The Dispatch Podcast - Our Growing Pirate Skiff

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

On today's episode, Jonah hijacks hosting duties from Sarah to have a conversation with Steve as The Dispatch celebrates its second anniversary. How did we get here? What is the state of the company? And where are we going? Show Notes: -The Dispatch manifesto from 2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everybody. This is Jonah Goldberg and I have taken over the Dispatch podcast because we are going to do a special Stephen Jonah two-year anniversary of our first post kind of thing. And so stay tuned. So I was tempted to do a sort of ball, like outer limits, I control the vertical, I control the horizontal, do not try to adjust your podcast. But that's like a really deep cut pop culture reference, and it has no place on this august and very serious podcast that we're about to do. So, Steve, good to see you. It's been literally minutes since last we talked. That's been. Why don't you start off by explaining why, in fact, we're actually doing this thing. this way. So today, well, actually today is Wednesday, Friday, the day that we're publishing

this, will be the two-year anniversary of our first post at the dispatch. So we decided that rather than bringing a newsmaker or do a traditional Friday dispatch podcast, we would talk about what we've learned, what the experience has been, and why we were so crazy to do this in the first place two years ago yeah and a little to be fair also a little what's next you know um in this grand adventure a fair amount of what's next yeah yeah in the uh the original manifesto as we call it in in house um we referred to ourselves as a very humble pirate skiff asking people to join i don't know my nautical like ship sizes but we're we're not a skiff anymore I wouldn't say we were like a frigate or a galleon or anything like that, but, you know, a schooner, I don't know, but things have gone pretty well.

Since you're the CEO and I am the mere figurehead editor-in-chief, why don't you just sort of walk through for people do an elevator pitch on like when someone- I thought you were going to give me all credit. Since you're the CEO and things have gone pretty well, it's all, it's all, okay. Yeah, that's not going to happen. I know too much. I have too much paper. And we did say that we were going to provide truth to our readers and listeners. Fact-driven reporting and analysis, right? So you deserve your fair share of credit.

Yeah. And historians will forever debate how fair or share that is. But why don't you sort of talk about just sort of, if someone well-intentioned but curious asked you in an elevator how's it going sort of just as a business venture you know why don't you tell people how it's going yeah i mean so as it happened i had a conversation with a mutual friend of both of ours uh within the last hour who asked me exactly that how's everything going and i mean i think the the the did you say hi to gory londowsky for me he was disappointed in my answer um

Look, it's gone, just in terms of numbers and in terms of audience and in terms of the people who are reading our work and listening to these podcasts, occasionally watching us when we do a live stream, it's gone far beyond our wildest dreams, right? I mean, we had these conversations in early part of 2019, and we did all sorts of. different scenarios and rosy estimates of members at the end of 2020 and the end of 2021. And none of them are even close to where we are right now. So that's great. We're just shy of 30,000 paying members right now. We've got more than 150,000 people who get our free emails. And those are numbers that if we had talked about them, In those first few days, we would have thought that was crazy. That was silly.

It would never happen. I mean, I do you think it's fair to say, you know, one of the questions we had when we first conceived the idea and then when we first launched was, is there an audience for this? And certainly there were skeptics, including some people who were close to us. I'm not sure there's going to be an audience for this. And some I'm even married to. I'm going to let you handle that.

I will say nothing further. She was particularly concerned that you were teaming up with me, I think, at the time. She's smarter than me. But that wasn't a crazy question. I mean, you know, I think we both had sort of conviction that there was an audience and that we could find it and that we would grow it. But it was still a question. There was a sort of non-trivial chance that the answer that was not really. There's not really that much of an audience.

And it turns out there's an audience and a much, much bigger audience than we thought. So that part of it's been great. I mean, there have been, you know, there have been challenges. It's, I'm a lot fatter and a lot grayer. And I feel a lot older than I did two years ago. I tell people, I mean, and I'm not, I'm sort of only half kidding about this. I wouldn't necessarily advise, you know, someone to think about doing a startup as they approach the age of 50. Like, startups are usually done by young people, and there's a reason for that because the hours and the time and all that.

But, you know, I think over the course of the two years, in part because we've managed to put together such a great team, it's been far more enjoyable than it's been difficult. And, you know, as a measure of whether it was all worth it two years in, I mean, that's probably the most. And that's been great. Yeah, I mean, the only thing, sort of, the only I'd add to that sort of elevator pitch, our elevator explanation, is, you know, a couple things. One, we thought there was a market. We didn't know how big, and we didn't know if we would be able to find it. We thought it was out there.

I mean, not to get all remnanty, but we thought it was out there. But could they find us? could we find them and could we make a go of it was an open question. But I think you're giving us sort of short trift a little bit insofar as, you know, we've gotten, our numbers are better than we expected them to be. And the shocking part about that is, particularly for a startup, is we've had, you know, we're not profitable, but we've had almost a non-burned, rate, right? We had, we raised about $6 million to start this thing. And two years in with

staff, how many people are on the, um, uh, total of 19, I believe, depending on how you count. We'll have to call the herd. Um, but, um, you know, 19 employees, two years in, and we basically still have six million dollars in the bank. And, um, and that was what we raised. That was the, right. So we, we have, and, and this is an argument. have, you know, my wife will often, the fair Jessica will often ask, why the hell are you sitting on all that money? Shouldn't you be like putting it into stuff? And to say that you and I have talked about this a lot is such a gross understatement. Right. But part of the reason why we still have this, this nest egg, which we are in no way opposed to spending for the right

reasons. But we've waited, we've been struggling. Struggling is the wrong word, but we, well, struggling is fine to put in place the right team that allows us to spend that money the right way. Because our view is, you only get to spend some of this money once. We just hired this fantastic. We hope he's fantastic. We're confident he's fantastic. You know, growth marketing guy and um and so we are much better positioned than um we had any right to expect we you know normal startups would have been down to like half that much money or something like that and we've had almost and so i guess part of the reason to bring this up is that it's been all organic growth it's just been correct essentially word of mouth um we've dabbled in a couple

little things but decided it wasn't worth it in terms of trying to like do marketing stuff because we want to do it the right way. And so in a weird way with the whole finding the market stuff, I hate this expression in politics. I mean, I really hate it, but it kind of applies to what we've done is if you build it, they will come. Yeah. And so, and we'll cut this out if I'm not allowed to say this on the podcast. I never know like what the business stuff I'm allowed to say publicly is. But there are these systems that are sort of in place or these rules are in place that when they're trying to value the stock price, you know, of the company that, you know, so like what was it? A year ago, I guess, a little under a year ago. Our valuation doubled. And it's

still all meaningless for us because we're not selling and it's paper and all that kind of thing. But what was interesting to me about it is that the explanation that we got was with a startup, the first year there's priced into your valuation as a risk premium. Like have you come up with a business model that is viable? Have you found a market that will sustain this business model, all that kind of stuff? And after the first year, the people who do these kinds of evaluations thing, said, okay, you've proved your concept. And so, you know, basically our quote-unquote stock price doubled, and which was a nice psychological thing, even if it's not a tangible financial thing, because we're both still eating cat food and that kind of thing.

But, and so, you know, it fills me with a certain sense of not just pride, but, you know, optimism that, you know, it's basically like, the way to think about it is if, if starting Friday is a two year anniversary, Monday, would you like to start a startup with all that money still in the bank with nearly 30,000 paid subscribers, you know, under your belt, 150,000 people on the sort of free list, and then start really laying into the growth strategies and do all of that low-hanging fruit that we haven't done for two years. It gives me a real sense of optimism that, you know, that this thing is going to go to another high plateau before we, you know, think about next steps.

Am I wrong about any of that? No, I mean, look, that's that's the hope. I mean, you know, the way that we've talked about it internally and we've talked about it with our board and our investors is we think we're sort of nearing the end of the true startup phase, it's been two years. As I say, the sort of fundamental question, is there an audience for what you're, you're producing has been answered and I think answered pretty decisively. So the question then is how do we grow? And the interesting thing, I mean, I don't know, maybe people won't find this

interesting, but I find it interesting and worth sharing. You know, when we went and we made, we took a week, week and a half in the spring of 2019 and went and made these pitches to our investors and some people who chose not to invest in us. And one of the things we said from the beginning the people who chose not to just to clarify just to clarify um the one of the things we said um kind of from the beginning you know let's be blunt about it neither one of us knew what we were doing we did not know how to do an investor meeting we had never done a deck we had um this guy mike brown who lives in this world and was indispensable at every step that we took and, you know, really walked us through.

It actually prepared some of the decks for us. Otherwise, the company wouldn't exist. But when we went into these investor meetings, our approach was just be totally honest about everything, including the fact that we didn't know a lot of this stuff. So we would sit across from, you know, big deal investors, names people would recognize, top venture capital firms in the digital media space. And we'd say we don't want to have the kind of, we're not seeking the kind of crazy growth that you have read about

with BuzzFeed and Vice and Vox and all these companies that got hundreds of millions of dollars or tens of million dollars in investment and had valuations in the nine figures. we said instead we're going to spend the first couple of years making sure that we have the audience we think we have and growing sort of methodically and slowly and then we want to build from there and I think you know certainly I can point to about 50 things that I've done wrong and that we as probably probably would do it differently I'm going to give you an opportunity in a few minutes to just list them but I

I would say that, you know, one of the things that, one of the things that I think was the right move was to do it that way, was to be slow, was to be deliberate, was to say, look, the foundation of this thing is going to be reader revenue and members. People had to sort of really want what we were providing. And if they wanted what we were providing, they would stick around. That was one of the reasons that we sort of decided pretty early not to take advertising, not to pursue advertising, at least on the, on the, on the, print products. You and I, though, didn't see eye to eye necessarily about that from the beginning. What was your point and why were you wrong? Now, we've talked about this. I mean, so much. I mean, I'm a little jealous because you were looking through like the rings of the tree and the earlier memos and stuff that we were trading back and forth two years ago. Oh, I'll be bringing those up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me time. And, you know, the thing is, is like, you know, when you talk about slow and steady growth and not chasing crazy growth, make it sound like it was purely a business strategy. But, I mean, I think we should be honest about this.

I know that doesn't come naturally to that the, like, when we first had our earliest conversations about this, I mean, early, like, the weekly standard was still, smoldering rubble and all that kind of stuff um we were you know we said to each other in a thousand different ways i think if we do this it it might work there's definitely a blue sky possibility to all this but we should do it because it's the right thing to do and if it ends up like a lot of startups, you know, crashing and burning in five or seven years. We'll be glad we did it. We'll think we've been on the right side of the right issue and all that kind of stuff. And we'll find, you know, other work, that kind of thing. But we'll have done something noble and good and all that. And we used to talk all the time about how if we make, if we're in the black by one dollar a

year, we'll be okay with it as long as we get to do what we want to do. We've raised our ambitions considerably since those conversations. But at the same time, the reason, but we haven't let go, and I know this has, this can sound really pompous and self-congratulatory, in part because it is. But, you know, we haven't,

you know, it turns out that doing things for what we think are the right reasons turned out to be a good business strategy, I think is the way to put it. And, and you look at a lot of, outlets in the last 10 years that launched that had promise and some still are you know have their merits we don't need to get into a name-dropping kind of thing but a lot of

places got into trouble I mean OZ is the best example of the extreme example but they had a good idea of it were a journalistic product but because they were chasing these crazy valuations it forced them to adopt clickbait models or advertising models, however you want to put it, that over time eroded the journalistic integrity of the thing. And that's sort of how we were persuaded by the guys at Substack that don't go that way because it actually was the way to sort of fulfill the sort of philosophical mission-based kind of stuff. And but it's funny, you know, I tell people this all the time. It's like, you know, Steve and I, we agree on a shock.

amount of things and it always surprises me that we end up on the same place. Especially because I have good judgment. It's weird. And then how do you explain that we agree? I know. That's my point. So, but no, but like the, like you hate the clickbait model more than I do for sort of what I would sometimes call gitchie goo journalistic reasons.

Do you think it's sort of corrosive to the journalistic product? you and there's a bit of personal experience layered in there you have a bit of personal experience with all this and if you want to tell those stories that will boost downloads of this podcast considerably so i encourage it i mean that would be sort of meta right if i told the clickbady stories to get more downloads well it's not even that it's like a nashore drawing tell clickbady stories about clickbaitiness to get more clickbait i mean like it's great but um like and we see it all over the place i mean there are places that that that that that that front load sensationalistic stuff because they don't actually care about the content. They just care about the clicks and the eyeballs. And I think that's all bad, but that, you know, I worked in National Review. I think we did a pretty good job of resisting our advertisers. I literally wrote a piece calling for the bombing of Canada as a cover story. The week that the U.S.-Canadian Friendship Alliance started taking out ads at National Review.

So, you know, I think it's in the New Yorker in lots of places, you know, they resist the pull of everything, but it makes it harder and the clickbait era makes it even harder. So my argument for it was always that it just, it just sucks for the user experience, which you agree with, but it's just not your primary reason. And so we just sort of come of these things from slightly different angles sometimes, but we end up in the same place. Like, there are just lots of websites that might have really good content, but the auto play video, auto play. music, the toe fungus pop-ups, how do I close this window stuff, drives me crazy. And I think that, you know, avoiding all that stuff is good in and of itself just as a sort of aesthetic editorial thing, regardless of the sort of the corrosive effects of filthy lucre or any of that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. So you mentioned the early memos. I do have the early memos. I have the

first Jonah Goldberg dispatch memo. This was before there was a dispatch. Do you remember this is a little unfair, which is why I'm enjoying there. It's why I'm enjoying it. I don't remember. Do you remember the five names you floated in your first memo for the dispatch? I do not believe this is the first memo. I do not.

I think of these was a third memo. No, no. It was in the first memo. It was in the first Jonah memo. First of all, everybody should understand. Jonah writes memos like he writes the G file. So they're sort of filled with, he signed this first memo to a group of us. He said, anyway, this is all just to start a conversation.

Like a pagan, I'm married to nothing, open to anything. I have no recollection of this. I deny it. there are those lines throughout the entire. I didn't know. But this was a very early, very early memo. And I don't think we had even, this, this, I mean, I've got in front of me. This is actually you proposing that we start to think about names.

Finally, we've got to come up with a name for this thing. Do you remember any of the ones? I'm sure you'll, some of them will jog my memory, but right now I truly do not. No. the pinnacle the summit the advance the prompt and the mast the mast i think playing on the pirate skiff theme that we later yeah well so like i mean we don't need to tell the story about the hellish baton death march or coming out with a name thing but in my defense i literally went through a list of all English language publications

going back to the 1600s and just taking the ones that I thought were interesting or whatever, but it was a terrible process. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind.

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Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ethos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. All right. So let's let's move on slightly. What have been your biggest surprises, positive or negative over the last two years? Good question. I'll start with negative and then I'll mention it quickly and move on because I don't think we need to dwell on it. It's way, way, way more work than I thought it was going to be.

I mean, I went in sort of eyes open. It's a startup. We've got to do startup things. It's going to be startup hours, sort of. well aware um you know i figured that would last six months something like that and the startup hours are still sort of startup hours um i keep telling myself that that that the the the change is right around the corner um and it probably suggests that i'm you know not that there are things i'm doing very wrong that it still is sort of startup hours um but that would be the one

negative surprise. I'd say the positive surprise for me would be the direct relationship between really good editorial work and new members. You can chart it on a graph if we have a particularly

good explainer about something that's happening in the news today. We'll publish it. You can literally see it in our back end, how many memberships that generates. And every single time we have something that we're really excited about internally, we see that direct relationship. And I mean, to me, that's kind of the, I mean, it's a, it's just very gratifying to see it right away, I would say, um, because it's, it's what you hope will generate rewards. And none of

it is as, as, as we've made clear, none of it's clickbait. It's, it's all the good work. It's all the good explanation. If you have a particularly good G-file, all the G-files are really great. They're all just as good as the others. But if you have a particularly good G-file, um, we'll see it. I literally say all the time, this G-file wasn't very good. So, I mean, so, I mean, But we'll see it. We'll see it. And I think that's been, that's been good. What's the, how do you answer the same question? I mean, the hard work thing for sure.

I'd say one of the biggest surprises is both, it's a two-sided coin, like in fact, most coins, in the sense that I've been shocked by, I've been negatively shocked by the, by the number of people who actively, not just passively, but actively wish us to do poorly. It's sort of in this weird die marker to see the people who really want us to fail, to hear stories from mutual friends about actual actions that they've taken to see that we fail, or at least not help us succeed. And some of that has been, you know, kind of depressing. And a bummer.

The other side of the coin is the number of people who have, who are deeply invested in our success and want us to make it and are, you know, eager to sort of help us out. Beyond that, you know, and we've talked about this on some podcast at some point before, a lot of, you know, a lot of surprises about the process of actually launching a company and so far as, you know, and I think I've said this on the remnant a bunch of times, but like when we were coming up with the deck and the business model and all this kind of stuff, we thought, okay, this is what you do, is you come up with an idea for a product,

you know, a mousetrap or whatever, and then you go around, you try to sell it to people, get them to invest in the idea. And, um, and Mike Brown was the first guy to sort of disabuse us of that. And it was like, no, no, no, it's iterative. That's the term, you know, iterative, where, you know, you're going around trying to raise money from really smart people who know a lot about this. I mean, I'm not a lot. When I'm going to talk this way, it drives my wife crazy, this space, you know, that kind of thing. And you're such a founder. And they ask you, well, I actually said this on Glop the other day. It's a true story. At one point, I was in the kitchen with my wife. My wife was at the sink, you know, doing some dishes or something. And I was talking about

somebody. And I said something along the lines of, yeah, no, he's really outward facing in the podcast space. And my wife turned around with the water still running and said something like, my God, what have you become? Or who are you? Or something like that. But no, like people ask you really tough, interesting, smart questions because they're smart people who are like interested in their money. And, um, and some of their questions are so good, you're like, huh, we got to sort of deal with that. And you start fine-tuning things. And so that whole process, I mean, I remember saying to you, you know, like 50 days into that period, you know, we're iterating like mofos, you know, because like we're just, you know, coming up with, you know, different ways to think about things. And, um,

I liked that process. It was an interesting process. We should say Toby Stock, who helped us throughout all of this, was really indispensable during a lot of that time. Definitely. But other than that, I mean, this is, it threatens to be too schmaltzy, but, like, we've had our disagreements,

but precious few. One of the biggest surprises is like, we have literally not. had a serious fight or argument at all what's our biggest disagreement what would you say our biggest disagreement has been i really there's it's it's hard to come up with yeah i mean you really don't like the idea and we'll now listeners will be able to weigh in um i still have phantom pain you know and we've talked about this obviously uh from not being able to blog and so does david And embrace the pain, embrace the pain.

And being able, and we used to talk about having smart, sort of, you know, not hot takey, but serious sort of stuff through the day kind of thing. I still think it's a good idea. I think it would drive people toward the top of the funnel, as you like to, as you suits like to say. And I haven't dropped that yet. But, I mean, that's like, you know, your position as far as I can tell is not that you dismiss it out of hand. but that you don't think now is the time. That's a prudential question that I'm open to. But, I mean, ultimately, time will prove you're wrong.

I mean, open to it. So let's push on this. Okay, it's a raw nerve. Let's just like lean right in and push on it. What's, if we were to do something like that, like basically have a group blog, right? That's the idea. If we were to do something like that, how do you do it and have it not be hot-takey? Isn't part of the problem that we are trying to.

trying to address as an institution, avoiding exactly the kind of knee-jerk reaction that gets a, like, hasty but cute reply to the Covington Catholic video that's not in context, or pick whatever your thing is, you're tempted to respond right away with your knee-jerk thoughts. It's like thoughts that probably would be best kept inside your head, never expressed to anybody. But with a group blog, they're there for the world to see. Why would we not then just become another hot take factory? Well, because first of all, you're, first of all, you're contradicting some of the things you said in the past when we've talked about this. Insofar as you used to make the case that when we were talking about doing some of the things like this when we

or in the early in the iterative process, your position was that people like me and David or people like, let's say, Noah Rothman at commentary, that we were good enough at doing this kind of thing without being hot-taking. Moreover, I trust our, if the journalistic fatwa is not to be hot-taking, one can take that into account when one is offering takes.

Moreover, the idea, look, I mean, I came up with the idea of the corner, which, you know, it has evolved in all sorts of different ways over the, you know, subsequent 18 years or whatever it's been, to communicate this idea that conservatives are more heterodox, more human, than the caricatures imply. and I kind of think a conversational thing between like the three of a four you me you know the dispatch podcasters you me Sarah and David maybe the Rowan Starwalt maybe every now and then let the kids out of their crates and let them put stuff in that isn't necessarily like this you know responding to this tweet kind of stuff but you know look I mean we're since we're talking about this the one of the problem of the real hurdles that we've dealt with is because we don't care about advertising, we have an SEO problem, right? We have a challenge, let's say. Yeah, no, that's true. And one of the ways you get new readers and new members is by getting people when they Google for something

or, you know, Alta Vista for something, that our stuff shows up. And having a place where people can kind of hang out, come, get involved in the conversation publicly. Some of this will come down the road because we have all sorts of ideas for all sorts of new, fantastic member-based bells and whistles and discussion forums and all that kind of stuff. But something that appeals to that kind of search, I think, has its benefits. This is not a hill to down on. You're the one who want to push back on this. Those are good points. Those are good points.

I mean, of course they are. I think, no, I mean, you may accidentally make some good points. The other, but no,

I mean, there's like, but more broadly, just like, we don't argue about stuff. I mean, this is like as close as we get to arguing about this.

This is the single biggest argument we've had since we started. That's kind of creepy. I mean, like, it really kind of bothers me. And, um,

I can find stuff. Do you want me to just like, no, no, you're like, you know, like, all that but I don't want to do that but the I wouldn't want to either because you're wrong

objectively wrong yeah yeah uh the other thing that really depresses me surprises me is um so much of your Midwest Midwesternisms have worn on worn off on me like I can tell you how often I use the adjective super which is so juvenile but I do it all the time now I can't stop myself and I know I got it from you um you know other other surprises management these aren't surprises it's just like affirmations of stuff that I knew and I had organized my life to avoid management's hard yeah you know um and we're very lucky and I think this is this is another surprise none of us saw the pandemic coming right because we don't work in the Wuhan virology lab um we had a big plan for lots of events sort of go on the road podcast tour

all that kind of stuff. We still really want to do that. But that was a big part of our business model. It is, let the historical record show in our original budget, and we underestimated how much revenue would come in from readers and members. Our single biggest revenue line was the events line. Right. And we did none of them.

Right. And, And so I think one of the bigger surprises, and it's a really positive one, is that in the midst of a pandemic, with people working remotely, all sorts of like one-year fellow kind of people coming in and out, we somehow stumbled into a really great office culture. you know people i mean again i'm i'm aloof i don't you know for all i know caleb our podcast producer is routinely getting into knife fights with decklin and we just don't hear about it but the sense i get is that they at least hide it very well and everyone seems to actually like each other i mean we have a we have a legit HR challenge for this bet because three of our male employees live together and two of our female employees

live together. And I guess gender segregation in this case makes sense but it's a challenge and and that's been great. I mean like we like to make fun of some of these guys and all that kind of stuff, but everyone really seems to like each other and get along and that's and now we're, I sometimes worry that we're too

protective of that. We're so terrified of the idea of having like ugly social stuff going on that sometimes I think it makes us overthink hiring in some ways but um but that's been another pleasant surprise well hiring hiring has been a challenge hiring has definitely been a challenge hiring has been a challenge um you know we're at the point where we want to take this sort of next step we have a number of senior level positions open and part of it is honestly just interviewing for all of the different positions at the exact same time

I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. If you're a potential job applicant, he loves it. He loves it. No, no, no, no. I actually say this in all the interviews. Like you know, we do these Zoom calls, all these people. And I always up front, I always say to them, before we get started, let me apologize to you in advance. I spent, like literally, this is my script. I spent 20 years curating my life to maximize my freedom and my misanthropy. and the thing that comes with being a founder of a startup and being in management and doing

hiring stuff means I have to all of a sudden look a lot of people in the eye and have conversations and ask awkward questions of them and it does not come naturally to me and I think it's the right thing for me to say to these people because one it's true and two it puts them a little at ease, but it's definitely true. I mean, it's exhausting for me. You know, I know I crack jokes and I seem gregarious and all that kind of stuff, but like, I don't like being amongst the humans that much. I mean, the humans probably don't like being amongst you either.

Totally fair. In some cases. Vice versa is totally fine by me. I mean, you're a much more gregarious outgoing guy. guy than I am. You like phone calls. I will say I don't like phone calls. It's sort of odd. I'm much less gregarious and outgoing than I was before the pandemic in a weird way. We don't need to get into that. I don't need to put myself on the couch about it, but much less eager to engage that way. So what would you say if I asked you who your favorite staffer is

and who your least favorite staffer is? No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. What I was what would you say that would have been really problematic what what would you say if i said what's like what's the biggest mistake you've made we've made we've made we've made as an institution Caleb just interjected on this to say letting David French podcast from a bathroom that's that's kind of a niche complaint but it's fair I don't know I mean look obviously we've made mistakes

we don't need to dwell on some of the sort of specific kind of like, gosh, wish we hadn't done that kind of stuff. But, you know, there were a couple talented people that I think, so like, we should just be honest about some of the stuff. I mean, I'm not like you're not being honest, but I just throw killing. Like, one of the things that we have learned, in part because we have husband or, our money, like Scrooge McDuck, and not spent it on buying, you know, like, I guess we should explain this to people. You can do lots of things to boost your subscriber numbers.

You can do all these sort of Facebook kind of things. You can do these special deals where you discount stuff. You know, there's all this technical thing. And this is, this is the OZ scandal, right? I mean, this is what they did. They spent, they raised a ton of money. and they spent it to fraudulently boost their numbers. Right. I mean, I've been rewatching the wire. For them,

it was all juicing the stats. And I guess this is another big surprise. I mean, I got to be honest. How much I actually care about doing this with integrity, I would not have expected. I mean, I've always thought I was a basically honest,

decent person. Most people do. But like, just cutting corners, I'm shocked at how little desire I have for short-term game on a lot of this. stuff. And, um, but one of the things that we've learned, in part because we haven't done even good, smart, responsible ethical marketing stuff, because we've been waiting for

the right, to have the right team. One of the things we've learned is that, um, big drivers of, of members are people who have personal loyalty and affection for me, for David, for you, although you don't write. That's another thing where we, you know, you're stuck being the CEO so you don't write.

I can't believe what, Caleb, how far into this are we? And this is the first time this is coming out. Yeah. Well, look, I mean,

look, I tell everybody I interview for the executive editor job, the social, the marketing director thing, all of these different positions. The chief job requirement, I see that you need to fill is taking stuff off

the Steve's plate. Because he promised me, like he, you told me you were going to write a friggin, like, newsletter. You told me that you were, going to do it like a reported column two years ago for sure you we used to have for it is one of the

longest running jokes in dispatch history is now basically the editorial meaning version of waiting for godot where you used to say i got to do this but you know i'm still working on this piece about the taliban and now the frigging taliban runs afghanistan if you had written that piece when you first started talking about it. Maybe we wouldn't be where we are today on all this. The piece was from late 2019 predicting that the Taliban would run the place by now. Exactly. And that that that was the piece. And that future President Joe Biden would screw up the withdrawal. And you nailed all of it. You know, but the only thing I was getting at is that like there are some really talented great people who are philosophically sympathetico. I think we could look back and say we should

have swung for the fences and try to really convince some other people to join. I think we should have figured out a way for me to take more stuff off your plate so that you could write and report more. There's a lot of that shoulda could have would have stuff. It's not the end of the world, but I think it's there. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to available. and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply.

Learn more at mx.ca slash y annex. I can't remember how we got on this at this point. It's just sort of we're rambling on and on. So let me ask you to ramble on and on about another important topic. When did you start becoming the interviewer in this? I switched. We switched. Yeah, we switched.

This is not the remnant. What are we not doing today? So right now, just a level set with folks. We have 10 newsletters. We've got three podcasts. We have some fun and interesting announcements coming in the next probably a couple of weeks about new things we're going to be offering. But what are we not doing beyond the possible, I guess we wouldn't call it a hot take blog, but a warm take blog or something? Beside that, what are some other things you would like to see us do?

Number one, number two, what have you heard from others that we should be doing? And if you want to share any actual plans for things we're doing, feel free to do that. Let me think about what plans I can actually share. But no, look, I mean, look, it's weird how much I care about the growth stuff now in ways that I didn't. 18 months ago, 18 months ago, I just don't want to humiliate. myself, right? I just want to like do right by the people that we've convinced to work for us.

I want to hold my head high, all that kind of thing, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now I really want, I mean, I try to talk about this on the Remnant a lot. I want more paid members. I want more growth because there's so much more cool stuff that we

could do. You know, I think our, our straight news and politics stuff is great. Obviously, we could expand that. We both think that we really want to do more reporting. Like, this is one of these things. I mean, I wouldn't say it's a surprise from the dispatch, but it's really been hammered home because, I mean, I knew some of this from NR. Reporting is just expensive. And I don't mean expensive just in terms of hiring good reporters. It's expensive in time because you can have the best reporter in the world

chase down something and it just doesn't turn out to be true. It's a dry hole. It's a dry hole. Yep. And then you abandoned it after three weeks. Yeah, you paid their salary for three weeks with nothing in return. This is one of the reasons. And maybe sent them to a particular place to cover a particular thing.

Yeah. And this is one of the reasons why hot takes and all that and aggregating other people's reporting has become so big is because it's cheap. And the actual good reporting is expensive. And I would love to do more reporting. I know as much as I would love to do it. I know you would love to do it more. But also,

like, I would like to branch out into other, I hate calling them products, but other beats. You know, we really would do well to have a good science correspondent, you know, or science newsletter, sort of what David does on Sunday for religion, have someone do that for science in the right way. You know, one of my oldest and dearest friends is Ron Bailey, and I've told him if he ever wants to leave reason, come on board because he would be great. But there's all that kind of stuff. There are all these, like, weird things we've talked about endlessly with the board, with our advisors, about different beats. And we should say, sort of core to our whole sort of, it's not quite a journalistic vision. It's not quite a business vision.

it's a mix of both. Part of our whole philosophy is to hit where they ain't. And I think we do a good job of that on the news and politics stuff as best we can. But there's so much, and that's one of the reasons why we really want to David to talk about sort of religion stuff that wasn't purely through the Beltway prism of Trump voters and blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, he talks about that stuff because he has to, but he also talks about other stuff. stuff. And there are so many things like long-form podcasts, which we talked about from the beginning that we really want to do. Your big idea. I would say it was your, you drove that process. We haven't done it. And it remains sort of one of the, it's one of the big ones that

we really want to do. I want to do more, like I do these solo, uh, sort of not the solo ruminant remnant stuff, but like every now and then I'll just basically read something. Um, I got inspired to do that from the Revolutions podcast. I actually want to do well-produced historical little vignettes about, I mean, the amount of paper I hold on things like the New Deal and Eugenics and all that, I would love to do little sort of mini-docs about that kind of stuff. And that's why, you know, I keep saying- On video? No video. Not for me. I mean, like...

Just audio mini-docs. Yeah, for now. I mean, eventually we want to do video. So, like, one of the funny things, I mean, just the... pivot when we were talking to investors. Are you pivoting to video? I am right now. I'm pivoting to the center. No, when we were raised money,

a lot of people asked us, aren't you aiming your sights too low? Don't you, shouldn't you start a competitor to Fox and all that kind of stuff? And I remember telling one very famous, you don't need to name them, Silicon Valley investor. Hey, look, you know,

if you want to give us, 500 million dollars, glad to have that conversation. But for now, you know, we think actually what we're doing is the way you build up a brand and build up value at a more achievable, reasonable level. But a lot of people want to do video. I have no problem going to video. I just want to do it right. So we've, we've had inquiries. I mean, we don't need to get to details, but we've had inquiries from folks about doing a video show. We do these dispatch lives. I guess we can sort of stumble into a semi-announcement of this.

We do dispatch lives, basically an hour of live streaming with dispatch writers and editors. We've been doing it sporadically, occasionally. we're likely to increase the cadence of that to about every other week coming up. Would you be open if people wanted a regular chat show to doing that at a greater rate, or not really? I'm open to it. Yeah, the people want to see my mug fills me with Billilderment. But yeah, no, I mean, look, I mean, like, that's the next step. Lots of people want us to, like, videotape the podcast stuff, you know, and I don't mean

lots of people just in terms of, like, audience, but business people say it's really smart to do it to sort of get double duty dollars where you do it on YouTube, you get one audience, you do it on podcast, get another audience. There's a lot of that stuff that I think would be smart to do. It's just we want to do so much stuff. and we need to grow the bandwidth to be able to do it all. I mean, I have no problem with Caleb not eating or sleeping. But, you know, yeah, no, look, I mean, we want to do all things to all.

We want to do an enormous number of things. And, um, um, and that what, what's required for that is, for the membership ranks to grow. And I think that's a, not to turn this into an advertisement, but, you know, the best thing, you know, people, people who have stuck around

for this conversation this long. The people who are still here are already members, probably. You awesome eight, if you can just sort of spread the word about what we're doing and why it's important. I mean, we haven't even talked about,

we have, it's weird. We haven't even, I mean, particularly given like, I just did a podcast with George Will where it's all I talked about. I do this weird seminar thing, which I'll talk about another time, which is all about the future

conservatism. I talked to Harvard Federal Society about the future conservatism last week. We haven't talked about conservatism at all on this thing. And that's a whole other conversation. You know, you're a Columbia Journalism School dork who likes to talk about journalism stuff. I am a seasoned passionate and committed conservative who cares about conservative ideas and principles. And so you're like, we're like Donnie and Marie. You're a little bit country. I'm a little bit rock and roll.

I think it's the way of that. So you just used the word conservative. For two years, we've talked about whether we should use the word. Oh, the endless debate. Yeah. Are you using it here because you're tired and you don't know what else to say? Or are you using it here because you've made a decision that we should embrace? conservative as a label?

As Bill Clinton would say, I think this is a false choice. I am both tired. No, look, I mean, just so listeners understand, we, and this is a real challenge, and I'm happy to turn the tables back on you to get what you think about it, but it's a real challenge in this moment where, let's put it this way. There are a lot of people who are what we would have called conservative,

conservatives in 2014 and 2015, who are no longer willing to use that label because of what has happened to quote unquote movement conservatism or the right in that kind of thing. And so it's a label, it's a brand that actually as a business proposition is complicated. And I have never shirked from telling people I'm a conservative, at least I'm a conservative. at least I'm a conservative circa 2014, 2015, maybe even 1915. But the question we've always had is

do you opt for showing rather than telling, right? We are center right. We don't make apologies for it, but we don't lean into it as a marketing thing either because we think, given who we are in our histories, that's kind of self-evident. And so the question is,

if you're marketing to someone who doesn't know who we are, who doesn't know our stories, does it make sense to lean into the label conservative? Yeah. Or does it make sense to lean into center-right or just fact-based news and analysis? It's not like the New York Times says,

yeah, we're a mainstream fact-based liberal publication. why do we have and it's not like i mean even the new republic doesn't do much of that maybe it does now i don't know i don't read it enough but um but this is a real question for us and there are good arguments on both sides where do you come down on it now yeah i don't i don't have a strong strong view i mean we've been debating it for for two years on the on the one hand i mean i've always identified myself as a conservative or a conservative slash libertarian i mean i'm really libertarian on on some things i'm not where libertarians are on mostly on national security issues. So I don't have any problem describing

myself. You're not for legalizing heroin and privatizing prisons? I'm not. I'm actually, I'm actually rethinking my whole decriminalizing marijuana stance as like every time I drive anywhere near Washington, D.C. It's amazing. Get this contact high just from like being in your car. It's sort of insane. Although the fact that Declan's in your car, might explain some of it, but that's, it's an information. Declan, well-known pot smoker. No, I mean, it's an interest. I mean, maybe people don't find it interesting.

I find it very interesting. It's sort of as a non-trivial discussion of like how we talk about this stuff. On the one hand, I think one of our main advantages, we're totally honest with people about where we come from, right? There's not, like, there's no, like, there's no attempt to guile people into coming to our site or reading our newsletters. We say we're from the center right or we're conservative, what have you. And we think that's an advantage. We don't provide information either through sort of the filter of the mainstream media, which we regard as left-leaning, or the increasingly sort of boosterish, I don't know.

even know what you call it, populist right media. So we tell people where we're coming from, and we think that's an advantage. That, in fact, is a helpful contrast from what you get from the New York Times, where I think the vast majority of people work at the New York Times, whether they're on the editorial page, whether they're reporters, their center left or left. And they present the news as if they're objective. It's one of the reasons that people don't have as much faith in the news. So on the one hand, I love leaning into sort of we are who we are, sort of take it or leave it.

On the other hand, the word conservative is fraught in a way today that it wasn't in 2014 or in 2016. And when you say conservative, it's sort of a door-closer for so many people. And, you know, while I'm a limited government guy and have been for as long as I've had views on these things, I'm not sure I'm conservative in the way that most conservatives describe themselves as conservative. So that's an ongoing, that's an ongoing challenge. I think we probably won't solve it, but it's, I don't think we'll, we'll answer the question. I don't think we'll come up with a final conclusion in this conversation. but if you know and in fact i think the key is not to come up with a final conclusion of this topic but to come up with a conclusion of this podcast because we've now gone in an hour

so we've got two more hours to go is that what you said originally you wanted to go three hours on this one i got i got dinner upstairs dude so final final question parting question On a scale from zero to 10. I have so many things, so many things that I would like to ask you as a parting question. I would like to say you can cut this, Caleb, if you want to, but I don't think we should cut it. So your decision to leave National Review was not an easy one. You were identified closely with National Review. You'd been there for two decades.

You left, unlike me, I left the weekly standard because the weekly standard didn't exist. You left, and as you used to say in our meetings with prospective investors, you burned your ships. You kept the personal relationships. You're fond of most of the people who work there. You're certainly fond of the institution, have tremendous loyalty to the National Review. But it wasn't an easy decision. I don't expect you to put yourself on the couch, and I probably would be a little bit bummed if you said,

yeah, man, that was a terrible decision. I never should. But when you think about that, you had sort of a great setup there, and you took the risk. Are you glad you took the risk?

Oh, I'm glad I took the risk. You know, um, I did not know you're going to ask this. I, you know, it had cost me like the friendships I care about at National Review, I might have a more

ambiguous answer about it because some of those guys are like, like, I mean, I've been friends with some of these people for 20 years and, you know, like family friends. Like our, like my daughter and Ramesh's kids grew up on and our cruises together. You know, I mean, like, like, we're friends. And, um, um, um, I think the decision so i mean a part of my answer about what about the decision is one i believe in what we're doing and all this kind of stuff to um i really liked the idea of the adventure you know um the whole pirate's gift thing was appealing to me um i felt like i had gotten into a bit of a groove um um also a lot of my conservative heroes um were institution builders

and that's one thing I really hadn't done. I mean, I can take pride. I was founding international review online. It was the creator of the corner. But, like, that's still within the broader context of NR. And also, we had, I mean, we don't need to get deep into this now because it's running along. But, you know, we had these conversations a lot where the weird thing happened, was a lot of people older than us had basically just changed on us.

You know, we don't have to talk about body snatchers and all that, but like the older generation with a handful of exceptions. You can name some, do you want to name some names? No, it's okay. So, and the older folks, they just got on board the Trump train. The younger folks, some obviously lots got on the Trump chain for all sorts of different reasons from totally defensible to totally indefensible, and we don't need to get that either.

But for those of us, like you and me, who actually believed that this train was not one that was good for anybody, we were one of a handful of people who had enough of a reputation, had enough of experience, and were of an age where we were young enough to step into the breach,

but old enough to know sort of what we were doing and be able to pull it off. And I honestly, I mean, again, I don't mean this as a self-aggrandizing thing, but part of it was I thought it was the right thing to do. And at NR, you know, and people have their arguments about how NR handled all of this. I generally, I have nothing but sympathy for the position that Rich was in as the editor of NR, given the role that the editor of NR plays in the conservative movement. Obviously, I have my disagreements with him. I've talked to him about it.

I've written about it. I have my disagreements with other people that, you know, worked there. But one of the other factors was just simply that, and David talked about this on one of our dispatch lives, I think. There's this feeling where, like, NR. Rich would never have fired me, contrary to what some of these conspiracy theorists are talking about. I don't want to say never. I mean, if he found me with a live board. in my trunk or something.

You know, that's one thing. But, like, given what I was writing, he wasn't going to fire me. As opposed to a dead boy? Well, I'm glad you added live. Yeah. And, but he, I felt back then that,

and David has talked about this as well, that we were making the lives difficult for people that we respected and liked in an institution that we felt strongly about, more difficult. by writing what we felt we had, writing and saying the things that we felt we had to write and say. And one of the things I love about the dispatch is that for the most part,

everybody we hired, we hired for the right reasons, and they get to be their whole selves. And, um, and that's something I'm very proud of, you know, that's, and doesn't,

it's not a reflection on NR. Again, I love NR and I'm very excited about rematch taking over. I think it's going to be great. But at that moment, given where I was on where the concerto movement was going, and all those other reasons about the opportunity and all the rest, it was the right decision to make. But it was a difficult one. So I feel a little bit badly for putting you on the spot there. I'll give you my full opinion of that question after we stop recording.

No, the full opinion is right now. opinion is right now um put me on the spot what do you want to ask um gosh i didn't know this is how this was going to go um or don't ask a simple softball question if you prefer no i mean so since you ask me about nr um i think that the weekly standard diaspora is in many ways much more interesting than the National Review Diaspora. I think you are now... And we're out of time. We're out of time.

I think you're now out of your non-dispargement clause time limit. I was wondering if you want to say something, or do you want to save it for a three-year anniversary catch-up podcast? That might be wise. at this point. Because I kind of know what your answer is, so that's why. But like, screw you, you asked me that question I didn't want to be asked. Right.

You can dodge it and people will interpret it as they see fit. Yeah, no, I mean, I think part of the problem is if we tell people that we're going to just like to say what we think, regardless of consequences, and then we dodge questions like that, it doesn't reflect well on us. Look, I mean, you know, my experience is we. standard was phenomenal for 20 years. I was a writer there. I was a reporter there. I spent all of my time all day, every day reporting and writing. And then after Trump was elected in 2016, I was asked to take over as the editor. I don't think I've said this publicly before. I didn't want the job. I turned it down probably a half a dozen times. I was nervous about the direction that the ownership, the owners, the owners, there's a holding company called Media, D.C., that owned the Weekly Standard and the Washington Examiner and other publications was pushing us in a click-bait direction. So I was, you know, part of the reason that I decided to join was because I thought I could potentially have a play a role in holding that off and let the weekly standard continue to be what the weekly standard had been and let the writers and reporters at the weekly standard continue to do the work they had done. I think it's fair to say that it's not what unfolded. There were, yeah, just different priorities than the kinds of ones that we started with,

you know, that the founders of the Weekly Standards started with in 1995 and that continued when I took over for Bill Crystal. So that was, you know, that was a challenging, that was a challenging time. I think the Weeking Standard was doing really good work. We were actually, despite some claims to the contrary, our overall web traffic, which was a metric that people internally there cared a lot about increased over those two years. But I think they had made the decision to shut the magazine down, as I said at the time and continue to believe. If you own the magazine, that's your decision. You can make the decision.

There's nothing I can do about it. But I think we were doing good work. Some of what we're doing at the dispatch, I think, grows out of the way I thought about journalism at the weekly standard. I tried to convince you to join the weekly standard several, several times when I started and weren't ready to take the leap. But I think it was a phenomenal institution. The leadership was sort of even when we had internal disagreements, the weekly standard. I mean, I didn't agree with everything that Bill Crystal said all the time,

but Bill Crystal's a man of integrity. and, you know, when he said something, you knew that he believed it. Even when there were disagreements, you sort of understood that everybody was coming to this from a point of intellectual honesty, which looking around the journalism landscape today is a rare thing. So, you know, if I had to do it again, I'm not sure I would have taken the job. If I knew what was going to happen, I'm not sure I would have taken the job because I think to a certain extent they understood what was going to happen. and the weekly standard was not likely to have survived that. I certainly made a number of mistakes in those two years, but we did good work.

We had great writers. I made great friends. And to the extent that it provided additional understanding of journalism, and as you might put it, Jonah, in your new founder era lingo, this space. it's all to the good so i have to commend you given how i know the fuller context of a lot of this you managed to answer fulsomely while at the same time dodging all sorts of uh pitfalls and maybe on our third anniversary show uh we will we'll fill in some of those gaps but with that i think i can tell the story about

the Neo-Confederate ads? You want to do that now or next? No, no, next year. It's a cliffhanger. This is what we call a tease in the business or as you might know it in this space. Uh-huh. All right, so the thing about this space is now closing

because my dinner has grown cold upstairs and I can hear my wife fuming about how long this has gone. Never mind the listeners who feel like why do the hell and I just listen to this? But again, I think we should both say, I know I'm speaking for Steve, and if Steve wants to add something, that's great.

We are just so unbelievably grateful to the members of the dispatch community. You know, we, I can spend all day responding in the comments and all of that. That's a rabbit hole. I try to avoid. But we follow what you guys say. We read your emails.

we are deeply honored by the commitment and the well wishes of our readership and our members. And I know I say this at the end of every remnant, but like we got so much more stuff that we want to do and we want you guys to be part of it. And thank you. I've got nothing to add. That's exactly right. All right. We're out of here.

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