Give Yourself Permission To Suck
The media business is in a state of flux. My bet is that the only way to survive is by being aggressively, unapologetically human and trade the algorithm for your own curiosity. Here are the receipts.
This year has been… a lot.
I’ve been running around like a madman, chasing one weird project after another. It’s been a blast, I’ve made some cool stuff that I’m proud of, but I’d be lying if I said I felt demonstrably better for it. It’s the kind of busy that leaves you wondering if you’re moving forward or just running in a really interesting circle.
It’s a feeling that’s hard to shake in this business. BroBible is navigating a soft ad market and a bit of a slump right now, making it easy to view it as a personal report card that simply says, “Mediocre.” There's a law of power dynamics in this everyone-is-a-creator world that the money in the Internet content business flows toward what's cool. And maybe we’re just not cool enough right now (or maybe we never were and just got really lucky for a while?). I don’t know. I’m trying to process it.
To be clear, when I say "slump," I don't mean we're circling the drain. Things aren't that bad, in the grand scheme of things. It’s just obvious that the entire Internet and marketing as a whole is in a weird state of flux, and the expectations we put on ourselves are sky-high. It's a mixed bag, really—our social accounts, for example, are hitting all-time highs in reach and views. It's a confusing time to determine what's actually working and what has downstream effects on overall revenue lift. The only constant is that we have to be ready to adapt and change to what's going to work lightning quick.
Sometimes I wonder if this is tangibly related to where some of our pitfalls are with BroBible right now, with not having the special sauce.
What is "the sauce"? At its core, as a media operator, it’s the moment a passion-driven project transforms into a sustainable, high-impact revenue center. It’s when the content flywheel is spinning at full speed: guns are blazing, traffic is flooding the site, the connection with an audience is engaged and quantifiable, and there's a clear, justifiable correlation between a writer or creator’s salary and the revenue they generate. Every output has a correlating, well-optimized input for the business as a whole. A site of our size can't survive on articles that pull in just 4,000 views consistently. The sauce is when a handful of articles regularly hit 100,000 views, and an even more elite cluster hits 400,000+, getting rewarded with ad dollars. It might just be a couple of times a month, but in aggregate, those big wins are crucial. It’s the difference between hitting base hits and hitting home runs.
A media brand has the sauce when it has a healthy proportion of home runs mixed in with its base hits. Base hits are necessary, but if that's all you're hitting, you lose momentum. It’s too easy for the next hit to be a ground-out to second or pop fly. You just don’t live in the audience or advertisers’ brains with consistent base hits.
Same thing in baseball. The home runs are what create exponential growth and excitement. Like baseball, they drive traffic through the gates and drum up excitement with advertisers who are genuinely excited to be associated with the brand and how we can help reach people with their message.
Of course, in baseball, slumps are an accepted, inevitable part of the game. Even the biggest, most highly-paid stars go through stretches where they can't buy a hit. It’s brutal, but it’s understood as part of the natural rhythm of a long season. In the digital publishing business, however, there’s no such grace. A slump is objectively bad. It feels less like a temporary dip and more like a permanent verdict from the market. There’s no off-season to retool; the game just keeps going, and the pressure to hit a home run every single day is relentless.
Looking back, there were three distinct eras when BroBible truly had the sauce. From 2009-2012, it was a raw, unfiltered connection with post-grad millennials before algorithms ran the show. This was the era of our unhinged dating advice columns and lots of hot takes about cargo shorts and boatshoes. This was the glory years for establishing brand identity and audience equity. From 2014-2015, after being acquired, we sharpened our voice and scaled. Gawker cited us a lot. At Midnight with Chris Hardwick on Comedy Central cited us a lot. So did Sports Illustrated. So did lots of places. We made news often, people looked to us for that, and advertisers rewarded us for doing so with media plans. Culturally, we had arrived, and we had the numbers both in traffic and revenue to back it up. Then there was a slump, starting in 2016 when the online vibe started to shift with the Presidential Election cycle later that year. We had our moments where we overcame it, but it mostly lasted until about 2019. After buying the site back in August 2018, we had a renaissance. We were re-energized and incentivized to manifest our own audacity.
There have been highs and lows since then. 2019 was a big one. So was 2024. Years like 2020, however, proved to be tough. We took a couple of big bets on talent right before the pandemic pulled the rug out from under everyone's feet. We were forced to learn a lot about our own ambitions in a “new normal” that had gone completely off the rails.
Then came the pivot. For years, Facebook's newsfeed was the firehose that delivered the sauce, sending a massive, consistent stream of traffic to publishers. We built a whole strategy around it. But the algorithm is a fickle god. When Facebook turned down that spigot, the landscape changed. The pandemic and a shifting ad space only accelerated the need to find a new source. The focus shifted from the reader relationship we’d built on social to the cold, hard math of gamifying Google with the things we *thought* it liked. We found a new recipe, but in doing so, we risked losing the original.
This is where the "fear of sucking" comes in. I’m not talking about an internal fear of mediocrity. I’m talking about external fear of the platforms that control our destiny: Google, Facebook, the ad networks. This fear breeds risk aversion. We start playing things too close to the chest, prioritizing safe bets that won't upset the algorithmic gods. The big swig, human, and potentially costly ideas, which are the ones that could be home runs, get second-guessed.
I’m going somewhere with all of this, so thanks for sticking with me here.
This brings me to the most exciting thing I did this year, semi-relevant to my job for #content: interviewing John Hoffman, the new drummer for Primus. For those who don't know, Hoffman is an internet sensation drummer from Shreveport who landed the gig of a lifetime after winning an American Idol-esque YouTube series called the Primus Drum Derby.
It wasn’t a particularly big swing, and it sort of just fell in my lap, but the “get” was a huge deal to me. I’m a music head who’s been chanting “Primus Sucks” since watching Woodstock ’94 reruns late at night on MTV as a kid. The interview itself was a fun, low-stakes video shoot backstage at the Greek Theater. We did a bit on drummer jokes, my dad taught me, and talked about his hometown mayor declaring it John Hoffman Day. It was human. It was low-stakes. We weren’t talking nuclear secrets. It was exactly the kind of thing I dreamed of doing when I decided to go this route with my life 20+ years ago.
I’m really proud of how it came together.
Here, some shameless self-promotion. Go watch it, or read about it on BroBible:
A couple of days after posting it to YouTube, someone left a comment: “Questions could have been more interesting; a lot of what was talked about has already been talked about a lot elsewhere.”
And you know what? They might be right. It reminds me of something Bill Burr said. Bill Burr, you see, is a drummer’s drummer trapped in a comedian’s body. He’s a hobbyist in the purest sense, doing it for the love of being behind the kit. And because he’s one of the most original comedic voices of his generation, he gets to do some cool shit, like jam with legends. He pops up every now and then in the L.A. music scene, drumming in tribute shows for AC/DC’s Bon Scott, as organized by comedian Dean Delray, which I believe is where he probably met guitarist Larry “Ler” LaLonde from Primus.
The night after my interview with Hoffman, Burr got to live out a fantasy and play with Primus. By his own admission, he messed it up. “I f—-ed up some of the changes,” he said on his podcast the following day. But that wasn’t the point. “It's not about doing well,” he explained. “It's just about having the balls to go up there. So that's it. Give yourself permission to suck and uh then you're off and running.”
The night of the show at the Greek, I posted a video of his performance on Instagram. Most people loved it, with many discovering that Burr can rip on the drums, and gets to live the dream doing it with such a genre-defining band. Some pointed out that Hoffer was doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the drums in the clip. Bill himself chirped up in the comments, a masterclass in keeping it real. He just said, “I thought my fills were decent.”
But let's be clear about this ethos. "Permission to suck" isn't a free pass for mediocrity. Nobody likes things that actually suck. The goal is always to do good work, and that comes from effort, enthusiasm, and skill. This isn't about being okay with a bad result; it's about not letting the fear of a bad result paralyze you from even trying.
That’s the whole ethos, isn’t it? You don’t have to be perfect to take the shot. Burr could have declined the invitation to play drums in front of 6,000 people on a summer night in his backyard, paralyzed by the fear of not being flawless. But then the moment—and the lesson—would have never happened.
You have to get out of your own head, trust your gut, and say yes to the things that scare you a little. Otherwise, you stop getting invited to the party, and then you just sulk about it and never really grow in a cycle of doom.
And a cycle of doom sucks.
It points to a funny contradiction, doesn't it? We all claim to hate AI-generated content, then turn around and critique the human-made stuff with just as much venom. That interview with Hoffman cost me $800 of my own money, as a passion project with no clear business case. That's the unseen investment behind the effort. Real passion has a price, and caring enough to risk sucking is part of it.
This is why, in a world flooded with sterile, AI-generated “slop,” giving yourself permission to be human is the most principled stand a creative can take right now. Maybe sucking can become its own ethos, where the flaws are the feature. Those warts are the very proof that a real person is behind the work, not some input-output machine. It’s a bet on genuine intent in a world that’s starting to devalue it, and I have to believe that’s what people will start looking for as they sift through the slop.
This leads to the gazillion-dollar question: Is our current slump at BroBible a result of being too human, or not being human enough? The old model of aggregation is dying. The new currency is originality that can be commodified and scaled. But it’s an entirely different muscle than the one we’ve flexed for a while.
To please the machine, you have to feed it predictable, SEO-friendly news content that we hope will trigger an algorithm to get in front of more people.
But to connect with people, you have to be original and messy. You're just a normal human, with a complicated and sometimes contradictory sense of taste, quirks, and desires. The algorithms don't seem interested in surfacing who we are as humans; they're looking for easily identifiable tribes.
Maybe the path forward isn't to become less human, but to become more human by being more brazen?
I think this is going to be my credo: Be brazen. You can be sharp, smart, empathetic, and brazen, and perhaps at BroBible, we’ve become maybe just a little too mediocre in an attempt to please everyone? I don’t know. Maybe the answer is to not overthink it and lean deeper in our actual personalities? Again, I don’t know. There’s a risk with that, and it’s a big one. The algorithms might not reward it, and sometimes, being too human repels people. They call it “cringe,” which gives them the “ick.” There’s a fine line between magnetism and narcissism, and an even finer one between sharing a real part of yourself and simply performing a version of yourself you think people want to see. How many times have you scrolled past someone on your timeline and rolled your eyes because they were too messy or too unhinged? Or too online? You know… too much?
That’s the worry with being brazen. The hope is that real people will connect with whatever the heck realness we’re trying to project out there. And I know that in itself sounds like a contradiction. But really, that’s the only bet worth making. It’s basically what I’ve been making all year, for better or worse.
So, what does that bet look like in practice? The rest of this update is, admittedly, partly a brag sheet. It's a way for me to take stock of a chaotic year and prove to myself that the work is the actual reward.
But it's also a personal inventory. I’ve struggled with “defining what I do” in the past couple of years, and I think by laying this out, it helps me audit it in a very public way.
I know a lot of the people who read this, so please… You have permission to tell me to step it up and go make some clever stuff. Or chill out and cut out the dumb stuff. I’ll listen to what you have to say respectfully, no matter what.
Here are the receipts from a year spent chasing the un-automatable:
The Un-promptable Conversations
Interview with Primus’s New Drummer: This one was personal. It was a chance to tell the incredible, unautomatable story of John Hoffman, who went from winning a YouTube drum competition to becoming a celebrated hometown hero in Shreveport. For me, it was a reminder of why I got into this business: to capture genuine, pinch-me moments of human achievement. It’s a story about the grind paying off in the most spectacular way, and it serves as the backdrop for the whole Bill Burr ethos that follows. Read the full story on BroBible, but more importantly, check out the YouTube video to see the dream in real-time, since, again, it cost me $800 to make.
G-Eazy: A remarkably candid conversation with an artist who soundtracked a specific era for so many of us. We talked about his decision to leave LA for New York, the creative rebirth that followed, and the process of betting on yourself in your 30s. It was a deep dive into reinvention and the courage it takes to trade a persona for a person. Read on BroBible or watch on YouTube.
Adam Richman: A conversation that started as a geek-out session over our shared love for Pennsylvania's snack food legacy and evolved into a deeper discussion about the relentless grind of staying passionate and creative. As a food-TV legend, he offered incredible insights into his process, the pressures of the industry, and what it takes to stay at the top of his game. Read on BroBible or watch on YouTube.
Forrest Galante on "Cocaine Hippos": I’ve talked to Forrest a couple of times over the years, and his stories as a television-ready wildlife biologist are always mind-boggling. We dove into a subject I’ve been fascinated with since my AOL.com days: Pablo Escobar’s feral zoo hippos. But it’s one thing to discuss an ecological crisis, and another to hear Forrest describe, in chilling detail, the two separate times a hippo has almost killed him. It’s a stark reminder of the real-world stakes behind his work and the kind of stories you only get from someone who has truly lived them. Read it on BroBible or watch it on YouTube.
The Guy Who Played Donald Trump in South Park: This story started with an email from a professional Kim Jong Un lookalike and ended with one of the wildest, untold stories I’ve ever chased. The actor revealed the viral scene in the Season 27 South Park premiere wasn't made for South Park at all, but was from an unreleased Trey Parker and Matt Stone feature film shot five years ago—on the literal eve of the pandemic shutdown. We had this “scoop” (if you want to call it that) before anyone else, which was cool. But also, a story so uniquely bizarre it serves as a perfect litmus test for the kind of weird, human tales that an algorithm could never generate. Read on BroBible or watch on YouTube.
The Stuff You Had to Be There For
Beyoncé and Taylor Swift in the Same Month: As a middle-aged jam band fan, I went into these two cultural monuments not to crown a pop queen, but to chase a spark. What I found were two entirely different kinds of joy: Taylor’s Eras Tour was a flawless, Broadway-level ride through nostalgia, while Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour was a rowdy, defiant celebration of cultural reclamation. It was a chance to witness two masters of their craft build entire worlds, reminding me why live music is still our greatest mirror. Read on BroBible.
Spicy Taco Quest Around Los Angeles: This was a branded content project. It started with a simple premise: find the spiciest taco in Los Angeles to pair with a new mango-habanero energy shot. It turned into a multi-day vision quest through LA street food culture that ended with a man-on-the-street video at the Venice Beach skatepark, swapping stories with strangers about the spiciest thing they’ve ever eaten. It was a perfect example of how a simple, weird idea can lead to a genuine, unplanned human connection.
The Griddle Shoot Saga: Also a branded content project, and a big one. What began as a straightforward video shoot to show off a new griddle turned into an all-day culinary marathon. I made everything from a breakfast bacon, egg, and cheese to a late-night smash burger, documenting the entire process by a beautiful pool in the hills of Encino. It was a fun, hands-on project that let me lean into my backyard chef aspirations and share the simple joy of grillin' and chillin'. I’d love to make more of these, but oh boy are they time-consuming and expensive to produce.
Connecting the Weird Dots
The Jerry Garcia AK-47 Article: This started with a wild story from a new memoir about finding AK-47s in Jerry Garcia’s BMW trunk. It became a deep dive into the strange intersection of the Grateful Dead’s counter-culture and their surprising connection to firearms, but the real story was the paradox it revealed: a man who carried assault rifles but also showed radical compassion for his tribe. It’s so much deeper than the tie-dye stereotypes people imagine when they think of the world of the Grateful Dead. It’s a perfect example of the weird, contradictory threads that made the Dead so fascinating. Read on BroBible.
The Sea-Doo "Male Loneliness" Article: This piece started with a text from a friend warning me against a midlife-crisis purchase and spiraled into a deep dive on the male loneliness epidemic. It explores how hobbies and community—whether it's Boomers on Harleys or millennials on personal watercraft—can be a legitimate prescription for the isolation many of us feel. It's about finding your tribe, even if it means making a "wildly erratic move" just for the hell of it. Read on BroBible.
The Big Lebowski IRL Theory: This was a journey down a classic internet rabbit hole that took a surreal turn when Jeff Bridges himself endorsed the fan theory that Donnie isn't real. It became an exploration of how art outlives its creators' intent, and how chasing a weird idea can lead to a moment of unexpected validation from The Dude himself. It’s about the joy of finding new layers in a story you thought you knew by heart. Read on BroBible.
Seth Rogen's The Studio: I sunk a good bit of time into writing about this show because it feels so vital to the creative struggle right now. One piece explored the long-running, low-key beef between Seth Rogen and Entourage, framing the show as a soulful and realistic counterpoint to a dated Hollywood fantasy. Another was a deep-dive into how an entire episode served as a brilliant homage to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, using it to explore the anxiety of trying to make meaningful art in a system that rewards conformity. It's a show about the love of the game, made by people who are clearly still in love with it, even when it breaks their hearts.
Holy cow, I wrote a lot again.
Let’s land the plane on on one last note. If you need a perfect, living example of a good ethos between art and connecting with an audience, look no further than King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. They’re one of the most fun bands in the world right now. A couple of Sundays ago, Maggie and I went to the Hollywood Bowl to watch them perform with an orchestra. They’re the embodiment of doing whatever the hell you want, critics be damned, being good at what you do, and having a whole lot of fun with it. That’s the whole bet right there.
And this week, the adventure, of course, continues. It has to.
My parents are flying into LAX from Pennsylvania, and we’re going to see Herbie Hancock at the Hollywood Bowl. It’s such a special place for live music, and I’m so excited to take them for the first time to see a living legend. It’s another bet—on the timeless, the authentic, and the kind of experience you’ll remember long after the algorithm has forgotten you exist. Then, the following week, I have a couple of days in Palm Springs on the books that I hope will turn into some kind of pinch-me-esque experience.
Let me know what you think about any of this! Comments or email: brandon@brobible.com.
Thanks for reading, and have a good one!
Great post. On point. Years ago after hearing writers complain about comments on spelling and grammar goofs I interviewed them to find out why they quit. After hearing these complaints I decided to open a site on Medium called the Imperfect Writers of the World. It was open to all who needed and wanted to write without the criticism. It worked. We posted without grammar or spelling concerns. Make a goof, move on.
Great post, B. Poetic summary of the ephemeral nature of the #content biz. Slumps come and go, but have you tried more seagull content?