Welcome to another bonus episode of the Tech Mem Ride Home, this time with someone that you

hear all the time on the podcast because I quote from them all the time.

Ben Smith is the founder of Semaphore, which you know I've been quoting from a lot over the

last few months.

He's been a New York Times columnist.

He was a long time head muckity muck at

BuzzFeed News. He was at political real heads. Remember him as a New York politics blogger, but he has a new book out called Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and The Delusion in the

billion dollar race to go viral. Ben, welcome to the pod. It's been long overdue.

Thanks so much for having me. I didn't realize we It's been long overdue.

Thanks so much for having me. I didn't realize we went that far back on the internet actually

to the New York politics stuff.

Okay, well, okay.

I told you offline that I thought that this book I knew you had a book coming on and I thought it was maybe some vague

Thought leadership thingy you know no, no, but I'm like a thought follower right no no told Nelai that this is a book about our

childhoods and dude, listen, this is very near and dear to my heart because I've

always been based here in New York City and so you know like I

moved here in 2002 for the first time so even though I've been in tech like digital

media is sort of how I experienced the tech industry here in the early 2000s like my startups were always

non-media plays but you know my friends my colleagues were all in digital media so you know I

was listening to the the podcast with with Kafka that you did with Denton and Jonah Peretti and you all kept calling it a scene but like it was it was it was there was so much energy people were doing so many interesting things like so let's start there. Let's describe the scene the golden era of digital media that this book describes.

Yeah, and you know, it's funny.

I mean, it's a scene I wasn't totally part of.

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