Good evening current affairs listeners. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor of Current Affairs Magazine. I am here with my colleague Allegra Silcox, our business manager. Hello, Allegra.

Hello.

And we have two extremely special guests, two people that I would never have expected would come together, but who have united for a fascinating project that we are going to discuss?

They are Maria Bustillos and Jason Adam Katzenstein.

She is a journalist, writer, and he is a cartoonist, and they are both part of the new Brick House Media Cooperative.

They are currently raising money on Kickstarter and we're going to ask them all about it, what it is, why it exists.

It's called the Wolfproof Media Cooperative.

So I want to start with the question of wolves. I want to start with

who are the wolves? What are the wolves doing? These are not literal wolves, but there are wolves.

Well, Tom Skokka and I were discussing, you know, what are we going to call this project?

Because we had been working on different cooperative media projects since 2017 together.

And we kind of came up with the idea we just want to make ourselves a place that is not going to get blown down.

And, you know, I had been in the courtroom when Peter Thiel succeeded in taking Gawker down. And it really had a big effect on me.

I mean, at that time, we didn't really understand who had been behind the lawsuits. It took a few weeks before that was

like revealed, but it eventually became evident that it was possible for enemies of any

particular press outlet to to sabotage and take them down in a number of different ways.

And so we've designed this business structure and sort of business model,

this novel approach to how to do publishing with a view to protecting ourselves from

those kinds of depredations.

Yeah, because I think all of us have watched in recent years,

you know, publications that, you know, didn't need to die, you know,

from places like Deadspin and like the outline that were producing

...