The 404 Media Podcast

404 Media is what happens when four veteran tech journalists leave Vice's Motherboard and start their own thing. Joseph Cox, Sam Cole, Emanuel Maiberg, and Jason Koebler launched the outlet in 2023, and the podcast quickly became a weekly extension of their investigative reporting. With about 160 episodes out and a 4.8 rating from over 400 reviews on Apple Podcasts, listeners clearly appreciate what they're doing. The show runs anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half. Some weeks it's a roundtable where all four hosts break down their latest stories. Other weeks they'll bring in a source or an expert for a deeper conversation. The journalism itself is what sets this apart from every other tech podcast. These are reporters who get leaked documents, file FOIA requests, and spend months on stories about surveillance tools being sold to authoritarian governments, or how AI-generated content is flooding the internet, or what data brokers actually do with your location history. There's a scrappiness to the whole operation that comes through in the audio. They're running an independent, journalist-owned newsroom without corporate backing, and they talk openly about that reality. The conversations are informed by real shoe-leather reporting, not just aggregating headlines from other outlets. Cox in particular has broken major stories on phone surveillance and hacking that made international news. If you've gotten tired of tech podcasts that just react to press releases, 404 Media does the work that generates the press releases other people react to.