Marshall and Saga here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

Quick note before we dive in, Saga and I are about to record the next edition of our supercast

subscriber exclusive asp anything. Discussion episode, a little later this Thursday afternoon.

So if you are a subscriber, go to realignment.supercast.com to submit any additional questions or

points for us to discuss. And if you are not a subscriber and would like to get all of our exclusive

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Onto the episode. Every once in a while, a book comes out of just incredible timing.

The realignment's previous best guest timing world went to Chris Miller's chip war,

the quest to dominate the world's most critical technology that came out last October.

And that was right as the semiconductor debate discussion,

Ritzchich Peak after the signing of the chip act. Today's guest Ben Smith has Chris Miller beat.

Got some big news in the media space, laid to this topic obviously, the closing of BuzzFeed news

and the fact that Vice declared Arizona's path to declaring bankruptcy this week. Ben's new book

is Traffic, Genius, rivalry and delusion in the billion dollar race to go viral. It's all about

how digital media from BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post to Vice and Gokker, crashed and burned.

Ben is the editor-in-chief of Semaphore and was the former media columnist at the New York Times,

while also previously serving as the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed news. So he's the perfect

guest to cover this topic. You can find traffic and plenty of other great guest books at our

bookshop store in the show notes. A huge thanks to the foundation for a mega innovation for supporting

our work. Ben Smith, welcome to the Reliment. Thanks so much for having me. It's good to see you, man.

Good to see you. Congrats on your independent new media venture. I wrote about you when you were

still working for big media. You were the original people. It's not the overly generous to the

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