David Ellison's Skydance acquired Bari Weiss's online outlet The Free Press for $150 million as part of the deal that installed her as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Where this was said
At 2:02:18 · chapter starts 1:55:40
A CBD vape leads Rogan to consider doing DMT, which becomes a substantive discussion of the frontier of psychedelic research. Gallimore's programme at Bacuía in the Caribbean aims not just to administer DMT but to create a repeatable map of the experience — sending subjects back to the same 'place' repeatedly, charting entities they consistently encounter. Rogan has been there: jesters, millions of them, giving him the finger in perfect unison, which he interpreted as a correction — he takes himself too seriously. Chase Hughes's five-hour experience changed him permanently. Rogan's philosophical point is sharp: the human body endogenously produces the most potent psychedelic on earth. The body built a gateway to somewhere. Whether that somewhere is hallucination or reality may be the wrong question — the experience is equally real either way.
Researcher Andrew Gallimore is running extended intravenous DMT sessions — keeping subjects in the state for up to five hours — to map the entities and environments that consistently appear. Joe Rogan has seen jesters there himself. The question isn't whether it's a hallucination. The question is whether those things are real.
Despite months of meticulous preparation, Starter Story's initial launch attracted zero users — a humbling reminder that building alone guarantees nothing.
A single Reddit link post quickly drove 100 visitors to the Starter Story website, igniting the founder's belief in social traffic.
After reformatting content as a native self-post (no direct link spam), the post exploded with hundreds of upvotes and thousands of readers.
By posting again and again with the native-content strategy, the founder's posts repeatedly hit Reddit's front page, reaching millions of readers.
Before Reddit banned his domain, the founder converted his viral traffic into an email list of tens of thousands — a self-owned audience independent of Reddit.
Redditors eventually organized a petition to ban starterstory.com posts, effectively ending the Reddit growth channel — but the email list was already built.
The Reddit attention strategy ultimately served as the foundation for a million-dollar business, proving that free distribution channels can replace paid marketing.
The key tactic was keeping content fully on-platform (no direct link spam), then adding a small link at the post's end for users who wanted more.
With a thriving email list and a self-owned audience, the founder quit his six-figure New York City salary job to go all-in on Starter Story.
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