone came out, or for that matter, the period after the first internet browser came out 35 years ago. And so we're on the verge of realignment of industries and ways of thinking about the future that are going to be as big as the realignment that grew out of those two other developments.

(32:43):

But we also realized that the innovation part of that whole world wasn't actually being covered all that much because the coverage of big tech was sucking a lot of air out of the room. And all of that is absolutely appropriate. And all of that makes total sense. I mean, we're talking about the five or six most powerful richest companies on the planet. Mainstream media needs to be writing about what they're doing, holding them to account, asking them really tough questions and doing all that. But at the same time, by definition, that means that it's very, very hard for them to do that. And at the same time, also focus on writing about all the interesting innovations that are happening in Silicon Valley right now because of artificial intelligence. And we're not just talking about sort of a new product out of Google. We're talking about earth shattering changes in the way medicine, healthcare is delivered and a hugely rapid increase in the way we discover and test medicines.

(34:08):

I mean, biotech and biotech and tech have lived in these sort of two parallel universes for a generation, and the falling price of genetic testing has merged them because essentially you're taking bodily fluids and digitizing them by running them through an aluminum machine. Or the point is that these two things they've operate, biotech, biotech and technology have operated in parallel tracks for a generation. And the sequencing of the falling price of sequencing, the human genome has essentially allowed Moore's law and the falling price of storage and bandwidth to all suddenly act on all of what's going on in the world of biotech. And when you stop and think about what goes on in the world of medicine, what is medicine? It's trial and error with notes. I mean, that sounds super glib, but it's not really meant to be super glib. I mean, if you look at the history of medicine, it is, let's try this and see how it works, and let's keep track of what happens when we do this.

(35:33):

And that way when we to do something like it again, we can actually go back over here and look at this study and go, actually, we shouldn't go in that direction because this is what happened over here. We should go in this other direction. My only point is that medicine is this trial and error process. What does AI do? It allows you to speed up the trial and error process in exponential ways. And so all of a sudden your ability to discover new drugs and new therapies and new ideas goes through the roof. And so there's that. There's what's happening with blockchain and its ability to help us solve the issues of identity online, what's going to happen to the big social networks. We all sort of operate under the assumption that the lock-in that all these social networks have on us is going to go on forever.

(36:40):

But I'm starting to see, for example, early signs that new technologies are starting to emerge that are going to actually allow us to break those bonds. Well, when you stop and think about what happens to Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter and Snapchat and TikTok and all the social networks out there, when you start to think about what happens when they don't have any lock-in over your usage, where basically you are the person that controls the social graph, where you go from place to place to place to place with your social graph and get to use it in however way you want to use it in any of these social networks, that changes the game entirely. So I think we're at a super interesting time. And so that's part of the reason why we decided to kind of dig in. I'm not entirely sure where it's going to lead.

(37:42):

Certainly Wired was smart enough in the Wired started in 19 93, 19 94, and they started with the understanding that the internet revolution, that the internet was going to be this incredible revolution, and they built this incredible magazine and publication that was trying to tell the story about that. I don't know that we're, I think it would be presumptuous to assume that we're going to be able to do something that enormous so early in the process, but the same things that drove the folks, the folks that started Wired are certainly similar to the stuff that, the stuff that's driving us right now.

Dave Reddy (38:26):

I was going to ask you how you defined innovation, but I'm pretty sure you just did. It is probably one of the most overused words in the Valley. I, I'm curious.

Fred Vogelstein (38:38):

Yes, it is.

Dave Reddy (38:40):

And so let me ask you this way. Looking back at your career, the Journal, US News, fortune Wired, the information Wired again, how has the newsroom changed? And I guess the answer might be that there's no longer a newsroom. Do you work remotely?

Fred Vogelstein (38:58):

Yes. I mean, I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer that question only because I haven't worked in a traditional daily newspaper newsroom in years.

Dave Reddy (39:15):

You were remote before Remote was cool.

Fred Vogelstein (39:18):

Well, no, I mean, I worked in the wired newsroom when I was there, and actually intentionally worked, intentionally did not work remotely because I thought that physically, I thought that humans physically working next to each other generate better stories than people at the other end of phone lines or zoom lines. And I would argue that two of the cover stories that I did during my stint, during my stint at Wired would not have actually happened had I not physically been had a desk in the newsroom. But the world is a different place, and even in the past four years, and so I can't begin to imagine how I'm probably not a great person to give you that arc. I think that I have to say I'm a little puzzled by the interest in young journalists in not working in a newsroom and for that matter, the interest of young workers of any kind, not working in an office because so much of my professional development and so much of the people that my early friends actually grew out of being physically in that space.

(40:49):

But the world is an entirely different place now with different rules and different technologies. And at a certain point, people like me are just dinosaurs that way. I mean, it's a little bit, I sometimes think a little bit about how, in terms of how you have to be careful about overstating this stuff. When I was a parent, my kids are now 23, but when I was raising them, I really made a big to-do about teaching them how to kind of tell time on a traditional clock, the ones with hands. And as a result, they might be the only, each of them are probably the only ones among their friends who actually knows how to tell time that way. And guess what? It doesn't matter at all. I mean, it's a completely useless skill. I still wear a watch because I'm a person of a certain generation. But if you've got an iPhone in your pocket, why do you need to watch it? Why do you need to actually know what the hands say? So anyway, I think we can interpret the way things used to be versus the way things are in a way that is misguided too.

Dave Reddy (42:12):

Well, let's talk about a couple important evolutions. You already talked about ai. How are you and OM using AI at crazy stupid tech?

Fred Vogelstein (42:20):

Not that much yet. I mean, I just did a piece on Notebook LA out of Google, and it's, it's already starting to have an impact on my workflow. I mean, I think it's one of the most interesting pieces of tech that I've used, and I think it makes me smarter. And so actually, as far as I'm concerned, the more the merrier when it comes to AI and its capabilities. I mean, so one of the reasons I was so enamored of what Notebook LM was doing is that I feel like it makes the front of my brain a hundred times bigger. I mean, if you think about, I mean, this is a super simplistic way of talking about it, but if you think about the back of your brain, the place as the hard drive that stores all the stuff that you've learned over your life and the front of your brain as the working memory, where you're loading all this stuff, where you're loading all this stuff from the hard drive into working memory and ram, I sort of feel like AI makes the front of my brain 10 times larger.

(43:39):

It's like going from four megabits, four gigabits of ram to 40 gigabits of ram. And so from that perspective, it's kind of an amazing thing. I mean, what I really want it to do, for example, is on my own computer, not in the cloud somewhere. I wouldn't feel comfortable having it out there like that. But what I'd love is for AI to essentially create the large language model of me to essentially take all the hard drives and all my emails and all the various things that I've thought over the course of the past 25 years and upload them all into its brain and be able to kind of spit out stuff that I've forgotten. Right? I mean, when you think about what I do as a journalist, I'm essentially in the idea creation business. And if you're in the idea creation business, you're looking for where certain vectors, collage, but we're only as good as what we can load into the front of our brain in terms of understanding, in terms of plotting those connectors where those vectors will collide well. So if AI can digest everything that's in on my various hard drives, it can probably surface stuff that I've forgotten about many years ago and probably surface trends that I once knew about that are forgotten about. So I mean, in that respect, I'm super interested in it. I don't see us using it. I don't see us, we haven't really talked that much about using it in the production process.

(45:29):

We are actually still focused on producing stories in the same way that we always have. But I think that if we can control it, it's got to be a good thing. It's going to be a good thing. It's obviously a big if, right? I mean, I think obviously one of the things that we have to do is we have to figure out how to keep it from stealing copyrights of those who are, we don't want it stealing our work. We also need to make sure that there's enough transparency so that when publishers decide to run stories written by ai, they actually say, this story was created by AI rather than actually pretending they were generated by people. But as journalists, there's constant tension between content output and quality and accuracy. And in fact, when you think about all the various journalism scandals that have happened over the course of the past generation, those have all been driven by the fact that we all want to produce more than our brains can actually produce. And so some people try to cut corners as a way of getting ahead professionally. So I actually see AI as allowing all of us to be more productive and produce more. We just have to figure out how to control it. And the thing that actually gives me some comfort actually, is the fact that the people who invented most of the AI that we're using are the ones who are the most concerned about it. And so I think to the degree that the administration in DC doesn't wreck everything, that might be helpful.

Dave Reddy (47:14):

Well, let's go there. So in the past few weeks, the shift, and understandably by almost everybody in tech media is covering Musk, covering Trump, covering dc, covering the executive orders, covering the potential deregulation of AI Bitcoin. Have you, how long do you expect this to last? Is this going to be a few more weeks, or is this going to be the entire administration?

Fred Vogelstein (47:38):

I have no idea. Anyone who tells you they do know is lying.

Dave Reddy (47:45):

Donald myself does not know.

Fred Vogelstein (47:47):

I'd like to think that the recklessness with which Trump and Elon are pursuing their goals will upset so many people that there'll be enough pushback to slow them down. But we've never seen anything like this before. I think probably the first test, and I think it's going on really as we speak, and certainly over the course of the next week or two, is going to be how the current administration responds to the various court injunctions that have been issued. Because if we get to a point where we've got federal judges issuing injunctions saying, you, the federal government are in violation of this law, this law, this law, this law, and you need to stop doing what you're doing until we can have a hearing and chew through this. If we get to the point where Musk and Trump basically give them the finger, that's going to be super complicated.

(48:58):

I mean, that's really a spot where nobody has ever been before, and I'm not at all sure where we go from there, right? I mean, what do you do when the President of the United States says, make me, I mean, I wish I could tell you that I knew I wish I had some wisdom in terms of how I thought we were going to respond to that, but that's a pretty dangerous place. And I mean, maybe it'll get so crazy that the Republicans will finally come to their senses and say, enough, but that's only going to happen if it starts to become clear that they're all going to lose their jobs as a result of this. And so I guess that's a really long-winded way of saying, I have no idea. What I do know is that what're not going to cover it. I mean, one of the things when there are just two of you, you have to pick your spots. And there's a zillion people covering this who have been covering it for years and years and years and years, and literally armies from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, and it's like there is very, very little that we can bring to the table by jumping into that.

(50:30):

And I don't think the people who subscribe to us want us to go there. Anyway,

Dave Reddy (50:34):

So after that very serious question. I will finish with a fun question as I always do. Berkeley or New York City, can you choose?

Fred Vogelstein (50:44):

Oh, I think the answer is yes, lived here. I've lived in Berkeley for 25 years, and I certainly have moments where I go back to New York where my brother still lives and my father still lives and think that it would be fun to live there, especially now that our kids are grown, and we're definitely trying to spend more time there. But I went for a bike ride in the Berkeley Hills yesterday, and you don't get to do that in New York City in February. So there's a lot to recommend it out here. I mean, without question, New York. New York is a way more vibrant, diverse, interesting city than San Francisco. I know that they're going to be lots and lots of people in the Bay Area that are going to push back and tell me, I don't know what I'm talking about, but it's like San Francisco has 800,000 people and New York is 8 million people, and there's just no comparison. But on top of that, on top of that, it's hard to explain the vibrancy that exists in a place like Midtown Manhattan during lunch hour to anyone if you've not actually been there. And that can be really annoying and really hard to live with, but it's also kind of exciting. And so I guess the short answer to the question is I guess I'm going to try to do both. I'll let you know if I succeed,

Dave Reddy (52:26):

Which is a fair answer. Fred, thanks so much for your time. We could probably talk for three hours and still have interesting things to talk about. I forgot to ask you real quick, you ever get to Moscow?

Fred Vogelstein (52:36):

No.

Dave Reddy (52:37):

Wow. Okay. Well, that's on your bucket list, my friend.

Fred Vogelstein (52:39):

Yes. Well, although right now, maybe I should wait. Excellent point.

Dave Reddy (52:49):

Let's hope the window opens up again soon. Fred, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate lots of fun.

Fred Vogelstein (52:53):

Thanks. Talk to you soon.

Dave Reddy (52:55):

I'd like to thank you all for listening today, and once again, a big thank you to our guest, Fred Vogelstein of Crazy Stupid Tech. Join us next month when we interview yet another member of the B2B Tech Top 200. In the meantime, if you've got feedback on today's podcast or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valet Marketing and how we identified the B2B tech Top 200, be sure to drop me an email at d ready@bigvalley.co. That's DRE double DY at BigValley, all one word.co. No M. You can also email the whole team at Pressing matters@bigvalley.co. Once again, thanks for listening. And as always, think big.