Hey, it's Alex Sujong Loughlin and I am here with the Rachel Hampton of Normal Gossip. Hello. Hello, Alex. And I'm also here with Patrick Redford of Only If You Get Caught. Hi, Patty. Howdy? How are we doing? So we're all here together because the annual Radiotopia Fundraiser is upon us and we are still trying to reach 1,500 donors by the end of the year.

So Radiotopia is the network that sells our ads, that does our marketing.

Rachel, what does it mean to you to be a part of an independent network?

I mean, I think it means mostly and most importantly to me, a lot of editorial freedom.

I love that I'm not beholden to anyone when we're scheduling how many seasons we do every year

or how many episodes we want to make.

We get to make the show that is the most sustainable for us

and that allows us to make the best version of the show possible.

Huge. I totally agree. I think that something that I have really appreciated about

Radiotopia is that they give us total control over what advertisers we say yes and no to.

So like in the past, we've had advertisers that we've worked with who then maybe we

hear from our audience that, you know, they're not so into them. And we can go back to

Radio Topia and say, hey, we don't want to do that anymore. And I think not a lot of podcasts have

that kind of autonomy over who is advertising for them, which is really cool. Definitely. And it

means that the things that we do advertise, we actually tend to enjoy. Shocker. Patrick, tell me,

what does being independent mean to you? Well, this is maybe a sort of oblique answer, but like,

in sports media specifically over the past few years, everyone is

like underwritten by a gambling company. And you can just see when there's these big stories,

you know, cheating adjacent about gambling in sports that like so much of media is like compromised.

And it's such a breath of fresh air to like not have to deal with that to just know that like

whatever we put out there is like our own thoughts. no, like, intervening layer of owners or advertisers.

And hopefully that comes through to the viewer. Like, hopefully you see that, like, you know,

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