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Welcome back to the Creator Spotlight podcast. This is our ninth episode, and today's guest is Ryan Broderick, the creator of Garbage Day, a beloved and Webby Award-winning newsletter about having fun online.

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Ryan's been running the newsletter for five years total, full-time for four, and before that, he spent a decade writing about the internet for publications like The Awl, Vice, and for eight years, BuzzFeed.

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As always, thank you for listening, and enjoy.

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I've spent like, you know, five to seven hours listening to content you've put out, reading content you've put out, et cetera, over the past few days, but I imagine anybody listening has not done that.

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So who is Ryan Broderick, and what do you do? My name is Ryan Broderick. Uh, I am a tech journalist. I write a newsletter called Garbage Day, which I have been doing as my full-time job since twenty twenty.

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And, uh, my major focus is, I, I suppose trends in culture, memes, uh, how the internet kind of is changing the way we think, how we experience the world.

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And I try to make that as fun as I can, but that's not always possible. But I try. Yeah. I think I read...

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This w- this was in, like, a different newsletter, I think the Embedded newsletter from, like, twenty eleven, and you said that if, like, the intensity of everything on the internet can go, goes up to a ten, you try to keep it at like a six point five at all times.

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Oh, I don't remember saying that, but that is a great quote. I'm gonna use that again. That was cool. Yeah, you can steal that from yourself. Yeah. Thank you, past Ryan.

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Uh, yeah, I, I think that, uh, particularly after the, the Trump era, there was this, uh, real burnout from treating the internet like this massive horrifying thing happening all the time.

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And so I think finding the right balance for people is important because you, you need some sugar to, to make the serious stuff easier, uh, to digest. So that-that's what I try to do. Yeah.

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I, I agree with you that, like, the Trump era was, seems to mark, like, a turning point, but on the other side, like, was the, uh, like it's hard to remember now because it was like ten years ago, but was the pre-Trump era, like, do you think that was less worse?

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Just, I'm curious. For sure. I was, I was writing for digital media outlets then, and I was doing the same kind of work, and it was very new. Mm-hmm.

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Uh, like, I remember, like, the first time I ever pitched something about 4chan to an editor, and there was just, like, a total, um, lack of understanding of what it was, what was going on.

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I think it was, like, a fake Twitter trend called Cutting for Bieber, where, like, 4chan k- guys were, like, pretending to be Bieber fans, and they were, like, harming themselves because Justin Bieber had been photographed, like, smoking weed, and they were gonna, like, cut themselves to make him stop or something, and it was something ridiculous.

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And, and I f- I, I, I watched the, the, the, the switch happen

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around, you know, in between, like, GamerGate and the rise of Trump, where these bizarre, frankly, like, shaggy dog stories, these sort of, uh, people on the internet doing this weird thing, it doesn't really matter, but it's kinda funny, it's kind of interesting.

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They started to change, and then all of a sudden, like, CNN was talking about it, and it was like major news networks were covering this stuff. And a lot of the, the nuance, I think, got stripped out.

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Um, so I've been trying to bring the nuance back just a little bit. Yeah. The cru- the crud rose to the top rather than the cream and has kind of stayed there. Yeah.

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I, I j- I think American media has a tendency to tu- uh, turn the volume up to eleven on everything. And when you do that with the internet, you lose

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some really important details, uh, particularly because, like, the internet is just people messing around. And I think when you forget that, you, you tend to overstate the importance sometimes. Yeah. No, I like that.

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So for years, you built your career as a journalist, and now I would definitely term you a creator. That word creator, though, I think is, is slippery, and I've got my own definition.

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Maybe you've read it in the newsletter. I'd love to hear how you define the word creator. Uh, a gig worker for content. Um, I don't know. I... An Uber driver for posts. I, I feel like- I like that...

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[laughs] the, the, the, the creator economy- I hate it, but... [laughs] Yeah. The creator economy has gotten a lot better over the years. It's become a lot more manageable.

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Uh, even five years ago, uh, this writer I really like, a friend of mine, Brian Feldman, sort of wrote this piece about how there was no middle class on the internet and how the, the, the chips were stacked against anyone trying to build that, and I, I think it's gotten slightly better.

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Right now, I think a creator is someone who is making stuff online in formats that do not fit or are not appreciated by larger media corporations.

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But now, many creators are beginning to pivot into proper media corporations. So I, I think we are at a turning point with a lot of this stuff. So I think for right now, it's just,

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yeah, it's people making internet content as, as, as the main thing. It's not like they're making something online to be read elsewhere or to be seen elsewhere. It's like they are operating online fully.

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And the rest of the world is, is beginning to catch up. Uh, so if you're not a creator yet, chances are you might be by the time you hear this episode. Who knows? Yeah. Um, okay, a few things in there.

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One, the Uber driver thing, there was another, uh, digging into the, the Ryan archives, um, this was on the Follow Friday podcast. Uh, this was like in twenty twenty-two, I think.

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You said something, and you might have been quoting a friend of yours, but you said something about, like, how you don't wanna be the Uber, you don't wanna work for the Uber of your industry, which that, and that resonated with something I thought of first, which you just said too, but when I was talking to Casey Lewis, um, like a couple months ago for this, for this podcast, um,

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we were talking about Substack and, like, how Substack, you know, takes the fees and such, and we don't need to get into a conversation about Substack.

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Yeah, but that was the first time I thought about where I was like, a creator is, yeah, the gig, the gig worker of the creator economy, where whether it's, like, on TikTok, you're create- you're just creating for TikTok ra- and the people.

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But anyways, um, I think that that Uber forContent thing is, like, very darkly true I think it's, I, I think it's true. I, I...

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Al- although I will say, like, the, the more that I've become my own media operation, the more I realize that, like, you're always somebody's Uber driver. Like, there's- Yeah...

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there's just no way to r- mm, to get around it.

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But I think the m- the, the reason why I get kind of nervous about stuff like that, and why I think a lot of other creators get nervous about it is because you wanna sort of maintain a sense of agency about how you're making stuff, and most large platforms, at a certain point in their life cycle, will start to make your content have to fit a certain shape to be promoted or to be prioritized by their algorithms or their recommendation network, or whatever it is.

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And when that switch flips, it never flips back, and it's never ever going to fit whatever your platonic ideal of your content was.

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Uh, that, that was always sort of a, a, a major thing for me with Garbage Day, which was that, like, I wanted it to take a shape that I cared about and, like, fit what I wanted to do, and I didn't wanna go tap dance for likes and subs- Mm-hmm...

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on YouTube and let YouTube decide who I was and how I spoke and, and how I reported and how I thought.

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And, a- and I, I think the average person is much more familiar with this phenomenon than they used to be because of TikTok, where, you know, you have people opening up the app, they watch it for a while, they realize, like, what they have to do to get people to see their content, and then they do more of that.

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And if you take that all the way, you know, six months down the road, a year down the road, you don't really recognize what you're doing anymore. You're doing something else, and, and I think that can be very sad- Mm...

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uh, and very alienating. And so that's really what I'm kind of focusing on when I, when I compare [laughs] myself to an Uber driver, who I think are lovely, by the way. I don't wanna say that, like...

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Those people do a lot of very important work. Uh, and I wish that, like, they weren't so gamified by the, the, the corporation that is- Yeah... sending them around.

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Well, which, I mean, that's what it's shorthand for, though, is that, like, you become just so- I wanna be clear. Just [laughs]... subject to the gamification. No, it's about, it's about being- Yeah...

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subject to, like, a tech corporation's gamification. Yeah.

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It's, it's, it's taking the last bit of agency you have away from you, and in exchange you, you might get money, you might get, uh, attention, you might get notoriety, but it, it can be extremely alienating, and I, and I think it, it results in worse content over time.

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Yeah. No, I agree.

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Um, so there's this definition of a creator that I came up with, and I think now I agree with what you said, it's basically just you're creating content that's meant to be distributed online, and, like, there's no need to really overcomplicate it much.

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But, um, I am interested in, like, the relationship between being a creator and being a journalist as somebody who was a journalist for...

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uh, has been a journalist purely for most of your career and then became more of a creator.

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But, so my definition was that, like, number one, the, the highest priority is that you're creating content to be distributed online. Number two is that you're doing so with no middlemen, besides, besides platforms.

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But, like, a journalist where you have an editor in an organization that you're accountable to, then you're not a creator, which gets into this agency thing you're talking about, where it's like you don't necessarily have the agency to make all these decisions.

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Um, and then I put a qualifier about, like, platforms on there, because I think that's just something you can't avoid.

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And then my third qualifier was that they're, like, monetizing it somehow, whether that's direct- Right...

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platform payouts or subscriptions, or even, like, a much longer tail, like, using a, what you're doing as a creator as, like, a business card, like a proof of concept.

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Um, but so my question is, like, what's the difference between a journalist and a creator, given that middleman idea? I think there's very little. I've even seen, like, creator-run newsletters that have editors.

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Like, it's, it, it is happening. Um, it's really just about resource allocation and where you wanna put that. But I do think, like, the major shift has been that in the '90s and the 2000s,

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people liked brands, they liked magazines, Rolling Stone, MTV. They, they, they, they gravitated towards institutions. And in the 2010s,

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the assumption was that if the institutions got on the internet fast enough, that could just continue. And I often kind of look at, like, the digital media boom of the 2010s as this weird side quest that kind of fizzled.

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But there was this real kind of skepticism around people who were not going to digital media outlets and who were trying to do it on their own, and they won.

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Like, that's, that, like, even, even digital media outlets now are trying to find, you know, personalities that people can gravitate towards.

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That, that was actually part of the whole blow-up around, uh, the, the Bon Appétit stuff, which I won't mention too hard on this podcast 'cause we might go down next. [laughs] It's a cursed story to touch.

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But I think it's a good example here where digital media was a lot of legacy brands getting online or venture capitalists creating the, the, the legacy brands of the future, and almost none of those brands exist anymore.

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I mean, Vice is gone now. That was, like, my first job out of college. And so the, the, the, the shift has really been around the consumer and the audience who want to know where their content is coming from.

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You can say all you want about Joe Rogan, but, like, Joe Rogan's fans, like, know it's coming from Joe Rogan. Mm.

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And that is a very different relationship than The New York Times readers who know it's coming from this amorphous New York Times editorial board.

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And as we've seen since October 7th with Israel and Gaza, like, that can become very politicized very fast because the- I think there is a very kind of deep shift in how the audiences treat institutions, and now they treat them with a lot of distrust.

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And they, and, and whether it's right or wrong, and I think actually more often it's wrong to assume that the individual is more trustworthy, that is happening.

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And once again, I think that is probably part of what the platforms want, you know?

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It is not super conspiratorial to think that, uh, you know, a site like Facebook or TikTok or whatever, YouTube, would rather destroy old institutions and replace them with new ones that they control. I, I think- Yeah...

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that that was definitely part of it.But it has spread to everything. And even the most successful new digital media companies right now are based around personalities.

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My favorite example being Dropout, the, uh, the, the unscripted comedy network launched by former College Humor people.

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It just sold out Madison Square Garden, I think, or it's about to sell out Madison Square Garden for their live show.

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And, like, the major funnel for that company is monetizing parasocial relationships with their hosts and their, and their actors. And I think that is the future. I mean, even A24 does it.

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Like, everyone has kind of figured this out. Um, so in a sense, like, everyone is kind of some version of a creator now. Yeah.

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It's like, I mean, before there was celebrity marketing, and then it became influencer marketing, and now it's just all the same and it's back to just being celebrity marketing again.

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Um, one thing though, you were saying about how, like, people trust institutions less, and, and I agree how it's like th- maybe there used to be this, you know, understanding that an organization like The New York Times has some sort of, like, journalistic objectivity or like, you know, extrapolate it to, like, not that we need to get into this, but, like, Su- the Supreme Court, and now there's all the, people are more, like, understanding, like, things are politicized here.

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I've been wondering if, like, people y- like, yes, are starting to, like, distrust institutions more, but do they carry, do you think they carry that distrust to the individual at all? Like, is it, like, an under...

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Is it a distrust of institutions and, like, a trust of individuals, or more of, like, a heightened media literacy and understanding that, like, no one person is objective?

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Or is it just, "No, I just trust that individual"? That's a great question. Actually one I hadn't really considered. It's possible. I, I do wonder, um, we haven't seen...

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Like, okay, so the, the best example I could think of is, like, during the blog era, there were all these bloggers that blew up similar to our creators now, and then in the early 2010s, they started to aggregate together into digital media companies, Gawker being a great example here, but there was a bunch.

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And, like, these big bloggers would go and start things like Vox, you know? And that happened. That has not happened again. And the question I think a lot of people are wondering is, could it happen again?

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And, and it would really come down to, like, money. Is like, is, are the people with the money gonna spend it to make that happen again?

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If it does, we'll, we might get an answer there, which is like, do, do you lose your street cred if you join an institution?

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We, but we haven't seen it because the new model seems to be, like, the Marcus Brownlee or the MrBeast sort of becoming, uh, the Defector, sort of becoming, uh, people becoming their own media companies and then creating a new set of values and incentives and audience relationships through those media companies.

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So, so far we have seen the distrust of the institution and the trust of the in- individual extend over. So, like, if you are a really trusted writer who's been independent forever and you start your own media company,

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the audiences do seem to follow you and seem to trust you and seem to think that that's, that you're good. And this is good and bad, 'cause it also applies to, like, Barstool Sports.

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[laughs] Like, you know, it goes both ways. Um, but I, I do wonder if that would change if all of a sudden, like, a bunch of big, uh, YouTubers, uh, got hired by Disney or something. I, I, I don't know. Yeah.

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Or if MrBeast started a show with Amazon or whatever. Um, yeah. [laughs] See, that'll be, that'll be the real test here is, like, will the, w- which brand wins, the Amazon brand or the MrBeast brand?

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I think it's the MrBeast brand. But, um- Me too. [laughs] So moving on. One more thing about journalism in this way, like, I think this is on Ben Dietz's podcast. I listened to that episode last night that you were on.

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You said that you, you remembered as a young person being told that things were trends, and it's less harder to tell now what's a trend because there's less media written by professionals, which I think goes into this thing, uh, that we're saying of, like, institutions aren't as trusted and, like, it made me think of, you know, that term, like, we're losing the recipes.

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And, like, v- very few creators, like, purport to put out hard news, right? Like, I, I don't know. I, I, I guess I worry that there's this loss of, like, journalistic standards, media standards.

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Like, do you think we're losing the recipes of journalistic standards as it goes to more of this individual model? Well, okay. So I'll go, I'll go a little deep here 'cause this is something I think about a lot.

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I think the first thing to think about is that due to the First Amendment, uh, every American is a journalist if they wanna be.

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Uh, I once looked up, like, the first, I wanted to figure out, like, who was the first journalist in America, and I'm gonna butcher this story, and any historian listening w- can email me and correct me, but the broad strokes was it was a guy who got kicked out of Europe for committing libel.

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Uh, essentially, like, he had, like, a gossip newsletter about, like, European royals. So he left, he went to Boston. Woo. Uh, and he just proceeded to commit more libel and, like, keep writing his gossip newsletter.

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And so when I think about, like, the great historic importance of journalism in America, I just think of that guy, who was, like, such an irrepressible asshole that he, like, couldn't stop writing gossip about rich people in Europe, and I think that, like, that's actually more inspiring to me.

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Um, so the first, the first answer to your question is, like, anyone in America can be a journalist if they want to. I mean, we, we've had cell phone footage win Pulitzer Prizes.

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Like, we're, we're, we're safely on the other side of that now. The other thing is that journalism standards are always eroding.

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Um, there's this great, [laughs] there's this great anecdote in the Ken Burns Vietnam documentary, which is a great thirteen hours if anyone wants to spend it watching, where they, they talk to a New York Times reporter who was embedded with the US troops, and he was talking about how coming out of World War II, the assumption was that you would never report negatively on your own side.

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And there was this huge, huge controversy about whether or not he could report on what we now know were war crimes, right? Mm-hmm. Being committed by the US, these atrocities.

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And so even then they were like, "Oh, no," like, "we're losing the standards of journalism in America to these young people." And this has happened over and over. New journalism in the '70s where, you know, Hunter S.

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Thompson would take, like, a crap load of drugs and go to Las Vegas or, like, uh, it's always happenedSo I, I, I think that's safe.

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I, I think what you might lose if this trend continues, and this does worry me, is the ability to throw real resources at something. Mm-hmm. Um, the stories that matter are expensive, and they're complicated. And,

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you know, I am not, like, totally anti-editor. I like having editors. I like working with editors, good ones. [laughs] I, I like that. I compare it to, like, a producer, uh, for, like, a singer-songwriter.

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Like, you want, like, a, maybe not Jack Antonoff, but you want, like, a Jack Antonoff figure, right? Um, and I, I think that that is still true, and, and I, I do worry that

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losing that, at least in the short term, will make American journalism less impactful.

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And then the other, the, the last piece, the, the, the most dangerous piece is that when news is delivered the way it's currently delivered, in these little fragments- Mm-hmm...

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in these little pieces that you see all over the Internet,

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you never really get the full story, and it creates this vacuum for bad actors to just spew crap at you, and I think the average person is beginning to feel that now.

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And they're, they're, they're really struggling to understand what's going on because the voices have just quadrupled, and it's just really hard to follow things.

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Uh, and I put the blame not on the creators in that situation. I put the blame on the, on the institutions who are still struggling to figure out how to deal with that. Yeah. Well, and it's, I mean, it's also,

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as, as it is with so many things, as people have to say, it's the phones, right? Like, I-I think you said this on Ben's podcast as well, where you were like,

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um, and I agree with this, like anything that you're putting out is the same, like you're the same as a journalistic institution 'cause it's all just stuff you look at on your phone.

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And I, I first learned that a couple years ago w- you know, working in marketing at a B2B SaaS company where it's like we're not competing with this other company, we're competing with, you know, everything else on your phone.

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It's, so that's the thing. It's like, and I think that's actually why people, especially, like journalists often will bristle at the term content or creator because it's like, it's just a flattening.

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It's like one of those hydraulic presses on TikTok where everything just, you know, shoots out [laughs] of the holes- Exactly... at the end. Like, I don't know. So I think that's really, that's the problem, right?

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Like, it's not just the institue- like, how does the institution fight that- Well-... the sameness of the phone? Okay, so there, if someone listening to this or reading this can find this piece for me.

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I've been searching for this piece that I read like 10 years ago for, ever since. And, and I've asked other people, and they can't find it, and I know I didn't hallucinate this.

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But I think it was someone like John Herman at New York Mag or Max Read at Read Max Read, back when they were writing somewhere else, wrote about this thing where in the '90s you would go to the supermarket, and all the tabloids would be next to the real newspapers.

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And the tabloids looked like garbage.

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So you knew that the National Enquirer wasn't good because, like, it looked awful, like the production value was bad, it was cheap, and you kind of understood that, like, to be successful, it had to look good.

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When all of news started to be filtered through Facebook and instant articles back in the 2010s, that flattening I think was very, very detrimental because all of a sudden, all news looked the same.

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Online, there was no way to, to differentiate between, you know, uspatriot.eagle and NBC News.

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And that has only continued because now actually it's, I, I think it's almost gotten worse because a lot of creators have gotten a lot better at making really slick content. And so it is really hard- Mm-hmm... to tell.

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In fact, the, the only bright spot here is that The New York Times has invested so much money in their news site that, like, it does feel like a platform of its own, and it starts to feel, like, really legit compared to, you know, Garbage Day.

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But for a while it was really hard to tell, you know, who had real resources and who didn't. And, and that, that is a platform thing. They, they absolutely flattened that.

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And that they have their, their own app, and it's, I mean, you can just see it on Twitter, or you can, like, go to their own app, and it's feels like this special polished experience. Um- Exactly. Yeah.

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Uh, okay, I wanna move to Garbage Day for a bit, and then we'll, we'll get back into the, the mires of, uh, what [laughs] is a creator and all that. Um- [laughs] Okay.

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So the business of Garbage Day, any stats you're comfortable to share? Subscribers, open rate, click rate, and if there's a single metric that you really prioritize above all else. Sure.

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So, um, right now my subscribers, uh, my total subscribers is just over 68,000. My click rate is 21%, and my open rate, um, took a real hit, uh, after smart warming was finished. Mm-hmm.

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Uh, it has now begun to climb back up. Uh, it is usually in the mid-40s.

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Um, I, I, I, I started to freak out a little bit, uh, after the, the Beehive migration, but things have started to calm down, and, uh, it's, it's more stable than it was.

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And in terms of the business side, um, I can say that

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I have, uh, just under 3,000 paying subscribers, and I run an ad ch- usually in every issue, give or take, uh, which right now are just a couple hundred bucks.

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But that rate is going up, if anyone wants to advertise in Garbage Day before it does. Um, and it's enough where I can pay my bills, I can eat food, I can buy clothes, I can live a normal life.

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And I recently brought on a, uh, a researcher- Nice... uh, Adam, who is fantastic. Nice. So it's become its own little operation. Um, and

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yeah, it's, it's stable, which is, uh, which is, it actually freaking me out a little bit because, uh, the media is never stable. But- Yeah. No, so-... it's all good... I mean, the click rate especially there is insane.

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You said 21%?21.2%, yeah. Wow. 'Cause I think when I talked to Casey too, 'cause industry average is like 2 to 3% or something. I talked to Casey, and hers was at, like, 10%, and I thought that was wild.

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So 20% is crazy, which, like, I counted, and in a recent issue where you got... It's each of your issues is right under, like, 2,000 words.

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You had 34 links that were not counting, like, embedded TikToks and tweets and stuff, and, like, your, like, usual, like, you know, infrastructural links. We had 34 links.

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So it's like people come here to, like, find other content to look at in other tabs. Y- yeah.

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I, I, I, I did not know the industry standard for click rate, uh, because, uh, back, uh, back in my old hosting sub stack, the click rate was, like, never very prominent, so I never really thought about it.

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In terms of, like, the reader behavior for, for Garbage Day, like, I, I do think that the point with Garbage Day is to find cool stuff.

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I mean, the, the initial reason the newsletter was created was to create a place to organize stuff on the internet that didn't make me miserable.

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Um, and I think- I think in your first post you say, "I- there's gonna be no news, I promise." Yeah. And that's changed a little bit, but...

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I, I had to put that 'cause, uh, I was, yeah, I, [scoffs] I wanted it to be fun, and I, I was also, like, working other jobs, and I didn't wanna sort of mix all those streams together.

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Now it's the, the main destination for everything I do. So yeah, it all goes in there. But the,

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from the very first issue, like, I wanted people to, to have that experience of, like, clicking on a link and discovering something cool. So that, that has continued. That's great to me.

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Um, and that's even why the little, uh, the tagline for every issue is, like, "Read to the end for," and that's, like, my little Simpsons couch gag.

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But it, and it was also, like, an- initially a hack to see how many people got to the bottom of the newsletter, uh, 'cause I could look at the click-through there and be like, "Okay, so this many people made it to the bottom."

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I love the idea of a Simpsons couch gag for your newsletter, by the way. That's- I- That's a great way to put it... I think everything needs to have something like that.

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Um, and so yeah, people, people click, and they, and, and, and they click so much that actually the paid version of the newsletter is just more stuff to click on, um, because people want that.

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And I, I think that that's cool. I, I, I think link aggregation as a concept went really out of fashion really hard during the 2010s, and I think the internet got worse because of it. So it's- Mm-hmm...

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it's nice to kinda keep that going. Yeah. Um, I wanna get back to that in a second, but I do wanna talk about, um, the, your premium offering. So as far as I know, there's like...

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So you send, you send three newsletters a week, like Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I think it's premium on Friday, and it's a bit shorter, and it's more focused on l- link aggregation.

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And then you have the Discord, and then you also have Garbage Intelligence, whi- which might be another tier. But yeah, so tell me, what is your premium offering, and then how long has it taken to get it to...

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You've been doing this for five years. How long has it taken to get 3,000 premium subs?

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So the, the, the way it's set up was I, at first, I wanted to keep as much of it as free as possible, but, like, I need to eat, so I, I started with just, like, interviews. I would just, like, paywall written interviews.

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Mm. And, and it was, like, an offering that people would pay for, but it wasn't, like, anything that people, you know, were really excited about. Need. Y- yeah. And also I, yeah, I, I, I wasn't excited about it either.

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[scoffs] So I did the interviews, then I launched the Discord, and I was like, "Okay, well, the Discord takes time to kind of monitor, so I'll throw that in and only ma-" And I didn't want, like, thousands of people in there 'cause that's when- Mm-hmm...

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communities start to s- start to suck, so. You, and you started your career as a community moderator, right? I did, yeah. Mm. So, um, I, I have a bit of experience kind of, like, managing that.

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So I, I put those together. People were kind of into it. Then I was, like, getting bored of the interviews, and I was like, "Okay, I'll, I'll do a Saturday issue, and I'll make that premium."

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And I did that for probably about a year, and I was like, "I hate working Saturdays. [chuckles] This is killing me." Uh, and so last summer,

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I went on essentially, like, summer hours, where I would just do a, a free issue and a paid issue on Fridays.

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And when I came back from the summer, I had sort of rejiggered m- all of my business stuff and realized, like, oh, I can just do two free issues a week, Monday, Wednesday, and then do the Friday issue for the weekend.

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Friday's are the weekend. Like, that works. Uh, and I've been doing that for a while now. Um, and I constantly want to change things up.

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Like, I have, like, such a, a bad kind of urge to pick that scab, but I also kind of tell myself that I, I have to move in six-month increments to make sure things- Mm-hmm... don't get wacky.

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So I'm currently thinking about how to change things, uh, it also coming even down to, like, subscriber, uh, um, cost, like, trying to figure out, like, the right balance 'cause I haven't changed my prices pretty much since the very beginning, like 2020.

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So things, I, I, 'cause I, I, I didn't wanna be an expensive newsletter because I n- I, I get messages from college kids who are now studying memes and digital culture, which is insane to me. Uh, I mean, godspeed.

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You're on the syllabus. Yeah. I, I, I have been told that, that Garbage Day is assigned, and I have seen s- universities buy subscriptions and stuff. So I, I, I, I try to keep that in mind.

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Uh, but for right now, they're, they're stable, and I, I want Garbage Day to be as accessible as possible because I think the service of, like, sending traffic to other places is really important. Um- Mm-hmm...

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I, I think of myself a bit like a DJ, you know? It's like you, you, curation is a, is a, is a thing that matters. So, uh, I try to think about that, but I am getting itchy again to change things up.

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But I haven't, I haven't decided in what direction yet. Yeah. Um, okay, there's like a million things I wanna talk about there. One, though, you just talked about curation, so let's talk about that.

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I think with, with Casey Lewis too, like, she, she does a, a similar thing to you, and I described what she does with her premium offering, which is kind of what you do too.

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I mean, with, with Garbage Intelligence, it's exactly what you do, is this one-to-many consultancy, like a, a consultancy you can subscribe to, consult- consulting as a service, call it. I don't know.

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Anyways, um, but that curation thing, I think-I think this is just because I've been, like,

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obsessing over creators and different ways of being a creator recently, but I feel like curation is, like, having a moment, coming back, becoming more important. You know, the age of AI and algorithms, et cetera.

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Am I just, like, seeing a trend because I'm just looking at a thing myself? Or do you think, like, curation is becoming more valued and more important to consumers? I hope it's becoming more important.

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My sus- my suspicion is that it's becoming more noticeable because people are getting more burned out. Mm-hmm.

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I also think that this might be kind of like a millennial aging into adulthood thing, where there is, like, this first online generation that is extremely burned out by algorithms, and they still wanna use the Internet, but they don't wanna use the Internet the way, the way they've been using it.

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So I do think that's happening. I don't know if younger people are, like... I, I have, like, a rough idea of the, the average age of the Garbage Day reader, 'cause I, I, I meet them. Yeah.

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And so, like, I have this i- I think I know what the average age is, um, but I don't know. I, I, I, I truly don't know if, like, curation will ever become mainstream again. But right now, I do think it...

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At least for me, it's been a good business proposition, which is that it's something that, like, major platforms aren't doing well for a certain kind of person, and that person is willing to pay some money for it.

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So I think it works. I don't know. I like it. [laughs] Well, it's, it's, it's that people, people will pay for taste, right? And that's what it is. I think that's true.

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I also think that there are people who want to spend their time online better. Mm-hmm. And not in a productivity sense. Actually, in the quite opposite sense. Yes.

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They, they want to have fun in a way that doesn't feel like they're wasting their time. Mm-hmm. But they still wanna have fun. Yeah. And I think that is very powerful. Yeah.

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Anyways, so you have, you're hovering around 70,000 right now. Is there, like... When f- growing from zero to now, was there any, like, inflection points or, like, things that you did? Like, how did you get...

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Was it, like, Substacks, you know, algorithmic recommendation stuff that got you here? How did you get here?

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So for, so when I was doing this, like, on my lunch breaks, um, in 2019 once a week, it was, like, hovering around, like, 2,000 subscribers total, just free.

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Um, and it was just- Like New York media friends and connections rather. Yeah. I think it was just something that was, like, being dropped in Slack rooms and stuff.

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Then, uh, when I went full-time in August, it doubled to six. That was probably, like, the, the biggest, like, single day, single weekend growth, which was great. Uh, and then it just started to, like, climb

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very consistently. Um, the next big bump was when I did this experiment with, uh, Casey Newton and a couple other writers called SideChannel, where we created, like, a group, uh, Discord, uh, which was really fun.

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We, we got Mark Zuckerberg to come on, and then, like, my readers bullied him for a while, and apparently it was, like, a big problem.

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But hey, I was like, "Hey, guys, I gave you a, a, a shot to ask Mark Zuckerberg questions in a Discord." I feel like that's a pretty good, you know, uh- It's... People pay for that.

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And then the other big increase was, uh, April 2023. No idea what caused that. Um, at least I, I may, I may have at the time. Mm-hmm.

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But 2022 to 2023 was, like, a huge growth year for me, and I think a lot of it was because I had kind of gotten into a rhythm with what Garbage Day was and its point of view, and I was like, I was...

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I, I had really figured it out. Mm-hmm. And then things just kind of, like, steadily increased for a while. Um, there was another jump back,

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uh, jump up rather in 2023 this, uh, last summer, which is interesting because I was publishing very little, uh, which is kind of weird and, and curious.

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And then, um, s- oh, and then there was a huge amount of activity when I announced I was leaving Substack, but that activity was largely from people's, uh, paid signups, um, 'cause a lot of people had told me for a while that they didn't wanna pay Substack.

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So giving them the opportunity not to was pretty big. And then with Beehiiv, the, the growth has been flat, uh, give or take like 1,000, but I'm still getting signups from S- Substack which come over.

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And so the new sort of project for this year is figuring out, like, what growth looks like on Beehiiv, which feels very...

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Like, l- leaving Substack for Beehiiv feels very much like big fish in small pond to swimming in the deep blue sea of the internet. Yeah.

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And so trying to navigate that is my next project, but I, I, I have yet to figure out exactly how to, how to, how to do that.

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And it's, it's also possible that, like, the, the, the newsletter boom time has just changed a bit, so I have to, I have to figure it out, but I'm not quite sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to...

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That's kind of my whole thing. I'm trying to figure that out too, which I think it is.

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I mean, like you say, it is the big d- deep blue sea of the internet, and that's kind of what I was talking about too with, like, the more the marketing-focused meta is you have to, like, figure out how to distribute content online.

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And, and then I think this is too where, like, all creators either just stop, or they just keep doing it as a passion project, or they become basically a media b- founder, right? Like- Right... and that's what you are.

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Yeah. It's, it's wild to think about. I, I try not to, but yeah, I guess you're right. I mean, I, I, I will say, I've never, I've never advertised Garbage Day. I've never paid for ads anywhere.

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It's all been organic, and I, and I do think... Okay, so this is, like, kind of the philosophical growth hacky part of my brain coming out here, but I, I, I remember meeting a guy once who went viral on Kazaa.

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I don't even remember what that was, honestly. [laughs] Uh, the file-sharing site. Okay. [laughs] It's like Li- like Limewire, but he- Yeah. Yeah. Yeah... he made...

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Like, there's this music video that, like, everyone kind of saw in the 2000s, which was, uh, Cowboy Bebop, the anime, mashed up with "Smooth Criminal" by Michael Jackson.

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Uh, if, if you're over 30 listening to this, chances are you saw this video. I met the guy at a com- at a Comic-Con once who made that video, and we talked for a while about, like-Peer-to-peer virality Mm-hmm...

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which is like what makes somebody show somebody else something?

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And when I was making Garbage Day, that was the closest analog I could think about for email, which is like how do you make an email that people would forward to somebody else?

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And I'm, uh, and it's always changing 'cause it's, like, extremely personal. Mm-hmm. But I do think

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it can be done, and I know for a fact that the early days of Garbage Day, that's where the growth came from 'cause I could see [laughs] I could see similar email domains signing up, like, in a blast, which, like, I would call, like, the Slack room bump.

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You know, like, clearly I got dropped in some company Slack room and then they're all signing up. And so there is a way to do this, but it's finicky and you, you...

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And, and I don't know if you can do it at a scale where, like, you know, you can get, you can go from 70 to 100,000 readers, but- You know, one thing that you could do is you could do, like, a referral program where they get your Garbage Intelligence reports, like, on a two-month delay or something if they share it with one or two people.

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My d- another project that is on the horizon for me now that tax season is over is figuring out, uh, Beehive's referral setup because I- Yeah... I do think that... I had one going in Substack, and it was very powerful.

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Um, and I, and I wanna reward people who are sharing this stuff, you know? Mm-hmm. I, I wanna make it... I want to incentivize the right behavior. Yeah. I'm working on one right now for Curator Spotlight, actually. Yeah.

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It's, I think we're gonna push it live this week.

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Um, anyways, though, one, one other thing I wanted to ask about the move from Substack to Beehive is, like, there was a great, you know, for the, for the Beehive employee in me, there was a great [laughs] moment w- on Ben's podcast where you are talking about how you moved over to Beehive and the data was so much better.

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You, you were like, "Yeah, I had no idea who my readers were."

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I think you were exaggerating a little bit, but, um, yeah, tell me about, like, how, who your reader is and how you got more access to that by moving from Substack to Beehive. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's still true.

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The data that Beehive provides is very useful. Yeah. Um, it has a clearer way of showing where people are coming from. So, you know, I can, I can tell where people are reading me.

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Obviously, I'm, I'm biggest in the United States, but I have, I have a huge amount of readers in Europe, which I was only- Mm... kind of vaguely aware of. I have a bigger audience in California than I thought.

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Um, I didn't know those people, you know, read. Um- New York guy like you. Yeah, I didn't know, I didn't know people on the West Coast got the internet yet. That's crazy. Um- [laughs] I...

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And I have, like, a much better sense of the amount of people reading me.

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Th- this is sort of very inside baseball, but I was not aware until recently that Substack, when it gives you, uh, its, uh, total traffic, is not giving you uniques. [laughs] Oh.

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It's just giving you every time someone opens the newsletter- Wow... which is, like, um, misleading. Uh, so it, it has, it, it has been kind of brutal in a sense to, to learn the actual kind of

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scope of my newsletter, but also important because, like- Mm-hmm... this is my full-time job. I, I, I pay people to, to work on it for me. I, I, I want this to be a full-time job in the future, and I think that

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it was very important to go find a host that would not try to sugarcoat it and, and be able to, like, do some real maintenance on this thing that started as a passion project.

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And I think that that is a thing that every creator eventually has to do. Mm-hmm. The, the trick is to not destroy the thing that

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made people like it in the first place by professionalizing it and streamlining it, but, like, really distilling what works and what doesn't. And so yeah, the Beehive, the Beehive data has been really useful.

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The post report is great 'cause, like, I can actually- Mm-hmm... like, see [laughs] who's- Yeah... looking at stuff. I don't know. It's, it's been useful. Um, and I will say, I, I can share this here, um,

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by all accounts, the most read, uh, Garbage Day issue ever, uh, came while I was at Beehive. Um- Which one is it, if you don't mind sharing? It's called AI Search Is a Doomsday Cult,

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and based on what I can tell, it's been read, uh, on the web alone 120,000 times. Holy shit. I, I think I'm reading this right. It says re- it says web views 121,000. Yeah. That's insane.

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And then its open rate was 52%, so, uh, an additional, you know- Stop bragging. Damn. [laughs] Yeah.

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I mean, that was, like, the bigge- that's the biggest thing I've ever done, but what's even crazier is, like, the next one down, Blue Sky's Biggest Selling Points Are Things That...

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I can't read the whole thing here, but it, it's, uh, one about Blue Sky, was 92,000. So, like, I'm... My traffic is, like, much healthier now, and I can tell, and it's like, it seems to be real numbers, which is- Yeah...

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uh, it's a great feeling. That's amazing. Well, congratulations. Um- Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. No, that's, like, mind-blowing. Um, so you really are a media... You're a media business.

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You're a media founder now, and you were kind of touching on that, where you were saying, like, a- any creator, you know, you have to professionalize, and, like, that's what that is, right?

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So I'm curious, too, you have this employee, Adam, who it looks like, I think, first worked with you one year ago on the first Garbage Intelligence and then came in maybe full-time as a...

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or part-time, I don't know, as a researcher in November. So tell me about why you brought Adam in and what they do. Yeah. He's, he's amazing. He used to work at Know Your Meme.

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Um, we met at a Garbage Day live event a few years ago, and I was, like, excited 'cause I was like, "Oh, whoa, people..." I've never met someone who worked at Know Your Meme. It's sort of like this very, like...

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You never meet them. Like, they're, they're, like, this cabal over in the corner of the internet. And we got to talking, and I came up with this idea for, uh...

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This other newsletter writer I spoke to was like, "You should have, like, an enterprise offer." And I was like, "I don't, I don't know what that means, but sure."

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And then at the same time, though, I was getting emails from people being like, "Hey, I love Garbage Day.

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I wish it wasn't full of stuff about, like, furries and foot fetishes so that I could send it to my bossAnd so I was like, well, this, this actually might make sense if I just do, like, a business offering. Mm-hmm.

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And I was always a huge fan of the NewsWhips and the DataMiners and, like, these, like, services that I was using as a journalist in the 2010s that would show you a snapshot of, like, what was happening on the Internet.

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And I thought, well, could you just, like, take as much data as possible from all over the web and, and, and organize it in something that, like, made sense so you could see, like, what was happening on every platform.

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So I brought Adam on, and he was great. And I was like, "I, I have some money. Like, let's bring you on to, to work regularly for me." And the, the...

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Then we got a partnership with NewsWhip, who is providing some of their data to us, and it's been awesome because now we have-- It's go- it's a year now.

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We have a year's worth of data about the biggest platforms on the Internet, and we're able to, like, like, track activity and, like, figure out, like, okay, like, Twitch is bigger this month than it was last month, and we can try to understand why.

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And being able to offer that to people has been huge. And then the biggest thing is, uh, this month, we just, um, started a partnership with Sherwood News.

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So they're having us kind of like write little case studies about our data. And it's been great. I mean, I, and I, and it maybe goes back to kinda your idea about curation being important again.

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And I think it's possible that people are just really curious, like, what's out there because after Twitter turned into X, it became less useful as, like, the central nervous system of the Internet.

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And so now there is just nothing there. The, the newspapers aren't able to do it. Twitter's not able to do it. So we're trying. But yeah, no, I think it's just been...

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it's been cool to realize that, like, Garbage Day readers will pay for more information. Mm-hmm.

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So I think our job is to just get better and better information for them and, and reinvest that back in and figure out how to keep making it useful. Yeah.

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So I guess quickly, we don't have to talk about every platform, but you are on... Obviously, newsletters is your main-- newsletters are your main thing. You have a decent, like, YouTube presence, video essays there.

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You've been experimenting with TikTok again recently- Yeah [laughs]... for the first time in a while.

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Uh, on LinkedIn and, and Threads, it's kind of just one version of what you do on Twitter, which is just screenshot of your, of your, like, the most, a paragraph from the most recent issue of the newsletter.

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Um, all that said, what's your relationship with not necessarily any one other platform but, like, the need to be on multiple platforms? I don't know.

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Um, right now, like, the, the, the value of a platform has just become very nebulous, and I'm not really sure. I will say, like, LinkedIn traffic is great. Uh, everybody should be on LinkedIn. It's good.

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Uh, I've noticed it pop up as a, as a referral for me. TikTok is an enigma. I experiment with it. I try to find, like, a thing that I like doing with it. YouTube is a huge time suck, and it is not, uh, easy to monetize.

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If I ever get, like, enough money for a video editor, I might just throw them at it and say, like, "Let's figure it out."

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'Cause I do think, like, there's a big audience there, and I, and I like the fact that, like, you can link on, on YouTube, which is a rarity.

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And I just started a audio version of the newsletter, which is like a podcast RSS, which I think is, like, important just to have. Um, and, like, it could be down the line that that podcast RSS turns into video content.

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I was reading recently about this concept called super formats which, um, I think it was, like, a Neiman Lab article where they were sorta arguing that, like, the current Internet landscape requires, like, one giant unit of content that can be cut up into smaller units.

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So the super format would be like this Matt This. Basically, you record this interview, and then it becomes a written piece. It becomes videos. It becomes audio.

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And it seems like that's kind of the game plan for everyone right now, which I think is a lot of content, uh, to be put on a lot of places for, like, very little, um, uh, value, uh, for everyone.

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But for right now, that's kind of what everyone's doing. So I, I, I've started to think of the newsletter itself as a super format, and then the, the point is to cut up as much of it and put it places rather than

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the opposite, which is sort of investing time and energy into these platforms.

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Of course, the platforms get really antagonistic when you do that, and so, like, TikTok has already started to incentivize longer videos that can't fit on Instagram Reels and yada, yada, yada.

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So there's a lot of, like, inter-platform politics there.

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But I do think, like, it's in the creator's best interest to spend all of their time on the thing that has an audience they can control and distribute to directly and monetize, and, like, that should be your focus.

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Like, Garbage Day for me is the focus. The platforms are an afterthought.

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Although, like, I do write the top essay specifically as a way to grab people from social, which used to work really well when Twitter was, like, very active.

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And I also just think it's a good exercise for a writer to be like, "Okay, can this one paragraph from this long essay be read on its own, make sense, and get people interested in reading the rest?"

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And so it's, it's, it's a useful creative exercise. But I don't, I don't wanna go and make, like, platform-native content just, like, all the time. No. It just seems like such a drag.

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Again, when I interviewed Andrew Huang, he said that, like... I asked him a similar question. He was like, "I just realized that, like, I don't have to be on every platform."

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And, I mean, he has the luxury of having, you know, two point four million YouTube subscribers and a bunch of different income streams, but I think still it resonated with me. But, um, a couple more questions. Hey, hey.

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Oh, go. George R.R. Martin ha- has been on LiveJournal for, like, thirty years. You know? Like, Neil Gaiman has a Tumblr. Still.

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Like, you, you can just find the thing that you like and just stay there, and people will find it, I think. Will find you.

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Um, I was gonna say, okay, so besides growth, uh, the other [chuckles] side of newsletters is writing really good stuff, and I think that's always my advice to people when people come into Creator Spotlight and ask me for advice.

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I'm like, "Look, the one thing is, like, just focus onWriting something good and putting it out there regularly, and you'll get better, and etcetera, and it keeps on going.

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Um, do you have any particular advice about writing a newsletter that's, like, unique to that format? Well, I, it's not applicable to everybody, but I do think, like...

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So when I'm writing a freelance story and looking for, you know, experts in a subject matter, I like now to go to creators.

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It's very difficult, and I wish YouTubers were easier to contact, uh, because they are experts on the thing that they're making content about all the time.

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And so, like, you know, if I'm working on a s- I was working on a piece the other day about, like, Marvel movies, and I interviewed a bunch of film essayists on YouTube because I was like, "You guys are staring at this stuff all the time.

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That's, like, great." And, and their quotes are fantastic because, like, they're, th- they don't have anyone to impress, so they're just... They, they can tell you honest stuff.

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And so when I started Garbage Day, I was thinking a lot about the idea of, like, what couldn't I say at a desk job with, like, a media company,

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and I'll say that because chances are there are reporters working those jobs now who wish they could say that, and then they could just, they could just cite me. Mm-hmm. Uh, which did work. It, it has worked.

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Um, and I, I think that, like, that's the value of being a creator right now is that you can, you can be the mouthpiece. You can determine how the, the news articles are written.

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A-and it's such a bizarre thing to me that, like, so many creators are so still, like... They don't wanna play ball with the mainstream media.

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But it's like punditry, columnists, like, this, this role has existed since the beginning of media. Like, there are...

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Someone's always looking for someone who's gonna mouth off about the topic they're trying to write a-against a deadline. Um, so at least for me in my patch, that's what I'm trying to do, is I'm trying to give...

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I'm try- I'm trying to give ammunition to the reporters I like and care about, and so they'll call me up and be like, "You know, what's the deal here?"

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And it, yeah, I think it, I think it works, and I think it helps grow your audience because, like... I mean, we just saw this with, uh, Marcus Brownlee's review of the Humane pin. Mm-hmm. Like, it works.

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Like, that's, that's our job, I think. Yeah, to be, to be that, like, public mouthpiece. Uh, so you've been doing this, I checked. You've been doing...

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You've done 668 issues, unless you've deleted a few, and you've been- Good Lord. Yeah, I know. It's insane. And you've been doing it for five years. Um, in five years, have you published 1,336 issues?

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Or what is Garbage Day in five years? Five years from now, there's, like, three out- there's, like, three possible outcomes for someone like me based on history.

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Either I just, like, keep doing it at the rate I'm doing it. It doesn't really grow, like, astronomically, and I, I just become, like, either, like, a,

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a well-respected blogger that people kinda read sometimes or, like, a cranky old man who's now insane. That-that's-that's, like, one path.

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The other path is investment, viral growth all of a sudden, things change, and Garbage Day becomes Garbage Media, [laughs] and then that's a whole other set of decisions to make.

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And then the other one is that- And then you acquire Gawker. Anyways. [laughs] Yeah, then I, I buy, uh, I'd buy the AV Club, yeah. I, uh, they, they... I think they're not up for sale anymore, but they were.

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I, yeah, they, they... That'd be cool. Um, and that's one version. And then the o- then the third version is that, like, after a while, the,

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the, the grind just sorta wears you down, and I, I go get a, a desk job somewhere. I think I would prefer the second one.

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I think I would prefer to become a media company, although being, like, an insane old man who just, like, screams about stuff on the internet all day, like, does sound pretty fun. As of right now,

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more so than any point in my career, I cannot tell which way the wind is blowing with the internet, which is, like, exciting and frustrating.

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So I think, like, the main thing for, like, at least the next year of Garbage Day is to just be as flexible as possible, which is really hard for me. So I'm trying my best to just, like, sort of open myself up to any...

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You know, the eclipse just happened. [laughs] It's a big thing for, uh, for astrological houses. So I'm trying to, like, open my mind and just sort of, like, let what happens happen. Um, but we'll see. Let it go.

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Um, one more hypothetical for you. One more, uh, needless hypothetical. If, uh, so I think this was in some back issue.

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I was, I was, I was trying to see if you'd ever written about StumbleUpon because I was thinking- Oh... about the curation stuff. I built one. You built... Okay. Well- Wait, do you know about this? Hold on. No.

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Oh, I did. I checked it out. It's broken. I tried to use it. It's broken. Oh, man. Really? Wait. But I, uh, I would love to u- It is broken. I, I tried to use it, um, 'cause I found out this- Nope. Yeah. Go ahead.

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No, I, it's broken. Nobody, nobody was using it. Uh, th-this great reader of mine, uh, reached out, and we built it last summer, and I have to figure out how to fix it now. But yeah, no, I love StumbleUpon.

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I, I, um, I, I miss it every day. Maybe that's a referral thing, where that's, like, reward number for three referral or whatever. Um, anyways,

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I was trying to find this, and I read in a back issue you said that when you were in college, all you wanted to do was write for blogs. Bad news, Ryan. Your wish came true. Now your brain is broken. Um, so- Yeah...

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if you were 19, in college now, what do you think, uh, would you be... Would it be blogs? What would you be dreaming of doing if you were the, the same guy but in college in 2024 or whatever year it is?

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My assumption is the me in college would probably be watching a lot of YouTube and would probably be, like, dreaming of having, like, a cozy YouTube studio setup, and I assume that's where all the talent is.

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I assume the, I assume all the cultural commentary, all that is happening on TikTok and YouTube. And I think that's really sad because, like, words are good, and writing them is fun.

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And, like, it's easy, and you should... I mean, [laughs] it's not easy. It's- You just do it. It's a curse. Uh, it's an affliction.

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But, like, there, there aren't a lot of in- Like, there, there might be interesting writers out there under 25, but the apparatuses that we had created to find those writers are broken.

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So a lot of those personalities are coming in through video, which might not be a good fit for them.

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And when I talk to people, you know, in their early to mid-20s, like, they all talk about that, where they wish they had an office they could go to.And I was like, "Guys, you'll never believe it.

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You could get as much free seltzer and coffee as you could, you could handle, and you could stuff your pockets full of granola bars at the end of the day, 'cause they're only paying you $30,000 a year, but it's the best job in the world.

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I met Grumpy Cat." Yeah. Like, all that stuff is, like, not happening anymore, and I wish it would.

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And if I, if I ever became a media company, if any investors want to invest in Garbage Media, that's the first thing I would do, is find a bunch of young people and just give them laptops and let them light the world on fire for a while.

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Because I do think that that is the, the most fun thing to do, and the world without that is actually quite boring. Yeah. Well- And, and I think we're beginning to feel how boring that is.

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That's kind of what you're doing by hiring Adam, right? Or, like, somebody...

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The person I talked to for the Creator Spotlight that goes out this week, she has hired, like, a few really young people to d- to, like, do, produce her podcast and such.

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So I think, like, that's maybe what the future of that is, is, like, as creators professionalize, they look for people who maybe don't have a resume, but they have, you know, their, their creative project is their business card, and that's what gets them hired.

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Um- You have to. Yeah. Yeah. You, you, you- Social responsibility. There, yeah. I mean, there's just, it's just not as fun without it.

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Like, we need, we need deranged young people to destroy the internet every five years, or we end up like this, and then this is boring. Like, come on. [laughs] All right. Uh, well that's a great place to end it.

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Um, plu- what's the plug? Where, where should people find you? GarbageDay.email. All of the relevant links, except for my StumbleUpon clone, are there and working.

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Uh, and you can email me directly any sort of hate mail or notes about this recording to Ryan@GarbageDay.email. This has been episode nine of the Creator Spotlight podcast. Thank you, Ryan, for joining me.

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Thank you, listener, for sticking around to the end. And if you enjoyed it, it would mean a lot if you rated us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. I'll see you next week.

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