AG1 built a billion-dollar brand in large part by tapping into the fitness and wellness podcast and YouTube markets. Recently, AG1’s founder, Chris Ashenden, resigned after a decades-old real estate scam in his native New Zealand came to light. While Chris has mentioned it in passing, he’s always claimed to have paid full reparations for his crime—and it was a crime.
Turns out that he hasn’t paid it all, as uncovered by New Zealand journalists Jonathan Milne and Mike Wesley-Smith. They join Derek to discuss their year-and-a-half long investigation that resulted in a billionaire founder leaving one of the most well-known supplements brands in the world. They also talk about why journalism still matters in a world seemingly run by billionaires.
Show Notes
AG1 founder Chris Ashenden resigns amid scrutiny of NZ criminal history
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The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still drink AG1 once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs.
I take a lot of vitamins.
I take athletic greens.
That's one thing I take, but I take a whole suite of different vitamins.
AG1, the company formerly known as Athletic Greens, built a billion-dollar brand in large part by tapping into the fitness and wellness podcast and YouTube markets.
As you just heard, Andrew Huberman and Joe Rogan love it.
Well, they're paid millions of dollars to say that they love it on air.
And they're not the only podcasters to claim that AG1 is the foundation of health, but they're certainly the biggest names.
Here's the thing about being chronically online.
It shields you from real-world responsibilities.
And that's kind of the focus of today's episode.
I'm Derek Barris, and this is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or you can just grab our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions, As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
And the role of media is also going to come up in my conversation today with Jonathan Milne and Mike Wesley-Smith.
Jonathan is the managing editor of Newsroom Pro, one of New Zealand's top online news publications.
Mike Wesley-Smith is an independent investigative journalist who is working on several investigative podcasts for Newsroom.
And one of those podcasts is called Powder Keg, and that's what we're going to be discussing today.
If you're a regular listener of this podcast, you've probably heard me critically cover AG1 in the past.
You might have read the New York Magazine expose of Andrew Huberman earlier this year, in which I was quoted critically discussing AG1. Shortly after that story came out, I was contacted by Mike, who, it turns out,
had been working with Jonathan for over a year on an investigation into AG1's founder, New Zealand native Chris Ashenden, and his history in that country running a real estate scam that cost a number of low-income residents a lot of money.
Despite Chris's claims that he paid the court-ordered reparations, As Jonathan and Mike discover in the course of their investigation, he has not done that.
I'll link to both the newsroom story and the podcast in the show notes.
I don't want to give everything away.
You should really listen to it.
But I want to make these three points before we get to this interview.
Shortly after the story broke, Chris Ashenden resigned as CEO of AG1. Jonathan didn't start out by trying to take down a billionaire.
He actually wanted to write a business story about the success of a Kiwi building a billion-dollar brand.
But it turned out that AG1's shady marketing and press tactics tipped him off that something else was going on here, and his spidey sense kicked in and he started really digging into Ashenden's past.
Second, I'm interviewed in Powderkeg, so I do have some personal involvement.
I've really been enjoying the podcast series, so outside of my involvement, I truly appreciate the detailed investigative work that they put in.
Now finally, after you hear details about this story and the wild ride that Jonathan and Mike were a part of, my last question is about the role of journalism in a world that distrusts media more and more.
And yeah, there's a lot of clickbait, attention-grabbing, storytelling, cosplaying as journalism out there.
There's a number of propaganda outlets masquerading as doing journalistic work and...
And there are just influencers who've never taken a media course or don't understand what reporting entails calling themselves journalists.
But there's also a lot of important work in media happening right now, like really important work.
As I've often commented to people who talk about the shady mainstream media, if you dislike journalism, just wait until we don't have any left to hold those in power accountable.
As The Guardian recently reported, Donald Trump is already suing outlets he has personal grudges against, like The New York Times and CBS and Penguin Random House, for billions of dollars.
And if we're not careful as a society, soon all we're going to have left is state media.
If you read Project 2025, that is sort of a goal.
Jonathan and Mike did not intend for Chris to resign.
This really isn't a story about taking down a billionaire, but it is a story about holding a man who ends up becoming a billionaire in part by screwing over poor people coming to terms with his past actions, and, I'm guessing, being held accountable by AG1's directors and investors.
I mean, look, Chris, as a billionaire, he's going to be fine.
As for the people he screwed over, if you're a low-income single mother taking care of three children, thousands of dollars is a lot of money.
At the very least, their story is told in powder keg, and that's really important.
And if we don't continue to support credible journalism, their stories aren't going to be told anymore.
Jonathan, what made you want to start to write a story about Chris Ashenden?
Well, it's funny.
I'm a business journalist and often I start out looking into stories that look serious and important and worthy.
But this one was actually on my summer holiday last year.
I was coming back with a family sort of scorching day and we listened to American podcasts on the radio.
My wife loves listening to American podcasts.
She's saying, hey, how'd you get this ad on this one?
It's for this product called AG1 and it says it's made in New Zealand and it says it's amazing.
It seems to be really big overseas in America and Europe, but I've never heard of it here and I hadn't heard of it either.
I thought, well, that's curious.
And I, you know, when I got back to the office after, you know, a week or so later after the summer holidays, I sort of Googled and found out that this guy, Chris Ashenden, was behind it and he was a New Zealander.
It was founded by a New Zealander.
It was invented by a New Zealander.
And it was made in New Zealand.
You know, call it insecurity, but we're a small country in the bottom corner of the world.
We feel that we don't get noticed very much sometimes by...
I'm part of you big players in America and around the world.
We do get quite excited by our success stories.
And I just thought, hey, this is a great young, this Kiwi boy from the same town as me, who's made it big, who's created a $1.2 billion capitalized...
Well, I will say that even being from New Zealand, I have been listening to the new Fat Freddy's drop album non-stop.
So you do have some influence on the global stage.
Yay for that.
When you started the story with Ashenden, you were focused on the AG1 and profiling him.
Is that correct?
Yeah, exactly.
I dropped a line to the company and to their PR agency in New York and said, this sounds like a fantastic story.
A great success story.
I loved to interview him.
And they were just slow.
They were obtuse and obstructive and evasive.
And it just started getting a bit weird.
And Derek, I just, you know, I'm a journalist.
I just started thinking there's something else going on here.
And so I started Googling and it didn't bring up anything.
I mean, if you Google Chris Ashton's name now, you'll bring up all kinds of stuff from his history.
But back then, I don't think I trained Google so well.
And I didn't know what to look for.
Everything that came up was very sort of Clean and flattering about the success of AG1. But I dug and I dug and I sort of looked into New Zealand's insolvency register and its company liquidations and court records and everything else.
Nothing was coming up.
Then eventually, when I was just about to give up, I plugged his name into something called the New Zealand Gazette, which is basically sort of this antiquated publication.
It used to be like a sort of weekly hard copy publication that the government put out where it made announcements and Regulations and announce people's triumphs and successes, their divorces, their bankruptcies.
And I found his name in there from way back in, I think it was, what was it, Mike, about 2007. He'd bankrupted himself, owing $3 million.
And this had been stricken from most public records because we've got rules over here that's kind of ripe to forget kind of stuff.
The Gazette, it's old school, I never forget.
Mike, had you heard of AG1 before you started working on the story with Jonathan?
No, and probably went through the same kind of realization process as Jono did when he first came across the story where in New Zealand, like Jono says, you have a real awareness of Kiwis who have done well on the international stage and you feel you have a general idea of everyone that's out there because New Zealand media does Do a pretty good job at celebrating that international success.
So to hear about the company and then hear of its valuation and then realise you hadn't heard of it before, that was immediately a curious thing to kind of try and process.
So yeah, I think I went through exactly the same phases as Jono did, but he obviously was able to quickly bring me up to speed and then we just started finding out more and more stuff.
And let's get this straight.
I could count From a New Zealand point of view, I could count on the fingers of one hand the numbers of New Zealanders who've built a billion-dollar company from scratch.
It's a rare and exciting thing for us.
We just don't have that kind of scale.
And so it was absolutely perplexing to find that this Kiwi existed.
He built this company, he manufactured this product in New Zealand, and we had never heard of him.
I don't want to give anything away.
I am going to link to the show notes to both your article on Chris, as well as Powderkeg the podcast, which is part of the Delve podcast in the show notes here.
But can you give me some broad parameters of what you found about his real estate involvement?
What we discovered was that he had, in the early 2000s, run essentially what was a rent-to-buy scheme, or what he represented to people as being a whole bunch of people who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford their own homes.
They're often in the lower socioeconomic level.
They had this opportunity to own their own homes, some really persuasive advertising.
They essentially believed what they were being told.
But in reality, in effect, what transpired was that they didn't actually become the legal owners.
They wouldn't actually take on the property title for 30-odd years.
So essentially, they'd been misled as to what exactly it was that they were signing up for.
In monetary terms, many of them lost thousands.
But I think what was kind of clear from our interviews with these people was more the sense of their lost opportunity, which was something you couldn't put a dollar figure on.
And I think even with all these years later, that sense of loss of opportunity and all the confidence that comes with it was really quite visceral.
And in a way, it kind of gave...
The wrong of what had happened to them some currency because they still carried it.
We were able to ascertain that contrary to his kind of public statements, Chris hadn't actually made good on all of the damage that him and his companies had done.
Yes, he had paid back some reparations that courts had ordered him to pay personally, but some of his one-man companies that were caught up in this offending I think that's a really important point.
Chris Ashton made mistakes in the past.
We've all made mistakes in the past.
We've all got regrets.
We've all done dumb shit that we wish we hadn't done.
But there's a couple of things there.
It's about how you make up for it, how you set it right.
And how you own it, both to the people around you and to yourself, I think, as well, whether you take responsibility to yourself.
And that's been the problem for Chris Ashenden, I think.
If he had accepted, acknowledged what he'd done, and he was convicted, he has now 43 criminal convictions next to his name, He and his companies combined were ordered to pay $360,000 in fines and reparations.
If he had accepted what he'd done and said, hey, I'm sorry to these people, had done his best to pay his reparations when he could, you know, and clearly he can now, that would have gone a long way for these people, I think.
People would have been willing to give him a second chance.
But the problem is that right up to this year, right up to this moment, he refuses to own it.
And we have an audio recording of him addressing a staff meeting just a few months ago when he was first starting to get hit by questions from us and another journalist.
He purports to own up.
He purports to take something he calls radical ownership.
He says, you know, this company is founded on these principles of openness and transparency and owning what you've done.
And yet it's quite the contrary.
It's really actually a particularly opaque company, one of the more opaque companies I've dealt with.
They try to hide how they operate.
They're very reluctant to disclose even basic information about their customers and their revenues and what their AG1 product is made of.
And Chris is at the head of this.
He's the founder of the company.
And he continued to deny, even high He hired a defamation lawyer to write a letter to this effect.
He denied having criminal convictions.
He denied having an arrest warrant out in his name.
He insisted he'd paid all his reparations.
None of these things is true.
And you pieced it together through podcasts, correct?
I mean, that's one of my favorite aspects of your podcast is that you show what he says to friendly interviewers, mostly in the health, fitness, or wellness space, and then you actually bring the receipts.
Yeah, and I think that's why it's so important to tell the story in this space.
The world of YouTube and podcasts is where Chris and AG1 lives.
This is where they have marketed their products.
This is where they have ambassadors, well-paid champions like Joe So it's very important that we brought this story to the world of audio, where so many people have been influenced by Chris Ashenden and AG1's messaging, to make sure that they are hearing the other side of the story, I think.
Yeah, from a production point of view, Jarek, you could understand this.
It was faced with having to tell a multi-episode podcast and knowing that the principal character is not going to do an interview.
It was like, gosh, how do we...
How do we make sure his point of view, his words, have the presence that they needed to have in our podcast?
And of course, with all of these other interviews that he had done, it was possible to piece together at least what he said had happened.
I suppose in one sense, this podcast is about the stories we We're good to go.
We did a really good job in terms of trying to highlight the charitable work that AG1 and Chris have done, which nothing can be taken away from.
You know, concrete, tangible, positive benefits for people.
And so, you know, we touched on that in the podcast.
We don't ignore it.
But it's that tension with, you know, the values he says he has for himself and more broadly his company.
It's an interesting tension that I think comes through quite clearly in the podcast.
How long did you spend working on this overall?
A long time.
I first heard about Chris Ashington and started Googling him back in February 2023.
But bear in mind that that was when I thought it was going to be, you know, just a nice sit down profile interview of a Kiwi success story.
And then, you know, shit happened.
We had the biggest floods in New Zealand history, massive climate event in January, February.
My house got flooded and I got distracted by sort of cleaning up the house and reporting on the floods and reporting people on people who were hurt and harmed far worse than my family were by the floods.
I kind of got sidetracked, and it was only this year that I came back to it and thought, what?
I'm not going to let this one go.
And I dug around, but I found out about the bankruptcy.
I found the court judgments of his criminal convictions.
I went back to AG1 and their PR agency and said, hey, let's revisit this.
Earlier this year, I was involved in a New York Magazine story about Andrew Huberman where I spoke specifically about AG1. And at the time, I had found out about the real estate schemes through someone who told me about it.
And I was interested in pursuing this story, but I don't really have those sorts of resources.
And then you contacted me, Mike, which kind of blew me away because the story had been in my head about two months.
I had collected some information and I was so happy to find out that people with actual resources were on this and were going to do a story.
But it seemed like along the way, as you were collecting, the story got out a little bit sooner.
Can you speak to that a bit?
Yeah, so this was a story with international dimensions.
And so there were people like Scott Carney and yourself, Derek, who had contacts or had knowledge.
I was interested to kind of speak, to learn more about.
Ended up having a conversation with Scott and it was, I think there was a miscommunication.
I'd had a conversation with him about what we were looking into.
And then the next thing he says, oh, okay, right.
I'm going to go on my YouTube channel and talk about it.
And immediately I thought, oh, crikey, if I let the cat out of the bag, Because although there was some information out there online, it was more of a historical nature.
And what transpired is, as Scott did his video highlighting some of the matters that we were looking at, it ended up having the effect of provoking a response from AG1 and Chris Ashenden.
I think we thought, okay, right, he's going to answer all of the...
The points that have been made in a fulsome way.
I think Chris Ashton did a post on Substack and we saw him engage with some of the offending in the New Zealand property market.
But we noticed that he'd left some stuff out.
There wasn't some stuff that he had addressed.
And so we realized, okay, this is kind of completely unexpectedly giving it more currency because the guy at the center of it has purported to have come clean about everything.
And we kind of knew that, well, actually, no, you haven't touched on everything.
And so it kind of set the scene for Jono then to send him to make that point and bring more stuff to light.
Yeah, look, I think it was entirely constructive in the end.
Scott Carney's YouTube video, while it was pretty thin, obviously there was a lot of stuff he didn't know.
Revealed to us exactly how AG1 might respond if it felt that its brand was under threat, and it was a three-pronged response.
They hired one of America's top defamation lawyers and sent him a very threatening letter.
He published a substack, so he went to the public, his customers, and he called an all-staff meeting at short notice, 300 plus AG1 staff, and addressed them.
So We brought it right into the present and I think really aggravated some of the people who he had burnt in that property scheme and some of the people who were concerned about the health impacts of his new product, of AG1, because they were saying, wait on, he hasn't changed.
He's still misrepresenting what actually happened.
He's still denying his criminal convictions.
He's still denying his arrest warrant.
He's still pretending that he's paid his dues.
That allowed us to Go back to the company and go back to Chris Ashenden and say, well, wait a sec.
Here's the facts.
Here's what you've told your company.
And like I say, we had an audio recording of him talking to his company.
Here's what you've told your customers.
They don't match up.
How sustainable is that for you as chief executive of AG1? We don't have a clear answer in the form of a statement from him.
He did apologize to the people he'd burnt in that property scheme.
But what he did was, the very next day he resigned as chief executive.
I'll leave listeners to draw their own conclusions.
You had trouble talking to Chris, but in the course of this investigation, you did actually meet up with him face to face, correct?
That is correct.
It took a very long time.
I thought the day would never come.
You know, this day and age, we don't go hammering on people's doors very often.
Right now, the three of us are doing this podcast.
I think probably Derek, you're sitting at home, I'm sitting at home, Mike's sitting in his car, and we do everything online.
But I've been in journalism for quite a long time, you know, 25 plus years now.
And when I started, we would go and knock on people's doors for them to answer questions and criticisms.
And that's what we had to do in the end in this case, because we tried and tried, months, more than a year, to get an interview, to get statements from Chris Ashenden and his company and his PR agency just evaded it and obfuscated.
We were left with no choice.
and we discovered, we thought, because all the company papers say that a list of companies being registered in Nevada, in Cousins City, Nevada, we thought we might have to jump on a plane to its head office in Nevada until we discovered that it was actually a sham office.
It was just a post office, really, a postbox.
No one actually worked from that registered mailing address.
In fact, the 300 staff were dispersed all over the world.
And we eventually discovered that Chris himself was in Colombia, in Medellin in Colombia.
And so we talked and we tried a little bit more.
And then with a bit of supporting from a philanthropic foundation called the Brian Gaynor Initiatives, which supports business journalism investigations, we jumped on a plane to Colombia, We got there.
We didn't know where he lived.
We didn't know where he worked.
We didn't have his phone number, and we thought we're probably pretty staffed.
I mean, I was talking big, but I wasn't entirely optimistic.
All we knew was what Jim worked at, and that's because he posted Of his gym, of his workouts in the gym.
And we worked with a local freelance journalist and managed to narrow the branding down to a SmartFit gym, but there's still about 20 of those in Medellin.
And then she kind of like zoomed in on the views out the window of this gym and worked out which particular branch of SmartFit it was.
And so we went over there, me and Mike, we brought our gym gear with us.
And we were all prepared to spend a week or 10 days there sitting in the gym all day every day until he turned up.
If it had happened that way, I would have been in great shape by the end of this.
We really were having to find a needle in the haystack.
I mean, it was kind of amazing that, you know, we left Auckland International Airport in New Zealand with as little information as we had in terms of trying to find this guy.
But nonetheless, fortune favors the brave, I suppose.
So, yeah, we end up at this gym in the middle of nowhere.
Well, no, not in the middle of nowhere, in this very swanky part of Medellin.
And we're in our gym game.
And literally, we instantly see this dude who, from about 200 metres away, looks exactly like him.
And we think, crikey, are we just going to have the most best luck ever?
Like, the first place that we go, there he is.
I think we got a little bit nervous.
So we went into, like, the guy's changing room where we kind of gamed it out.
Like, okay, Jono's going to go up and do this and do that.
And so the heart gets racing and Jono takes off and there's all this anticipation.
And then, of course, he gets within...
10 metres and realise it's just somebody who looks exactly like Chris Ashenden.
He was doing the cable chops like I've seen Chris Ashenden do in his Insta videos.
He was wearing the same blue T-shirt and he was the same kind of short stocky build and the same tan.
I thought, this is that guy!
And then I got there and he kind of like, he just stops his exercises and he picks up his towel and sort of wipes his brow and looks up and looks straight out at me and it's like, It's not him.
We just build it up so much.
But you know what?
We came out of that gym and very soon after that, Mike heard from some of his sources and we realized that That, in fact, he was, and this was actually perhaps my worst fear, that we had turned up in the very week that he was not in Medellin, which sounded initially disastrous.
But what we discovered was that he had gone to Playa del Carmen, or was about to go to Playa del Carmen in Mexico, where he was going to have a sort of monthly strategy meeting with his executive team.
And we knew which hotel they'd be meeting in.
Mike got on the budget airline search engines and realized that, you know, Medellin to Playa del Carmen was only three hours on Avionca airline, relatively affordable.
And so we sort of had some negotiations with the manager who held the purse strings back in the office in Auckland.
And a couple of days later, we jumped on a plane to Playa del Carmen in Mexico to try and track them down at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in that very hot resort town.
Beautiful city.
I was there in 2000. I'm sure it's changed a lot since then.
So you get there and what happens?
Well, we knew which room in the Grand Hyatt they were meant to be meeting and we knew where he was probably staying.
So Mike staked out his oversized B&B. Well, I staked out the Grand Hyatt, bought a lot of overpriced coffee, a couple of croissants, sucked up the Grand Hyatt's power, keeping my laptop and cell phone charged.
And eventually saw from a distance him walking past and I texted Mike and said, he's there, he's here, I see him.
And Mike rushed around and sort of the other entrance of the hotel, I rushed out the hotel after him, went up to him in the street and said, hey.
I'm Jonathan Milne from Newsroom.
I'm the guy who's been trying to get hold of you.
He said to me, Jonathan, what are you doing here in Mexico, good sir?
And fair enough, good question.
And it was a funny joke because we knew who the other management members were and one of them was a former Australian rugby player and of course we had joked that we hoped he wasn't with Chris when we rocked up to him because he might employ some of his old rugby tactics and flatten us.
And it just so happened that he was the person right next to Chris when Jono went up to him.
But instead of pulling off any impressive tackle, he actually exited stage left and left Chris all on his lonesome dealing with all of these questions from the last person on the planet that he had expected to see in a Mexican street.
And I think this is an important point to make.
We had gone over there And we'd given assurances to some of the people who'd lost their homes and lost their money, lost their opportunities at life in his property scam in New Zealand.
We'd given them assurances that we would try and find him and ask him questions and ask him what responsibility he took and ask him whether he would pay his reparations and whether he regretted what he'd done.
We've made similar assurances to people who had used AG1 and felt that it had adverse impact on their health.
So we felt a sort of duty of care To find him and put these questions to him.
And we knew.
We knew that he would not roll over and say, mea culpa, you know, and let me sit down and tell you the whole story, Jonathan.
We knew that wasn't going to happen.
What did happen was I had seven minutes with him in the scorching heat.
I mean, it was the middle of one of Mexico's biggest heat waves on record, and we're standing out there in the scorching heat.
I had seven minutes talking to him, and he didn't want to answer my questions, but I put every one of those questions to him, every one.
He was not comfortable, and as we finally bade farewell and he hopped into the taxi to leave, I had a great deal of confidence at that point that we'd set the wheels in motions where he would actually now have to take accountability.
He was there to meet with his executive team.
We knew that he was going to go back, meet with the team, Do we actually front up and answer their questions?
Do we stay mum and hope it all goes away?
What they did do is their vice president responsible for comms He emailed me a week or two later and said, okay, let's talk.
Fantastic job on this story.
I want to go big picture for the last question.
I want to get both of your input on this.
You flagged being in journalism for 25 years.
I've been involved for about 30. When I started, it was a lot of door knocking.
It was a lot of face-to-face with your little recorder.
It's changed a lot.
It's The online world allows people as you've pointed out to evade responsibility and talking to people and journalists I still feel have a duty to try to do their best to get them to talk and to own up to what they've done.
In America, the media isn't held in the brightest light right now.
And there are some institutions and organizations that still do a lot of great work.
But in the online environment, a lot of it is compromised to try to get attention instead of actual reporting.
And I'm just wondering where you guys sit in New Zealand.
How do you feel about the role of media and your work?
And also within that, does New Zealand value good investigative reporting like this?
You know, it's hard not to answer that question without having some reference to the election your country's just gone through, Derek, because I think it does touch on what you're talking about.
And certainly I think for me doing this story and just dipping our toes into that communication landscape that exists around, you know, nutritional supplements and the divergence between what the science is and what these products, marketing campaigns talk about.
You do see the tension and you sometimes wonder who is winning that information war.
I'm certainly not at a stage where I want to pack up and go home because I think it's as important as it's ever been.
But I think the fragmentation, the cocoon chambers or the echo chambers that audiences that were once in the same room have now retreated into makes it kind of really...
Difficult.
I think a lot of the assumptions that we make as journalists that if you put a certain amount of information out there, it'll have this consequence or that consequence.
That seems to have changed.
I mean, maybe this is an example of a bit of an old school outcome where, as Jono said, you know, we put certain information out there and maybe there was, were described as some kind of accountability.
This looming threat of Not having common facts, not having a common reality.
It doesn't put me off wanting to do what we're doing.
But it's hard not to realise that the, like in New Zealand, the number of journalists has been shrinking for the last two decades.
A lot of people were surprised that we were even able to find the funding to do this work.
I'm just not sure about the general trend, the direction of travel at the moment.
It's really uncertain times.
I think next year for the United States, and I think sometimes people in America don't necessarily understand how much countries like New Zealand look to the United States.
You know, like we see what's happening there.
It's often said America's socially 20 years ahead of where we are at the moment.
And that's not maybe true in every respect, but yeah, you worry about how much people do pay attention to facts.
I'm glad you asked this, Derek, because this has been in my mind.
Trust in journalism and how can we reclaim that?
I was at the New Zealand Business Journalism Awards last night and afterwards we all retired to a bar and said about putting the world to rights.
I think what I discovered was that a lot of people, a lot of journalists feel the same way as me, which is very much up and down, day to day.
One day, I think we're absolutely stuffed.
Nobody trusts us, nobody likes us, nobody wants to listen to the facts, and we're just going to fade away and be replaced by algorithms.
And then I looked around me at the group I was with there and I thought, I know almost every one of these journalists.
I've known some of them for years.
I trust them.
I trust their integrity.
I know their heart's in the right place.
I know they're smart and they're really doing their due diligence on their journalism to check their facts and present the facts as best they can accurately and fairly.
So that does give me some confidence.
I do think we're facing...
Dual challenges at the same time, and there are links between them, but social media is probably the big link between them.
The dual challenges are revenue and trust.
And for us, very few journalists I know get to do projects like this.
We're just very lucky that this new charitable trust, philanthropic trust, the Brian Gaynor Initiatives, came to the party and helped my company, Newsroom, pay for this.
Otherwise, we couldn't have done this justice.
My great hope is that through doing a project like this, a long-form podcast, we can get enough people to listen and to get to know us, get to hear us, get to hear us talking about our method, showing our working, And can see that we are approaching this with diligence and integrity and hopefully that wins back some of the trust that journalism has struggled to maintain.
I sometimes worry a little bit about our sense of whether or not we're trusted is reliant on the loud minority.
That maybe skews our perception in terms of how bad that trust deficit actually is.
Because in New Zealand at least, the websites that still remain the most visible If we accept that the cyberspace is where we now might spend our time, in New Zealand the most visible website remain news websites.
So I do think there's a silent majority that gives me some confidence that, you know, there is a large constituency out there that still believes in news and everything else.
But I do think we would be remiss not to listen to the concerns about trust and not let it influence like, you know, never be complacent about, you know, how society sees journalism as a profession and have to constantly reassess and check we're not just repeating falsehoods and just...
Making sure we're doing what we say we stand for.
I look at what you're doing, Derek.
I look at what Mike's doing, and Mike's been doing some heavy-duty investigative journalism across a range of subjects around mental health, abuse in care, some cold case crime investigations.
This doesn't pay.
I don't know what your bank balance looks like, Derek, but I'm guessing A lot of what you do, like it is for us, is because you do actually genuinely believe that it is important and it's exciting and it's valuable.
And so I don't want to get up on a high horse and say, oh, you know, we're all about the public interest because we enjoy what we do as well.
I don't think we could do it, work as hard as it is as we do if we weren't certain that we're actually achieving something that was useful for public transparency.
