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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American power, politics and society.

On each episode, I will talk to an American expert or an expert on America

about something that's going on in America in 2023. I am delighted to be joined by Ben Smith,

who is the co-founder of Semaphore, which is a very exciting new digital media company.

And he's also an extremely distinguished journalist in many ways, and the author of a new book,

which is called Traffic, Genius, Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral.

Ben, congratulations on the book. I've just read it. It's fascinating.

And welcome to Americana. Thanks. And thanks for having me. You've called it an origin story of

sort of digital media. And I think it is. But I thought I'd start by asking you, what's the

origin story of this book? How long has it been gestating? How long did it take you to write?

And why did you write it? Yeah, you know, I was at the New York Times writing the media column during the

pandemic. I started in March of 2020. And I guess that fall, you know, possibly because we all

had a bit of time on our hands. You know, I was thinking about how it felt like an era, you know, the end of an era,

like this whole era was coming to an end.

And maybe that was a little self-serving, like my era of working for weird internet

startups had come to an end.

But, you know, but so it just sort of got me thinking about like, wait, well, so where did,

you know, where did it begin like what was this whole thing we just lived through in media well i think that's that's what i enjoyed most about the book it's

it's sort of there's a bit of memoir in there but it's uh it's almost a sort of cinematic story about

this crazy emergence of digital media and it focuses on nick Nick Denton and Jonah Peretti. And it's, I mean,

what I thought was very interesting is the way that they are, they are the sort of different sides of

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