Welcome back to the latest edition of the Audible.

I'm Bruce Feldman, joined by Stuart Mandel. We are presented, as always, by Welcome back to the latest edition of The Audible.

I'm Bruce Feldman, joined by Stuart Mandel.

We are presented, as always, by our friends at Trader Joe's.

Stu, there is a lot to talk about.

We have a bunch of games this weekend.

But first, there's some big news. So I want to preface this by saying years ago when this podcast was in its earlier days and it was on its shaky ground because I thought I was going to be staying at Fox.

You were not going to be.

And then you told me about some conversations you had with some business people about a venture that I'll be honest.

I was rooting for for you, but was very skeptical about. And now that little venture, which we both now work at, the athletic, had some

big news as we're taping this on Wednesday. Tell everybody how it felt when you saw the stories

coming out about it. Yeah yeah it's a milestone that

we knew we would hit at some point this year then the pandemic hit and there was no sports for four

months and obviously we there was understandable concern about how that was going to affect things but

at the end of the day the athletic has hit the 1 million subscriber mark, which is amazing. As you said, I joined the company at a time when nobody

had yet heard of it outside of the few cities that it had launched in, like Chicago and Toronto

and Detroit and Cleveland. There were, when I went to visit them in their office for the first time in San Francisco,

there were four employees in the office, including the two founders.

So at the time we launched our college football site on August 28th, 2017, I think there

were around 20,000 subscribers to the entire company. So to be talking about

1 million is surreal. But I, obviously, it's, it's great news for us, but I just think it's also

great news for journalism, because obviously it's been a lot of negativity, a lot of bad news, a lot

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