Maxwell Meyer on Arena Magazine's spy-and-space issue 007 and the business of high-trust print media

Let me tell you about Labelbox. RL environments, voice, robotics, eval, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading teams and AI teams. And we have uh Max Meyer from Arena Mag in the reream waiting room. Let's bring him in to you get off your dome. How you doing, Max?

Hey guys, how are you? I'm great.

Where do you think Warner Brothers should land? Are you are you Netflix? Oh, is there going to be a Darkhorse bidder?

Yeah.

Tell us.

I can't I I I I can't comment on any possible bids by the Intergalactic Media Corporation of America. I'd love to see.

But but but hey, you know, maybe may maybe maybe maybe Paramount should um should should should should should look at other assets in the media space. You never you never you never know.

Yeah, I I I I could imagine a a DC Comics Arena magazine crossover episode, Batman, Superman. Uh I believe uh James Bond is with Amazon now, but tell me about the latest uh edition of Arena Magazine because Spy, correct?

Um yeah, so from from the very beginning, we decided to we decided to give the issues three digits each. Okay. Just to account for, you know, centuries worth of uh quarterly magazine space. So issue 001 002 and so it happened that our seventh issue is uh issue 007. Uh and so you know I didn't I I didn't I didn't I didn't think we could fill it all with espionage. So we sort of added like space as like a secondary theme as it turns out. Uh

space

space espionage. Yeah. It's like arena magazine space opera espionage satellites radars. Uh So much of the uh intelligence collection these days is actually being done from orbit and not using sort of the the traditional human to human human to human methods. Uh and it turned out really well.

What's your favorite uh spy story, real or fictional?

Oh gosh, some of the uh some of the stuff that that the Israeli MSAD was doing in like the 60s and 70s is pretty crazy. I mean, they um Ikeman, who was a Nazi war criminal, was living in Argentina after World War II. His son went on a date with someone who was like, "Is this Adolf Ikeman?" and turns him into the MSAD. They go to Argentina. They kidnap him, dress him up as a flight attendant, drug him, put him on a plane to Jerusalem, and then put him on trial. uh uh uh uh you know, some of some of some of some of that some of that stuff from the 60s and 70s is like the most daring uh you know, in intelligence operations. Um

the Bin Laden raid.

I've always been a fan of the stockset story. I I always thought that was so so interesting in like the modern technology uh world of like dropping I think they dropped USB sticks with a virus in the parking lot. Someone picked them up out of curiosity, plugged it in, and that jumped the air gap network because the the computers inside the facility were not connected to the internet. So, there was no way to hack them remotely. So, you had to just get someone to accidentally plug in the wrong USB stick.

Yeah. I I mean, Hezbollah was purchasing explosive laden pagers just because they thought they were getting like a great discount from this from this from this Hungarian uh company. Uh so,

so yeah. uh what what what's the intersection with uh Arena Mag's usual topics of conversation? Are there American defense tech companies that are highlighted like what where else did you on this?

So, one of the stories and we're going to put this out probably probably like 10 days from now. Super cool company called Umbra down in Santa Barbara. They build uh they build synthetic aperture radars which is actually part of what I did in in school for geoysics and whatnot, you know. Basically, these are like incredibly sophisticated radars on satellites that can image the whole Earth, day and night, 24 hours a day. They can see through clouds. Uh, and the resolutions are getting like smaller and smaller. Um, and so we always have American startups, American companies in the magazine. We've got a good amount of like essay and historical content as well. Uh, and I think that espionage sort of secrets, uh, spying is a is a topic that sort of

Give me what kind of resolution are we talking about? Like it would would Umbra or a competitor be able to tell me like how many fingers I'm holding up on a given day if I just hel it's it's not that low. I think their I think their record is uh 16 cm, which is like this. The way that I described it is um they they they they released a few years ago uh a photo of the old Dole pineapple plantation in in Hawaii. Um and at at 25 cm resolution, you can see individual pineapple plants.

You probably certain smaller pineapples would be too small to see with that radar or whatnot.

Yeah. So you're seeing cars, not license plates.

Yeah. Yeah. No, you wouldn't. and and and and there wouldn't be anything about a license plate that like would reflect a radar or whatnot. Really, you're looking to resolve objects. Uh penguins, that's a good one. Uh you can see you can you can very difficult to stay on an ice shelf and count penguins, but we're very interested in in

there's a penguin out there that's like I know that I'm being tracked. I know I'm being tracked. I can't prove it, but I know I can just

No, I don't. Uh yes, the the Herzog penguin could be tracked by radar these days, but you know, the resolutions have gotten have gotten so good over the course of the last decade that there are all sorts of things that you can that you can do that you can do today. Most of them will probably never know about because because the people because the people doing it are the Central Intelligence Agency, National Geospatial Intelligence, uh and and and the Army. Um uh but yeah uh you know there's all sorts of crazy stuff there's all sorts of crazy stuff in space these days and whether it's radars uh extremely complex cameras listening devices there's a lot of interest uh and and so many of them are secret

are you bullish on data centers in space

um I don't have a strong I don't have a I don't have a strong opinion about it I think it's possible that you you you have to put some stuff up there because of like politics uh in a country like in a country in a country like in a country like the US there's not like a big difference between trying to send them to space or or just sort of places where there aren't local politicians who can stop it like space doesn't have like a city council

anywhere where there's like a city council is going to be a risk.

Yeah. Yeah. We talked to a company called Panthalosa that is doing uh tidal energy harvesting. So it's like basically the size of a container ship or a cruise ship but turned vertically in the ocean. And then as it goes around Antarctica and as the tides bob it uses that to generate electricity uh which then can be used for anything but uh bitcoin mining was the big uh topic dur years ago. Now it's AI uh inference. And there's a lot of other places where I think there might be stranded energy that uh might be easier to maintain, still very difficult, but uh available and probably less regulated.

Yeah, the Dutch were very interested years ago in these like using the motion of the tides. Um

it's sort of sort of always just an alternative to the thing that is cheap and always works, which is firing up new natural gas plants. But when you have like political equations to solve local politicians, subsidies, then there are going to be all these crazy that there's again there's no one to come and protest you while you're while you're sailing around Antarctica. Uh whereas like you try to build a data center in uh in New Jersey and all hell breaks loose. So you have to really really go to the really go to the ends of the earth. We were debating this uh and sort of going back and forth on the New Jersey uh protest combined with uh Trump's comments at the State of the Union about companies being he didn't even say mandated. He sort of said like invited to build their own power plants. And so I'm I'm interested to hear your take on how well do you think that will be received? Because a lot of the protesters might say, "Well, I didn't want a data center, but I definitely don't want a a data center plus a natural gas plant. So, this actually makes me worse off. But then there are some people that might say, "Hey, if you're going to do solar and uh you know, something wind uh that actually offsets my concern, which was that energy prices would rise in my town."

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, um I don't remember whether it was Microsoft or Amazon, but one of the two has sort of proposed taking over Three Mile Island, the old uh the old the old the old the old nuclear plant. I I I I don't think it's a coincidence that crazy activists will show up to protest both data centers and nuclear power plants. And so to them, there's sort of nothing worse than generating more energy and then using it for some sort of grand industrial purpose. I understand the political economy between of of people being worried about the um data center demand influencing prices, but but it's not actually true. And you just have to look at the map of California versus Virginia. Virginia is the data center capital of the United States basically. And it has um utility prices that are more or less in line with where you would want to be. California have have gone up massively over the over the over the past few years. And it it doesn't take long to investigate why. It's because they're shutting down nuclear. It's because they're making it difficult to do to do cheap energy. um you know lowering prices across the board, affordability, you really can't achieve it by just letting markets work. Almost all of the so-called affordability options are um in fact going to increase prices. Uh es especially when you know politicians are the ones coming up with this is how we're going to make energy more affordable by by by by by forcing all of these new rules or whatnot. No, it's not going it's not going to work. When when you have like this massive industrial thing that's taking place

if it can create like a massive supply boost, then who's going to benefit from that glut? It's going to be all of the consumers who also want to use natural gas power or whatnot. Uh and there's all this and there's all this increased supply.

How are you thinking about Arena Mag and the balance between contributors, full-time writers, researchers? like how are you designing the shape of the newsroom?

Um, okay. So, we so the so the latest one is the biggest issue ever. It's 128 pages. We we used over 10,000 pounds of paper in printing it. Um, you know,

we we have great contributors. We want people to send us We want people to send us more. I

I would say, you know, at the beginning, we had to go and sort of hunt down every single article that we wanted. We're very lucky to get a lot more submissions these days. Um, but the truth is is that, you know, we have a lot of readers who actually like read the articles in print and don't want to get spammed, you know, 10 or 12 times a day with new articles. And so, Arena is like a high-end media business where people pay us to leave them alone in a certain way where they love the quarterly magazine. They actually keep it. Uh, it looks great on a coffee table. People people keep it for their offices. Um, and we're working on some other sort of uh high-end printed products that have a mix of contributors, so to speak, and and other and other ways and other ways to put things together. Um, I don't think it's going to be a, you know, a 100 person newsroom.

Yeah. Leatherbound graipedia.

How about that?

Yeah. Yeah. I I I I thought um I I ran I ran I ran the numbers and you know depending on the type size I think there's I think there's some way where you could publish the Bitcoin ledger as like a as like a law code or whatnot. Uh it would fill like an entire wall. Um but you know actually I I'll I'll tee something. We're going to be announcing the very first

Arena Books coffee table book over the course of the next few weeks. I I I just got the first box of them on a plane from Europe. Uh, you know, printed on Italian paper. Bound bound to be bound to be very nice. Um,

it's going to be

unlike anything that people have ever seen, I think. Uh, and and and and hopefully, you know, look look great on coffee table books in the in the world in starters

or coffee table books. You'll be you'll be on the top of the stack.

You could you could stack them. Yes. Uh uh um yeah. So,

well, congratulations. Jord, do you have anything else?

Uh I did want if you have 60 more seconds to get your take on uh how you think how you think AI impacts uh original reporting

and storytelling because in my view, it's potentially great for an arena mag because there's so many more contributors that'll think, hey, I have this thing that I want to talk about. I don't really have an outlet or a platform myself or maybe I do but I want to share it in print and I can produce a great story in a much less time even if it's like heav you know hopefully uh heavily heavily written by themselves but um and and we've talked with other like uh plenty of other folks where I think that uh even in it feels like today an AI no matter how good the voice agent is if an AI calls you and you don't know who the person is and they're just kind of trying to mine you for information. There's not going to be a lot of information flow, which means that I think that great journalists and storytellers will have great uh great jobs uh long long into the future. But how are you thinking about it?

I long for the day when the AIs are actually a better writer than I am, but it it hasn't happened yet. I I I'm honored to be scraped by the AIS so that my like voice will live on. you know, I'm a super user of all of these platforms for automating all of the stuff that makes the enterprise like difficult to do, which is sometimes um you know, dealing with with complicated workflows and research and whatnot. Um I think that there is something around um certain sort of like newswire style things that could be automated super effectively where if you have like a newsroom of people where there's like even like 20 minute delays or whatnot that could be uh that that that could that could that could be that could be that could be improved by like uh immediate algor algorith algorithmic stuff but but I think that um as the like amount of high of lowquality content on the internet goes up, people are going to look for things that they things that they trust. And it doesn't necessarily mean print. For us, print is like a very good uh um you know, place of trust where the fact that we're actually taking several weeks in a giant factory with a bunch of paper to double triple check everything, it's like it's a it's a level of care that goes into it that uh reminds people that like things can be done by humans in this really dazzling way. And of course, you know, there's tons of clawed co-work and other stuff going on beneath the surface, but we wouldn't want to let that touch the writing if people are going to be paying for it. They should be able to get that stuff uh for free on the internet and and pay for highquality stuff.

Yeah. But at the same time, at the same time, I feel like the value, what you're saying, in some ways, the value of an editor goes up a lot because there's infinite content and an editor is deciding in this case with Arena what actually makes it to print.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a bunch of us a bunch of us at Arena were we're all editors at the at the stamp at the Stanford Review. And so, it's like you learn how to editing is definitely a editing is definitely a skill in itself. and being able to like point out why someone else's writing is bad, then you can point out how your own writing is bad and that's how you actually get good. Uh I I would say one of the thesis around like wanting people to contribute to Arena and compiling these issues is that like while it's a great thing that anyone can just sort of post out there, there's a reason why like the legacy institutions that have super high professional standards are extremely effective. like people Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, even the ones that people dislike for ideological reasons, like they have a seriousness to them that makes their messaging super effective. And a lot of that is because they're extremely effective editors. Um, I I will say Arena probably invests slightly less in copy editing compared to some other institutions. Uh, I think it's a sign of life that we occasionally find typos in the print magazine, but we spend an inordinate amount of time actually editing to make it good. Yeah. Uh, uh, when people pay you for something, you know, there there's an old joke. Boris Johnson, the former prime minister of the of the United Kingdom, used to be a news editor, and he would apparently tell his staff when something was bad. Um, you know, the readers pay us. we don't pay them. Uh and so you when the readers are paying us, it's got to be good. Uh and and there's a lot of stuff that is like assisted by AI or where the research has been helped with it. Uh transcript editing is like a super helpful one now. And like I can walk into like a a company with my iPad and record 5 hours of interviews. And both Claude and Grock are now very good at taking all of those and doing sort of very light style edits or fixing the sort of verbal pauses or whatnot, which would which would previously take me like many many hours to do. So that's an example of like my job's like a lot easier, but people are paying us for like a high quality product. And so we want to make it as uh as good as possible both in the writing and especially in the in the art as well. We love our non-reading customers. You know, there's a there there are a lot of people who love Arena who who haven't read a single article.

That's the coffee table and read a speech.

That's that's exact that's

Arena. You don't you don't you can just look at the pictures.

Uh well, you can find it at arenaag.com. You can subscribe to the print edition for $99 a year. It's an absolute steal.

I really think it's I really think it's a steal. I was telling people the other day, you know, I I I spent three months in an attic in the in the Texas summer going through different like paper samples, choosing the choosing the exact size. Um

I think I nailed it. It's uh

Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing this with us. We will talk to you and I love I love the vest.

The vest is fantastic.

Every media man needs a look. I bought 12 sweater vests on eBay earlier this year. Uh uh uh and a thing and and and it's working.

It's working. Well, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

Arena.

Goodbye.

Great to see you, Max.

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