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[intro music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey. This is a bit of a different episode because it's a preview of a new podcast I'm doing.

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You know, one of the reasons I like podcasts is that they're a more personal form of media.

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You know, I've noticed over the years where I would run into people, and they would say things like, "Oh, I listen to you while walking the dog."

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And I think that enables a different type of connection with the audience than a typical article on a website. And that's the approach that we hope to take with the new weekly podcast I'm doing with Troy Young.

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It's called the People vs. Algorithms podcast, and it's gonna be different from the Rebooting show in that it's gonna be a little... slightly less focused on the... straight on the business of media.

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And instead we'll take a broader view of the patterns in media, business, and culture.

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Troy is a great partner for this because he's one of the most thoughtful people I've spoken to over the years about the media business. Each episode is gonna revolve around themes.

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This week, in the episode you're about to listen to, I hope, um, we tackle the theme of whether media is better now than in the past, along with an exploration of one type of media that's winning in this environment, and that is narrower and more focused and more niche, something that I wrote about, uh, last week in the newsletter.

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Over time, we'll add in guests and evolve the show. You know, I've always been drawn to making something out of nothing, and I know you need to just get started, and then you'll start to figure it out.

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So please excuse any of the bumpiness along the way. Um, so what follows is, uh, the third episode actually of People vs. Algorithms.

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We made a pilot episode, um, and also episode one, uh, which you can find in the People vs. Algorithms podcast feed, which is on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Big thanks to Alex Schleifer of United Entities for his collaboration in making this a reality, and Jay Sparks, who is the editor on this.

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Um, please send me your feedback and sponsorship inquiries, uh, to bmorrissey@gmail.com. Hope you enjoy this episode. [upbeat music] Ah, that's Troy. That's always Troy. That's Brian. He's fidgety. I'm fidgety.

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I'm fidgety, but- Were you a fidgety kid? Yes, of course, I'm a fidgety kid. I'm a lunatic. Look, I mean, I think Brian is a very competent journalist. He's also a s-psychopath.

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I know, but, like, a lot of times good journalists are psychopaths. [singing] People versus algorithms. Algorithms. People versus algorithms. Algorithms. Algorithms.

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People versus algorithms.

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So I went to Catholic grade school, St. Genevieve, and they would give us, like, grades. Did anyone go to Catholic school? I went to St. Michael's University School, but it was- Oh, fancy...

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inclusive of all denominations. [laughs] No, no, no, no, no. Ours, ours was not fancy.

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But they gave grades, but then there was, like, a separate set of grades that were just basically about, like, your, like, character and, like, comportment.

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And those did not have, like, A through F, but they had, like, excellent or, like, needs improvement. And I was always given needs improvement for, like, shows self-control [laughs]

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and takes pride in personal appearance. [laughs] How bullshit is that to do to, like, like, young boys? I mean, that's why Gen Z doesn't understand- [laughs]... how hard we had it.

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That's why we're the Great Generation now, Brian. [laughs] I was being called a slob by some nun. I'm like, "Well, easy for you to say." [gentle music] People vs.

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Algorithms is a podcast dedicated to detecting patterns in media, business, and culture. I'm Brian Morrissey, and each week I'll be joined by Troy Young, writer of People vs.

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Algorithms newsletter and a longtime media executive, who was most recently the president of Hearst Magazines, where he led the transformation of that company.

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I've known Troy for a good fifteen years, and I can honestly say he's one of the best thinkers about the media business out there. This week, we start with a simple question: Is media better now?

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Of course, better is subjective, and those of us firmly in middle age have to guard against the nostalgia impulse of pining for simpler times.

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In my mind, I miss wrangling with the rabbit ears in order to catch reruns of Gilligan's Island. And on the face of it, we're now in a golden age of media.

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There's never been more information and entertainment at our fingertips.

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If anything, we're deluged with too much content, and the atomization of content has played a role in my opinion, or maybe it's just a reflection of the lack of shared experiences we have as a society.

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You know, House of Dragons is a big deal, uh, to many of the type of people I speak to, yet I saw the other day that only two and a half million people watch it.

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That's in a country of three hundred and forty million people. More people probably watch Gilligan's Island, but we just didn't tweet about it nonstop.

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We're also gonna end up discussing today the type of media that's winning in this kind of environment, and it's narrower, it's more focused, and it's more niche.

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There are outliers like Semafor that are looking to build a broad global news brand, but most of the talent and capital, at least that I see, is flowing into niche media that can be essential to a small group of people, helps if they're rich and powerful, and use that influence to make money in a bunch of different ways, sometimes through ads, but also through transaction businesses, selling products, and of course, subscription.

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So Troy, l-let's start off with the question that you asked, which, uh, you texted me actually earlier this week and asked me if media is better now.

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I gave you a response, and I didn't see it in the newsletter you wrote about it today, and that's okay. But let's talk about, like, first of all, what, what prompted you to even ask this question?

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And then secondly, why didn't you use what I told you? Well, it's funny. I'm sorry about that. You know that you've asked an okay question when you get lots of responses, Brian. I didn't set up anybody.

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I just sorta texted twenty people in one minute, and everybody responded. The reason that-I asked the question is because I love media now, and one of the times I appreciate it most is when I'm driving.

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So I was listening to the Ezra Klein podcast, Ezra interviewing Margaret Atwood. I'm Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show. So Margaret Atwood, the legend. Why do human beings think in stories? Ah.

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Well, people have had a lot of theories about that. And I found it to be so satisfying, and it just occurred to me how great media is and how great she is. And Ezra's a, a wonderful and well-informed interviewer.

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But I loved it, and there was so many remarkable and just kind of wise observations, and I was like, "This is a good product. I really like this product."

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I was then having dinner at my house with a friend of mine, and she was like, "Oh, I hate media now," blah, blah, blah.

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"We're feeding all these morons stuff they shouldn't be reading through algorithms, and media's creating division in society and all of this." Yeah.

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Your unnamed friend has a point, and I think a lot of the people [chuckles] who responded to you, I wouldn't say a majority. I don't know. You tell me.

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There is this feeling that media, we have more of it, but more is just more. It's not better, right? And there's sometimes too much. I think people feel overwhelmed by the amount of information out there.

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We're not more informed. I think by most measures, there's never been lower trust in news and information.

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I think you can argue that, like, entertainment is better, but in some ways I, I'm not even sure these days, right? Because if you look at, like... Okay, like, let's take House of Dragon.

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I, I like it and stuff like this. But at the same time, like, I almost feel like it was tested out too much.

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Like, they took the bits that resonated really well with Game of Thrones and just, like, created the prequel, like, leaning into those soap opera pieces.

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Well, I gotta tell you, Brian, I too used to watch Gilligan's Island, okay? And I'll tell you something else. It was the fucking same every time. Every show is the same.

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So it's this kind of warm, milky embrace that's incredibly comforting. It's ridiculous. I mean, its familiarity was wonderful. We got to know the characters. Oh, look. You know, the professor's gonna do this this time.

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He did the same thing every week. It was literally so templated. Yeah, I get that. It's like every Three's Company episode was a misunderstanding. Every single one was a misunderstanding.

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You know, House of Dragons is a little bit like the one that came before it, you know? [laughs] They're stories after all, right? There's a lot of commonality. But there's drama in this one that's new.

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It feels kind of fresh. I like it a lot. Yeah. But let me ask you this. What do you think about the impact of not having a- any kind of semblance of a shared culture?

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Because I think one of the problems, uh, you called it the richness of choice, right? Sure.

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Which I get, and the idea that there is stuff out there that can satisfy just about every curiosity is very tempting, and it's very attractive, and I like it.

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But at the same time, we've lost this idea of, like, having any sort of shared experiences, and I think that's broadly applicable across society, but I don't know if- So where... D- Uh, le- help me understand, Brian.

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Where does that affect us, right? Where, how does that affect us? So for example, I love sports for that reason.

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I think that it's fun to talk to people that like football or have an interest in a particular team, whatever. So sports does that for me.

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I'm wondering, where was that shared culture manifest before, and how'd it affect your life? Like, that your friends watched Gilligan's Island too?

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Like, is it that your family also watched it, and you could talk about it over the dinner ta- What, what is it? What does that mean? Yeah, I mean, I think that's in, in some ways. I mean, leave aside Gilligan's Island.

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I was watching the reruns. You might've been watching the originals. I'm not sure. But I think what it, it allowed for is you had, like, a more cohesive pop culture.

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So are you saying that, like, right wing and left wing shared the same interests, could find common ground in culture? Yeah, they do. Look, I mean, obviously the political culture was different back then.

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I mean, like, I think one of the first elections I truly remember was when Ronald Reagan won every state, I think except for one, against W- Walter Mondale. That's never happening again. We're not gonna see that.

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When did it start happening? I mean, I apologize that I need to understand. Did it start happen with, like, Duck Dynasty? No. When did it happen? It, it happened... You know, we had the, the web browser.

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I mean, like, this is what the internet has done. It has atomized culture and society, and I think in ways that we're only starting to come to terms with.

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I mean, it's not a coincidence what is going on right now with how polarized societies are and the fact that that polarization completely [chuckles] matches up with the march of digital technology and the connections between people.

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That's why I was drawn to concepts around Web3 in that, like, a lot of the promises of Internet 1.0, and definitely the promises of Web 2.0, they never came true. Like, we're not more informed.

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We're not better off, I don't think. People just seem to be shouting at each other more than ever. We have more content, but I don't know if it's necessarily better. Well, I think it's way better.

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I think there's more content, and you know, you can access what you want, where you want, how you want, so I think that makes it better.

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I think that it allows lots more people to participate, and it allows a richness in kind of mental exploration and community connection, I would argue, in smaller, more relevant groups that never existed before.

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I think that there's consequence to how we access information in that people with certain beliefs can be fed and guided into a, sort of unsuspectingly into places that have consequences that are maybe not desirable.

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And so I think that's the real thing that we're talking about. That's why everybody's kind of talks about the algorithm. But I just watch it with my kids.

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They are so endlessly fulfilled by self-guided media experiences that meet their interests and needs. That never happened before.

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And I, and I, it's just so profound for me because, like, we were starved of content where I grew up.

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Radio, we had to listen to something called Brave New Waves at night, which was a national CBC broadcast, and that kind of brought us together, but, like, we had none of that.

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So we found ways to discover stuffThrough networks, through friends, through catalogs, music was a really important vehicle.

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But if you're, like, interested in anything from, like, card collecting to model airplanes to anime to any of that, like, you are just so well-served now. It's great. It's awesome.

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Maybe there is, like, a way that, like, it's more accessible, and people can develop their interests a lot more. Could be. I mean, there's a million examples.

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I cited a couple here, like Channel Five with Andrew Callaghan. It's brilliant. It's a guy traveling the country with a camera and a mic, couple of guys, and they just got picked up.

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They're doing a documentary for, I think maybe it's HBO.

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He's an unlikely media creator with a sensibility that's extraordinary, that finds very unlikely stories by being on the ground and meeting people and kind of using modern tools of media creation which never could have existed, and a platform that finds fans in an open way where you don't have any gatekeepers.

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Like, all that stuff- Yeah... could never have existed before. It's am- it's awesome.

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So, I mean, that brings up the sort of next topic I wanted to talk about, which is, to me, it's like what I call in my own newsletter, the flight to niche.

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'Cause to me, like, the models that are working play into this, what I would call fragmentation, right? And, and it usually leads to niches.

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'Cause I think building a publishing brand in this environment, you know, really focusing in hard on a particular area and doing everything you can to be essential to the people in that area. It's kind of obvious.

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I love these businesses. I did a podcast with the COO of Flying Magazine. It's like an enthusiast publication.

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Apparently, there's like seven hundred thousand people who are pilots in the United States, and they got bought by Craig Fuller, who runs FreightWaves, which is sort of the Bloomberg of logistics.

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I do recommend checking out FreightWaves TV. It's pretty amazing. But it turns out that there is this version of the trailer park called airparks, where people who own planes are really into their planes.

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And one of the things that people who own planes really wanna be able to do is to be able to, like, literally sleep with their plane, and [chuckles] this is the, this is what Preston Hall and the COO told me.

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And the idea of airparks is that they're little mini resorts, if you will, usually in, like, flyover country.

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And you fly your plane in, and you park it, like, basically at your house, and that is very attractive to these people.

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So what Flying did was they bought fifteen hundred acres in a Tennessee valley, uh, put down a runway, and laid the lines for a bunch of different plots, and they now have twenty-seven million dollars in deposits from people who wanna build homes in this airpark.

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It's kinda crazy, right? It's an amazing story. Here's what I was thinking when you were saying that. The thing that separates us from apes are passions and interests and curiosity.

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And when I meet someone, our interests don't have to be aligned, but I love people that are passionate about something because that's love. Like, that's human energy.

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People that are passionate and interested and engaged and, like, really wanna understand how things work, how they connect, people that are interested in, like, really narrow subcultures to me are fascinating people.

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And I don't care whether it's stereos or Pokemon cards or airplanes. Maybe it's 'cause I'm a natural enthusiast. I like that kind of stuff. The internet is the greatest gift to an enthusiast.

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But people that are into airplanes, so much so that they wanna gather and hang out with others and sleep in them or whatever, it's so life-affirming. It's so great.

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I didn't know there's apparently, like, a big, like, social scene at, like, at the hangar. You know? It's like everything has their own...

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Like, it's like you hang out at the hangar and, like, you know, after you come back from, like, flying around or something like this, and I guess, like, toss back a couple beers and shoot the shit.

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[laughs] A little shout-out to a f- a friend of mine from Toronto named Ben Feist.

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Ben was a, a programmer, and Ben was incredibly passionate about space exploration and flying things and all that, and he used to get together with his nerd buddies.

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And do you know those gas-powered planes that, you know, enthusiasts used to take to parks? And Ben, in a passion project, created a visualization by syncing up the Apollo soundtrack to all the imagery

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from that particular Apollo mission, and he just did it, and it was amazing. And all the guys at NASA found it and were like, "We should do this for all of our missions. This is extraordinary." And Ben now works at NASA.

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And it's just one of these great stories made possible by the internet and deep passion and the sort of willingness to jump in, and I think that our world is better because of all that.

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And so we have some problems, right? We have some problems with how information is discovered and what kind of opportunities are created for polarization and misinformation, and we need to work on those.

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[upbeat music] The way that the internet has unleashed creativity is unbelievable.

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I'm an investor in this company, speaking of hyper-niche media, called Drug Hunter, and it serves early-stage drug researchers, and they do shit like Molecule of the Week.

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He's highly, highly focused on serving that community. It's the best kind of media. I love it. Not to get all business-y, but, like, that's where the money is.

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Like, you go into these stodgy categories, and you take a consumer-ish approach because, like, people just want good shit, whether it's about, like, business or pharmaceuticals or whatever, and that's where the opportunities are.

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So on the one hand, I love it. Maybe that's one place for opportunities, Brian, because there's lots of opportunities for Kylie Jenner and MrBeast- Right... and their mass platforms.So there's opportunities both sides.

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Yeah, that's true. But TCG, which I think we both know well, and I think they're, they're some of the, the smartest investors in this kind of modern media, and- Do you want a fun TCG fact that I learned this morning?

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If you read my newsletter, there's a little quote at the bottom from Prince saying like, "The Internet's cool, but be careful 'cause it'll steal your soul." And it was from the nineteen ninety-nine Yahoo! Music Awards.

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nineteen ninety-nine. Holy shit. Don't be fooled by the Internet. [audience cheering] It's, it's cool, it's cool to get on the computer, but don't let the computer get on you. [audience cheering] It's cool,

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it's cool to use the computer, don't let the computer use you. You all saw The Matrix. [audience cheering] There's a war going on, the battlefield's in the mind. And

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the prize is the soul. So just be careful. It's very important.

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[audience cheering] And it was a prescient and fun little thing that Prince threw out there in his acceptance speech, and I'm a big Prince fan, and I got a text from Jesse Jacobs, one of the principals at TCG, this morning, and he said, "Did you know I produced that show?"

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And, uh, that was surprising, and what I said back is, "You're very old. You're older than I thought." [laughs] Yes. Very prescient.

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TCG is, is linking up with, uh, Night Media, and they're basically going to try to find the next MrBeast.

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They're working with MrBeast's manager in order to, the way I understand it, marry creators who are focused on specific audience segments in a lot of cases, and marry them with, like, DTC products.

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Am I, am I getting this wrong? Yeah, I think so.

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I think the churnin' thing has always been, we love media, we love kinda modern platforms to connect with consumers, but we don't want to underwrite businesses that are solely ad focused.

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That's my understanding of their thesis, so if you got some ads, it's okay. Food fifty-two has some ads, but their mechanisms for monetization are much different, and in their case, commerce would be a big part of it.

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But yes, I think that what you're looking for is deep, deep engagement between a creator and a fan, or a creator and a community, or between members of the community, that you can turn into transactions. Yes. Yeah.

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I mean, so I guess my question ends up being, how important is the quality of the product at that point?

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There's one thing when you can turn the attention you have into getting people to try something, but, like, I'm also reminded, like, look, a lot of the DTC companies failed, in my view, because, like, they weren't product focused.

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They were distribution focused.

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They all came up with the idea between their first and second year at Harvard Business School, and they used, like, a small period of time where acquiring customers was incredibly cheap thanks to a lot of targeted advertising by Facebook and Google.

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In the end, like, most of them didn't really have good products, right? I think it's more than just product quality. I think you can bring people into a room and get people's attention with media.

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I think that may or may not have any bearing on your ability to sell them a product.

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I think the whole art of this is to find the Venn overlap between what you do as a, as a media company, and how you're going to kind of fulfill some need as a product company of some kind.

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So clearly there's a capability or a competency in Los Angeles that understands sophisticated engagement mo- Like, Kim Kardashian does this with Skims, right?

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It's a sophisticated product, and it aligns really well with her fandom, right? And I think as a result, it's a really big business.

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Now, MrBeast, and why so many people talked about it, is because, yeah, MrBeast could sell T-shirts and shit just like everybody else can, but that's not a big, long-lasting business. MrBeast is selling hamburgers.

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So what makes it remarkable is, A, there's seventeen hundred locations where you can presumably buy a hamburger. I checked it out and I was gonna order one to my house, 'cause you could get one in Brooklyn where I live.

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Apparently, the hamburgers sucked, and then they got better. I'm skeptical.

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I think that running the operations of a fast food joint requires years and years of honing your processes and focusing on quality and making a better and better product and lots of ongoing innovation and all that.

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Like, it's not like you're making some merch. So I think that part of it is gonna be really hard for, for the Beast. Yeah.

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'Cause I think that to me it's like you have to excel at, like, a few different things that, what are the chances you're gonna be really great at, one, being able to build, like, an audience and have a really tight tie with them, and then also be really good with, like, supply chain and with merchandising.

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It's really hard. First of all, they're completely different businesses, media and commerce. One is a business of unit economics, the other one's a business of marginal economics.

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When you are building a commerce business, the easiest way to think of it is just like a pie, and realize, like, most of the pie disappears very quickly.

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Meaning, how much did it cost for you to get that good, and how much did it cost for you to acquire that customer, right?

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Not to mention any of the other things you have to do around fulfillment or overhead to get a product to a customer. But, like, I was looking at some numbers on a DTC business yesterday.

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We were spending on average forty dollars to make a forty-seven dollar sale.

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And listen, we may be able to turn that into a subsequent sale, we may be able to get average cart size up to make it worthwhile, but you have to be obsessed with both how you get that forty dollars down and how the cost of goods sold is so small, right?

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Or an increasingly small percentage of what you're selling. That's why America outsourced everything to China. Yeah.

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I've seen content-to-commerce companies that do a great job at content and bring lots of people in, but those people don't buy things. Right.So there's audience, but they're not actually buying the things you're selling.

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So you really gotta be careful about the overlap. Yeah. So final thing on this, is it more likely that content people... 'Cause people are coming from both sides, right?

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There's people who come from the content side who wanna get into commerce, and people from the commerce side who see content as a way to have their, like, negative CAC or whatever.

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And I think, like, to me, like, the people coming from the commerce side are probably more likely to be able to add the content part than vice versa. I think you're right. 'Cause it's just, it's harder.

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Like, I, like, making stuff that, like, people... Making, like, content that works is hard, right? But, like, I just think it's harder to make a really good product, [laughs] like physical product. I could be wrong.

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I've never made one. Very few people do it successfully. That's why everybody's freaking out about MrBeast, because they're just so enterprising. They're just so good at hacking audience- Yeah... that it's amazing.

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So clearly it takes a unique combination of skills to make something like that work. [upbeat music] Let's move on to good product. What do you have for us this week, Troy?

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Well, I just wanna remind people that I'm not sponsored, by the way. I wish I was. If anybody from this company sees me doing this, I'd appreciate it. It's a podcast. All right.

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And it's not Nicorette, and it's not an Egg McMuffin. I was thinking, why don't we just go back to where we started the podcast? It's The Ezra Klein Podcast. I think that's a great product. Yeah.

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But why is it a good product? What makes it good? It's just a good podcast, yeah? Because it reminds me of the warm embrace of public radio.

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[gentle music] Because it reminds me of how I feel when I'm listening to Terry Gross. Because [clears throat] they get good guests, and because Ezra Klein reads lots of books. He does.

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It's funny, 'cause, like, I think the podcasts that, to me, that are best are, are people that are able to go deep in a bunch of different areas.

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It's a unique skill, and I don't think I really have it, and I think very few people do. So podcasts products that I like best are more like The Ezra Klein.

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My personal favorites at the moment are Derek Thompson's Plain English. Hi, I'm Derek Thompson, and this is Economics in Plain English, where I answer your questions about business and money. You asked, "What is money?"

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He goes from topic to topic- This sounds like a pretty easy question...

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but, like, he's able to zero in on, um, on the important trends within each and have really good conversations about them that I learn something from.

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And the other one is Ones and Twos with Adam Tooze is a terrifyingly smart economic historian. Hi. Welcome to Ones and Twos. That's Foreign Policy's new economics podcast. Yeah.

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So my day job is that I'm a professor of history at Columbia, and what I spend my time doing is, I guess, trying to make sense of the state of the world and the world's economy, uh, against the backdrop of history and economics and economic data.

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But I think they're really unique, and I think that's, like, what makes that kind of product great.

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Well, I would only add that the breadth, depth, and variety exists because of the internet, which would support my original point.

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The second thing I would say is that I love Lex Fridman, except stop trying to take three hours of my day. You don't need three hours to do this, Lex. It's a schtick. So... No, I know, but he's really smart.

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He summarizes well. He too does good prep, and I think he asks questions with a kind of empathetic charm, but you can't take two and a half hours of my day for your podcast with some weird scientist. Virtual reality.

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Will that have a component in this, or will most of our advancement be in physical reality? Well, that's a little bit like Second Life, although the Second Life actually didn't work very well.

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But that's, like, a thing now, and I just feel like it's... I don't know. Like, longer is not better, and personally, I skip any podcast that has, like, two fifteen. Like, I'm like, "You gotta be kidding me."

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I don't have a vacation home in Shelter Island to go back and forth to. So no, not happening. I, I think it's time you stop playing the poor me card, right?

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[laughs] Like, but one thing that I would suggest, and, and I remind myself of this in life and in podcasting, folks, be careful not to become too much you.

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And I think that that happens sometimes in podcasting, where- Oh, yeah... it becomes incredibly indulgent. There's another thing that really gets me. So Scott what's-his-face is brilliant and all that. He, he- Galloway?

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Galloway, and he analyzes trends and sees things in interesting ways. He's a good writer and all that, but, like, sometimes he's too much him, and it's aggravating. And I, I would make one other observation. I used to...

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When my son and I took this road trip across the country, we did a lot of podcasts, and we started to listen to Smartless. I love the Smartless jingle, but they are so sycophantic, it's annoying.

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And so every time they bring the star guest onto the show, it's like, "Oh my God, I love you, I love you. You're great." And so they do this sort of sycophantic thing that drives me nuts. Um- Mm-hmm...

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that's kind of a Hollywood thing, and I would advise against that as well. Yeah. I think that's the essential challenge of any of these kind of more personal human forms of media, right?

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Like, is that you can easily, much like niche media can get, become myopic, like, when you make, like, media products like newsletters, like podcasts, they're really helped by having a more personal approach, right?

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You know, I certainly write in the first person more than I ever did before, and that's intentional 'cause the format to me makes sense. But you can't get too over- Yeah... indulgent.

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Like I always say, nobody cares about your problems. [upbeat music] There we- [laughs] Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah. Oh. Alex is here, guys. This is like a call-in. Yeah.

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I don't know if somebody like Scott Galloway becomes too much because he's too much himself. I think it's because he keeps-switching around. And I think a lot of it isn't himself.

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I think he's trying to be a lot of different roles. He's trying to be funny. He pitched himself as this kind of controversial character, which he isn't really.

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And, and so you listen to one podcast and then another, and he's vacillating between all these different states.

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While if you listen to even Lex, like, you're kind of listening to the same person throughout, and that's okay, that's what you're used to, you know?

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And it can be deeply personal or deeply professional and comforting, like an NPR show. The problem is when people are trying to please too many audiences, which is, I think, what Scott Galloway does a lot.

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I do think it's beneficial when you have characters, though, and I think that's where All In does a good job, right? They have the angry Republican, s- sort of sympathetic biologist, capitalist guy.

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You know, I mean, they, they do a good job of creating a family, and, and I think people really respond to that, and that's one of the reasons that podcast works so well.

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And they are reliably themselves, and so like them or hate them, they remain themselves throughout, I think. Yeah.

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But I think what you're getting at is that sort of, uh, I hate the word, but the authenticity part of it, because sometimes you can get trapped...

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Probably people can get trapped into, like, almost, like, playing a character, right? So, like, what you're saying, Troy, is that it helps to have characters, right?

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But the, the problem ends up being is if you start to just play a character.

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Podcast, there's a lot of different ways to do podcasts, but the podcast approach that personally has not worn well on me is The New York Times, The Daily, like, the Michael Barbaro acting shocked when someone tells him something he knows very well, because you're now, like, telling me that you're just full of shit, because, like, you're acting surprised at something that clearly is not surprising to you.

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And there's some of that, right? Like, I mean, I ask questions of people that I know the answer. Like, yes, I do, because it's not about me, it's about an audience.

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But I think that that is, I don't know, it's, it's hard to, it's hard to, uh, square that. I wonder if people will like this podcast. [laughs] All right, Troy, mailbag time.

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This is from the newsletter that just went out, Is Media Better Now? And it was from my old friend, well, now a Miami resident, and super smart guy named Mark Kingdon. And- Oh, I know Mark. Yeah. You know Mark.

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We were supposed to meet up down here, but... This is, this is Mark criticizing me. He said, "I love you," so I knew something bad's gonna come. Yeah. And then he said, "That was a hard read." I know.

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Well, this goes back to the original point, that it's, like, a sort of depressing state, if you will. I think Mark is taking the counterpoint to your, I think you called yourself, like, an optimist.

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I'm very much an optimist. He added a couple, one last thing here that's worth mentioning. "Speaking of personal media, you didn't mention OnlyFans. Creators made three point nine billion in '21, up 115% year over year.

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The big story in media is personal media, MrBeast, the TikTokers, OnlyFan workers. Media is becoming hyper-personal. Just some thoughts for you." Thank you, Mark Kingdon. Yeah. Mailbag.

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All right, Troy, let's leave it there. Thank you everyone for listening. Always love to hear feedback. Just send me an email. It is bmaracy@gmail.com.

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If they send you emails, Brian, they could be featured in Mailbag, our new segment. Okay. [laughs] That is true, Troy. Thank you for reminding me of that.

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And special thanks to Alex Schleifer, who in addition to being a recurring character on this podcast, is also our creative partner on this project. Audio, production, and theme by Universal Entities.

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And just again, if you wanna be featured in Mailbag, send a note, uh, bmaracy@gmail.com, and we'll be back next week with a new episode. [outro music]