How Dropout Cracked Internet Comedy
· The Atlantic
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How do you build a streaming service from scratch? On this week’s Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with Sam Reich, the CEO of Dropout, a comedy streaming platform that’s found success eschewing the growth-at-all-costs model of the mega streamers. The two discuss the pre-YouTube days of online video and how Reich acquired Dropout, formerly known as the internet site CollegeHumor, for $0. They talk about how comedy has evolved online, how to build a cinematic universe of content, and whether Reich sees Dropout as a feeder for places like Saturday Night Live. Reich shares his philosophies on how to make things that people love and why he steers away from the venture-capital and big-media playbooks.
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The following is a transcript of the episode:
Sam Reich: I’m an open book.
Charlie Warzel: Oh, very exciting.
Reich: I am a creased-open, dusty, worn library book with too many dog-eared pages.
[Music]
Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to talk about how to make things online that people actually enjoy.
We are living through an era of pretty remarkable media consolidation—the streaming wars started out scrappy, and they have landed in this place where we now have this constellation of increasingly expensive apps and media catalogs. It’s a kind of an on-demand reconstruction of the old-school-cable package, but for arguably more money. The streamers themselves—they’ve become pretty hard to root for. Gone are the days of password-sharing, which means that people can find themselves in this constant rotation of tracking down individual shows, signing up for the free trial, bingeing, and then waking up in a cold sweat three months later, realizing that you’re still paying for Paramount+.
Streamers have given us genuine content abundance, which is great. But it’s not without its issues as well. These endless libraries have created a decidedly gilded problem of endless perusal and decision paralysis. The issue is real enough that there’s actually been an uptick in people investing in physical media—Blu-rays and other formats. That’s for better quality, but also so that they don’t spend forever trapped in this “What’s On” menu.
Which is all to say that it is supremely difficult to start a streaming service these days. And it’s even harder to start one that people will pay for and will actually seem to love.
Now, you may have never heard of Dropout TV. But in some ways, that’s the point. Dropout was founded in 2018 as part of CollegeHumor—the digital-media company that rose to prominence in the 2000s as one of the early “bored at work” video sites. CollegeHumor was part of a generation of online video pioneers—coming up well before YouTube and before short-form and streaming video became the lingua franca of the internet.
One of those pioneers was Sam Reich, who joined CollegeHumor in the mid-aughts, rising up the ranks, helping build Dropout, and eventually managing to pull off the deal of a lifetime. He purchased both Dropout and CollegeHumor from its parent company, IAC, for the low, low price of $0. That’s a story that we’ll get into in detail later.
Since 2020, Reich has helped turn Dropout into an online-comedy success story. He’s built this beloved cast of characters and a slate of improvised series that stand on their own but are also imminently watchable as short-form video clips on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
Now, what makes Dropout so fascinating is that, on this algorithmic, growth-at-all-costs internet, the company embodies an old-school-internet ethos.
The stuff that comes out of Dropout is weird; it’s playful; it’s even joyous. Dropout ads encourage password-sharing. They don’t run advertisements on the platform. It seems like they’re not interested in courting the biggest audience possible, but the right one.
And the concepts of their shows are not ideas that a major media executive would green-light: There’s a show based around comedians playing Dungeons & Dragons.
[Clip from Dimension 20]
Warzel: Another where comedians are dressed up in elaborate makeup and then must create a character in minutes to go on a fake talk show.
[Clip from Very Important People]
Warzel: There’s a show where people give PowerPoint presentations.
[Clip from Smartypants]
Warzel: In other words, Dropout is executing a kind of indie-media playbook in a media category that is dominated by titans, and it’s finding a real kind of success.
I’m fascinated by Dropout, because I think it speaks to this moment online and in media where people are just exhausted by the scale and the big sell. And so I wanted to talk to Sam about how he’s built this platform, and what it takes to make things that make people feel good. We cover his early days and the Dropout acquisition, but also how he thinks about the internet, how comedy can be inclusive, what it takes to green-light shows, and why Dropout doesn’t follow the VC template. Here’s our conversation.
[Music]
Warzel: Sam, welcome to Galaxy Brain.
Sam Reich: Thanks, Charlie; it’s a pleasure.
Warzel: So I gotta get this out of the way early. I do a lot of research here, and the first place I start is just like: What is the bio? What is the person putting out there about themselves? And the first line you have started out at: “humble beginnings as the ‘village idiot’ at the New York Renaissance Fair.” And so I’m gonna need more. I’m gonna need more context here. Just tell me everything.
Reich: You know, it’s like every other aspect of my life: hardcore imposter syndrome. Even there, I was only a village idiot, one of four, for one summer. And there are a lot of people who can claim to be more entrenched and truly better at the Renaissance Faire than I could.
Warzel: Did you want to be more of a stage performer, more of an “in front of the stage camera,” whatever it is type?
Reich: For sure. I got the acting bug before I got any other bug. And I think that’s pretty consistent with other young people, because acting is the first thing that we have access to in high school. So we tend to be bit by that bug first. But really, every step along the way in my creative career was a concession, based on the fact that no one would cast me. So you know, there was an acting class where an acting teacher said, “You should market yourself as an actor based on the first impression you give when you walk into a room. For instance, Sam is short, so he should do comedy.”
And I already loved comedy, but in that moment, I was like, I wonder if that’s true. I wonder if I went hard at comedy, if I’d find more success. Super did. And then, you know, I was doing some work with the Theater Studio in New York. I asked them, “How many headshots and resumes do you get from actors per year?” And they said, “Roughly 50,000.” And I said, “How many director resumés do you get per year?” And they said, “Between four and five hundred.” And I went, I like those odds more.
Warzel: Yeah.
Reich: So I started directing. From directing to forming this little internet comedy group with a group of friends. Plucked out by CollegeHumor. Became a new-media executive at the age of 21.
Warzel: It’s like a Richie Rich situation, you know? It’s like, Put him in charge.
Reich: Kinda, yeah.
Warzel: There’s something there, I think, with also being good at the Internet and being good at making stuff for the Internet.
Reich: Sure.
Warzel: Which is like—you only have so much control, right?
Reich: One hundred percent. I think—I’m not the first person to make this observation—but I think the internet really captures a lot of theater people. Because there is a kind of a black-box studio, “the show must go on tonight, no matter what” quality to ending up on the internet.
You know, I really don’t envy folks who lock themselves in a room and try to write a screenplay over the course of a year or two. Because the feedback loop on that is so long that it’s hard to get good at it. Whereas if your feedback loop is 60 seconds to three minutes—as it is these days online—it’s easier to get good at that with consistent feedback from your audience.
Warzel: So I wanna start very basic for people. What is Dropout, for people who haven’t heard of it? How would you describe Dropout?
Reich: Sure. Dropout is a niche, maybe even you might say alt-comedy streaming platform. Right now, it focuses largely on unscripted comedy content. We are over time sort of moving away from that moniker specifically. And that’s basically it, Charlie. We charge X number of dollars per month, depending on when you’re watching this. It’s right now about seven bucks; it’s cheaper if you sign up for an annual subscription. And in turn you get our collection of original shows.
So we’re a little unlike most of our quote-unquote competitors, in the sense that most people producing original content are doing it with an AVOD [advertising-based video on demand] model, or an advertising model, on YouTube. And most people who are doing the SVOD [subscription video on demand] thing—meaning the subscription thing—are doing it with other people’s content. We are making our own content and monetizing that with a subscription, which puts us in a little bit of a category unto ourselves.
Warzel: I also have to acknowledge the history of Dropout. And you becoming the CEO of Dropout is like a bit mind-bending. You purchased it from IAC for $0. We don’t have to go deep, deep into the weeds, but: How did that all go down? How did you pull that off?
Reich: A lot of this is very lucky/unlucky, circumstantial. IAC for years and years had been trying to give birth to a bigger, better version of CollegeHumor. And there was always a plan to do that. Depending on the year, that plan might have come from any number of my bosses at the time. And some of those plans were better, and some of them were worse. I think I counted—at one point, I think I had nine or 10 bosses over the course of my tenure at CollegeHumor, some of them at the same time.
Warzel: Fun.
Reich: And we would never objectively fail at the things that we set out to do. We just wouldn’t achieve mammoth success with them, either. And you know, IAC, God bless, were incredibly patient with us over the course of those 10-plus years. CollegeHumor wasn’t hemorrhaging money. It just wasn’t making a lot of money. It was essentially, like, a break-even proposition as long as it was under IAC. So IAC wasn’t losing money. They were just losing a lot of time and effort trying to make something happen with us.
It was two years before 2020, so it was 2018, when we hatched this plan around subscription. Which is, you know—social media is taking a huge bite out of our ad-sales business. Like, all the ad dollars are now rolling up into social media. TV turns out not to scale very effectively. We had made Adam Ruins Everything at that point, but it’s hard to pitch and sell TV shows. What if we went to direct-to-consumer with our own subscription proposition? And IAC got excited enough about that to get on board. We started production in 2017. We launched in 2018. And by the end of 2019, we had 75,000 subscribers. So not nothing, but not enough relative to the amount of IAC’s money that we were spending on this.
And around the end of 2019, as they realized they would not carry on bankrolling us, they tried to sell us aggressively. And the problem with that, it turned out, was that because they had just invested a huge amount of money in Dropout, on paper, it looked like we were losing a lot of money. And the business plan that we had put forward for Dropout had us losing many millions of dollars before we flipped profitable. So anyone looking at the business was basically like, Well, I have to buy it for X amount, and then I have to bankroll it for Y amount, hoping it flips profitable. And then I make my money back over Z period of time? I mean, a real losing proposition.
I had this realization as I was going around town, trying to sell the company in order to save jobs, which is: Any great investment opportunity is one in which you know something that the rest of the world doesn’t know. Not to make this sound like insider trading, or not to be a proponent of insider trading. It’s basically like: I have a thesis that other people don’t agree with, but I’m really confident in my thesis. And I was really confident in the thesis that we could reboot this company. And no one agreed with me. And at a certain point, it was like, Well, maybe actually I can work that to my advantage, and I can pitch IAC on the idea of giving the business to me. But I didn’t have money with which to buy it—so this premise depended on there not being a better offer.
So it came down to me and one other offer, which came from a major conglomerate. And that offer was for, I think, like three million bucks, and it really was an asset grab. We’ll buy the YouTube channel, we’ll let go of everybody, we’ll figure out what to do with all of this IP, no promises. And my offer was $0; IAC would stay in the minority position in the company; I would assume complete control. Truly my pitch to IAC, over the phone, was: “I’ll make you more than $3 million. I don’t know; I can’t promise you a huge amount, but I’ll probably make you more than $3 million. And lo and behold, I have made IAC more than $3 million.
Warzel: Hell yeah. So you joined CollegeHumor in 2006, director of original content, true pillar of pre-social-media joyful internet content. I’m curious, because you did mention when social media came it kind of ate up part of the business; made everything a little bit harder. What did you learn during that pre-social-media time about making things for people on the internet? Some of those early core lessons? Because I feel like a lot of Dropout captures to me some of that joy of that time.
Reich: You know, it’s so funny you should say this. Because Ricky Van Veen—who founded CollegeHumor, who I’m still good friends with—was introducing me via email to someone and said, Sam runs Dropout, from CollegeHumor; I can take zero credit for what it’s become. And I reached out to Ricky immediately, and was like: That is total BS that you can take no credit for what Dropout is.
Like, those early seeds were absolutely in my early CollegeHumor and early internet education. One of them is the strength of personality. In just about the earliest version of CollegeHumor, people were gravitating toward the people who worked there. And we were sort of noticing that having like a recurring cast gave our audience something to latch on to.
The second has to do with attention. And how you capture attention online, and how you capture it quickly. Even back then—I mean, even before the social-media days—we were in the attention economy and trying to figure out how to get people to stop and to watch us. When we were making programming for television, when television was really just a matter of channel-flipping, there was a little bit of this philosophy, which is like: How do you make people stop flipping? In the context of the internet—when people have literally the entire world of media forever at their disposal—it becomes even harder to get someone to stop.
And so we learned lessons to do with virality, some of which are still super true today. Which is: People have to be clear on the premise of something, pretty immediately, when they start watching it. Stuff needs to be visual or to have a visual hook in order to be able to grab people. Like, talking heads are normally not enough. Obviously a lot has changed about Dropout versus CollegeHumor. Long-form content as opposed to short-form content; unscripted content as opposed to largely scripted content. But that early training was paramount.
Warzel: This is great that you led me nicely into, like, I wanted to talk about that cast of characters. Because I think that you all have built this sort of Dropout Cinematic Universe of personalities. And I think when I look at a lot of different media properties, a lot of the things that they have in common are people will wander in from another space, right, that you have this previous relationship with that you really enjoy. Like, you can get a little more like cynical about the parasocial relationship, or whatever we’re calling it.
Reich: Yeah.
Warzel: But I think at the heart of it, it’s like—there’s this continuity. If somebody wanders in that you like and trust from this one thing, you’re like, Well, I want to see how they do in this environment. Right. And then, I love this environment. I love this show.
And I’m curious, like, how that system works. How did you go about building it? Was it one block at a time? Was it just kind of organic as it happened?
Reich: I think it was super organic and accidental in a lot of ways. I think, like to your point, we are an unusual company insofar as if you look at other media companies, particularly those who are doing comedy, a lot of them are non-ensemble. Like, they have like a few lead creatives at the forefront, particularly if you’re looking at like YouTube channels, right? Those are creator-led channels, as opposed to sort of ensemble-led. And Dropout, CollegeHumor has always been an ensemble. There has never been a star of the platform. Sort of on the flipside, you have companies that are strictly IP focused, right? Like the Jukin Medias of the world or the Cut, for instance, who will do sort of concept after concept with no particular set of talent attached. We again fall into this sort of middle space: where people like the conceit behind the shows, and they like the talent involved.
Alchemy-wise, that’s what’s working for us here, particularly as we endeavor to do comedy: The No. 1 reason why people do not want to watch comedy—new comedy—is stranger danger. It’s hard to laugh at someone you don’t know. You don’t trust them well enough to know that they’re funny and to relax around them.
I think it’s part of the reason why drama is—actually we’re more likely to take a risk on new drama than we are on new comedy. We sort of don’t doubt that someone can act in front of us, but we do doubt that they can make us laugh. And by having a cast that ports over from show to show, we’re basically solving that problem. Which is to say: Once you’re a Dropout fan, if you’re a Dropout fan, you will probably like everything that we put in front of you, so long as you like the people involved.
And I’m sort of putting that in front of you as if it’s a well-thought-out strategy, when actually we’ve totally lucked into this, right? Where a lot of what we do as leadership, we call “a gentle hand on the wheel.” Which is to say: You notice something is working, and then you start to like lean into it a bit.
CollegeHumor, basically, starts using its editorial staff in videos over and over again. At a certain point, now as editorial members leave, they’re replaced by people whose full-time job is acting and writing. And we call those folks “cast.” To: We hemorrhage our entire full-time-employee base, and really can only afford to work with anyone on a contractor basis.
And what that naturally does is open up the relationship in such a way where cast can now go out and do anything. We have nonexclusive relationships with cast, but we can call the Dropout family a much bigger group of people and split them between more projects. There is a larger group of people called “Dropout talent” than there ever was called “CollegeHumor talent.” It’s kind of ideal.
I get asked all the time how we find new talent. And sometimes it’s a bit intentional, and more often it’s an accident—where someone will recommend that someone else participate in a show, or like we should check this person out, they seem really funny. They come and do a day with us, or two days with us. Or I have them on Game Changer or Make Some Noise. I’m wildly impressed by them, they start appearing in more things. And it’s just, you know, like a friendship. Like, we hung out, and the chemistry was there.
Warzel: Well, and it makes sense, too, that you would want that organic thing, right? Because I guess one way to think about it is: If you’re building that trust in order to get people to laugh, the new people that come in to the ecosystem in a way sort of have to be vetted by the other people in the thing.
Reich: Sure.
Warzel: Like, if everyone’s kind of, “This person’s a little weird, and we just kind of have to tolerate them for this, you know, one-hour show that we’re doing together”—you know, that makes everything weird. So I think the natural nature of that is, it’s gotta accelerate the ability for you guys to, you know, change the environment. Bring on new people.
Reich: I think that’s true, but I would also give the cast a lot of credit and say that they are such sort of welcoming and open-minded people. It means that even if we were—and there are plenty of situations where we shoehorn someone into a show, and we trust that our cast is gonna get along with them. Because we think they’re really interesting, and we wanna work with them. And the cast is always incredibly welcoming.
But they, too—their social circles are always expanding, and they’re doing live shows with different people. And I get emails all the time from folks to say, “Are you aware of this person? You should be.” Which—it’s not like our cast is at all economically incentivized to do that. They’re just excited to see talented people thrive.
Warzel: Do you think about the talent-feeding going the other way too? Like, Jeremy Culhane is an SNL [Saturday Night Live] cast member in this current year; he’s been in a bunch of Dropout stuff. Like, do you think about the old Second City, Groundlings, UCB—that kind of pipeline to these, you know, legacy properties in the comedy pantheon or whatever? Do you think about it going that way? And like, what we want to do is also provide this thing to be an accelerator for those pathways?
Reich: No; I mean, listen, I think it’s an unfortunate reality of there being very few middle-class media companies that exist anymore. You have sort of creators on the one side, and then you have these, like, monolithic institutions on the other, like SNL. And because there’s nowhere in the middle, there’s no stepping stone. There’s no getting from here to there.
And if we at times behave as a stepping stone, I think that’s a really important community service that we can perform. And I’m not at all above it. Anytime anyone refers to Dropout as a stepping stone, it’s not like I’m like, “We’re more than that.” Like, I don’t feel that way at all. I think that we are trying to do something a little different, vis-a-vis our relationship with exclusivity.
And I think this is super important, because I see people—I would never take credit for this—but I think Jeremy’s a really great example. If SNL had asked Jeremy to be exclusive, you know, I don’t know what his reaction would have been. My guess is he would have done it anyway. SNL is incredibly powerful and a huge opportunity. But Jeremy has permission from SNL to come work with us and continues to all the time, like whenever he is back in L.A. or off SNL.
Our attitude about folks like Jeremy or Vic Michaelis, who is in Ponies, or Lou Wilson, who is Jimmy Kimmel’s announcer, is: We are very content to be your favorite second thing you do. Like, by all means go out and find a primary job, and then come play with us all the time. What I think/hope that means is that, as time goes on, folks like Jeremy and Vic and Lou will always find the time to come back and work with us, even as the rest of their career blossoms and transforms. They don’t have to sort of step on us and move on from us. They can like come back and play with us all the time.
Warzel: I know you guys are rooted in comedy above all, but as we’re talking about the cast of characters and everything, really, it’s hard to miss how inclusive the network and Dropout is. And not just like the diversity and the types of people featured, but also just like: I think there’s a lot of small and meaningful touches. Like as small as, you know, pronouns and title cards and things like that. That does feel different and welcoming in this way, especially on internet spaces. And I’m just wondering: Is that part of a concerted effort by you all to really message to an audience, make sure that they feel seen? Tell me about how that vibe that I get watching was created there.
Reich: You know, I would talk about this in a very similar way that I would talk about the cast in general. Which is to say that I think we—as a gentle hand on the wheel—have sort of steered into the direction of something that was very naturally occurring anyway. We live in Los Angeles. It’s a very diverse place. It’s a very progressive place. We work with these people because they are the funniest and most talented people around. But I think if you’re making comedy in a metropolitan area, it’s going to be diverse.
You know, Brennan [Lee Mulligan] sometimes says, when we set out to do Dimension 20, we set out to do the comedy D&D show. And then the reaction we got from its audience was, “You have made the diverse D&D show.” And that was sort of surprising, you know? It’s not the mantle that we necessarily set out with. There is a way in which, once this snowball gets going, if you have a diverse assortment of people involved in creating your content, the people they then recommend to come to the table are also probably diverse people.
And this collection of diverse people will have wants and needs in order to feel taken care of, such as pronouns on-screen. And all we are doing is sort of behaving as community leaders—which is to say we want everybody to feel comfortable and treated with respect. And so, we naturally lean in that direction.
It’s funny; pronouns were appearing on-screen maybe even for a full year before they started appearing on call sheets, on our production call sheets. And we suddenly woke up and realized, Well, why on earth aren’t we doing that? And if we’re not doing that, why aren’t we wearing name tags on set so that people with those pronouns can feel treated properly? I mean, there’s all sorts of just very naturally occurring ways in which one step leads to the other leads to the other.
And I say this so much that I think I’m almost in danger of seeming like I don’t care about the ethics of all of this. And of course I do. Like, all of this has its foundation in ethics, but there are really just purely sensible reasons why this happens. Unfortunately, the bar is just incredibly low.
Warzel: There’s that. The other reason, and I hope this doesn’t … like, I’m not setting you up to make a political statement or anything. But I feel like part of why I wanted to ask that is the algorithmic nature of social media shows me two parallel worlds of comedy, right?
Reich: Oh, damn.
Warzel: What you are all building is this very decidedly different world. And then there is the Kill Tony sphere of like, I am here to push boundaries in a very, you know, purposely provoking way. Or also just, mean-spirited comedy versus a comedy that is a little more like, We want you to relax and feel included and, you know, entertained, in this other way. And I’m just wondering if you see Dropout as reaction to that type of thing? As an oppositional force, a palate cleanser? Or in relation at all to, like, that fork-in-the-road difference in how people pursue comedy.
Reich: Yeah; you know, it’s interesting. I probably don’t personally see it as quite that binary. And I would be sad if I thought that Dropout didn’t, in its own way, have permission to be a little edgy sometimes.
I do think that there is a difference between creating comedy that feels sort of cutting edge—to use a term that I like a little bit more than the term edgy—and punching down. Like, we are in a moment that is scary enough politically that it’s hard to laugh at punching down. Listen, I grew up on a lot of that comedy, because it’s hard to avoid when you were a teenager in the ’90s. I was a huge Family Guy fan when it was on the air. I’m not allergic to edgy comedy by any stretch of the imagination.
But when a community of people is actually being threatened, to go after them feels real bad. There are comedians out there who are making this their thing. And part of the reason why they’re doing it is marketing, where they’re like appealing to this, whatever this is, “anti-woke,” right? When a group of people can gather these fans in my space, these fans who are willing to spend money on me. Their thing has like more to do with anti-wokeness than it has even to do with comedy, I would say.
Warzel: So how do you all come up with new show ideas? How do you know what to green-light? What’s not a fit? When to cut bait? I think the bigger part of this question is actually asking: How do you make stuff online in 2026? We talked about attention spans being fractured, but there’s something about Dropout. Two nights ago, I watched six comedians play a board game for an hour, and I’m just like, Give me another one. Can you bring me a little into the room? How do you guys make stuff for people in 2026?
Reich: One thing that has set Dropout apart since we broke off from CollegeHumor is we have an internal development and production mechanism. Which is to say, particularly if you look at the slate of shows that we’ve done up until this point, the vast, vast majority of them were ideas that came from inside as opposed to outside. Very Important People is based on a series that I created 13 years ago, starring Josh Ruben, for CollegeHumor called Hello, My Name Is. And is a reboot of that show. A lot of people have no idea that that’s the case. And why should they?
Part of the reason why that is is because we need to be very particular about what we put on Dropout, given that we’re trying to check a lot of boxes at once. The boxes that are difficult to check at the same time, most difficult to check at the same time, are the ones of “this works in long-form, widescreen format,” and “it works in short-form, vertical-video format, such that it can effectively market itself.”
Just in the last year or so, we’ve maturized the development effort considerably. So there’s now more new, very talented team members working on it. We’re doing more development on the outside of the company. Which is to say, more traditional kinds of development where writers and creatives are developing ideas on their own, and we’re coaching them through that process. But what remains is our hands sort of in the mess with the creatives—which is to say, we want to lead them to the promised land. And we feel like we have a lot that we can do to help them.
Development in Hollywood, particularly now, has a little bit of a pass/fail mentality where it’s like creatives often partner with production companies, and the production company is going to try to help craft the idea. By the time they’re pitching it to the network, it better be fully baked. It better have a star attached, you know, and then it passes and fails in that room. Whereas our attitude about it is, “Let us make this show with you.”
Warzel: Yeah, an issue that I think is very prevalent in media, especially in Hollywood and television, is this nature that things need to be absolutely tested to, right? Like, they have to be focus grouped, to have an absolute core audience. You know that those people are going to be bought in. It has to play well in this market or this market or this thing. You guys have so much more flexibility, but is there a sense like with Dimension 20, a D&D series. Do you come at it and say, “There is an audience of underserved people who’ve grown up with this, who love this, who care about this, who think it would be great, and we want to give these people this type of thing”? Or is it just, you know, genuine love for the game and a good idea, and it’s a huge surprise that it’s a hit?
Reich: I think it would be irresponsible to develop shows without some kind of a thesis. So, for sure—we have a thesis about the kind of shows that make sense for Dropout and the kind of shows that don’t, right? We call it our development sieve, or our creative sieve. If you imagine a sieve, like: What ideas are getting passed through, and what are getting caught by the sieve and rejected? Traditional networks sometimes call them mandates.
But ours are pretty loose and pretty experimental. Like, part of the fun of running Dropout—and we think the fun of being a Dropout subscriber—is that we’re gonna do stuff that other people aren’t gonna do. Like we’re focused on offering something differentiated. We wanna be seen as “better internet” and not “worse Netflix.” And when we’re talking about innovation, when you’re trying to encourage innovation, you simply cannot afford to be all that stringent with what shows get experimented with, and what concepts get experimented with, and what concepts don’t get experimented with.
I would say if there is one criteria that rises to the top, it’s that someone needs to be really passionate about this thing. But arguably, the stranger and more experimental that is, if it has someone who’s really passionate about it, the better. Differentiation—uniqueness, novelty, more thesaurus terms for that word—arguably is the most important facet of Dropout content.
Warzel: You’re building this business in a way that a VC or a media executive definitely wouldn’t. And I mean that as a compliment, because it just doesn’t seem like you guys want to grow, but you’re not obsessed with scale. You’re putting the words “yes, you can share your password” in the marketing campaign, right?
Reich: Yeah.
Warzel: Do you feel at this moment that it’s a superpower for you all? To just zag in that way?
Reich: I do think there’s a bit of that. Look, I’m like in some ways contrarian to my core. And so I think when other people are doing something, we’re inclined to do the other thing partially just out of a rebellious instinct. Like that’s just true, probably.
I think what’s interesting when people tell me, like, “You’re not doing what a traditional network would do” or “You’re not doing what a VC fund would do.” In a lot of ways that’s true. And yet, despite all of these things, we’re saying: “Dropout doing its people well, treating its people well, or not being interested in growth at all costs, or championing sustainability or profit share or whatever you want to point to, it’s working.” It’s really working, commercially. Meaning, we have grown a lot every year despite ourselves.
So one of two things is true. Either zagging is just its own commercial benefit, or everyone else has something slightly wrong that we’re getting right.
Warzel: I mean, that’s I think what people want now more than anything, in this era of saturation. We’re talking a lot about making things for people in 2026. Like, a lot of people use the word taste, but I think ultimately what people want is to be led by curiosity, to be led by interest. And that is what feels authentic. And I think even if that is just the rebellious spirit,
of “We just don’t want to be doing that thing, because that’s boring, because everyone else is doing it.” I think even that is a signal to people that this is something worth checking out.
Reich: Sure.
Warzel: Sam, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain talking about all this stuff with us.
Reich: Such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
[Music]
Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Sam Reich. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe at The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, or on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.
This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Renee Klahr and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.