Max Towey | CEO and Co-Founder of RocaNews
Max shares about hustling senior year to change the direction of his life, founding RocaNews, and how his small team can snuff out biased information using logic and historical knowledge
I met Max through a recommendation from a friend. We met for coffee outside of the RocaNews office in SoHo, a conversation that I thought would be merely for career advice. What formed, instead, was a persistent friendship. Max is undoubtedly one of a kind for our generation. (Just ask Forbes who made him 30 under 30 or the New York Times which mentioned RocaNews this week.) He is the definition of zigging when people zag, and what he is doing to change the nature of news content at RocaNews is honorable. He is also an amazing human being — very upbeat, thoughtful, and asks great questions. Max and I recorded this conversation in October but what was supposed to be a five-question interview over an hour, turned into a three-hour dialogue with tons of tangents about books, family stories, and philosophy. As a result, it took me a while to process and distill all that Max shared into a reasonably-sized long-form piece. Unlike Roca, I may be biased, but I think this interview is worth a read.
What has your path been like from Notre Dame to RocaNews?
At Notre Dame, I wasn’t a good student. I wasn’t as hard-working as I should have been. My focus was more on taking advantage of campus. I was in a bunch of different clubs, President of the Hall, and ran a grill for a year. I loved all that stuff. But what that left me with was not a great GPA.
I had a moment senior year where I wanted to start focusing so I stopped drinking. I locked down and hit reset, which opened my eyes to what I really wanted to do which was politics and policy. I applied to a bunch of think tanks in Washington D.C., did a ton of networking, and ultimately ended up at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). I was probably the lowest GPA of anyone in my class. I started in corporate relations but after a year and a half, I was tapped to become co-host of AEI’s official podcast, with another guy named Max Frost, who was one of the smartest and most curious people I’d ever met.
All of a sudden, we were interviewing some of my favorite writers, like Andrew Sullivan and Caitlin Flanagan. We interviewed politicians from Paul Ryan to Jeb Bush, great journalists from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. We interviewed Anthony Scaramucci after he got kicked out of the White House. It was incredible. I immediately fell in love with the process of growing that podcast and growing something in media. But I never felt ideologically aligned with The Institute and the DC world felt out of touch. Then the pandemic hit, and the news sucked more than ever. So Max Frost and I decided to try to fix it.
Can you explain, in your own words, the mission of RocaNews?
RocaNew’s mission is to make the news easy, enjoyable, and reliable. We want to deliver fact-first news in a way that people want to consume it. We put out opinion-free content. There’s always going to be some level of bias. Even in picking stories, there’s bias, so we’re never going to reach this platonic ideal of bias-free news. However, you can minimize that bias by sharing stories that don’t reinforce the narrative or don’t fixate on political dramas and cultural wars as so many publications do because of clicks. The other thing we do is pique the curiosity of our generation. We try to follow what is interesting. There’s a big curiosity gap in our country. So we try and fill that gap. (Note: Roca has 1.2M followers on Instagram)
You and I have spoken about curiosity and the idea that curiosity levels, among our generation, are underestimated. Can you say a little about that?
I believe that our inclination to curiosity is identical across generations. What activates it the most is our environment. Young people today are exposed to so much at a young age through hyper-connectivity that there’s also a hyper-level of curiosity. Whatever we’ve lost in attention, our generation has gained in curiosity. So yes, it may be a little more like the dog in the movie Up where you’re just darting this way and that, but young people are focused and excited about things.
Our generation has seen the lows of capitalism. We were kids in 2009. We saw that level of hardship and are also living in a time where buying a house is a distant fantasy. We’ve seen how expendable one can be in the eyes of companies, how quickly things can turn upside down, and how soulless a lot of jobs can be with little reward. Witnessing things like this makes people less likely to chase the house with a picket fence by becoming Vice President at an insurance company and more inclined to turn to what they’re interested in. Social media also activates curiosity — like seeing a YouTuber in a different country and realizing you want to go there. Curiosity has been heavily activated for young people, but news companies haven’t caught up to this. They look at young people as mindless, screen zombies when in reality, there is an inner life and curiosity that is waiting to be harnessed.
I’m fascinated by the way RocaNews, as a small team, can process complex topics full of bias like the current Israel-Palestine conflict. Can you share how Roca filters the news to report as accurately to the truth as possible?
Israel-Palestine is the single most difficult news story to cover in the world. Not only is it difficult from a fact-verification perspective and a historical context perspective, but it’s also high on the audience passion scale. So you have people who are extremely passionate on both sides and rightfully so. It’s so hard to figure out what’s true — even with events caught on video. There have been several clips that have gone viral that weren’t from this year.
Because of our standard where we don’t care about being first, we just care about being right, we’ve learned that being patient with facts has been a wise strategy and saves us from jumping on stories that have been proven either outright false or at least unclear. For example, the October 16th Hospital Bombing in Northern Gaza. To this day, it’s not utterly conclusive what happened, but it appears it ended up being a rocket misfire from Gaza, though the NYT and other publications initially reported it as Israel bombing a hospital. Frankly, we were surprised at first when we saw the news that Israel had bombed a hospital, and we thought that there must be more to the story. Israel is aware that it’s under the Western media microscope. Bombing a hospital indiscriminately just didn’t seem likely at that stage in the conflict. There was a little bit of skepticism across our team. Even if you were to start with a negative view of Israel, you still have to believe that they are cognizant of their media perception so it would be surprising for them to do that. People were also quoting the Palestinian Health Ministries casualty number of 500 without any second source, and that’s a Hamas-controlled ministry. And so you’ve got to take that with a grain of salt, as they’ve misreported numerous numbers in the past. It made us realize there had to be more to the information.
So we just sat on the story for a little and then Israel denied it outright and so we thought maybe it would go down as one of these undisputed stories. But then we sat on it a little longer. We wanted to see more confirmation. We wanted to see more people on different sides confirm it. We wanted to see more video angles, more everything. And it turns out, the next day, that it was a small crater in a parking lot next to a hospital. There is such pressure for a news organization to be first. We just tried to be slow and careful instead of fast and reckless on this issue, and we felt good about that.
One thing we also do is rely on our readers for on-the-ground insights and primary sources. We polled them and said, “Who lives internationally and is willing to be a source on the ground?” And thousands of people came back to share their information with us. So we have a map around the world of our readers. We talk to them a ton about what people are saying on the ground – what’s true and what isn’t. A lot of time, they’ll have intel or sources or a view on an issue that we don’t have. That’s a way that as a smaller organization, we can get insights on issues that others can’t.
What do news organizations typically do when they’ve made a mistake?
Quiet retractions and live editing of articles on their websites. There’s little accountability and often they won’t correct it for weeks and when they do, it will be through a note in fine print at the bottom. Ultimately, the reaction from readers is a loss of faith in the media. Of all Western countries surveyed, Americans have the least faith in our media. Americans don’t trust the news.
Switching gears to the more personal here, I know you stopped drinking in college. What made you do that?
I stopped drinking after fall break senior year. I think everyone expects me to have a more interesting story than I have. They want this grand tale like, you know, I had a vision in the desert but the reality is, I didn’t like where I was in life. When I would drink, I would drink a lot. and I didn’t like my relationship with alcohol. I wasn’t proud of who I was becoming. All the people I looked up to in life, whether from books or real people, all had a level of character that I just didn’t have. For me, with an all-or-nothing personality, I wanted to be fully committed and develop muscles – intellectual, spiritual, and work muscles that I didn’t yet have, and drinking was an obstacle to getting those. Originally, I decided to just take a break from alcohol but two weeks turned into two years and now it has been over six.
I don’t view myself as happier than other people who drink. But I do feel very alive. I feel very activated. I feel that I’m able to give my all to something and be very focused. I was very happy drinking. Probably happier than I am now, but I didn’t respect who I was.
Can you tell me about a phrase or idea — maybe from a book, a song, a life motto — that you repeat to yourself often?
One of our angel investors, as he cut us a pre-seed check, told us to “get a little bit better every day.” And when I first heard that as his piece of advice, I was like: “You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s so generic. I could have found that on a fortune cookie.” But I genuinely believe that this is the secret to success. The more you hear from people at the top, it’s their obsession with getting better. It’s why Tom Brady was barely recruited out of high school and became the greatest football player ever. He was forced to focus on improvement year to year. Getting a little bit better at what you do and staying focused is the best mindset you can have. It's infuriating how generic the advice is, but I think that’s the secret. There’s no hack. It’s you challenging yourself to accelerate.
So, where do you go from here?
It’s Sunday morning so I’ll go get another coffee from here — probably a hot red eye. Then I’m going to go to the office to work on a new video product about Frost’s travels. But more generally, we [at RocaNews] are going toward profitability. In the early days, we were focused on growth and product market fit. Now, we’ve had to completely shift mentality to become a really good business.
Nietzche talked about the different stages of becoming a fully realized person. Part of it is shattering every single thing you know and building anew. And I think I’ve tried to shatter as much as possible the things we know about how news companies should be and, like a child who knows nothing, build anew. And so I think, philosophically, I’m trying to shatter all the assumptions and get out of the imitation mindset as much as possible.
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