The Fifth Column, After Year 1 on Substack: Are You Not Entertained?

Here’s what we did in exchange for your generosity over the past 365 days.

One year and two days ago, The Fifth Column took our talents to Substack. Roughly 4,000 of you pre-existing Patreon subscribers moved over with us (with the occasional tech-grumble), a singular act of generosity/faith/encouragement that has created realms of new possibilities in our lives. We want to address this progress report particularly to that bunch, as many of you are coming up on your annual subscription-renewal decisions; but also to the thousands who have joined since, plus the more than 800-score of you who are enjoying (or at least tolerating!) what we offer here for free.

(For the don’t-bore-us-get-to-the-chorus types, CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE! And don’t forget that the Never Fly Coach level is a floor with no ceiling!)

In our initial pitch to the Patreon-porters, we vowed: “[T]his move will just flat-out bring you more—more content, more places to comment, more regular opportunities for hanging out.” So how’d we do? Let’s break it down!

MORE CONTENT

In those 52 weeks, we brought you:

* 50 regular episodes (with 29 guests), 46 subscribers-only episodes (with 7 guests), 1 unlocked episode, 47 written posts.

In the 52 weeks prior to the Substack move, we had brought you:

* 42 regular episodes (with 25 guests), 51 subscribers-only episodes (with 8 guests), 1 unlocked episode, and 15 written posts.

So the Substack Year featured 3 more episodes, 3 more guests, and 32 more posts. More content!

MORE PLACES TO COMMENT

Paying customers can literally comment on every piece of content we’ve ever published, as opposed to the pre-Substack limitation of only being able to comment on subscribers-only podcasts, using Patreon’s considerably inferior interface, so this one’s a bit obvious. But I would like to expand on the notion a bit, since the community experience here has exceeded all expectations. And by “all” I do mean … Substack’s!

Back when we were finalizing the big move, our (very helpful!) friends at Substack were all, you sure you want to limit comments to paying customers? Maybe just open it up to everyone at first, so that the little number there isn’t embarrassingly low? We were all, nope! We knew you’d be numerous (and vigorous, and hilarious). But still, wow.

Y’all have left more than 11,000 comments on the stuff we’ve posted over the past year. And it’s not just the quantity, but the quality—unearthing old YouTube footage of the latest bizarro Moynihan reference, tipping us off to hot new content from the Greater Fif’iverse, enriching our conversations with a bunch of context and correctives and hyperlinks. I am not blowing smoke up your patooties when I say that this is the best comments-section on the Internet: I’ve been around such things for nearly three decades now; this is special.

MORE REGULAR OPPORTUNITIES FOR HANGING OUT

We’ve done 10 Second Sunday sessions with zoomed-in participants (including, legendarily, Ben Dreyfuss), plus one live show with an after-hang, and another invitational live deal in Frisco. This compares to the prior year’s 1 zoom-participation pod, plus two live shows (on the same bleary night). Yet this clear advantage for the Substack Year only begins to scratch the surface.

The above picture, full of 100% Fif’ fanatics, was not taken at a Fifth Column event, but rather at a live NYC taping of The Reason Roundtable podcast, which I host every Monday. Reason, my primary employer, has been putting on an increasing number of New York events (you can get on the mailing list here), at which I’m invariably in the back corner chilling with Jaye & the gang. If I was a betting man I’d lay some money down on more Roundtable tapings elsewhere over the next calendar year.

Kmele, too, has been out & about in public, emceeing the FIRE gala, appearing at Intelligence Squared debates, working the conference circuit (to death). At every single one of these public events, which I do my best to publicize in the weekend links, we encounter a feisty Fif’ contingent. In short, it’s been fun getting to know a bunch of you, accepting your generous invitations to Shabbat dinners, and in fact I’ll be joining an Ask a Jew meetup just tomorrow….

As for more Fifth Column live shows? Well, we purposefully avoided making unrealistic promises a year ago, focusing instead on strengthening the core podcast. A bit further below you’ll see some concrete new deliverables for the coming year; let’s just say that the future for us individually involves finishing some large-scale projects/products, some of which will most definitely need to be toured….

SELECTED FIRST-YEAR HIGHLIGHTS

We are three jackasses talking and drinking and laughing about the news and the news media, yes and always, but we also occasionally deliver you smart people to discuss breaking events of significance as they happen. So, within hours of Roe v. Wade being overturned, Supreme Court/legal whiz Damon Root, in what was our most downloaded episode of the year, came on to sort it all out. Fired Fox News political analyst Chris Stirewalt joined right as the Fox/Dominion lawsuit was getting juicy. Allison Schrager de-complexified financial regulation just as Silicon Valley Bank tanked. And Ben Smith came on recently just as an entire wing of digital media that he both worked at and wrote about flat croaked.

We’ve made a concerted effort to reduce turnaround time between recording and posting (this despite all my worst efforts to sabotage the tech), and the Paloma studio in Chinatown is getting a refresh and will almost certainly be used more for (vastly superior) in-person recordings over the coming year.

Then there are the off-news deep-dives with fascinating characters—Moynihan conversatin’ w/ Bob Colacello and Jon Ronson, Kmele plumbing racial identity with Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, me talking the decline in work ethic with Nicholas Eberstadt, plus our long-awaited (and listener-prodded) bread-breaking with Douglas Murray. Life’s too short to get trapped in news/commentary-ruts, and you people have been vocal in encouraging us to go ever-further afield.

Of course, sometimes the magic is, ah, unplanned. “Peter, blood clot, you nearly dead,” the rise and fall of Casanova Brown, the dread threat of Manganese, the heroic travails of the WOO-mon King, audio of Kmele singing “Moon River,” and so forth. If you know, you know.

WHAT WILL YOU GET IN THE COMING YEAR?

While again erring heavily on the side of deliverability, I can confidently predict the following over the next 365 days:

* At least one limited podcast mini-series, available to currently paying subscribers.

* More original video content.

* Interviews with 2024 presidential candidates.

* More published emails from you; more published responses from us.

HERE IS WHERE YOU COME IN

No, not just by mashing the subscribe button, though that’s appreciated! But rather, please give us some concrete suggestions about improving the podcast, the website, and your overall experience. The best venue for said tips will be in the comments to this post, so that you can generate discussions/brainstorming among yourselves, but for those still on the sidelines, you can still shoot us an email.

On behalf of the other two malcontents, I thank each and every one of you for riding along with us this far. I cannot wait to see (and hear) what comes next!