Episode Details

The mainstream media is dying — and almost nobody is actually reading it anymore.

In this episode, Malcolm & Simone Collins break down the shocking reality behind the Washington Post laying off a third of its staff, why legacy media has become irrelevant, and how a new decentralized information ecosystem (YouTubers, citizen journalists, Substack, and AI synthesis) is rapidly replacing it.

Topics covered:

* Why the Washington Post’s 13–14 person climate team was mostly cut

* How our small channel has more real influence than dozens of NYT journalists

* The hidden truth about newspaper readership and subscription signaling

* The new media pyramid: original research → synthesis → commentary

* Why citizen journalism is outperforming legacy war reporting

* AI’s biggest emerging threat to information quality

* How we’re returning to real gumshoe reporting in the cyber age

If you want to understand where news is actually going in 2026 and beyond, this episode is essential.

Watch until the end for our thoughts on AI harmonic patterns and the coming verification crisis.

Drop a comment: Do you still read any legacy media outlets? Which ones?

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we’re gonna be talking about the death of Legacy Media.

Recently, the big story in the news tied to this right now is that the Washington Post laid off a third of their staff

Simone Collins: and they’d be mad.

Malcolm Collins: You were just complaining to me, you’re like, oh my God. I do not understand. When you see people protest like. These people were not generating value, they were not generating money anymore.

The number that had been going around that I think is hilarious is they had 13 to 14 journalists as part of their climate team.

Simone Collins: Just, just to cover climate change.

Malcolm Collins: And they let, I think all of them go,

Simone Collins: no, I think they kept one or two. One

Malcolm Collins: or two to like,

Simone Collins: which is one or two too many. You could have honestly, like anyone covering economics or politics or really any, I mean, climate change is one of those subjects that really only.

Has context and importance in relation to another field like science, [00:01:00] like, ecosystems, like food, like any, anything on its own. It doesn’t matter. It only matters in the context of something else. So you don’t need a journalist for that. I can’t believe they ha How did they even end up with that mini, I mean, the way that Aspen Gold was talking about it was that like you just get one and they just hire more and more, like they just want more of themselves and they grow like a cancer.

Malcolm Collins: No, it’s,

Simone Collins: it

Malcolm Collins: is just like a cancer. I mean, wokes and Wokes topics aren’t like a cancer within an organization. Yeah. And they spread from the, the, the start point. And it is you have to cut out the entire cancer. That’s the only way to, to keep the organization alive.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And if you’re not willing to, and that’s the thing with giant bureaucracies, it becomes harder and harder and harder to do that.

So giant bureaucracies perform less and less well. Mm-hmm. Which is why new companies are able to bubble up and do. New and cool things like our fab ai creating the best AI chat bots around. And they really are, we’re gonna start advertising. Like

Simone Collins: actually yes.

Malcolm Collins: Like actually, yeah, I’ve used the other bots, they’re not as good