San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

Oh man. Dear god. Thanks, you all. This year, you downloaded episodes of our podcast 276,977 times. As a San Diego media company just trying to create things of value where you’ll learn something, think about something in a different way—that’s a huge number. I’m sure Joe Rogan sneezes that number, but for us it’s pretty great. A lot of sneezes. When we launched “Happy Half Hour” in 2016, we had zero or near-zero idea what we were doing. Flailing at mics. Loghorrea-ing our way into the digital void. All we knew was that to stay relevant in media, you have to embrace new forms of storytelling. So much tire kicking. David Martin was (and is) in a band (Weight of the Sun who you should listen to). He knew how to record stuff. Our friend, Arsalun Tafazoli (who owns CH Projects, which is restaurant Jesus now in San Diego, but at that point was more of a midsize pack of creative lunatics), agreed to be our first guest. Former editor in chief Erin Chambers-Smith and I sat and talked with him—randomly about food and