Can you believe it?

That is a common question around the metaphorical water cool-air trigonometry these days, and for good reason.

Our journey so far is as improbable as they come.

Two unknown circuit comedians start a podcast in a room above a comedy club.

They borrow a camera from a

photographer, buy 50-pound microphones and launch. Within three weeks, their producer quits due to

ideological differences. She's woke, they're not. At this point, their interviews average a few

hundred views. The next producer lasts nearly twice as long and quits for a different reason. He likes to

get paid. Soon after, the comedy club, which lets them use the room, kicks them out, again,

for not being woke in the middle of the pandemic. Five years later, they're interviewing world

leaders and averaging close to a million downloads an episode. As remarkable as the story is, what makes

it satisfying is not actually how far we've traveled from a lowly start. After all, every success

story seems unlikely in retrospect. What's special is that we've done our best to approach our

newfound role as content creators in the right way and haven't been crushed by the algorithm or the

competition in the process. The right way does not actually belong in quotation marks, but I use

them to emphasize that in today's media climate, our incentive structures have perverted our

understanding of right and wrong. Today, merely claiming that there's a right way of doing things

seems grandiose, arrogant and presumptuous.

The slow but inevitable decline of mainstream media is, as I've written before,

partly driven by technological change.

Lowering the barrier to entry was always going to end the legacy media monopolies and

information.

...