Do you want to know what it was like to work inside BuzzFeed at the height of its power? Ryan can help you with that.
“Digital media was the problem. It wasn't the job. Like the burnout I felt as a journalist was not because I didn't like being a journalist. It was because the structure I was in sucked ass run by sickos. And now it's like, it's nice. Like turns out that even on a bad news day, like this week, it was still fine.”
Ryan Broderick is the writer of Garbage Day, a Webby Award-winning newsletter about the Internet, and the host of the new podcast Panic World. He reported for BuzzFeed from 2012 to 2020, and has also worked at Vice, Gawker, and the Awl.
Credits
- Hosts: Eric Silver & Amanda McLoughlin
- Producer: Brandon Grugle
- Editor: Mischa Stanton
- Graphic Designer: Shae McMullin
- A Multitude production
About The Show
Interviews with online creators about how their jobs work and how they got there. Hear the personal stories behind seismic events in digital media and learn what concrete steps we can take to build a sustainable media landscape. Hosted by longtime podcasters and business owners Eric Silver and Amanda McLoughlin, Attach Your Résumé proves that the best credential for deciding the future of media is actually making stuff. New episodes every Thursday until we run out of episodes and have to go make more.
Transcript
Amanda: Hello and welcome to Attach Your Resume, the digital careers podcast where we talk to online creators about how their jobs work and how they got there. I’m Amanda McLoughlin.
Eric: I’m Eric Silver!
Amanda: And Eric, if you had a Substack with an attached podcast, I would definitely pay $10 a month for it. Not just cause we’re married, but because I think it’d be really good.
Eric: That was in our vows: Through sickness and in health, through Patreon and through Substack.
Amanda: Through micro and transaction. Indeed, we’ll be here for each other.
Eric: That’s how you unlock that super cool skin that you have on me.
Amanda: [laughs] Exactly. Well, the person that you talk to today knows quite a bit about running a monthly membership business. Eric, who’d you bring to the show today?
Eric: I talked to Ryan Broderick, the writer of Garbage Day, an award-winning newsletter about the internet, and the host of the new podcast Panic World. You might also know Ryan from working at BuzzFeed from 2012 to 2020, and he’s also worked at Vice, Gawker, and was an editor at The Awl.
Amanda: I mean, what a resume for a digital media jobs podcast, but the thing that stuck out most to me in this interview, Eric, was all of the stuff that Ryan had to say about the future of journalism and digital media. Now, Ryan has been, like you said, running a newsletter full-time for the better part of six years now. And he specifically says in this interview that his specific business model of being, like, a guy with a Substack — former Substack now, on a different platform — that you subscribe to because you already know their work, is in no way the future of digital media. And I thought it was really, really interesting for him, not just to talk about the past and where we came from, how we got to this moment where so many people are going independent, but also what on earth we’re going to do in order to make this a sustainable and scalable model in the future.
Eric: Yeah. It’s almost like the Substacks that we’re seeing is the rocket leaving the exploding planet, the Superman-ing, but now Superman needs to land on a new planet and do something else.
Amanda: Ooh, very good. I like that metaphor.
Eric: You know, Ryan spinning up Garbage Day and then adding Panic World is like the next step forward. Where are we going to thrive on this new planet, and is the sun going to be as energy-filling as it was back with all the other super people?
Amanda: And I’ll tell you, we cut clips for social media on this show — you should follow us, by the way — and I had about 30 very viable clip options from this interview with Ryan. So it’s filled with a lot of great stuff I know people are really gonna enjoy.
Eric: Yeah, we recorded this episode recently. As you can tell, we recorded it since Trump was elected. But Ryan had so much prescient stuff to say that we actually moved it up in our release schedule. You can find all those clips at MultitudeShows on Instagram, but you can follow us on a different social media that’s doing really, really well right now. Follow us on Bluesky. Shout out to Bluesky. I’m feeling very invigorated after the Gita episode last week and seeing how everyone’s building their audiences up. It seems like Bluesky has the juice, so follow us on Bluesky. I’m ericsilver.bsky.social, Amanda is amandamc.bsky.social, and Multitude is multitude.productions. Yeah, we figured out, through extensive help pages, how to make our username the same as our website.
Amanda: Just like in the early 2000s, when I was messing about with text records and the ICANN notice of domain names, we did it again. And here we are at multitude.productions on Bluesky.
Eric: If we could have a social media account on the Neopets discussion boards, we would, but this is the best we can do.
Amanda: Say it again, Eric. Mm. So good.
Eric: Neopets discussion boards.
Amanda: Incredible.
Eric: I have a Petpetpet. It’s a really small bee that holds a, um, pencil.
Amanda: [gasps] I want it so bad now!
Eric: Sorry, I just invented it. All right, follow us on Bluesky, follow Multitude on Instagram and on TikTok to see those clips. But before that, listen to the episode with Ryan Broderick.
[theme music]
Eric: All right. The way I want to warm you up is: What is your favorite way that protein is prepared? My favorite way that protein is prepared for me is when it’s on a big cone and then you slice it off and put it into a little thing. It could either be kabob or al pastor, any of that stuff.
Ryan Broderick: Yeah, no, big things of meat are great. I won’t take yours, cause you already said that one —
Eric: I mean, it’s a good one.
Ryan: — but I will say slow cooked in a big pot —
Eric: Oh, yeah.
Ryan: — I feel like is adjacent to the big spit. The big stick.
Eric: Yes. Is it the satisfaction of watching meat slough off of bone like that, like you’re watching RoboCop?
Ryan: Love a good meat falling off the bone. Love that. Love when the bone gets hot enough that you can drink the marrow on the inside.
Eric: Oh, perfect.
Ryan: Enjoy that. Yeah. Big fan of hot meat in a pot.
Eric: And then breaking the insides and drinking it.
Ryan: Yeah, love it. Love that.
Eric: Incredible.
Ryan: Yeah.
Eric: Ryan Broderick. I’m so happy to hear from you. As we start every episode of Attach Your Resume, how do you describe your job to other people?
Ryan: Oh, boy. Well, I used to say I write a newsletter, and then people at parties would be like “Oh, are you on Substack?” And I was, like, okay —
Eric: “Oh, are you a right-wing grifter?”
Ryan: Yeah, and I’m not on Substack anymore. So now what I say is I run a small media business.
Eric: I like that, though, because — I feel the same way when someone says, like, “Oh, I’m a streamer. I’m a YouTuber.” It’s like, “Oh, do you yell slurs out while playing Fortnite?” But “small media business” is like, “Hey, I am a job creator, look at my LLC,” which I think is important.
Ryan: Yeah. Like I recently upgraded to an S corp structure and it was horrible and annoying. And I feel like to go through all that and not call yourself a small business owner — like, you take it, you know? Like, that’s what it’s for. That’s what the tax season nightmare is for, is being able to say, “I’m a small business owner,” so yeah.
Eric: So what do people say when you say you’re a small media business owner?
Ryan: I mean, if it’s a good conversation, they don’t ask any follow-ups and we can just move on, because I have reached a point in my life where if anyone tries to talk to me about my job at a party, I will not continue the conversation. I find it extremely boring, and New Yorkers are very neurotic about it, because they’re trying to size you up.
Eric: They’re called Jews, Ryan.
Ryan: Oh. Look, I am not stepping into that.
Eric: I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did that to you.
Ryan: I am not going in that direction. If that’s where you want to go, it’s fine.
Eric: It’s taking forever, right, it’s fine, it’s fine.
Ryan: I’m not going out there.
Eric: I’m joking.
Ryan: But yeah, so I don’t particularly find my job interesting to talk about, at a party at least. If they do ask like, “What does that mean?” I’ll just be like, “Well, I have a newsletter, I have a podcast.” And then they’re like, “Oh, you have a newsletter, you have a podcast.” I just find it so tedious, that they’re clearly — All they really want to know is like, “Are you wealthier than me or not, or do you have more followers on the internet than me on a platform I care about?” I just think it’d be easier if I could just open my phone and be like, “Look, here’s my bank account. Here are my followers across various platforms. Can we move on now?” So I haven’t figured out a good way to answer that question, because nowadays it’s just complicated. Needlessly so, I think.
Eric: What is complicated?
Ryan: Well, it used to be, like, you worked at a company, you said, “I work at this company,” and they’re like, “Oh, I know that company” or “I don’t know that company.” But more and more, especially in the media scene, many journalists I came up with out of college, they either work for themselves, or they work for a thing you’ve never heard of, or they’re doing journalism in some way that didn’t five years ago. And so media parties have become hilariously convoluted, because no one really knows what the other person’s doing. Which I sort of enjoy to a degree. But it is confusing.
Eric: When you say it like that, and then this is also a thing that I don’t have a lot —
Ryan: Yeah, what do you say? “I run a media collective”?
Eric: Well, I say I run a podcast company.
Ryan: Okay, well, see? There you go.
Eric: But no, that’s why I like the thing you said, because it’s like, well, let’s lead with the business, the fact that I I’m actually paid to do this. I don’t have a trust fund that I can dip into like Chuck Rhoades. Again, I’m so sorry, I’ve been watching a lot of Billions. When you describe the thing that you’re saying, like you and media people at a party, it feels like FBI agents coming out of Quantico and it’s like, we’re scattered to the winds instead of doing the things, I think, following what an institution is supposed to do. It’s like, you’re going to go here, maybe you’ll defend the president, maybe you’ll shake down a mobster, or you’ll take down financial crime. And now it’s like, I don’t know, we’re doing weird stuff right now.
Ryan: Yeah. In fact, I was just talking to someone about this this week, where we were spinning through what the last Trump presidency was like, and kind of reminding ourselves of a lot of the very wacky stuff that was happening at the very beginning, both on the right and the left. And it was a really interesting moment, because New York media as a concept still existed. Everyone would, like, read Today in Tabs on their lunch break to catch up with the gossip and the Twitter beefs. And everyone was still kind of living in fear of the Gawker sites and, like, Would they write about you? Would they turn your email job into a big thing? And like, there was a whole gossip network and there were parties and there was money — like, it existed as an idea. And it doesn’t anymore. Yeah, I went to 404 Media, who are an incredible —
Eric: We’re going to have them on the show. They’re awesome.
Ryan: They’re incredible. I went to their first big party in Williamsburg, which was awesome, and I was not looking forward to going. I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t want to go to this.” Because I was thinking it was going to be like a media party 10 years ago, and it wasn’t, and it was a great time.
Eric: For me and for people listening, what is that? What would it mean to be a party in 2014?
Ryan: Okay. Imagine a room, everyone has at least a bachelor’s degree, if not like graduate degrees, Ivy League, it’s very hierarchical based on where you went to school. 80% of the room has slept with each other. They all don’t like each other and so you sort of stand around in little pockets, just sizing each other up, and you’re sort of not allowed to talk to each other like real human beings, but you kind of have to do it to see and be seen, because there’s a chance that you might see the editor there for your next job that will matter.
Eric: Right.
Ryan: It’s horrible. It’s like a school lunchroom, but the people who are cool, like, decide whether you get to have a job in the future. And there’s sort of like the specter of cocaine haunting the room.
Eric: Just someone from Vice has it, in a bathroom somewhere.
Ryan: Exactly, yes. And those things don’t exist anymore. And now I can be like, “Oh, I miss that. That’s so cool. I really miss those days.” But at the time, they were a nightmare. And I was very, very relieved that 404 Media’s party was not like that. It was a very different vibe. And in fact, all of the media events that I’ve been to in the last six months or so, which are kind of beginning to come back in small ways, don’t feel that way. And I think that’s great, that the new generation of independent media in New York is not turning into a nightmare the way the last generation did.
Eric: Right. Well, there’s not enough money for it to turn into a nightmare.
Ryan: That’s it. It’s just people aren’t rich enough to be assholes yet. It could happen. Who knows.
Eric: I think that this is a big thing of why I wanted to have you on, because you’re someone who I remember consuming a lot of the stuff when I was coming up and when I wanted these jobs. Ryan, I found a tab in my email —
Ryan: Uh-oh.
Eric: — that I had for jobs that I was applying to in media from, like, 2015 to 2018.
Ryan: Okay.
Eric: And I found like 13 BuzzFeed ones that were tagged. And there were even more. And the premise of this show, it also comes out of like, I wanted to work at BuzzFeed so fucking bad.
Ryan: You didn’t write the Awl piece, did you?
Eric: No.
Ryan: Do your listeners know about the Awl piece?
Eric: No.
Ryan: Do you know about the Awl piece?
Eric: I know about The Awl. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Ryan: So there was a piece that went viral in, like, I want to say 2014 or 2015. It was a blind item, anonymous written piece that TheAwl.com, RIP, published. It was basically this person being like, if I don’t get a job at BuzzFeed, I’m gonna kill myself.
Eric: A lot of people felt that way. Like, that’s why it got published!
Ryan: That’s so wild. It’s so wild. Yeah, and for years everyone’s, like, who wrote the Awl piece? Like it’s still a mystery in the burning embers of New York media. Yeah, I mean, so I graduated in 2011. And when I was coming up through college, I was getting worse and worse grades as the years went by, because I got the ability to have a laptop in class. And so most of my classroom experience was just me reading blogs.
Eric: Of course.
Ryan: Which is like an absurd thing to say now. Like, I don’t imagine that 18-year-olds are reading blogs —
Eric: No.
Ryan: — for fun.
Eric: Except for the ones, I guess, the subscription-based websites that they’re paying $5 a month for.
Ryan: Hopefully! Any Zoomers that pay for Garbage Day, thank you very much, I love you. You are my IRL friend. I was reading The Awl, I was reading Thought Catalog.
Eric: Oh, of course we were.
Ryan: I was reading Cracked.com, loved that; CollegeHumor essays that were really funny. AV Club stuff, I was reading a ton of criticism — BrooklynVegan — sort of like, I was consuming independent media at a clip that like would not be possible now. And so when I graduated, like it very quickly became, like, I want to do that. I wanted — in fact, I literally said to my mom, like, I have a journalism degree, but I don’t want to be in journalism. I want to go work for blogs.
Eric: Yes.
Ryan: And so my first job out of school was Vice. And I was like, “I’m not cool enough to work here. I don’t want to be here.” And so I left there really quick. But that was the goal, was like, to go towards blogs.
Eric: It’s crazy because we had such a similar origin story that I’ve said on the show before is like, I also wanted to do these jobs, but then it felt like in 2012 the ladder was pulled up. So then it felt like once 2013, 14, 15 and then beyond — as shown by my inbox — it felt like there was no more way to get on board and then everyone was just kind of getting up.
Ryan: I remember it. I remember, like, there was a whole group of us in the city in 2011, that were all actually kind of meeting each other. This is when I met Taylor Lorenz for the first time. It’s where I met a lot of — some people who are still in the game, a lot of people who aren’t. And we all were kind of getting these jobs right before they mattered. And —
Eric: Yes, that would be the best way to describe that, yeah.
Ryan: And I want to say it was like the end of 2012 — I sort of always timestamp it by Hurricane Sandy, which in my mind sort of restructured New York media to finally take the internet seriously, because it knocked out server towers that were running sites in the city. And so for the first time ever, major news organizations based in New York had to go mobile-first. And so it sort of changed the dynamics of what these newsrooms around the city valued. And after Hurricane Sandy, you get this wave of mass shootings for the first time ever with, like, the beginnings of incel spree shooters. So not only was there a new sense of “the internet matters because we can publish on it,” but there was also a sense of “the internet matters because news is happening first on the internet.” And so around 2013, let’s say, that was the first time I remember working at digital media sites, and my friends working digital media sites, all noticing the graduate programs that kids were coming into as interns were getting better. And I remember being like, “Wait, why are there Ivy Leaguers interning for these sites? Like, this is ridiculous. These are like dot-com sites. This is silly. These aren’t supposed to be anything.” And by 2014, it was just, the whole thing was different. Like 2013, I would sort of timestamp as like, that is the transition period of like where people were like, “This matters now.”
Eric: Yeah. That was the time I was told I had to figure out what my job was and not try to get a blog. So shout out to my five-year English education degree that I used one time.
Ryan: Hey, you’re speaking it right now!
Eric: Yeah, I know. This is praxis right now.
Ryan: You’re doing it, you’re doing it.
Eric: Once I’m doing it, then you can just do it. So obviously, here in 2024, I know the answer to what you’re about to say, but I feel like I have to say it: How much did you feel like you were given keys to the castle during this time, when these websites started being important, in your words, and then was there another side to those keys?
Ryan: I mean, there was definitely like a dark side and things got toxic. But in the beginning, what it was — and I think this has sort of been lost to time — the majority of these sites like Gawker, Vice, BuzzFeed, any of the sort of early publishers that would become viral media, their largest referral, when I was working at these places and when my friends were working in these places, was StumbleUpon.
Eric: Really?
Ryan: In 2011. Yeah. And what happened was there was a News Feed tweak in 2012 that was made for the Facebook mobile app.
Eric: Of course.
Ryan: And what that did was it opened the floodgates to a new kind of traffic. And I remember at least at Buzzfeed, we discovered it because we had a quiz about what kind of pooper you are. And it went insane. And we all sat in this room being like, why did this quiz go insane? And we realized it was because people were taking it on the toilet. And this is so crazy, because this is like barely 10 years ago, 12 years ago: that was the first time we realized that people could read on their phones. Like, that’s how new this idea is.
Eric: That’s crazy.
Ryan: And this was happening everywhere. So this is the period where, you know, sites are writing smaller stuff. They’re starting to, like, experiment with infographics for, like, Pinterest. This was the transition to mobile that was happening, and that sort of changed everything. And that would create the domino effect that would eventually destroy all of media and then help Donald Trump get elected a second time. But back then, it was just like, “What is this? This is new. This is interesting.” It felt very think-tanky, actually, in the beginning, because you’d go out for drinks with a bunch of young journalists and you’d wake up with a notepad on your phone full of crazy ideas to try because you were just like, will it work? It felt very experimental, and some places were better about keeping that experimental spirit alive longer than others. Whereas Gawker, you heard horror stories where they had your traffic leaderboard on the wall and they were all, like, watching each other.
Eric: That’s something that feels like it’s only in prestige TV right now. Like, nothing makes me more mad — and this is the kind of person I am — that, like, Succession didn’t stay more with that one Gawker-esque lie-in there.
Ryan: What were they called?
Eric: They were called Vaulter.
Ryan: Vaulter, yeah.
Eric: I hate that I know that —
Ryan: Yeah, Vaulter.
Eric: — I hate that it’s just stuck in my brain. But I’m like, I want to see them shake out the numbers on the wall. Like, that’s what I want to see. I want to see those things happen.
Ryan: I mean, I don’t want to waste this pitch —
Eric: Please.
Ryan: — but a friend and I for many years have been talking about like a Halt and Catch Fire show based on, like, the last 20 years of digital media, which would be uninteresting, I think, to almost anybody. But to us, it would be very interesting.
Eric: It would have like 100,000 viewers and a hundred articles on Vulture.
Ryan: Yeah. Hey, if Vulture still exists, great. I would be happy to help them have content to write about. But this is the thing that I think most average people do not understand, which is that that period of time created the exact dynamics that led to this election.
Eric: Yes.
Ryan: That sort of destruction of traditional media created a space for new players, but the thing was that those new players weren’t creators. They aren’t like me now. They were these increasingly massive companies that were trying to become traditional publishers. Rather than creating something completely new like Defector or Dropout, or you or me, trying to create new corporate structures for a new internet, based on a creator class, they were going the opposite direction. And I even remember in like 2013, 2014, if you had told me you’re a YouTuber, like, “Oh, you’re a pedophile?”
Eric: Right.
Ryan: Like, “Oh, you’re a predator? Oh, cool. You’re a child predator. Okay, cool. Oh, that’s cool, man.”
Eric: “Oh, I love that you do that. That’s so neat.”
Ryan: “You can just say you’re a child predator. You don’t have to say YouTuber.”
Eric: See, that’s what you’re saying at parties when you introduce yourself with “newsletter.” It’s like, “Oh, I have a newsletter. Yeah.”
Ryan: “Oh, you hate trans people? You have a Substack, you hate trans people?” That’s what that means.
Eric: “Yeah. I’m Bari Weiss’s best friend. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Ryan: “Yeah. I just don’t think trans people should be in child sports.”
Eric: “I have a bunch of guns that say that as well. Just so you know.”
Ryan: Exactly. “Yeah, I’m just, like, a common-sense centrist.” No, but it was interesting that not up until maybe even the pandemic was it acceptable to identify in the media as a creator and be taken seriously as a professional person. And it’s still kind of hit or miss; it really depends on the creator. And you’ll hear people be like, I’m a creator, rather than a YouTuber. Like if you say you’re a YouTuber, I’m like, oh, you have brain damage. But you know, if you’re a streamer, even — okay, maybe, but these things are all very very new. And the media class of 10 years ago were still thinking, like, “We could cobble together enough Facebook traffic to become the CNN of the future, the MTV of the future,” where none of those things exist in the future, you know? It’s like saying, “I’m gonna put together enough MP3s to be the record of the future!” What the fuck are you talking about?
Eric: I’m gonna be Betamax in the future, just so you know. It’s funny the thing that you said, I’m stitching together all the things you’ve said so far. And one thing that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot, here in 2024, is that the only way for us to survive is if the new things we’re making now are actually taken seriously as a business with jobs and that can actually be sustainable. All the people who you listed off, right, that you read when you were in high school and college, Cracked, CollegeHumor, all those people then turned around and made something new. Now, whether or not they start a new company — like, for example, the CollegeHumor-to-Dropout pipeline — or go from Cracked, which is now, everyone who’s ever been on Cracked goes on Behind the Bastards.
Ryan: Cool Zone Media.
Eric: Right, but Cool Zone is attached to iHeart.
Ryan: Right. Even stranger.
Eric: Like, then you gotta make your choices there, and I think it’s interesting how it all shakes out. It’s like, you go to these parties and as someone who didn’t go to these parties, I see that now the new companies are just collections of people. Literally cause Defector did it: you literally all walk out and all of your friends go start a new company at the place with all the people who you used to work with. But it’s like, are we doing it just so we can do the thing that we wished we did unfettered 10 years ago? Or are we actually going to become new seeds that bloom into real companies and move forward while everything else is moldering?
Ryan: Wait, what’s that millennial buzzword? “Sustainable companies.”
Eric: Sustainable.
Ryan: I want a sustainable business.
Eric: That’s just the word — I think it’s become “adulting,” is “sustainable” now.
Ryan: I want a sustainable media business.
Eric: But like, that’s just called a business.
Ryan: Yes. It’s just a business. It makes money.
Eric: If you have one operations person, you are more sustainable than just, like, a collection of people who are telling everyone to pay them $5 a month. And godspeed, I do pay $5 a month. I’m doing it. But it’s like, what are we going to do next? Are we actually going to make companies now, and run it like companies?
Ryan: Well, so I think the problem with doing it on your own as a creator, or as a creator-run company like Marques Lee Brown or MrBeast, all of those guys actually all complain that being a CEO and being the lead creator of their own company is actually, like, brain-meltingly difficult and annoying. It’s not easy. And the other thing is, at least in those two instances, the creator’s still at the whim of the platforms. Like, if YouTube turned one of those guys off tomorrow, they’d be cooked, they’d be over. So, it does seem to me that the cool new indie media pivot is a way to get beyond the platform. Which I think is useful. I still have not come across a business model from one of these indie media sites, myself included, that I find interesting. Like, they’re still not really tweaking the business dynamics of media in a way that is exciting. You know, if you want to go 10 years down the line, that has to be figured out. And I don’t have any insight here. I’ve banged my head against the wall many times being like, what is the thing that we’re not doing? Like, what is it? And I don’t know what it is. Because you’re either doing ads or you’re doing subscriptions. And you just sort of pivot between the two, or you combine the two, you might add some other stuff — you know, the New York Times does, like, games, you know?
Eric: I mean, games and cooking props up the entire New York Times Company, which I don’t think is a problem. I think it’s okay to have that third thing that’s straight-up dollars, so that you can have your adult, sustainable business.
Ryan: I have a problem with it only because, in my own experience, media tends to optimize towards what’s making the most money. If you are a newsroom that starts a YouTube channel, and your YouTube channel starts making millions of dollars, you become a YouTube channel that happens to have a newsroom, and then very quickly, or at least eventually, you become a YouTube show. You know, there are many of these places that started with, you know, “well-rounded investigative journalism propped up by viral content.”
Eric: Oh, do you have experience with that? Have you ever heard about that?
Ryan: Never heard about that before. And eventually, it just becomes the viral content. You can say, out of the good of your heart, like, “Yeah! We’re going to support journalism with this thing that makes money.” But at the end of the day, your investors, or your owner, or your next owner after you can’t continue because you’re not sustainable, will just say, “I want the thing that makes money.” That’s the thing where I’m always like, “Okay. It’s great that myself and many of my peers have figured out ways to create businesses that can pay the bills and allow us to do cool stuff.” But then the question that none of us have answered is: What is that business model that makes media into a product again? Because it used to be. It’s actually only been relatively recently that we un-productized news content.
Eric: What do you mean?
Ryan: Like, you used to buy a newspaper.
Eric: Right. Like, by paying for it. It involves a dollar.
Ryan: You bought the product, and then you have it. I spent many years in the UK, where newspapers are still very popular, to the point where you can organize certain home rental apps by the subscriber of the newspaper in the neighborhood, to make sure that you don’t live next to people who read the Daily Mail — or the Guardian, you know, if you go the other way.
Eric: That feels like now you can see who voted for what if you zoom in enough. You know, there’s a data visualization where you zoom in enough, you can literally see, like, the building and how they voted.
Ryan: Right.
Eric: It freaks me out.
Ryan: Yeah. No, And so, like, British newspapers are not good, objectively, but they are a good product. Like, if you open one, on your commute or whatever, you probably will read it front to back — which, I don’t know the last time I’ve ever even picked up an American newspaper, let alone read the whole thing. Because they’re all so freaking annoying. We have the big broadsheet thing, where you’re like [clumsy noises], but I just think that there’s a lot of energy in indie media right now, especially in New York, and it’s really good. And now that we’ve sort of all got our ducks in a row, and we sort of all figured out a way to keep the lights on and keep operating, the next big question, the ultimate question, especially now in this second Trump age, is how do we create a product again? And that is something that I’m very focused on, but I don’t have any answers.
Eric: I have two thoughts about what you’re saying. I think the first thing, the thing that is actually selling, speaking of 404, is investigative journalism. It’s being the bogeyman. I know that maybe I’m True Crime Brain from being in podcasting so much, but like, people really like it when you tell them a good story!
Ryan: Oh, sure.
Eric: Especially when it’s a scandal. So the whole reason why I think that 404 is flourishing is, while all these tech blogs and tech websites are bending the knee to Silicon Valley and some dude who has 30 children and a ton of Bitcoin, like, 404 is breaking news constantly. I think being the bogeyman is a good product. The other thing I would say about how companies only run towards the thing that’s biggest, I feel like there’s so many examples of how reporters, or creators in various ways, do something that everyone loves and then the company is like, “Okay, that’s nice,” because they don’t understand what it is. For every Sean Evans, where Hot Ones is just Complex, I think about how Brian David Gilbert felt muzzled by Polygon, so that he could do his weird shit and then he didn’t get help for it. And how there was a revitalization of YouTube at Polygon that didn’t go. And I know so many other times where that’s happened and they don’t feed the beast.
Ryan: So I like Polygon. I’ve written for Polygon. I have friends who used to work there, still work there. It’s great. With Brian, who I’m a huge fan of, my understanding was that he wanted to expand beyond games content.
Eric: I was just using one example, but fair, fair.
Ryan: I think what you’re saying is correct. And this is actually, I think, a problem with the previous era of institutional digital media where — so Polygon is the gaming vertical, right? And they’re owned by Vox, and in Vox’s stable, if your listeners aren’t familiar, you have Vox, the mainline place; you have the Vox YouTube channel; then you have The Verge, which is the tech site; Polygon, which is the gaming site; and I think there’s other Vox properties, but I can’t remember the rest.
Eric: Someone literally asked me if something was under Vox or Condé Nast and I couldn’t remember, and I tried to look it up and I still couldn’t figure it out.
Ryan: Oh, New York Mag is under Vox.
Eric: Right.
Ryan: That’s it. So, with Polygon, they’re a gaming site that is not a vertical, it’s a site. So, you end up having creators like Brian David Gilbert who are multifaceted, they’re multitalented, and they want to sort of expand their range, and as a creator they can do that because their brand is just their face. And a lot of these digital media companies, like Vox, came into this exact problem at the end of the 2010s, where they accidentally created a creator internally, who was popular, and people liked their face and they trusted them and they liked them. And instead of giving them the ability to feel out the contours of what that creator could do and could be on, they were like, “No, no, but you work for the gaming vertical. So you got to be the gaming guy.” And I think that is like a thing that, weirdly, digital media had a big problem with. Whereas I don’t see, like, NBC having that problem. They’ve got, like, Anderson Cooper getting hammered at New Year’s or whatever.
Eric: I can think, everything — Audie Cornish has had like 30 different jobs. I guess it’s another thing. Like, Sam Sanders also felt squashed, and then he had to go do his own thing.
Ryan: Yeah, and this is a thing where — and a big part of the digital media union boom, right before the pandemic, was also tied to this — where these companies kept promising young people, like, we are the new thing, and we’re dynamic and we’re scrappy and we can do things that the competitors can’t do. But they would routinely create personalities and writers that were bigger than them, or becoming bigger than them, would not pay them, or would not support them, or would continue to shoehorn them into this little box, and people are like, “Why am I here? I’m being paid less than someone at the New York Times. I’m doing triple the work. I’m famous in a way where I can’t have a functional life anymore outside.” And I know many digital media-aligned YouTubers that, like, couldn’t go to the supermarket. And this was happening in 2018 and 2019. To this day, I will never totally understand why that happened that way. And my only guess is it was a control thing. But I still don’t totally get why these brands, that were not legacy brands, were so intense about squashing their own internal talent, or fitting that internal talent into a box. And then, obviously, the internal talent was like, wait a minute, I could just go start a YouTube channel. Why am I here? I could go start a Substack. I could go start a whatever. And like, that has been the story of the last five years, is anyone who gets big enough at one of these places is like, “Why am I still here?”
Eric: I guess that’s what I’m trying to say is, like — So here we are, right? In 2024. We’ve seen them do it badly. We have all these people who got exposed to massive audiences using corporate marketing apparatuses. And now they’re doing their own thing. But what if it became companies, and what if we didn’t fuck up like they did before? I know it’s just, like, results-based, right? The money’s coming in, but I think that the seeds are blooming into what this could be. And all we have to do is survive four more years of Trump, I guess?
Ryan: Well, I mean, the big question is, like, will Trump be good for the news business again?
Eric: Right.
Ryan: And I’ve heard competing arguments. I think Brian Stelter was saying that, like, he thinks that it won’t be good.
Eric: Right, cause everyone’s so tired.
Ryan: Everyone’s tired. Yeah, we won’t really know until it’s happening. And, you know, does Trump still have the juice to pull in the ratings? Who knows? But the last Trump era was very good for the financials of American media, if not the reputation of American media. But to your point, there’s this story I always think about: Do you know how Image Comics was started?
Eric: No.
Ryan: So Marvel and DC, maybe they still do, but at the time they had offices across the street from each other. And one day, the biggest writers and artists of both just marched out, met in the street, and formed their own company. And when they formed their own company, they created this new idea for comics, which was that Todd McFarlane, in it, would make his own characters, own all the intellectual property, and Spawn — Todd McFarland’s creation — could only appear in, let’s say, Invincible, Robert Kirkman’s book, with a handshake agreement. But there was no shared universe, there was no shared intellectual property. Image essentially was a way to combine resources to print comics.
Eric: Sounds like a good idea.
Ryan: It has aged kind of weirdly, now that some of these artists and writers have become so powerful that they’re essentially running, like, non-unionized shops inside of Image. And there’s a whole union drive inside of Image right now that I’m not super familiar with. But the initial idea of the artist-writer as a creator, sharing resources, that’s sort of the stage that we’re at right now, I feel like, with indie media.
Eric: For sure.
Ryan: And I don’t know what comes next. I know that there will have to be a next, but I’m sort of with you that, in my opinion, the shared brand, the shared resources, the shared company, makes more sense than the Substack millionaire. Which doesn’t make any sense to me and I think is a bad deal for everybody.
Eric: I guess I’m saying this as someone who has had to change my job from “head of creative” to “head of development,” to something that’s more business-y. Because also alongside me making my podcasts, I’m like, hey, if you want to hire us to make podcasts for you, I’ll help you with the creative. They like doing the fun stuff; no one wants to give away the creative. So now I have to change my job to something that’s a little more business-y. I’m saying I hope that the next step, and I think the only next step, is people need to hire COOs. Like, can we get a little bit more business structure here? Can we run this so someone knows how all the healthcare works? So it’s not just the person — it always feels like, to me, when a new subscription-based website comes around, is that they draw the short straw and the person with the short straw has to do QuickBooks.
Ryan: Yeah.
Eric: I just want one person who wants to do that job, and knows how to — loves Excel! — and then this person can do that job. I’m just hoping that’s the next step forward, because it’s the only way to actually become companies, as the economic unit of our economic system. That’s the only way for us to do it, instead of a couple of people hanging out hoping for subscriptions.
Ryan: No, I wish those people existed too. I mean, they do exist, they’re just expensive. That’s the other thing, because that knowledge is hard to come by. I also — I mean, this is true for me. My margins are very small. I have to assume that Defector’s margins are quite small, 404’s margins are quite small. And this is probably why the creator-focused, like, YouTube businesses have more money to go around, because I think the margins are a bit bigger. And I think they will be with video anyways. And this is why I always come back to the economic model question, because if you can make the margins bigger, all that stuff happens really fast. That’s why it happened the last time, is because you got venture capital going in, so everyone’s like, “I guess we have HR now.” That was not a possibility before venture capital.
Eric: I think it’s going to happen. I really do.
Ryan: Venture capital, or — ?
Eric: Money from somewhere. I mean, venture capital is a bad thing, because we now know they’re not angels. They’re just dudes who put on wings, right?
Ryan: But there have been some — So I was curious, who’s raising money right now? And Semafor, they raised a good amount of money. The Ankler, which is an independent-ish entertainment site based on Substack, they raised a good amount of money. Oh, Puck. They raised a bunch of money. Like, there is money to be had if you can get it. Most of the publications I see that are able to raise the kind of money that allows them to become, like, a real company with a real office and HR and all the rest of it, seem to be more specialized than they used to be.
Eric: Sure. I think that’s okay, though.
Ryan: I think it’s necessary.
Eric: And they don’t even need the office.
Ryan: And it also means they’re not chasing, like, inhuman levels of scale, which was a really bad decision in the 2010s. Like, Semafor is selling business and political news, right at that intersection where like the media also kind of fits in, and they’re selling a very specific product to a very specific kind of reader. Puck is the same deal. The Ankler, the same deal. And that, to me, makes sense and is much more “sustainable” than chasing 10 million Facebook ghosts that are going to make your advertisers happy.
Eric: But you need the Facebook ghosts in order for you to have an incredibly expensive Williamsburg office with the most expensive coffee keg that gives you three times as much coffee, and Action Bronson walks in every once in a while. Like, we can just adjust our margins around because I hope that we’re more clear-eyed here in 2024 and 2025 about what money should go to.
Ryan: I want the free cold brew, and I want the free seltzer so bad. I miss the seltzer so bad.
Eric: I will give you seltzer. You can have seltzer after this.
Ryan: I have to pay for my own seltzer now. It’s awful.
Eric: Yeah, but now you get to choose the flavors.
Ryan: Yeah, that’s true.
Eric: That’s the best part of running a business!
Ryan: If that’s not a great metaphor for the entire thing. Yeah. I can choose my own seltzer, but I gotta pay for it.
Eric: The reason why I wanted to have this conversation with you is because you wrote something that really struck me when President Trump — going to be —
Ryan: President-elect.
Eric: President-elect Trump.
Ryan: There’s a lot of certifications left.
Eric: I didn’t know, when you’re a previous president, do you call them that?
Ryan: Former president and current president-elect.
Eric: President-elect Trump.
Ryan: Yeah.
Eric: Yeah. We’re recording this two days afterwards, so everyone is kind of writing things and now trying to go watch Billions, recommending you watch Billions.
Ryan: Gotta watch it.
Eric: I think The Wire might be too much for your brain. Let’s do Billions. I have something, two paragraphs that you wrote, that I thought was really important about our conversation here. Would you like me to read it, or do you want to read it?
Ryan: I can read it, yeah. I’ll do a dramatic reading. I ended Garbage Day Live shows — “every night with a simple request to the audience: Make websites, send emails, use open platforms, share memes, not to go viral, but to communicate with people you care about, support independent media, and start to learn to use the internet in a way that can’t be censored by algorithm, corporation, or government. To learn how to have fun online again. And that request feels a little trite now. In 2019, the very first issue of Garbage Day promised readers ‘NO JOURNALISM.’ Today, we’re formally retiring that promise — or at least adding a comma.” And in this, I do a hyperlink to the Simpsons joke. “Because it’s time to accept what is needed in the new reality we woke up to this morning. The way we all have been building things, doing journalism, and organizing will simply not be enough. We have to build new ways of communicating. Create unions and support networks that can’t be crushed or throttled or shadowbanned. And we have to do that now because things are going to start moving very quickly.”
Eric: So that’s my question to you, is that last part there. What do you think those unions and support networks are?
Ryan: I think the easiest way to answer that first is a technological answer, which is it has to be on open platforms, whether that is encrypted messaging apps or open protocols like ActivityPub. You know, the thing that is running places like Mastodon. A version of ActivityPub that isn’t quite ActivityPub is running Bluesky, but it sort of works together, not quite, but this idea of sort of putting a podcast on RSS, putting out an email on SMTP, using protocols that can’t be monopolized. That, I think, is the first thing. If you have a union, just start an email list. If you don’t want to be tracked by your employer, start a group on Signal, with disappearing messages if you need it. From there, I think the next step is being open to the way those platforms and protocols shape the structure of what you’re making. For most of my adult life, I have watched social media transform into something akin to a television, and television transform into something akin to a social platform, right? Those are the two opposing and equal forces of media.
Eric: Is TikTok in the middle of those by being both at the same time?
Ryan: Exactly. So you have television becoming like Netflix, you have Facebook becoming more like Netflix. You know, everything’s sort of becoming the same thing. And they’re all owned by the same people. And the forces that guide them are all kind of becoming the same as well. So the first step is to find places and technologies and tools that break that. Think beyond the feed. Think beyond the platform. Try to imagine something different. You don’t have to have an answer. I don’t have an answer, but I think being open to that is important. And so we had mentioned media unions, but I think the digital media union boom of 2019, 2020, was actually very important for rethinking what a union is. Like, a white-collar union is kind of wild. And the explosion of interest in white-collar unions is a kind of new idea. Like, I think it’d be really cool if Google unionized. That’d be really funny.
Eric: Yeah, it would be really funny.
Ryan: I think that should happen. I think every big tech company should unionize. That’d be great. And so, having that openness to allow the realities of now to change what you’re doing, and evolve it, is really important. And that was the progress that we were kind of making before the pandemic. Millennials were aging into positions where they could say, “Okay, what is the value of this? How do we change it?” The idea of using a union to push for diversity standards, that’s an interesting idea that I feel is relatively novel. And in the same way, allowing the technology to alter how you’re publishing, how you’re communicating. Newsletters aren’t new, but this new presence in the media ecosystem is relatively new. Letting that stuff guide you and be flexible and evolve with it, I think, is the major thing as we gear up for a second Trump era.
Eric: For sure. How much are you applying the things that you think about, and the things that you’ve just said, to your own work with Garbage Day, with Panic World, now that you’re making the podcast that attaches to the newsletter? It’s kind of a classic play. How are you applying the things that you know by looking around there, and from your time at BuzzFeed, which, you know, didn’t end willingly —
Ryan: Sure.
Eric: — like, what do you, how do you bring that stuff forward?
Ryan: I think the major thing is: do these pieces fit together? So newsletter, podcast: if it’s together, it works well, but they have different dynamics, they have different needs. So creating small teams to do that. The podcast, we were lucky enough to get some resources to run it for, let’s say, at least a year, we think we’ll be able to do it, splitting those financial resources up equally so that we’re all pitching in and making it work. But we’re also not chasing — you know, you mentioned BuzzFeed, but the reason those places became so toxic at the end, and why many of them don’t exist anymore, it’s because they were chasing scale that was impossible, and they were being run by people who did not care who got hurt, or who was not doing what they should be doing. Like, were willing to squash unions, were willing to do really untoward things to reach these scales that were totally inhumane to try to keep up with. I am not trying any of that. I have a very specific audience that I want, and most of the products that I’m putting out are trying to reach more people like that, but more importantly, just give the people who are already subscribing, already reading, something they like. So Panic World was very much like, “We have these larger stories that we know Garbage Day readers like. Let’s flesh them out.” I have a Discord where I’m talking to my readers regularly, and I feel like I have a pretty good sense of what they care about. And then all of that flows into the Discord via RSS. So it’s all this hub that we’ve been building for years anyways. And then we have live shows on top of that. So it’s all about enriching the current audience, rather than trying to go for some insane mainstream audience that will never care about anything that we’re doing.
Eric: It’s sustainable.
Ryan: It’s sustainable.
Eric: See, you’re the one who put the “adulting” stank on it. I do like that word.
Ryan: It’s very easy to circle back to that word, but really when we’re talking about sustainability in business, it’s like, there is not really a great reason, other than making investors happy, to reach maximum mass appeal scale.
Eric: Exactly. Yes.
Ryan: It’s kind of a psychotic idea. And when you try to do that, you burn people out. You hollow out your own business. It is very much a vulture capitalist kind of idea that doesn’t serve anybody. It doesn’t serve the reader. It doesn’t serve the writer. It doesn’t serve your editors. And it barely even serves your own investors, because most of these places tried to SPAC and go public, and burnt out on the open market. So it doesn’t serve the investors — like, it’s a crazy idea, built up by people from the tech world who had no idea how media worked in the first place.
Eric: I think about that a lot, especially when the WeWork story was so big. I’m like, you did this to yourself! You didn’t have to go public! You didn’t have to show everyone your stupid ideas! You could have just kept doing it, and now you wouldn’t be a true crime miniseries. Like, there you go, you did it to yourself. Yeah. When you think about the people who’ve done these things, and they’re just kind of like still walking around out there — I feel this way about my old bosses too, it just feels like my murderer is kind of walking free amongst everyone.
Ryan: I mean, I honestly pity anybody working in that world still, or having to keep up these — I mean, most of them now are just run by AI, which is like even funnier. But anyone working at like a viral listicle site in 2024, I feel really fucking bad for you. Like, Jesus Christ. Like, do you want to talk? Are you okay? I feel bad for the young people that work at those places especially; like, that is some dark, dark stuff. And honestly, I have friends who work at traditional publishers and our lives have become so different that it’s like, I must be annoying to them. I mean, because honestly, if I’m gonna complain about a boss, I’m complaining about me. And if work sucks, that’s my fault. I don’t know. And it has been nice to create spaces where — I have a researcher, Adam, he’s fantastic, we work very closely together, and this week during the election, I was trying to do the things that I wished a boss had done for me. We had a mandatory, “You gotta get off the computer and go eat lunch, and we’ll come back to this.” We’re also living in a world where you’re not publishing by the second to beat nine other outlets to the same news story. Everything is different now. And so there’s no reason to act like a maniac.
Eric: Right. You don’t have to be a maniac if you’re not doing something that’s inherently insane, which is hollow out everyone’s lives and give it to some dude with a tie.
Ryan: Exactly. I mean, that is literally it. So yeah, I don’t feel ill will towards anyone I ever worked for in the digital media content mines, but I feel very bad for any of them who are still doing it. Like, Jesus.
Eric: I feel that way every time I see someone write an article that’s a slideshow. I’m like, “I’m glad that you’ve adapted yourself to this, writer at this website I like, but I’m so sorry you had to do this as a slideshow.”
Ryan: Oof. What a bummer, man. Yeah, I log into work every day, usually wearing a bathrobe, from my house. I have a great CMS that I like using, courtesy of Beehive. I can talk to my readers all day in a discord and, like, share memes and hang out. Digital media was the problem. It wasn’t the job. Like, the burnout I felt as a journalist was not because I didn’t like being a journalist. It was because the structure I was in sucked ass, run by sickos. And now it’s, like, it’s nice. Turns out, even on a bad news day, like this week, it was still fine.
Eric: It almost feels like everyone who works in media now, we just came from the same character creator. And now we’re just let out into Dark Souls, you know? And it’s, like —
Ryan: Oh, I tried Elden Ring recently and I lost my bow and arrow, like, two minutes in. And I was like, I’m not playing this game anymore. This sucks ass.
Eric: It’s too hard.
Ryan: It’s just too hard!
Eric: It’s like, I don’t have to— I played it in a time where I was okay with it being really hard. You know, it’s like, the thing that I always think about is me and my 30 rejection letters from BuzzFeed, and you were inside, it’s like, we still came to the same place. But now you have these skills and I have these skills, and now we’re just kind of doing it. Now we just have to do it, because the people who were running the companies messed up so hard that now we’re out here trying to do better with our actual experience.
Ryan: Yeah. And it’s like, you know, I worked for good people. I worked for bad people. I had friends who are at good companies and bad companies. That whole scene was of a time that just cannot exist again. One of the only benefits of that period of time is that because you are sort of in this group of young people who are all being paid just enough money to not complain, but not enough to really matter — but you are sort of forced to like do random stuff on your own all the time, like figure out how to film something or figure out how to report something that you’d never done before — most of the people I know from that time period did walk away with skill sets that are quite different than the generation before us. Like, I know journalists in their 40s, in their early 50s, who, they’re a writer and they can write a specific beat, a specific thing. And that’s what they can do. And they’ve sort of accepted that they couldn’t do what we’re doing. And, like, it’s a bummer. I totally get it. Unfortunately, we went through a grinder and came out the other side with, like, the ability to think a little more differently about how to do different things, in different ways. But that’s not a normal thing. That was a very specific time and place, I think, to go through that pepper mill.
Eric: Yeah. Okay, so, final question. Let’s go all the way back to the media party you were at.
Ryan: Oh, sure.
Eric: You were someone —
Ryan: By the way, I want to be clear: I don’t go to a lot of parties.
Eric: No, that’s fair —
Ryan: I don’t want your listeners to think that I’m going to a lot of parties. There’s a period, in my head while we were talking, I was like, I don’t want their listeners to think that I’m cool or interesting. Because I’m not.
Eric: All right. We’ll make sure to say in the title of this episode that Ryan Broderick isn’t cool or interesting.
Ryan: “Not cool or interesting.” That’s right.
Eric: Okay.
Ryan: I have a very boring life.
Eric: Okay. So, you have — I don’t have a lot of people who I can talk about this stuff with. I mean, this is also why we started the show, but also I talked to my colleagues about it, but because I don’t have that network of people, I was the one trying to get a weird job in like 2015. Like, I was working at Poncho, which was a —
Ryan: Oh, I remember Poncho! The little weather app?
Eric: Yeah, yeah.
Ryan: Yeah, I remember that!
Eric: It was great. So I was doing all these content-adjacent jobs. And I was trying to get this job now. So I don’t have a lot of people I can talk to about this. And also, the other thing that we talked about: yeah, I would talk about sports, but also the internet. And that is your job. You do two things that I think about a lot, and I look for people all the time to talk to about. When you’re at these parties, what do you talk about?
Ryan: Oh, I bought a countertop dishwasher recently.
Eric: Hell yeah!
Ryan: So I’m kind of, like, a sicko for this, like a real pervert for this, which is that if I go to media parties, I’ll try my hardest to never answer any questions about work in any capacity with somebody.
Eric: Sure.
Ryan: And so when I was at the 404 party, I had just bought this shower curtain that was promised to me that it would never mold because I was like, “You know, I’m sick of having to clean the shower curtain. Like, it’s 2024. There must be an answer to this.” So I’ve been literally walking around my apartment for several months now just being like, “I’m sick of doing this specific thing. Has technology caught up where I never have to do this again?” And so recently I was, like — I’m not ordering a lot of delivery right now because I was like, delivery’s too expensive and it’s, like, kind of annoying and I enjoy cooking. But then, the dishes. And I was like, “I don’t want to do dishes anymore.” But I don’t have a dishwasher. And I was like, “It’s 2024.” That’s how all of this stuff — all my thoughts start with, “It’s 2024. There must be an answer to this.” And so I found a countertop dishwasher. I bought one, the measurements were wrong on Amazon. It was just too big.
Eric: Got it.
Ryan: So I had to return it. I’d never done a large-item return on Amazon before. Fascinating process. They came to my house; it was the day of the New York City Marathon, and I live on that route. So I felt very bad. I didn’t plan for that. So then I got the new dishwasher. And it’s not as big as I wanted it to be, but it’s as big as physically could fit on the counter. And honestly? Changed my life. So that’s what I’ve been talking about at various media parties I go to, which is new household gadgets that I’m buying.
Eric: As soon as we’re done, I’m going to tell you about my ice cream maker that I just —
Ryan: [excitedly] You have an ice cream maker?
Eric: Oh, I went through so many different ice cream makers.
Ryan: Okay. No, again, I got an air fryer recently and I’m like looking at it and I was like, “This could be slightly bigger.” But then I’m like, “Do I want to be the guy with a bigger air fryer?” Because I’m starting to air fry more stuff, and that’s not good for me.
Eric: You’re the kind of guy who air fries, like, a whole fish at the same time.
Ryan: Ugh. I mean, air frying chicken wings?
Eric: Oh, the best.
Ryan: It’s great. No, but to bring that total aside back to the point, I sort of reached a point with Garbage Day, and with my own career, during the pandemic, where I kind of realized that the majority of what I was talking about was actually just complaining about the bosses, the structure, of the media environment that I was in. And as Garbage Day became successful enough to be my full-time job, I realized that if I was mad about those things, I was in charge of changing them. Which is a terrifying concept. There’s some real catharsis in not being in charge of your own career, in a way.
Eric: Yes.
Ryan: And complaining about it. So what I realized was, like, I could just change those things. And then I did change those things, you know, to some degree. And then I would go to be around media people — not in a party. But like in a small get-together.
Eric: [laughs] Of weirdos who are not interesting. That is what Ryan’s going to.
Ryan: Right. Weird people who are not interesting, and I’m not interesting. We’d all be in the room together.
Eric: They’re not even playing Netrunner or Magic, they’re just like standing there.
Ryan: Nothing interesting. And we’d be talking about the media and, you know, it’d be one of those things where everyone’s going around a circle, like, complaining about the things that I used to complain about.
Eric: Of course.
Ryan: And around 2022, 2023, it would become my turn to bitch and moan, and I realized, like, I have nothing to talk about. And I didn’t want to be weird about it, and I don’t think it’s something to even brag about, it’s just different. Like, I don’t consider myself part of the same industry as those people anymore, because it’s just different; the world is different for me. So then I was like, “Well, I’ve got this countertop dishwasher.” And I’ve had no complaints from people about breaking this sort of media griping fest. But, like, it’s just not something — I don’t even think I’d want to be a part of it again. Like, I don’t find it interesting, because —
Eric: That’s why you’re running your own thing.
Ryan: I guess, yeah. And I think it’s tied to these ideas about burnout, which is, like, a very sort of buzzy concept inside the digital media world, right before the pandemic, during the pandemic. And the thing that I learned about burnout was, like, I think of it more as about agency. So it’s, like, is the work you’re doing — do you feel like you have ownership over it, and do you feel like it’s providing momentum in your own life and self-worth?
Eric: Absolutely.
Ryan: And if one of those things in that triangle is broken, in that system is broken, you’re gonna feel burnout. I feel burnout, sometimes. And then I’m, like, “Well, I can just change it.” And then I do.
Eric: Then you adjust it.
Ryan: Now, obviously, it’s not a perfect job, because media is about catering to an audience, and if my audience doesn’t like something I’m doing — That piece you made me read on this episode, I got some hate mail for it. And I kept being like, “Have you people been reading me the whole time?” Like, I gotta be like, “Trump wins, suck it! I’m unsubscribing.” I’m like, “You have read anything I’ve written before, right?” So, at the end of the day, you’re still beholden to your own readers and your audience. But there’s a lot more flexibility than there used to be for me. And it’s not something everybody can do, but I don’t want to have those in-depth conversations about all this stuff at parties, so I just talk about my dishwasher.
Eric: I think that’s fair. I do think it’s really funny for everyone to go around and then you’re, like, “This dishwasher I got was too big on my counter.”
Ryan: I was like, “You want to hear a great story?” And they think I’m going to tell them about something that happened at work. I’m like, “I ordered this countertop dishwasher that was just too big.”
Eric: No, it’s great. Ryan, I could literally talk to you about this forever, cause it’s what I like to talk about, even more so than my ice cream maker.
Ryan: I’m curious what the ice cream maker is.
Eric: It’s really good. Don’t get the frozen bowl one. It’s not worth it. Get the one with the actual compressor in it. It’s a little bit more. I have a lot of things to say about it. Thank you so much for coming.
Ryan: Yeah, no problem! Thank you for having me. This is great.
Eric: I’ll bring you ice cream next time.
Ryan: Great. Fantastic.
Amanda: Attach Your Resume is created and hosted by Eric Silver and Amanda McLoughlin. It’s produced by Brandon Grugle, edited by Mischa Stanton, and our cover art is by Shae McMullin. We are a production of the Multitude podcast collective and studio. If you like the show and want to learn more about how Multitude helps creators make a living, follow us on social at MultitudeShows, or visit multitudeshows.com.