I think it’s perfectly germane. When a medium is both a means for making a good living _and_ a form of artistic expression, there’s a natural tension that emerges from people who pursue both those paths at once, in addition to the people who eschew either path entirely. Obviously many people avoid cynical reasons for doing the things they do - I’m among them - but you can’t fail to recognize that there’s always a demographic that doesn’t care about the art.

On average and in total, we pay more to teach children than we do on podcasts.

US podcasts have a total valuation of $8-9B with a revenue of $1.9B; total K-12 spending is $950B a year (about 500x higher). Education receives nearly three orders of magnitude more money per year.

Most people sitting on a couch smoking weed on camera make little to nothing, while 3.8M teachers are paid an average of $65,000 per year.

You’re comparing one-in-a-million outlier podcasts to the average case teacher in order to reverse the overwhelming amount more we put into education, both in total and on average.

Someone said "attention", and that is right. We are in the attention/extraction economy now. You are no longer a citizen - you are a walking number with a wallet.

Did you see the NYC ball drop by any chance? It was plastered with ads. Ads on screen, ads on people, giant KIA ad below the ball that ruined the shot on purpose. Everything is a money grab now, because we are just eyeballs that see shit and buy it.

If you think it's just the old me remembered things differently, here is 2002: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB6OzLUQE3I

Those jobs don't scale at all so you can't have the ability for the top .001 pct make significant money

Attention is where capital is applied because the demand is so high for it. Society can control supply and demand about as well as it can control the weather.