Hello and welcome to the traffic episode of Slate Money, your guide to the

business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. Emily Peck of

Axios is also here. Hi. We're joined by Elizabeth Spires, the editor of Gorker

amongst other things, or one of the former editors of Gorker. Hello. And we are

joined by Ben Smith. Ben Smith, welcome. Thank you for having me. Ben, you are

joining us on an auspicious day. We have all manner of median news in the world. We

obviously are going to talk about Tucker Carlson on this show. We're going to

talk about Buzzfeed News, which closed down. Buzzfeed News was started by you. You,

the former editor of Buzzfeed News, you have had a storied career at various

different media outlets. But what are you running now and introduce yourself? I'm

the editor-in-chief of Semaphora, a new news organization dedicated to

transparent journalism and to trying to help people navigate this very

complicated moment when it's very difficult to figure out who you can trust. And I'm

sort of caught between the moments because I've just finished writing this book. What

is the book? The book is called Traffic, and it's essentially the origin story of

this digital age, or at least of the digital age that just came and went, the

social media age. So we're going to talk about the book and all of the little

tentacles that have come out from it over the past week. It's all coming up on

Slate Money. Have you ever thought, oh, this water is too wet? Or this beach is too

sandy. My name's Christine. And my name is Sandy. And where the host of beach

to sandy water to wet. A podcast where we do dramatic readings of the most

wild and off-the-wall reviews on the internet. We find the funniest, real

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