When we started it, they were like, "I don't listen to podcasts." [laughs] And, and we were like, oh my God. Well, the reality is there might be a huge percentage of people we wanna reach who don't listen to podcasts.
Yeah. So we created another- This is my wife. She's only listened to one episode of- Yeah, my wife doesn't listen... the podcast. We definitely can't use this part.
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[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey. This is, uh, the first of two special year-end episodes. They're special because I'm calling them special.
I was gonna skip the end of the year episodes, um, but I felt like it actually fits well because we have a tendency at the end of years to both look back on, on what, uh, was passed and then to look ahead for what's to come, and so I'm gonna do that.
But first I wanna have a quick thanks to all of you who have shared the podcast or rated it or left a review on Apple. I really appreciate it. Thank you in particular to my old friend Joe Ciarallo, who is now at Toast.
One of my favorite COVID accelerations has been the ability to pay by QR code at restaurants, and, and Toast powers a lot of this. Joe had said that the Rebooting is quickly becoming a must-listen.
Joe, you couldn't be more right. Thank you very much.
So this week we're gonna look back, and not just on the year, but we're also gonna look back on where we are in this pandemic era because it's defined this year and it defined much of the previous year and it's going to, unfortunately, [laughs] define a lot of, of the year to come.
I think we're in a pandemic era at this point.
So I wanted to have on Spencer Bailey and Andrew Zuckerman to discuss a project that they started right when the pandemic kicked off, and it was called At a Distance, and it was a podcast.
They got top thinkers from different fields to share how the pandemic has caused them to think about the world in, in a new way because it forced them to stop and to consider how we're living.
And they've turned these conversations into a book. It's a lovely book. I, I recommend you checking out. It's also called At a Distance, and it's part of their company called The Slowdown, which we discuss.
But reading through this book and listening to these podcasts, I was struck by how many of the people desperately want this period to mark a turning point, and it is an opportunity for something better to emerge, something more sustainable, if you will, sort of what m- after with the rebooting in the media industry.
But I hope you enjoy the conversation. Please always, uh, feel free to email me with any thoughts or e- ideas. My email is bmorrissey@gmail.com. [upbeat music] I like to start with origin stories and stuff. So- Yeah...
Spencer and Andrew, welcome to the Rebooting. This is our sixth episode. Thanks for being on, guys. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us, Brian.
When we, like, first connected, I, I felt like we both sort of had a very similar view of the pandemic and, like, talking about it and stuff. So I wanna get to what you're doing with, uh, The Slowdown.
I wanna start with the At a Distance project and how it came to be. I like to talk about origin stories. So Andrew, you wanna, you wanna start? Give me the origin story for At a Distance.
For the At a Distance podcast and book? Yeah. Well, okay, I'll take it first. March 2020, and no one knew what was going on. I had COVID, didn't know it at the time because we couldn't test.
Actually didn't know till May when the antibody tests were available. But anyhow, in kind of a COVID stupor, I was like, "What are we doing? What's happening in the world?"
And my wife [laughs] and I grabbed our three kids, we left New York City, we went upstate for what we thought was a couple weeks, which turned into, like, eight or nine months or whatever.
And Spencer stayed home in Brooklyn. We kinda shut down the studio, and we were just getting momentum on Time Sensitive, our other podcast, and we were like, "We're finally-" Yeah. "...
like, feeling it," really interested in, in where it was going. And then it was like, well, it's so important that we're in person for that podcast with a guest, and that wasn't happening.
So we thought, "Wow, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?"
And, and what we realized was everyone we were talking to was thinking in a really different way, including ourselves, but everyone had this permission to think really big picture.
Like, this rupture had occurred, and this crack was opening up, and everyone was thinking about the world in a very different way and seeing opportunities, and the issues were super coherent.
And we thought, "Well, I wonder if people are gonna think about these things three weeks from now when this is all over.
We should really capture these thoughts now, and we should capture them for when we all get out of it." And by March 25th, I think it was, we had put our first interview together, and that was Bill McKibben.
Well, I, I mean, if we're talking origin story and we're talking March 2020, one of the sort of m-Ironies we found ourselves in being a company called The Slowdown was that all of a sudden [laughing] the entire world- You're like, "Yeah, it's finally coming back to us."
[laughs] Well, we knew actually, and, and this is sort of, uh, yeah, some of the init- initial thinking about the At A Distance podcast, was that Andrew and I on some deep level knew philosophically, based on kind of the research we'd done and just why we did The Slowdown in the first place, that the world was going to slow down somehow.
We never could have anticipated a pandemic, but I think we anticipated that there were gonna be other forces, environmental forces.
Obviously, that does relate to the pandemic, but c- could be economic, could be other reasons.
And yeah, I mean, we also knew from the outset that we didn't wanna just make a podcast recorded over Zoom, which is great, and a great way to collect ideas as they're happening in this very urgent moment, and it really felt like a long,
ongoing, urgent moment in 2020. We kind of thought, "Well, okay, this might be three months, but it could be much longer, and how do we capture that in a way that's gonna be meaningful?"
And so a book kind of was a part of the inception of this thing in the first place. We had the idea of, like, podcast as book.
And a little less than a year later, we started working with our great editor, Tiffany Jow, on packaging this material into a sort of distilled, condensed, edited format, something that would be highly readable, um, and digestible, but at the same time, full of depth, offer multilayered reading into what we all just went through.
So there are footnotes and annotations, or however you wanna describe them, that actually add further context to what is being discussed.
So we condensed and edited the interviews down to 300 to 600 words into these sort of short form narratives, and then the footnotes and annotations add commentary. So, for example- Mm-hmm...
when Bill McKibben talks about the kung flu, a, a term that Trump had weaponized and was using for all sorts of nefarious, terrible purposes, racist reasons, and trying to rally his base,
it was used kind of throughout the year in, in all these ways, and s- and we wanted to be able to write about how it was weaponized- Yeah... and give context to that.
One of the things is, like, reading through them, I end up thinking about, 'cause it's funny, 'cause it, it's not funny, but it, it, it sort of brings you back in time. But some of them are funny.
I mean, they're meant... We talk about memes. Yeah.
But it brings you back in time to, because the, the pa- the interesting part of the pandemic is that it was a shared experience of everyone in the world, a terrible shared experience for many people, but not all people, to be honest with you.
But that's why. It's, like, unique to everyone, and it sort of brings- Mm... you back in time to s- I was, like, reading through some of them from, like, April, 'cause I was, like, thinking through.
I was like, "Where was I at that point?" Not, like, physically, but, like, in thinking through this thing, because when this... I think it was one, like, in, like, early March.
There was one food writer who was- Jeff Gordinier Jeff Gor- Jeff Gordinier. [laughs] Jeff Gordinier was like, "I haven't been to a restaurant in weeks." [laughs] He did. "Jeff- [laughs]... I have some bad news."
[laughs] It's, it's gonna be a minute. Yeah. Well, there's a joy in that, right, of, of what they- Yeah... don't know. It's like watching a character in a film that doesn't have the same information that you have. Mm.
Right. Mm. Yeah, yeah. And that's why, I, I don't know if you guys ever find yourselves doing this, but I sometimes, like, one of the, one of the interviews, um, talked about the power of journaling.
I wish I sort of did that in the midst of it, but there was a lot of other things going on, even though I had time. But going through, like, you know, your iPhone photo roll and being like, the pandemic highlights.
I used to take photographs of my daily smoothie i- in the suburbs where I was living, 'cause there was nothing else going on. Decided to pivot my Instagram into the loneliness of suburbia. Smoothie content? Yes.
[laughs] A lot of smoothie content. O- one of the things about this project that I've been thinking a lot about lately is how uncomfortable it made us throughout, in a lot of ways.
Because it was so urgent, like, we felt this urgency to just keep making these episodes. [laughs] And then we felt the urgency once we'd done that, "Okay, we have 100. Now let's make a book."
[laughs] And we want that out before the end of '21. If, if it had come out a year from now, it'd be very different. Exactly. Yeah. So let me ask you this.
One of the, one of the threads throughout this, it, it seems to me, a lot of people were sort of un- dissatisfied with how the world was organized.
And I think that there was, broadly speaking, two groups of people, like, the people who wanted to just snap right back, V-shaped recovery. This thing happened. It was a blip.
We have to get back to normal as quickly as possible. And then there was the other group said, "No," like, "this stuff was always unsustainable. Maybe we can't...
Maybe it didn't arise directly from climate change or all the other problems we have, and inequality and stuff like this, but it is, it has shone a light on all of these issues.
And if it's, if we let this go to waste and don't really rethink and change or reboot, if you will, how we're living, then that would be a terrible opportunity to waste."
Yeah, I mean, every, it, the pandemic made all of these systems very clear. Food systems, climate crisis, social equality. Tons of these things were just so laid out before us.
And I think a lot of the thinking about why to make the book was, what are the ideas and suggestions for how we might move forward? These critical insights come in very specific moments.
They don't come in sort of normal life. They come when these things are made clear to us. And so that was why we felt the sense of urgency to capture it in that moment.
Yeah, there was this really interesting tension between our brand name, The Slowdown, and the urgency we felt with this project, and really wanting to get it out in a moment where we knew we were creating something long view and big picture that was an undertow of At A Distance, but at the same time, there was this urgency to, to want to get this out and to, to share it with people.At a time when they could really use it most, I think.
But thinking about your, your question, Brian, I mean, we focused on that other group. We didn't focus on the group that wanted to get back to normal. Yeah. We were not talking to the V shape- [laughs]... curve.
We were talking to the other side- I know... of the conversation. You guys clearly- Just to make clear. Yeah. Like- You guys clearly err on the side, otherwise it would be a less interesting podcast and book. Yeah. Yeah.
[laughs] That's like- Yeah. No, let's get back to stuff. Yeah. Looking back now, though, what's your evaluation? Where do you land on lasting change coming out of this pandemic? I mean, I sit between...
I like to think of how the book is book-ended. It begins with Bill McKibben, and we do have these afterwords that Andrew and I wrote that kinda have a sense of optimism, I would say. But it...
The, the final interview in the book is Stefan Sagmeister, the graphic designer, who's talking about how the world has never been more democratic, and he's making a very strong case for that.
And I think Bill McKibben's talking about how extreme the environmental crisis is and how we really need to understand that.
And at the same time, in the face of all of this stuff, we are seeing a world that does have a lot of signs pointing to greater democracy, greater freedom, and I think there's a lot of cases to be made against that.
But I- Yeah... do think Stefan makes some really strong arguments, and it leaves me perhaps not hopeful, but definitely rashly optimistic about our future.
I mean, I would just add to that, that when we talk about COVID, we're also talking about George Floyd, we're also talking about- Right...
a major social change that happened that we're seeing the effects of every single day. Mm.
I mean, the infrastructure bill, although it has all sorts of issues and all sorts of things, we are moving in the right direction, and it's, the narrative that's bubbling now is becoming much more towards solutions than ideology.
Yeah. Yeah, I think I agree. I mean, I think it's really hard to see change m- happening, even momentous change, like up close.
Like, it doesn't seem as momentous in the moment a lot of times because it's messy, particularly in democratic countries. And I don't even know if society...
I mean, we obviously didn't do a great job in the United States of mitigating s- this virus from a public health standpoint. And that, [laughs] that one I think will hold up. But, like, overall, societally,
I think there's a, the, in some ways, I think people handled it better than I would've expected, to be honest with you. I mean, we can't- The adaptability of people has been really truly remarkable in most instances.
And coordination. I mean, we have a vaccine. Yeah, that's, like, massive. My brother works for Merck, and in the beginning he was like, "It's gonna take three years." Yeah.
It's unreal, and I think you're right that in the center of it, it's tough to see the storm passing when we're inside of it.
But the reality is that we're doing extraordinary things every day, and we'll never outlive the moment we've just been in.
This is just part of a continuum, and I think that the, especially on a social level, the last kind of year and a half has had massive effects on a daily basis for individuals. Yeah.
Yeah, and this idea of the, you know, pandemic as a means for revealing cracks, I think that was something very central to the work we were doing.
We were trying to identify a lot of what these cracks were and explore them and go deep into them and understand them and think about what are some of the solutions to fixing these cracks as we emerge from this. Yeah.
I, I think it's like a lot of times people, it's like strategy versus tactics. People gravitate to the tactics- Mm-hmm... and they sort of miss the overall bigger picture thing, and I think that's the stuff that...
It's think about, like, work, right? The way the sort of quote unquote future of work is covered, you would think it was just about commuting and offices and stuff like this, and I'm like, "You are missing the plot."
It's about, to me it's about, like, individual autonomy and, like, how we organize ourselves and whether we're going to be, like, trapped in this weird or the original metaverse game of chasing after a, a piece of cheese.
Mm. It's not about the commute. I mean, the commute is just, it's a part of it, but it's not about that to me. We actually just spoke with Kai-Fu Lee, the AI pioneer- Oh, good...
about a lot around AI and the future of work, and he speaks so...
I, I think he's one of the, the shrewdest thinkers when it comes to understanding AI's impact on the workforce, and his belief and understanding for how it will actually open up all these more empathy-centric and related jobs.
Mm-hmm. So l- let's talk about how this impacted you guys both with what you're doing with The Slowdown. I mean, it confirmed a lot of what The Slowdown is about. Yeah? Yeah.
It started from shared frustrations that became very clear when the pandemic started. We had huge concerns about big tech pre Techlash beginning.
We had massive interest in food systems, food justice, uh, social justice, and the climate crisis. And all of those became, of course, the biggest issues that were laid bare during the pandemic.
So in many ways, it confirmed that, A, we need to slow down. Speed's been weaponized through technology, through all sorts of, all sorts of ways in our lives.
And yeah, it was kind of a moment of, yeah, we do need to slow down and think a little more deeply about things to understand what's going on.
I mean, the chaos storm that was happening at the beginning of the pandemic was what we'd been feeling for a long time about everything, so we think there's a need to engage with storytelling on this level.
[laughs] I have people on this podcast and they talk about different ways of building media businesses, and I always think of this as a business as something, when you're coming particularly from a content mindset, a lot of times the creation is not, "Okay, we ran the numbers about this market and there's this opportunity," and, like, all this, these slides and stuff.
They might go- Th- those- [laughs] Yeah, those, that fails. That is a road to failure. But it's, I wanna see this out in the world. Is that- Yeah.
I wish we could be, like, so brilliant and tell you that we created this amazing business model and we, we know exactly what we're doing. No, no, the charts- We definitely come from...
And I think for both of us, our whole careers-Whether it sounds entitled or not, I've basically done what we're most curious about and wanna- Good...
spend our time doing and we wanted to make something that we wanted in the world that we couldn't get, so we figured we'd make it ourselves, and that's what we've been doing. Yeah.
I just find it fascinating because I think a lot of this stuff seems obvious to you guys and to, to me, but if you talk to people who come at things from the other side, usually the business operator- Mm...
side or sales side and stuff, th- they graph that on later. Yeah. I mean, it... Andrew went to art school. I'm an English major.
That was not our training to go look at charts and graphs, but I do think that, per your point, the charts and graphs can come later, and I do think it's about engaging what interests you most deeply.
In everything Andrew and I have done, we've always kind of followed this path, I think, of what interests us most, and how can we engage with that in our day-to-day lives? Yeah.
So what you saw missing, though, was what specifically? That there wasn't, like, a, a brand doing this kind of storytelling. Is that what it is? I, I would say it...
Storytelling, yes, but also a kind of company that had- A philosophical foundation... a mission. I mean, let's just be clear.
Like, our philosophical foundation was not in terms of scale, growth, and, and the attention economy. So- Yeah...
on that basis, what we didn't see in the world was a company that was truly looking at this vector of culture, nature, and the future, and where that comes together.
And when you think about culture, the kind of the stuff we don't need, in the great words of Brian- Right... the thing we don't need. And, and then nature and how you define that is that what is nature?
Are we a part of nature? Is it part of the climate crisis? Where is that conversation? And the future, where we're going.
Of course, that's bits of tech and, but it's also policy around agriculture and, and, and various things and just people, government. So we, we d- we saw very...
We saw nothing that was intersectional, nothing that engaged with thinkers, makers, masters of the universe, kind of all of that together, so it was very much sector-based and quite myopic in that way.
So the nodes weren't connecting, and the kind of big picture wasn't happening.
So could we take a kind of almost like an anthropological view or a social scientist perspective on where we are, where we're from, and where we're going?
I mean, the big thing, you gotta remember, we started this during Trump, when context was vacuumed out of everything, so the truth could be whatever he wanted it to be and whatever his base wanted it to be.
And, and not like it was just on that side. It was on both sides. But context was missing, and we knew- Yeah... we wanted to bring that there. And we didn't look at this, you know, creating this company in a vacuum.
We, of course, [chuckles] looked at what else was out there and kind of understood based on that, that there was a real opportunity to create something new, something original, something different, and something that could take adva- advantage of the relatively low barrier to entry to creating something like this now.
Mm. Yeah. I think a lot of times, I mean, we talk about, like, focus and niche or having people from different, different worlds is important. They might do things differently, but you start to make connections.
You start to connect- Mm-hmm... dots. Like, I learned a lot that night about how the art market works, and I was, like, comparing it to programmatic advertising, and they're both just as messed up as far as I can tell.
But, like, uh- That's exactly right. I mean, what you- [laughs]... bring up is so important is what happens when we stop talking to the other? Mm-hmm.
We just create these echo chambers and that on a small scale in media and in a large scale on just general society, it's the echo chambers we're fighting against. Yeah.
It's the conversation we're, we're trying to create. I think, I think we're gonna have a revenge of the social sciences. That's my big, bold prediction. [chuckles] We do too.
Because if you look at a lot of problems, it... Like Facebook, they needed more humanities majors in that company very clearly.
[chuckles] God, could you imagine if there had been a philosopher who was challenging the underlying assumptions that all choices were being made from, not just at Facebook, but in every large corporation in the Valley?
Was anyone considering the environmental consequence of our obsession with hardware? Was anyone considering the environmental consequence or the social consequence of social media? Nobody. It was move fast- Yeah...
and break things, and it was capitalism in full force. So definitely, and we engage with a lot of people who are trained in philosophy or the social sciences and thinking about where we are and where we're going. Yeah.
Not to bring Web3 in, but I will. Comment. I do hope that, I do hope that it has, like, a broader base of inputs in it than just the, the tech people because the only way that...
'Cause I think that's part of this, right?
It's like the, the Web3, you know, what happened starting out of the financial crisis with crypto was a reaction to people's dissatisfaction with the financial system, yes, but it's, like, spread.
Nobody's happy with how the internet is working now.
Web 1.0 kind of fizzled, and Web 2.0, like, we haven't gotten all the things we've been promised, and things seem a lot worse to some degree, so if we're gonna rebuild it, I hope we don't go about it the same exact way.
Yeah, and to be clear, we're very pro-technology. We believe in technology used the right way, using the right tools for the- Yeah...
right, to the right ends, and I think that there's this great tension in being called The Slowdown and being, at our heart, a digital media company with, with di- digital media platforms.
I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense, and being based in New York. Yeah. Well, I mean, I do think, look, technology is, has obviously accelerated a lot of things.
It's made, like, ordering food very quick, and, and it's always been biased towards efficiency. Just it looks for things to optimize in general.
But we saw in the pandemic that if we were to do a scorecard, technology would come out probably at the top of the table, right? Mm. The technology performed better than expected. All the systems held up.
Zoom and whatnot, we might hate it now, but it, it was a lifeline in March, um-And April Certain aspects of technology, but the promise of high-level coordination and massive insight did not come through.
Where was AI at the beginning of this? And crunching data and understanding and having sort of empirical data on what was happening, which is what sort of AI promises, like a- Yeah...
a higher truth, definitely was not there. So- Mm-hmm... on a, on the level of communication platforms and connection platforms, yes. On the depth of where technology should've been in play, I would say a huge failure.
Okay. What won was regional agriculture. People realized they had farms they could buy food from when they couldn't get it at the grocery store.
There were things that won that we didn't really think about that, that we needed. Yeah. So tell me about, like, when you're thinking about th- bringing this idea to life, like, how to make it tangible.
See, it's, it's going from an idea to, to execution. Yeah. Well, we knew immediately that we didn't wanna be just another platform for presentation.
We wanted conversation to be central and at the heart of The Slowdown, like, what we were doing. And we figured, well, what's the best, kinda easiest, lowest friction way to do that? Create a podcast.
And so we started with the Time Sensitive Podcast. That was really our mission in ear- early on to create an opportunity to kind of explore
all the facets of what a podcast medium could do, and then we've just expanded and expanded from there. So our Time Sensitive Podcast, the audio's super high quality.
We record every episode in person in our studio in, in Chelsea in New York. The website features images of what's discussed.
There's hyperlinks, so when there's these obscure references, you can go deeper and have a deeper reading. We condense and edit the transcript.
We had friends when we started it that were like, "I don't listen to podcasts. Fuck podcasts." [laughs] And, and we were like, "Oh my God.
Well, the reality is there might be a huge percentage of people we wanna reach who don't l- listen to podcasts." Yeah. So we created another format. This is my wife.
She's only listened to one episode of- Yeah, my wife doesn't listen to podcasts... the podcast.
Anyhow, one of the things that we think about a lot are the concept of data collection and then the concept of data broadcasting. How do you... What happens in that space?
How do you gather everything you need and then create the story, synthesize everything, wrap it up as beautifully as possible, and make sure that different people can access that in different ways based on their preferred modality?
So the Time Sensitive Podcast gets read by probably, what, 40% of our audience- Al- almost 50... yeah, actually just reads it, um- Yeah...
and might listen to it during it, but they just read it like a, like any online article. The average time on site last I checked was around 14 minutes. So, so people are really sitting there. They're engaging with it.
They're listening. And, and the- Yeah. And reading... thing that we wanted most with everything we were doing at The Slowdown was we said we don't need to hit everybody. We don't need to be mass.
We're interested in the who, not how many, and really upstream thinkers that we're having on and people that can have a massive effect on, on our future by being quite upstream in their own job.
So what we love hearing most is, "Oh, this CEO just listened," or, "This leader in another field listened."
And so we knew we needed to make something that didn't waste anyone's time and that was beautifully done for who our audience is. Yeah.
And we've, and we figured time was a great central, you know, sort of way of exploring this. So Time Sensitive is not just a clever name.
We're really sensitive to the people who are listening, to the person who's in the room with us, but we're also exploring the subject of time, so looking at how they use time in their day-to-day life, but also how these different moments in time throughout their life have, have shaped them and made them who they are.
Yeah. So, again, starting this, you weren't starting a podcast company. No, we- No... we had big plans. We knew from the beginning- Still do... we knew from the beginning we were starting a multi-platform- Yeah...
media kind of universe, and, and we knew we needed to sort of feel our way into that.
And, and part of the reason that we didn't raise money and we bootstrapped this and continue to, at the onset, we didn't wanna come up with a business model.
We wanted to take a couple years and figure out what we were doing and how we wanted to do it. Yeah. On our terms. Yeah.
Well, so, uh, talk to me about that, 'cause I mean, it's something I keep going back to, of matching the business model with the editorial mission. And again, people come at things from different standpoints.
Like, the people from the sort of business sales operator side, they start with a business model and they work their way backwards.
Um, and it can work, but I feel like you gotta go with what's true to one- It also de-... I guess... depends on how you define work. Does it work like the business works? Okay, yeah. Like, it makes money?
So it works, it can work financially. Yeah, that's one very small aspect. If you've ever- But, but not if that's the part that you're coming from.
'Cause if you're coming from the operator sales side, the entire point is that. The, the scorecard is mostly just financial success. Yeah, I don't know if the media business is the best way to get there.
Let's- No, I know. [laughs]... like, day trade and- Crypto... you know, sit on Reddit and do crypto. [laughs] I mean, I, I just, I... We wanna...
Like, having a sustainable, healthy business is, of course, crucial to attracting talent, to having- Yeah... the ability to make things. All of these things, of course, are true. We know that.
We've run businesses for a long time, but I just don't think that's where satisfaction lies, and I ultimately don't think that's where sustainability is in a business. Mm-hmm. I don't think- Yeah...
the best businesses have been started that way. In fact- Yeah... I know they haven't, you know? Right. So did you start to attract the type of person that you thought you were going to?
'Cause I'm also interested, when you start something, you're not sure where it's gonna go. You can make a three-year plan.
It's an exercise for the planning aspect, but not because that's gonna be, like, how things are gonna go. Did you attract the type of person that you thought you were going to attract?
The people that we get feedback from and the sort of anecdotal- Yeah... research we have are people that are concerned with a certain aspect of life that we're concerned with- Okay...
which is, uh, the world around us and a certain kindness and a certain understanding and curiosity of how things work.And an unveiling and sort of an intellectual curiosity. Yeah.
And, and what's been great is to see it flower and grow. I mean, when this started it was Andrew and me starting a media company. We had our contacts, we had our backgrounds.
I came from running a design magazine as editor-in-chief for five years. He'd had a production company.
He, yeah, spent a lot of time in the Valley and knew a lot of people in technology, a lot of people in entertainment and in, in Los Angeles.
We kinda merged a lot of those contacts, and I think that's how there was some organic spread and word of mouth early on, through people that we knew. Now that we're two plus almost three years into this,
we have people who are in our audience who are so far disconnected [laughs] from that orbit, and it- that's what's so fascinating to watch- Yeah, yeah...
is how it went from this, like, kind of organic word of mouth thing, and now we're really starting to see, see... We're reaching people all over the world. We're hearing from people in Europe and Asia and Africa.
Nigeria. Yeah. What's fascinating is we're entering for the first time in history a global community that all has the same access, to a certain degree, to the same media. Mm-hmm.
And so advertisers haven't caught up with that. They're still like, "No, we just wanna know your US audience," or whatever. Mm-hmm.
But the truth is that we are transcending borders at this point with other systems, so the kid in Nigeria is certainly as interesting to us as the kid in New York. Right. Yeah.
And I do wonder how brand thinking is gonna shift with that. Right now, the, the brands still put so much budget into country. Right.
They're so focused on that, which is sort of ironic given- It's just how they're organized. It's how they're structured. Yeah. Yeah, you can't change it. Yeah. I mean, I, I...
Maybe it's having had to cover advertising for all these years. Like, I'm, I'm...
I think I might be more bullish on, like, profound change coming to, like, our healthcare system than I would, like, [laughs] to the brand. Advertising. Yeah, absolutely. I'm like- Absolutely...
healthcare, that should be easier to fix than- Yeah... local advertising. [laughs] 100% right. Yeah. 100% right. 'Cause then you're dealing with some real hardcore bureaucrats at Coke.
But maybe it's just having been close to it. But yeah, so how are you thinking about the business model? Because you're attracting, I'm sure, like, an affluent audience.
This is an au- audience that people, th- that a lot of brands wanna reach. Mm-hmm. Yeah, we definitely think of what we're doing in the sense of luxury. What is the new luxury?
How do you define luxury now, and what would a luxury media company look like?
So we have focused, especially in terms of the sort of brands that we look to partner and go after, these are companies in luxury, in technology, in health, wellness, travel, design, that kind of orbit.
I think we're thinking a lot around if you were to create a luxury media company, that has to be something that really feels thoroughly thought through at every touchpoint.
Every single thing you make and do has to feel extremely considered. Yeah. Yeah. And also, I mean, if, if I was running a huge corporation, I would want my employees listening to these podcasts.
I would want m- my employees reading the articles we're making, simply because this is first order research on the front line of kind of the edge thinking.
We think of celebrity in terms of celebrity intellects and celebrity doers, rather... We don't really pay much attention to Hollywood or entertainment in general.
So the information that we're publishing, hopefully it can really shift and move other businesses. Mm. So we're sort of wondering where that subscription model might be.
I know you're looking for a bit of, of specifics, and we're not there yet, to be honest. I mean- No, I, I- When I say, when, when I say- I think it's okay not there. I know all about that.
We're in the beginnings of thinking about that. Again, we had big questions about what it is, and we're constantly trying to look at ourselves and ask questions about what we're making after we've made it.
And right now we're definitely engaging the conversation of, okay, how do we scale this?
'Cause right now we really do need to scale it, because we're in that moment where we've caught an audience, we've captured attention out there, but we have big plans for what we want it to be. Yeah.
I think it's interesting this idea of it being a, a new kind of luxury media brand, to be honest with you. Because luxury brands, y- you flip through them, and it's the same stuff.
And then it sort of goes back to the pandemic debate, 'cause part of me feels a little guilty, 'cause I felt like, you know, it changed how I, I viewed the world and what I wanted to do, but that was a luxury.
I wasn't, like- Mm-hmm... an essential worker. I had the luxury to leave my job and move to Miami. I'm fully aware that this is the definition of privilege.
M- The little New York City apartment wasn't working for, for me, so I left. Most people could not do that. So I don't know. Yeah, let's just be clear. There's, there's two sides to it.
Like, culture's everything that, culture's everything we don't have to do, like I was saying before. Yeah, yeah. That great, you know, quote. And I think about that all the time, because...
But that's okay, and that's important, 'cause there's a whole lot of other stuff we do that we don't need to do, so we may as well make it valuable, and- Yeah... make it thoughtful and meaningful.
So the idea of a luxury... I mean, it's, I find it funny that all the luxury companies are now talking about themselves as media companies, essentially. Yeah. "No, we're storytellers. We don't just make product."
It's, well, no, you make product, and that's a good thing.
And, uh, you can tell stories about the product you make, but there's also a space right now we've been thinking for a kind of luxury model for media, and we think people will pay for that. Um.
And it is right at this intersection of culture, nature, and the future. And I think luxury brands, Gabriela Hearst is a good example. We had her on our Time Sensitive podcast.
A lot of the fashion people actually that we've spoken with, they do sit in luxury, but they care a lot about the environment. There's- Daniel Hume... there is...
Yeah, Daniel Hume from Eleven Madison Park also just on the podcast.
These are people who are thinking a lot about the future of the planet through the lens of what they do, and what they're doing, they all admit and say, "Yes, it's rarefied," but there is a ripple effect.
Yeah.Without a doubt. I mean, that's the, it, it always starts as a luxury, and then it sort of goes down.
And I think luxury goods are obviously geared to people with a lot of disposable income and time, because time is also money. The most- And they can work on things.
I'm fascinated by the whole wellness religion that has sprung up. [laughs] It was something that we actually were early talks...
I mean, we talked about so much of what we weren't and what we didn't wanna do at the beginning before we figured out what we did wanna do, and part of that was we are not prescriptive. We are not a wellness brand.
We're not this- Yeah... sort of idea. What's after that? And I think it's this... We always said, "What are you talking about tonight at dinner, and where are you getting that information? And what's truly interesting?"
And so we kind of try to arm you with that, and try to find the things- Yeah... that are unexpected. And I think- And one thing that lu- one thing that luxury does really well is it makes people feel something.
They take the time to make the things so that when you're engaging with it, you're having a physical response to it.
And I, I think this does go back to the root of a lot of our thinking, was, like, similar to how slow food happened in 30, 40 years ago, this was a response to it- the industrialization of food, and people feeling like shit when they ate stuff that didn't make [laughs] them feel good.
'Cause it was, it, the, people had forgotten where food was coming from, how it was made, how it was served, and it was being rushed and done without care.
And I think there's not a direct corollary necessarily, but there are a lot of similarities to what's happened in media. And I think if more people think about the media that they consume and how it makes them feel,
there will be more companies like ours in the world, because people will care a- and have a lot more kinda on the line, like, understanding, like, "No, this isn't just affecting what I'm looking at.
This is affecting how I feel, maybe how I think." You know. Yeah, you ingest through your eyes just like your mouth. Yeah.
It is kind of, it is kind of ironic, though, that people now aspire to l- eat like how, like, our grandparents or great-grandparents [laughs] like ate. Totally. Sourdough. Yeah.
W- w- w- And, and there's so much, there's so much contradiction in it, too. I mean, let's face it, Whole Foods and Amazon is now part of- Yeah... you know, the slow food movement, so. Yeah, but we're like... Yeah.
I mean, we're like early slow food, but we switched holes. But yeah, I mean, it, it'll be interesting to see what kind of luxury brands emerge out of this, because, look, it was a tough period.
I mean, it wasn't a tough period, 'cause everyone had disposable incomes, but as far as the brands themselves and the meaning of them- Although they all did incredibly well. That's what I mean. Oh, yeah.
Well, if you got a tons of disposable income that the stock market going crazy- Yeah... you'd be fine. [laughs] Go buy a watch. Okay. I'm gonna wrap it up there. I wanna thank you guys for coming on.
This is a huge honor for us. Thank you for having us. Yeah, I'll be rooting you guys on, so anytime you wanna chat, let me know. Thank you, Brian. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, guys.
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