On Friday, news broke that Rogan was renewing his contract with Spotify, and that it would likely be worth (another) $250 million.

The hilarious thing is that this renewal and the continued success of alternative media sources, like the very blog you are reading right now, come at a time when legacy media corporations are engaging in mass layoffs and losing both subscribers and viewership.

When I started my podcast in 2018 and this blog in 2021, something Joe Rogan once said echoed in my ears:

"You don't have to be everything for everybody; you just have to be something for somebody."

And that was exactly why I wanted to start a podcast. The people that I wanted to hear from in the world of finance, like Peter Schiff and Bill Fleckenstein, were given zero time in the mainstream media.

When they were invited on, they were heckled, ridiculed, and used as punching bags, despite often being the only people correctly predicting how the economy would go and representing the only counterbalance to an always bright, sunny, and cheery mainstream financial media.

I didn't really care if anybody ever listened to my podcast; I just wanted to have an excuse to invite people on whose perspectives I wanted to hear but wasn't getting from the mainstream media. In other words, I became part of a media free market that wanted to test to see if my needs were similar to those of other people who followed the news in the industry.

Lo and behold, about five years later, my podcast has over 6 million plays/downloads across platforms. It's definitely not The Joe Rogan Experience, but it's something for somebody. It's the same with my blog. Those who are subscribers here know that I write to discuss issues that are on the fringe—issues specifically not covered by the mainstream media. They are not always worth covering, but some times they are — that's the risk I run. Regardless, for the most part, you wouldn't be getting it anywhere else so that makes it worth it for me to hash out. I don't mind sorting through the muck on "the fringe."