How TBPN Built the Luxury Brand of the Creator Economy

And we're on track to do like 5,000 host red ads next year, 5,000 host red ads. Wow, 20 in episode, 250 episodes a year. I imagine that trades at a pretty high level to be one of those 20 spots. Exactly. Safe to say that trades in the 6 to 7 figures.

Today on the Colin Spear Show, we're joined by Jordi Hayes and John Cougin of TBPN. So, if you haven't heard of TBPN yet, that's kind of by design.

First of all, they just started the show about a year ago.

You're watching TBPN. But second of all, it's designed for a very niche curated audience. TBPN is what I call a luxury brand in the creator economy. It's an extremely high quality audience, very tight knit, and very high priced advertising. It's a daily news show that's live for three hours across X, YouTube, and Twitch.

It's kind of like sports center, but for technology. And because they took this traditional daily news format and brought it to the modern creator economy, they were able to grow really fast and get some pretty hard to get guests on. From Sam Altman to Mark Zuckerberg, everyone that you can imagine in technology has showed up on TBPN.

“So, in this episode, we talk about how they did that, how did they build such a luxury brand in the creator economy?”

We also talk about their ad strategy.

I truly have never seen anyone approach advertising the way that they do, and it's really impressive.

And I think you guys really enjoy that. So, hope you guys enjoy this conversation with John and Jordi from TBPN. Jordi John, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's weird to say welcome to the show because I know we're on your set.

Yes, welcome to the show, but I'm court. Yes, explain the show to people who haven't seen it before. Three hour live stream, daily 11 am Pacific weekdays. So, 250 shows a year, 750 hours of content over 1,000 guests a year. We typically go long, so almost 1,000 hours of content, which feels incredibly long if you're doing a podcast that drops once a month or once a week.

It also feels like we're maybe not as extreme as some of the live streamers that you probably interviewed where they're streaming 8 hours a day. So, we sort of fit into a little bit of the legacy TV mold where a sports center, a pet mac of each show, a squawk box, something on CNBC, might fit a three hour daily live segment. And we just kind of stumbled into that, but we do a lot of interviews, and we also just talk about the news between us. We go back and forth, and the show is very focused on technology and business, and so we talk about those topics and go back and forth.

And then hopefully have guests join us to add more context to whatever the news is of the day. Yes, you can think of it as 90 minutes of us just talking, going back and forth on the stories that are most interesting to us. And then 90 minutes of guests. And it's very much, I mean, it's live, obviously, a lot of tech content historically has been recorded in podcast format. And so it's lagging by a week or two weeks or at least a couple days.

And our industry moves really quickly. And so we were one of the first shows to put out a super high volume of content that was like right right at the present basically.

And yeah, I would say from there's a lot of interviews shows out there. We do interviews, but we view them much more as conversations around what's happening in various industries, what's happening in the news broadly.

“And and I think that's resonated. The show is also fairly niche. It's, I say, tack in business, the show T BPN stands for technology business programming network.”

Is that what it stands for? It was technology brothers. No, we had a reader started. Yeah, that was called technology brothers, this play on the tech bro mean. We are trying to reclaim the tech. The tech bro.

Yeah, that technology brother. The issue is that everyone would just abbreviate it when they were introducing us. So the show we started as a weekly show is kind of like commentary reaction show where we would have a printed out stack of posts from the internet. And we would just shuffle through them and read them and talk about them. And even though our audience with small early on, we realized that there was a lot of people that were our friends that were listening to every episode. And we decided to take it a lot more seriously, but the issue was people would introduce us as, hey, it's John and Jordi, the tech bro.

So the whole thing that we were trying to reclaim as like we're not tech bro's, we're technology brothers. It ended up background. But we realized we were doing our life's work, like really early on. And John and I were just like, we cannot go our whole life being introduced as the tech bro's.

“The thing we were trying to avoid, but I think there's a lot of different ways that you can look at the show.”

But the best way, I think the category that we'll see emerge is the highly produced live stream.

You have a camera or you're walking around the world, you know, some of these IRL streamers.

“And they're fairly low, they're sort of like low production, right?”

One camera, one microphone or a couple microphones. And you'll see sitting in the set here, we have a team that's doing like full live production. And so you can think of the show as sitting somewhere in between traditional television, which is like huge teams. You know, big, big budgets, highly, highly produced. And then like traditional live streaming.

So it looks like television, but we're still reading chat. We're still like interacting with with the audience in real time. And so that hybrid is something that we expect to see a lot more of going forward. Just as people realize, like, hey, there's not just one format for live streaming, which is a screen share. Right, and a camera on you, or not just like the IRL strategy that I show speed might do, which is like you're kind of just running around in the world.

“Some hybrid that I think people appreciate, because we do three hours, which is like a lot in the world of tech.”

Not nothing compared to like some streamers that are just going around the clock for days and days and days. And so we keep it like fairly condensed. We have a team here that's managing, helping us manage guest booking and a bunch of other things to make sure that that three hours every week days stays pretty tight. Right, there's no dead air. It's like, you know, really dialed.

What are the economics of a show like this that basically like takes the effort of what feels like TV, but is on the internet, especially considering it's pretty new.

Like, how do you, I read somewhere that you have 10 team members. Yeah, yeah, the economics of it is it more similar to what we see on streaming or does it actually feel more similar to TV. I would say, so we started about a year ago, and I was just the two of us in Ben, who's still here. I don't know if he's actually still at the office. But so originally it was like one camera, two microphones super simple, and then we added a second camera.

That's making Ben's job a little bit more complicated, and then we added a third camera, and then there's like more lighting, and then we added a caron, which is the, for those not familiar is like the overlay over the, that that you can update in real time. So as we started adding like more pieces to the show, we started adding more people, like as soon as the team would be like, well, this is a lot to handle, because you can imagine. We, we definitely had some sympathy for them, but we're also getting up there and we're like, okay, we're performing for three hours live.

And like it, it is very much like you have to be very locked in to be running the show from a production standpoint, but we built up the team from Ben to Michael the Scott, who do all of the live production, and then we've other people on the team that are kind of managing the complexity of like the calendar and things like that, and then we have our like editing distribution team that's doing clubbing and all that kind of stuff. There's been a number of late night shows that have been in the news this year, and a lot of there like sort of financials and numbers tend to hit the headlines when something happens to the show.

And I remember Benchmarking with, I don't know, was it late night, it was one of the late night shows, and I think we had one tenth the amount of employees. So and then like maybe one 50th of the overall budget and the reason that we noticed like just as many hours, if not more hours, like we took less holidays off, and so overall it's like, I think on a on a like per watch hour basis or a per hour of produced content basis. You know, you talk about this in Hollywood with like this, this movie cost $10,000 a second or something like that.

“I think we're, I think we're between ten and a hundred times more efficient.”

Then we had the reason these headlines were notable is we would look at them and we're like, okay, they produce two hours of content a day.

We produce three hours a day, and they're saying that they make 200 million in top line, but they're losing money.

They're like, how are they? How are they doing this? And I do think if you're not committed to getting the most amount, like as much as you can out of each person on the team, you can very easily be like, oh, let's add a sound guy. Let's add a dedicated light guy. Let's do all these other things, and I feel like for us it's this balance of wanting to deliver a super polished professional product that's ready for television. But at the same time, we enjoy working with like a small team, like, you know, we're like a two-piece a team, right? We like that we can go, sit at one one.

We get breakfast in the morning, one table, and staying that way as long as we can. From an economic standpoint, it's certainly, you know. I'm a gear nerd, like, I like dealing with cameras myself, and so I feel like everyone on the team is like excited about wearing multiple hats.

Yeah, understand, understand, like kind of TVPN, you have to understand what John was doing before this, which is building his own YouTube channel. I was through around, yeah, to somewhere around half a million subscribers, and then I actually started a YouTube ad network in college, helping creators like monetize their channel. So it was like, this was post like the MCN boom, and I didn't realize that those businesses like hadn't fully worked out, but I just started helping creators like monetize the ad inventory that they have.

And so I had done prior to TVPN, I had done like thousands of bespoke ad deals between creators and advertisers both on YouTube and podcasts. And so we came at this like John very much from a technical production standpoint, me from a commercial standpoint, and that from an economic standpoint, we wanted, we're a daily show, we wanted to bring on not a big, but like a small effective team early on. And so we structured, we structured our like ad product in a way that allowed us to have super predictable revenue throughout the entire year.

And so we've never been in a position where we're like, hey, we got a selling extra ad to make payroll this month, and I think that's allowed us to consistently invest in gear, consistently invest in the team, invest in the space that we're in, and really think super long term about all these things.

“I want to go deep on that, because like you've compared yourself to to late night a bit, compared yourself to sports like photography, and then podcast is in the name of the of the brand, and I think it's actually not.”

It's not programming network. Stop it. You got you again. No, you didn't. Yes.

No, no. Look on the website. I'm not using this. I'm not using this. These guys, they've changed in the brand.

Yeah, just if for everyone, listen, listen. This is not that of all these revolving doors. I thought it was tech, rose, podcast. Everyone thinks that. Everyone thinks that.

Yeah, but on the website, technology business programming, that we're. Okay. Well, kind of check the website. But yes. Great.

Great. Great looking website. Great looking website.

“I did a deep dive on the company that helped you with that website.”

Oh, yeah. Very good website. But you guys are, you guys are exceptional at packaging. Yeah. Meaning if package this show really well, you also package your ad products really well.

The thing that caught my eye, you know, hey, obviously has the show emerged and took over Twitter in a really interesting way. It was both the fact that it was this thing that I could have on in the same way that

when I was in college in my house Sports Center was always on.

Yeah. But it was a thing I could have on always while I'm working. That was relevant and relevant people in our industry were showing up on my screen, which was cool. But the thing that really struck me was the presenting sponsor, the presented by ramp.

Yeah. Because I've been, you know, in this world for 15 years and felt like the ad products that we all do, especially on YouTube was this format that was adopted by the radio and very D to C, very like quick break in the episode to tell you about square space and like use my code to get x% of job for the next third day is a very very radio style advertising

and it just isn't the right. You know, it's maybe the right ad product for podcasting, maybe it's effective in podcasting. But it's not like, we have to evolve out of this and I really appreciated the way you guys did.

The ramp deal, not only from a presented by on screen always, which I think is really powerful,

because I chose the clips, chose whatever. Because made like an actual ad for them. That was really dope to announce it. Like big partnership announcement. Yeah. So talking about our stuff and kind of framing around like what is the show?

Almost just reintroducing the show. You've seen these clips, but what is this? But I think it will. I think it will. Here's what it comes down to you. I think a lot of creators are reluctant to do advertise.

Yeah.

“That's what I'm even in the air is to do advertising.”

And it can be depending on the type of content we were talking on our show earlier. How steak is like UBI for wide variety of content creators. We'll expand on that, everyone listening. I think that's really just a. We had zero embarrassment around advertising early on.

And I've always, since I was a kid, I've been obsessed with advertising,

how it works, why it works on me. I think advertising is a beautiful business model. I think it's been under appreciated over the last 10 years as people were like experimenting with subscriptions and tipping and things like that. And I've always felt like content just wants to be free.

It wants to be seen by as many people as possible. It's in your interest as a creator to get as many people to see your content. And so we leaned heavily into advertising and the pitch to. Brands was like, hey, think about this as us building like a formula one team. So like you're going to sponsor us for a season 2025.

And we're going to like go above and beyond to deliver like your ping on a sort of monthly or an annualized basis. But we're going to go above and beyond. You're giving us revenue predictability. We're going to go above and beyond to like get you as many relevant impressions as we possibly can.

Because it's like television, right?

“People are kind of used to these kind of things already.”

And then innovating on the actual ad unit itself, which are hostred ads that we insert.

And our insight there was like, we're live and we start doing a 90 second ad read like a traditional podcast.

Had read people are just going to like to now or they'll, you know, It's it can be very frustrating. And so we told advertisers like, hey, you're spending money on podcasts. It's very likely that your audience is listening to the first 20 seconds 15 seconds 10 seconds. Maybe before they kind of like hit the skip button and skip through.

We're going to just deliver your ad read in that 15 seconds. But we're going to like make it really condensed so you're hearing like value props. You know, you are all test, you know, testimony all or like social proof right in terms of the other advertisers. And we're going to deliver like much higher consistency. So instead of doing like one ad every two weeks on our show,

we're going to do a daily 15 second ad read. And so, and to basically, and that meant for us is like a news driven show. It's like whether somebody tunes in, you know,

once a year on a crazy news day or once a week or multiple times a day,

they're going to be like getting, getting the right messaging delivered. But not in a way that's like, I get me out of here. Like, I, I, I deal with this on YouTube where I'm like falling asleep and I get an ad read for, you know, I post read ad and, and, and, and so yeah, there's been like kind of trying to rethink the, the, the business model in, in a number of, in a number of different ways,

but it comes from a place of being proud that we have companies that that back us, so that our content is free for the entire world. I think that is a massive differentiator. Even the, the, the psyche of being, you know, embarrassed or, or not embarrassed, but like just showing away from the fact that you have an advertiser.

Because we've built a culture where people skip them on YouTube or people don't, you know, want them. It's like the, the obvious reframe is, how do I make it cool? How do I, because it is, and what if it is cool? Confident about how I'm going to deliver this messaging. Instead of just doing whatever one else does.

“I think it's important to have a POV on advertising because creators assume, okay,”

this is just the way it's done in 60 to 90 seconds. But actually like, you should have a POV and you're paving a path that no one has done before. You're building a brand that no one's built before. So you should have a POV on how you think it should be integrated. Well, and a lot of times, I think also brands are looking to you for that.

They're like, oh, wow, this is great. Someone actually has confidence in how they think my branch should show up in their world. Yeah, and it was another point of differentiation. We saw it as a feature of the product because many, not all the many tech podcasts were monetizing in other ways.

Either working, you know, you have a business on the side. So it's just you're marketing for that business, something along those lines. Yeah, then classic is like having a venture fund, so you get managed. You're investors and you just have a guest on the side. And so the idea of being the exact opposite of that maximal advertising sort of funny.

And we liked the level of like, okay, we're standing out. It's we're pro.

“But when we really thought it through from first principles, all that applied,”

and also just this idea of like being pro, the companies that we work with. Yeah, totally. Like you look at the logos that we work with, and they are companies that we are aligned with. In terms of like vision for the world and like technology and like we, we, we feel like a strong alignment. And so the actual, notably to the actual ad load, like the amount of our content that is advertising is lower than a traditional podcast, which is already way lower than traditional television.

Yeah. And so that was like trying to find out, you know, when, when, when with the advertisers. The advertisers and the audience, you guys have innovated in a lot of different ways, but I actually have been a big fan of how you've done your advertising. There's that one photo that on Twitter of you, Jordi, like walking with your bag.

Yeah. And, and you have the, you guys essentially made these like jersey shirts. Yeah. And thinking about it like an F1 team where all your sponsors are listed on the shirt. And it's like the game day outfit.

And it's a game day outfit. And that, like, there's even noticed there's employees around here with the hats. Oh yeah. Yeah. As if it's an F1 team.

I mean, I thought it was a really bad idea. Yeah. I'm going to say that. I wanted to have, well, good.

And it's amazing that I desire a hat that has your sponsors on it.

It's crazy, but it's the same way that someone would wear, you know, their favorite football club, or, you know, any other sports jersey with sponsors on it. Yeah. When you guys first, like the transition from recorded to live is an interesting one for me. Yeah.

So let's talk about that transition as well as the first pitch to, you know, if ramp was the first big sponsor. Yeah. The first pitch to them. How big the show was at that time. How you got ramp to say yes.

So a lot of people ask us how do you do three hours a day of live content that sounds insane.

“You think about it as giving a three hour speech every day to an audience, right?”

It sounds insane. One, it's really a conversation between John and I, plus whoever we're bringing on the show. And then we also built up from starting with like a 90 minute once a week podcast. And we went to two days a week. And then we went to three in four and eventually five.

And we were doing a recorded five day a week podcast before we ever went live five days a week. And so building up to that was having the, we also did the first 50 episodes. That was a big thing and was something that that gave us confidence to, to understand that we're not a guest driven show. And there's plenty of guest driven shows and you can build a great media business or become a great creator by being guest driven.

But we, we joked early on, we were like, this is pretty amazing.

A podcast like one of the most time intensive things of running a traditional podcast is like booking guests and having a pipeline of very guests. And you know, creators will go through this of like, oh, this guest that I had that I was going to publish later this week. Just canceled now and scrambling. Or just like, I don't know another show. Yes, that instinct.

So yeah, we, yeah, having the confidence of doing, you know, something like 150 hours just by ourselves. And then going into into live. But going from zero to then starting three, three hours a day live would be really tough.

“From the pitch to advertisers, it was definitely, I think.”

In our case, we were asking ramp to make a big commitment right to sponsor us for all of 2025. We had been self funding through that point. But we had both known the ramp team for years prior to that. And so that was helpful. Like they were very much making a bet on us to like figure it out.

That when they committed to working with us, we had done maybe, you know, we were maybe doing three episodes a week or something like that. It was, but they saw signs of being like, hey, this is a great product and it will scale quickly as they spend more and more time on it. But I would say like a variety of the first sponsors that we had were companies that we had built relationships with for years prior to that and that that was super helpful. We definitely treated those like sales pitches like raising money for a startup coming in with a vision and knowing that there's not everything is going to play out exactly as we intend.

But if you, if you give us the opportunity, we're going to go and make plays and be creative and deliver value that is in excess of what you're investing. So we actually put together a deck. We put together a full slide deck. I wonder if I haven't delivered. We had a hand delivered to the CEO of ramp and he and in there there are some things that we definitely got right like we just nailed this this, but then there's some things where we're like, well, we promised to do what. Some of the things was that we we were under the assumption that that if that they were giving us money and if if we weren't able to put up numbers, we would be able to buy impressions or buy ads or promote our content and we were like, look, you're giving us money.

If if for some reason we're not getting a lot of views, we will we will be willing to take those money to pay to promote we never had to buy a dime of ads.

But we just got clipping working. We got a bunch of attention. We got great guests like things played out. We would encourage other creators or people that are getting media companies off the ground as we set the monthly pricing for 2025 in December of last year. They kind of could say like, hey, if this doesn't grow at all, like this is fine, we're kind of but we're going to commit to a year of spend. And that meant that when the show went viral, they weren't we weren't coming to them and saying like the price on the price went up.

“And so for them it's like, you know, we got the ability up front to have that predictability of revenue, which I think is super powerful.”

Because I've seen so many creators have this like kind of it's so easy to have. You're going to have ups and downs and big moments and flops and things like that. And so if you're constantly doing you're all your advertising conversations like week over week, then it's so hard to have predict like the predictability. It's hard to be like, I'm hiring a full time position for this role. And so ramp not only, you know, they committed early and they took on some risk. But that meant that by end of Q1, they were like, wow, this is like a home run, right, but we weren't going back to them being like for sure prices going up. So like we have a contract for the year.

So of course, some videos are not going to hit that's just the nature of what we do. Not everything's going to hit, but some of them really are.

Especially with you guys in the way that you clip to be curious how you story tell around viewership and metrics even today, because like I tuned into Evan Spiegel and on X. It was like 4,000 people. Watching Evan, there's a few hundred people on YouTube. There's kind of like different places that you guys are distributing. But of course, the clips have the opportunity to really be see. The other thing that's notable is like brands plan advertising on an annualized basis. Right. So of course, they're adding budget or sometime they're taking budget away, but if you're having a conversation with an advertiser, they pretty much know how much they're going to spend for the year.

And so you can work out deals that fit within how much they're allocating to content creators or podcasts or newsletters and things like that. Every town around viewership is like there's an exchange rate between, you know, one clip viewer or you know, one live viewer who's there chatting, who's like the super fan is probably worth 10 people watching it live, which is worth 10 people that watch the full three hours, but on video on demand recording, which is worth 10 people that you know, watch a cut down version and then that's worth 10 people that just watch one clip.

And so what I'm interested in is watch time from the core audience that we very narrowly define, we think that there's maybe 100 or 200,000 people that are interested in this particular corner of technology and business.

And then how can we reach them for a good amount of minutes per month? And that might be in a bunch of different touch points. It might be, yeah, they read the newsletter.

So they spend a couple minutes of day skimming that, then they'll see all the viral clips.

“And so they're watching two minutes of clips a day. That's actually an hour of clip watching per month, right?”

It adds up pretty quickly. You have just a couple minutes a day. And then maybe, if there's like a, their friends on, so they got to watch 30 minutes of that, or someone that they're going to pitch someone that, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm, I'm trying to invest in this company or vice versa. I'm trying to get money from this investor. So I'll listen to their latest hit on TV again. And so there's all these different reasons for people to go and spend a couple minutes with TVPN.

And so the absolute number of people that are sitting down and chatting constantly and like the, we basically have just taken the thousand true fans thing, like really, really seriously.

And then identified the niche of like, there's maybe a hundred thousand people in tech and business. How can we reach them in as many places and just be sort of like, like content agnostic? Like, if you're just not the person that has an hour to give every day, that's great. We'll take two minutes here, two minutes there. We'll, we'll, we'll, you know, it's like the, the jar of marbles that you pour the sand in and then you pour the water in just continue to fill it up. I think a lot of, we look at a lot of the content we put out is marketing for the main show and there's two ways to watch the main show. You can watch the live version, which today somewhere around 10 to 12,000 people tuned into the live at some point.

And then that immediately goes out on RSS and YouTube and then another batch of people will just watch it there.

“And already on that course show, we're doing comparable viewership to the major business like shows on on cable, right?”

Really? Yeah, yeah, if you look at all their ratings or publics, so you can look at CNBC's top shows, things like that. And so like a squat box, wow, how many do you have in under 55? Yes, sorry, not in under 55. So, so yeah, so our segment is like 25 to 55. Right, these are all that are. And so the young viewers on a legacy business show is, and ratings on traditional television are, they will count like if a TV is in an airport lounge or in the gym.

“There's some creative accounting there, but for us, it was like, we care about growing ultimately the metric that shows we're growing the show and the brand is the number of people that tune into the first 24 hours, right?”

So most of the people watch the recording because during the day, you know, their work, they might have it on in the office or their extra monitor. Most of our audience is like watching the recording and then a bunch of people watch watch clips, some people watch, we have people that just read the newsletter, right? So it's about taking the content and our point of view on the world and then, like John said, delivering it in as many places. And then we'll have like random breakout moments, like we, we got this exclusive interview with this guy, so Humper.

Yeah, I said, it's a different, six different jobs and Silicon Valley all the same time.

I think that stream was like a hundred thousand people. It must be a YouTube video. Yeah, and so, and so just being there for like those weird moments and that's another benefit of being live is that live daily, like, I'm sure there were a lot of other podcasts that could have said, oh, I'll do the definitive interview.

“But for someone like that, it's so news driven, he doesn't really have a three hour story to tell.”

He's still early in his career and it's sort of just this controversial moment. Being able to have a, have a show that someone can just hop on, do that, everyone go hear the full story from the person right there. That's been something that we've been coming back to again and again where there's, there's a conversation that's happening in tech, in, in business. How do we extend that conversation on our show and then clip the show and distribute the show in a way that that conversation can continue in the comments of those clips.

“Yeah, a big, a big thing to is we, we, from the very beginning of the show, we had this number like 200,000, like that is the core, that is the audience that we're building for.”

I mean, that's like the total addressable.

Yeah, and we have 10 million subscribers, like we've pivoted something, something's gone wrong.

We're not in enough. Yeah, and so, and that's people that are building startups, businesses working at the companies that we cover investing in the companies we cover and being okay with an each and not being. You know, the dopamine that comes from, you know, putting out a video that gets a bunch of views is very real, but we are not willing to let that guide the content. If we wanted to do that, we would get into politics. If we wanted to optimize for views, we'd get into sports.

And I saw that on my previous channel, I sort of figured out how to get a million views on the video. I was never perfect at it, but like I was following that optimization path.

And I sort of feel like, okay, I understand that story and it was time for a new story. And the reason that we need to do that is sort of an imperative is that we hand-make the show every single day. So we're not building a company. This is a show that we are the host of. And so imagine if we start, like, the things that we are obsessed with, the conversations that we have in group chats and on the weekend and all these things are the same things that we talk about on the show. And as soon as you start getting into, and that's just niche content, and that's okay. But as soon as you start expanding out into content that we're not already talking about like a monk star.

It becomes like just a job and then we love what we do. So we're like, hey, if we can figure out if we can just stay niche and do this forever, that sounds great. And it's been fun to see the different people that have picked up the show that maybe aren't a part of that 200,000.

But again, it's like we care a lot about that, about that person and care about continuing to deliver the content that they started watching in the first place.

It also gives, so a couple of things one, like the one thing we haven't talked about is how influential that 200,000 is, and I think that is obviously a very important note that like, if I'm an advertiser and I want to be one of these advertisers on the screen on the caron or on the ticker, like, it trades at high price because this is a very highly influential group of people.

“I think one way to look at is purchasing power. Yes. So like the average YouTube viewer, you could probably do the math and they might actually be responsible for.”

They might have like $5,000 a year of discretionary spending, like they're deciding like, so it's like a t-shirt. Yeah, I'm going to my a t-shirt or a chocolate bar or a subscription to this app that helps me save money or something like that. Whereas our audience spends like a million dollars a year on software. Yeah, they're business owners or they're out there investing a hundred million dollars a year and almost all of our sponsors are business to business companies. We have a few business consumer companies, but almost entirely business to business and and they're also essentially all like variable pricing price price elasticity there.

Yes. So when somebody here like add and they make a decision, it could be a hundred thousand dollar a year and you'll contract or if they work with ramp who we talked about earlier. They might go on to spend tens of millions of dollars on ramp the platform, right? There's companies where we've like converted a big company to that software and that will be a contract that's huge and last a really long time. And so there's there's a big there's a big value to

And so the way this is manifested in more consumer focus shows is through investing products or through gambling products, right?

Because if you get a whale, even in a mobile game, right? If you get a mobile, if I'm advertising game of war or one of those mobile games and and and a really wealthy person shows up, they could become a whale and they're going to generate a ton of revenue. The same thing exists in business to business software. We don't call them whales. We just call them Fortune 500 company. We call them great companies. And if they show up and they buy a particular piece of software, they're running their database on this one or they're cloud on this one or this API.

Then they could scale and wind up spending millions, millions of dollars and so I capture a fraction of that value. I do think that also aiming for a small niche community is obviously that's been a thing that has happened quite a bit on the internet that internet unlocked that.

“But I think more and more I'm watching it and noticing that when I have such an abundance of content like I want to go to the place where I understand the inside jokes more than ever, right?”

And I think your guys show is a show where there's inside jokes and if you get a line, I don't like it. And I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like the day that was funny. I was talking about a company that had was having an insane holiday party like Vegas style DJs, all that. The CEO was drinking on video and I was riffing on it. I was like John. I mean, I know what they're trying to say here. This is like an if you know you know them. I mean, this means that they're doing they must be doing billions of dollars a revenue and we just don't know about it.

So like that was me being like it was a very dry reference. So you have to stick call back to a joke we made eight months ago and someone in the chat was like, this is so g.

“Yeah, it was like, whoa. Okay. Yeah, they're paying attention. It was great.”

Yeah, and one thing one thing that we did early on is not relying on kind of like randomness to like curate inside jokes. So like we actually had a piece of paper. This is funny that we had print out and it had like every one of our inside jokes. In like different quadrants. And if we had a riff on the show that was fun, we just write it down. And even like who are our allies and it was like our close friends friends companies who are enemies and it was like, you know, like season ping or somewhat. You know, it's like or like stagnation like the lack of technological progress or podcasts.

It don't write it. Rockets that blow up, right? It's like we built this whole world of little little phrases and you know elements that could continue to build some sort of brand. Yeah, because as you grow, you just you forget the inside jokes you forget. I think a lot of this year was like remembering we got to a point where we were doing like eight guests a show because there was so much demand. And we were we were we had to remember go back to the early days of like what made us so excited to drive to the studio when it was just talking ourselves.

Yeah. So we made changes. We were like we're not going to do any guests in the first 90 minutes like that is a non-negotiable.

“That's what makes the show great. That's when people tune in for that's what we have a monopoly on anyone else can get Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or such in Adela on a podcast.”

No one else can get us on a podcast unless we decide let's do it like we're like we're doing it. And it's not it's not like we're we're we're happy to go on other shows, but this is like the one thing that we. Yeah, this is the resource. I mean, that's like a long-term strategy like getting Sam Altman on can be a big hit, but it's not a daily. Tactic you can use to get people to it. So yeah, it's a long-term strategy to just put you to up there for 90 minutes in the beginning of every show and just build inside jokes.

Yeah, and we we even see this in the the viewership because we're live we'll see like as soon as we have guests immediately of course you know 25% of audience to me that's like of course.

And from the guys who run a guest show, you know, because like basically over the past five years what we've noticed and what we were chasing for a long time.

What we what was challenging to chase was the variance of viewership and guests. And I noticed this with my own habits with like DAX Chepards armchair expert or smart lizards. I like smart lizards is a great example. Those three guys are very funny. I would just listen to them three talk about what's going on in the world. But if I don't care about the guests that I'm not listening and I I didn't put those pieces together as a creator of a podcast as quickly as you would imagine, but I also want to take a step back to something you said Jordan and have you explain the distinction because I think it's really important.

Can you talk a little bit about the difference between a media company and a show because I think those two things came together with the rise of the creator economy where the assumption was creators need to build scalable things. Right, and I actually like I think a lot of the even the energy towards advertising it's like advertisers not a scalable product for you like you got to build your own thing and why are you doing ads for someone else when you can be doing ads for your own thing. This is like the advice that was given to creators over the past five years has been.

“You know, okay, you got a hot thing great. Can you build the next talent under you.”

Yeah, right, so just make the distinction between a company and a show and why you have conviction in building a show not a company. Yes, so I would say.

As the creator economy has exploded, you've seen all these incredible personalities emerge that have gone on to become like many empires and themselves Mr. B.

Joe Rogan, things like that Alasko gave Dave Portnoy Alex Cooper right and the things that have actually been durable out of that are are the personality themselves so a lot of. We started this business having started venture backs companies in the past we made the decision we didn't want to start a venture backs start up. We didn't want to sort of venture fund and part of that is because we're in LA and we have young families and we were just like we we want a business that's aligned to our life in a line to LA and these are this is not the place to really I would argue to build either venture back start up or a venture fund just because the tech industry is really not here right and so we came into this.

“Being being comfortable with their being a relative like ceiling on the business which is.”

Very counter to like the whole Silicon Valley philosophy everything Silicon Valley is about scale and getting to a hundred million dollar run rate and then getting to a billion dollar run rate.

And we think that super admirable like a lot of the companies that come on the show are already doing that or plan to do that or will die trying to die trying to do that. Coming into this show like I talked about earlier is about like anti scale right it's like be okay with your niche figure out what your niches delivered the best product for them would it be good for our audience if we launched some product that was suddenly taking up. Twenty hours of our week with that actually make the show better and we've run that John's very good about like running that analysis on every single thing that we do of like does it make the core show better and pretty much in always it's a no right even going out to dinner.

It's like does that make this short show better you could argue you're going to hang out with somebody and maybe they'll come on the show but in reality.

You end up like going to sleep later and you get a bad night sleep in the show next day is bad or and so there's so many decisions that we make or like does this make the show better and we've had to like. Learn all of those things over and over and like actually learn what makes the show better but makes the show better is we get to the gym at 630 we start talking about what we want to talk about on the show that day we get to the office at nine we prep the show for two hours and we do it and like actually like having that.

“Rhythmic nature to making the show is what makes the show better and I think a lot of people investor types have pitched us have you guys thought about buying a cable network right guys thought about building out a talent network and we.”

We thought about everything like truly tried to think about everything and haven't come up with something that makes the show better which is that the show is the show is our business so. I think if you look at Dave Portnoi and you look at the funny thing is there's like a chain of creators learning the same lesson which is like. Even if you do the impossible thing which is identify exceptional talent so like Dave Portnoi is like Alex Cooper yes your your star we're going to build a show around you what happens right right as right as she's reaching like.

The sort of peak of her earning potential she ends up going independent and gets a however many nine figure Spotify deal right and and. And then she funny enough to my knowledge has like run effectively the same playbook with other creator Alex Earl right as soon as Alex Earl is the star you use it and so. The way the internet the way the internet works today and the way that content production works is used to be that like media companies could retain incredible talent because the cost to produce and distribute the content was so expensive.

That a creator would be like why have to work with these guys because I don't have 20 million dollars a year to spend building my own media business and now a content creator can be like if I have my phone or I have a microphone and a computer I can be I can launch a competitive product and so. We've just made the conscious decision to focus focus on ourselves and focus on the show and we're very like commercial you can tell like we care a lot about running a great business but.

Through that business but we're there's no we're not trying to prove anything to anyone.

“And and scale as again not the thing that we're optimized. I tend to visualize it like a barbell I think value accrues in media to the platforms so.”

YouTube spotify netflix these companies have been fantastic businesses just grown and grown and grown and grown and then on the other side the most extreme you have like the individual creator. The Joe Rogan's the individuals that we mentioned and then in the middle you sort of this messy middle where there's someone who's like trying to roll up a bunch of talent and put them in a bucket and capture some value but. I think at any moment those people could leave and do the why I quit acts go viral on YouTube right and then boom and they have a hundred thousand followers in the business the next day and so the barrier to leaving one of these like talent roll ups is so low that it's just very hard for the actual talent roll up or whatever you.

To capture any meaningful value because you can't keep these people I'm you've documented it Johnny Harris try guys clearly like all these folks basically got a paid education at one firm and then what and start their own thing. And for us and for us we have the flexibility with the show to be collaborative with so many people and provided right and all for other businesses other content creators other writers other business owners you can like if we want to have a conversation they can come on the show and we can talk.

To try to coach them from for sure we have an amazing relationship with Joe wise and thought he's at Bloomberg he has odd lots it's a fantastic podcast he's been there for a decade.

Like on the show eight times this year we did eight interviews with him on our show. But we're not asking him to come full time yeah he's just like when he does something cool come over here from like he's done growing his audience from coming on screen again like we're having a fantastic conversation. Our audience will enjoy it's it's like very that's like what I see there are certain cases where I can see talent like management companies still doing well. The one that I've identified as writers specifically journalists that do like scoop driven writing which is like I am out in the world trying to find four interesting stories a year and I want to break a story do the original fact finding right break the story and so we see that in tech there's been a lot of.

There's been a lot of people leave legacy media companies start a step stack and the challenges for as a consumer I want to subscribe to one place that's going to get like the maximum amount of interesting new information a year like scoops right.

But if I'm subscribed to an individual creator maybe I want to support them but they may only get like two three super interesting stories a year and that's amazing if you're at a big media company.

But it's hard to build a business around that because it's not a massive amount of value on an ongoing basis historically it's the Wall Street Journal because if you open up the journal like you know that. They're going to at least cover every single story it's very hard for an individual creator to guarantee for their audience that they are sort of a one stop shop on 360 view.

“Yeah, so I think that's that's like the durable platforms like talent management style media companies is people that are doing original reporting in fact finding.”

But if you're just a television personality you can probably go independent like anytime right. I resonate with everything you've just said about building a show and I think I think it is very easy in our world and I'll say we are not immune to this at all to get attracted to the entrepreneurship of. What comes with building an audience it's very exciting you know and you watch what happens with other creators and like oh I think I'm supposed to build a CPG brand or supposed to build a software I'm supposed to diversify this.

This revenue when actually the biggest outcomes in our in our world have been people built great shows like getting a nine figure outcome is no joke. And the fact that a Joe Rogan deal or an Alex Cooper deal are nine figure deals on a short term basis where they retain the ownership of the show is actually completely insane and I realize this through. I saw a lot of creators back in the kind of 2018 era like creative products and launch it. Yeah, and even even the biggest creators in the world don't have a big enough audience to just use that audience.

“No creative standalone business. You actually have to be building top of funnel you have to invest in building top of funnel even if you have an audience of you know millions millions of people.”

Yeah, you have it's it's equally it you give yourself like a one percent advantage on overall success.

Yeah, much much greater advantage and it's just hard because just mathematically you can just go to a brand that has an existing company and say, hey, I have an audience.

If I bring you my audience, can you give me the economically fair amount of share in the profits where the LTV or however you want to calculate.

“So if the idea that you have to start the company to effectively monetize your audience is really just you're sort of telling on yourself for not actively pricing your advertising product correctly.”

Because you could as long as the product exists, everyone somehow there's a product that just doesn't exist, but if if the product exists, you should be able to just advertise it and say, hey, I brought 100,000 people each of them are worth 10 bucks. That's a million dollars right give me half right you get half I get half you know like you should be able to do that. Yes, it's hard to attribute sometimes, but I think what I love about just how you also talked about the ad product is we were together at a Google event.

Maybe a month ago, and I was just observing how people were reacting to you guys and to Ben and David from a choir and I started writing afterwards about the luxury brands of the creator economy because I think you guys fit into that world.

I think Ben and David from a choir or that is the Rolex podcasting right like yeah, we we we have an amazing.

It's interesting we have it I feel like we have an amazing relationship with them because we have so much respect for what they do and they respect what we do, but we have like complete. You're on the job as it ends of the series. We talked about this on our show earlier like we're fast content right there slow content. Yeah, I will watch an acquired episode today that was released three years ago.

“In the same catalog of crazy catalog of all you being time to put the way that people like again, I think I think maybe what we lost sight of in the creator economy was brand building over the past couple years to be honest.”

I think we looked at viewership and metric building as like the end all be all what's like let me show you that I can get a hundred million views and that will trade at a high value forgetting that when you build a brand and it's hard to explain to someone what a brand is we were talking about this before that like what you guys have done here with TVN is tangibly different than what you did with the john kogan channel although you made video video I watched of yours.

The meta video that has like 8.6 million views you have multiple videos with millions and millions and millions of views and I knew about you and I watched your stuff and I'd met you.

She didn't carry those wait as a brand it wasn't a thing. No, no, no. This is a thing totally BBN is a thing. Yeah, and it stands for something and there's a I can close my eyes and imagine it and there's a color to it and a tone to it and I think we lost sight of that and that has created scarcity with those who create brands in our space. And I think that's where I'm noticing that there's you know luxury brands and the three that I was just writing about internally was like TBBN acquired and feed me. I think Emily Sunberg is in that luxury brand space whereas like

Mr. Beast and this is not at all like he's a friend he's there's not at all a dig but he's McDonald's right he's available to everyone and he is looking for global expansion and to be available in every country and every continent and Something for everyone right he his piece his content can Talk to a 12 year old and talk to an 80 year old. And that is what he he wants to build whereas the luxury brands in our space are more just focused on like Reaching an audience that's hard to reach in a way that's hard to do right you guys do a hard thing

By being daily and being alive and making making it a brand and being consistent acquired does a hard thing by researching and recording for 15 hours and cutting it down to six hours Like I just think Yeah, the luxury brands traded a different you guys get to do things that are different like you get to command with your advertisers for 2026 you get to say You get to set up very there's also there's also exclusivity so for us we won't work with two companies in the same category Right there's a there's a number of different categories so there's a scarcity element to it

But I would say the way that we've approached brand building and the way that I think a brand gets built Is not by just obviously getting the most reach and getting the most number of people to be aware of you, but it's getting how many how many people have you made actually feel something multiple times right and so

“It's probably like something you know advertising they say it's like you need to reach somebody seven times in seven different ways to get them to like”

Get to the point where they'll convert and I think with building a brand you need to make somebody like feel something a certain number of times before before you've actually like imprinted in their mind and so for us there's a lot of things that we do that have no

and text us about it and be like we do this we do this kind of thing multiple times a week where there's like we'll put out something that we know only like 200 people in the world will find funny

“And we know we're successful when like six of them texts the team and they're like this is hilarious”

Have you ever read anything sample of that? Yeah, so we do we do these like we do like use images to like share various news sometimes it's a fundraising announcement or M&A or somebody gets hired Those are hilarious. And yeah, so over the weekend they're hiring entrepreneurs when someone gets trained on a sports team. Exactly, but also on the cover of the Wall Street Journal business section today is a story about open AI changing their vesting schedules for how they

And we just took in post is like trying to come up with something a little bit fun twist on it just to give you the news But then also we had a friend who Jackson doll who interviewed us and everybody's with him and he had a new profile picture And so we put it in credit card just for that Yeah, and it's like it's like these are nowhere near as well. And we'll do we'll do like wedding announced or like yeah

And so you guys read the book unleashing the idea virus by Seth Goden Yeah, I go to and it's like OG. So there's a book that got me into YouTube. Okay. It's nothing about YouTube.

It's about his era of like helping Yahoo and Hotmail you know scale and the hotmail thing was so interesting because obviously that was

The first email product that had like sent with Hotmail and you could click to make an account and so he was like the product is the marketing

Yeah, but the thing he said in that book that I think relates here is he talked about being remarkable which a lot of people talk about which literally worth making a remark about yes But he talked about when you're when you're and I if an idea is like a virus and it's supposed to spread You you have to get into these small pockets and small communities where he coined the term sneezers where you find the sneezers Yeah, the ones who are going to sneeze all over everyone else and can't stop telling them about the thing

But that only works if you're in the confines of like how you guys have approached this of we're going to talk to technology employees You know as a subset of our audience because now you can spread through a slack you can spread through an office building and when our first YouTube channel 15 years ago Was about the sport of lacrosse and whenever I would I would tell Colin who are we making this for making it for the kid in the stretching lines that during practice while they're stretching Turns to everyone else and says do you guys see that one video and if we can make it for that kid

We will get 60 people on the team to watch our stuff

“But I think that's how I view what you guys have done is like you make something really exceptional for that one guy in the office who's”

Will just go around being like how are you guys watching this? I need someone to talk to this about like yeah, but then from a macro perspective it's super easy to explain Like it's even visually like in a second when I'm on Twitter and I see TBV at I'll get my center for tech and yeah Like sports center for tech and business. I see it. I'm like yeah, I mean well-friend that immediately one one I love the sneezers a little viral analogies

It is funny people think going viral and they think

You know the Mr. V's video the algorithm just picks up and just organically sends to a million or 8 million people or 10 million people

But we when we started the show we had this strategy where we would take a random person's tweet No matter how small they were as long as we liked what they had to say we would print it out physically on a piece of paper We would hold it up read it and we would react to it and we're here in suits and we're in suits You're watching and you're kind of like okay these guys are doing this weird bit whatever this is odd but what we do is we would cut the section where we were reacting to your tweet About whatever and then we would quote tweet your tweet with our video smart

And so you you've had post Go viral. You know what it feels like you know the first hundred likes or your friends and people you actually know businesses And you're like, oh cool like John like this one, you know, okay we're all good And then eventually the numbers just turns into like 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 likes and you just kind of tune it out You may be mute the notifications you kind of move on maybe you go in the comments and see if somebody said something interesting that But eventually it just becomes all like pixels on a screen

But when someone quote tweets your tweet with a video of them in suits right out your tweet

“Like it's completely undeniable you have to watch it”

It's like it's crazy super like yeah, you and you might have to retweet it. You might have to send it to your friend And so it was we described as just like love letters to Silicon Valley. Let's just send love letters to the people and Silicon Valley That we think are interesting that we think are cool and there was no presumption of who we are in the social hierarchy

that we liked we would talk about it and laugh about it and maybe debate it, maybe disagree, maybe agree, maybe love it, maybe laugh at it But you would get a video and it was like this like weird other thing that had never happened before Yeah, and there was this interesting phenomena Which was that we would talk about even early so Q4 of last year we would highlight somebody's posts And then you'd be able to see like a billionaire immediately like we'd highlight like a college student's posts about some sort of something sort of related

And then you see like a billionaire would go and follow that person

And that was like and we've always tried to maintain even with the content of the show on the same episode that we'll have somebody that has a hundred billion dollar company

We'll have somebody with a five million dollar company or you know and start a plan that means like they've raised their friends and family Right, sounds like a big number but it's

“I think a couple of weeks ago we had like a thirteen year old in a show who's like starting a YC company”

Just because he went viral I mean like the same episode we probably had like someone probably a public company see I can't I can't remember Because we was definitely we had like a big person in my opinion like Twitter actually needed to show Which is funny it is to think about and I remember like you know we used to have a tagline technology needed a podcast Because it was so obvious the technology didn't need a lot of ideas

Because it was so obvious it was our joke, but Twitter actually did need a show Twitter's needed a live show It's weird that it needed it actually in a like three years ago when Elon bought Twitter Yeah, he hosted the Zoom call with a few other creators And we all in an eye were part of the circle and he was asking what we thought he should do sure

And my pitch to him was he should try and compete with Twitch and make it the best live platform because I go to Twitter for what's happening right now Yes, right like I guess he was talking about YouTube And I was like that's again like you guys mentioned it's slow content like not going to that's not what Twitter is all

“Yeah, and and I think Twitter needed a live show”

Yeah, because what you're just describing of like a thirteen year old at the same time

It's a billion hours at the same time as a public company

So that's that's Twitter that is like you're getting a take from saying you guys would appreciate this Jon went on Eric tornburg show Yeah, like almost three years ago maybe two years ago way before we had even started thinking about TVPN or even doing our first episodes and he made like the full pitch for TVPN around like no one had cracked Like accidental tech I wasn't thinking about it, but he was like, oh, where else do you think there's opportunities in what white space and media like tech media seems really saturated

And I said well no one has cracked tech live streaming and because I had done technology focused video essays And I wasn't the first person in your video essay obviously there was a long lineage of people doing video essays for film critique or video game reviews or lore or politics And I was just the first person at least one of the first to really focus on like startup business tech content in video essay right in video essay work And I was like everything comes to tech eventually it just takes time to niche down

And so if I see what speed is doing or not still funny if you go into the platform To make it happen exactly and part part of that is that being a content creator in tech is relatively low status right Which sounds insane because like young people in the out in the world they're like I want to I'd rather be an influencer than an astronaut

But in tech for good reason right people can come into this industry and create a hundred billion dollar company right it's possible it doesn't happen

It's rare but you come into this industry for glory and to have a billion dollars hundred management or to have a unicorn You don't come into the industry to like make funny videos That's ultimately created an opportunity for people that do want to come in and take it extremely seriously So I feel like you guys are to Twitter almost what like subway takes us to Instagram in a way that like every time I open Instagram I hear the first thing I see in the morning is subway takes yeah, which is so interesting that like each platform needs like a native

Yeah, so yeah, I just got this like on the show we're trying to cover like how do we think about the topics what are the topics that we're covering every day What is the content on the show and the content is very driven by what is the conversation that's happening on Twitter

“Yeah, and and oftentimes like I believe it's funny we in the New York Times they call this this board center for the LinkedIn crowd and I was like”

It's funny because I do think our content in the long term can do well on LinkedIn when we repurpose it properly

You know, I don't know I think that's actually I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn

I don't think there's like a pulse there is a pulse there's a pulse on Twitter and on Instagram Yeah, for sure Yeah, they're all like story arcs John's analogy, which has been great is that X is the internet's dive bar Yeah, totally Are you this for YouTube

I don't know because the mission mission mission mission mission was the conversation that YouTube had and I feel like you were a focal point I would say we work okay, I think YouTube has grown and expanded into so many different directions

Yeah, but there was a pocket of time for sure when like there's people who associate the term creator economy with us

So let's say that we we came up with it Yeah, I don't think we came up with it. I don't remember if we did or didn't I assume we didn't. Yeah, it definitely said it a lot

“In a certain Tumblr as yeah, we thought once people started saying it we were like, oh, that's what we've been talking about”

Yeah, so the reason I used to kind of mock the VCs I think we're going to say that creator Yeah, I used to mock the VCs that would go on X and talk about the creator economy and how creators are the fastest growing category of small businesses I used to think it was so funny because I'd been I'd been in the space myself for a while since I was like how it was Like paying for my life in college was like doing ad deals between creators and and brands and I knew that all the creators just use like quick books

And they just use like a regular bank account and so VCs like started talking about this trend like it was happening now But I was like look back for the lot this has been happening for a while And we also were all good on software we didn't need like Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was a funny moment creator economy company but Sony so that's a creator economy company totally made the FX3 everyone has 10 so one thing I mean obviously this happened to us in the same time where we became that that show on YouTube

Very quickly if something starts working and you see the add dollars and it's like everyone starts doing the same show and that also happened not so it's like a lot of people did the same show or similar shows and competing for guests got hard and that and I would say pretty quickly after you guys made this show I started seeing this show attempted by other people You're just from like an artwork perspective and you don't have all the nuts and bolts But you're like visually there's trying to do something but it's the same thing with your thumbnails

“Yeah, I'm sure that this overlay is probably somebody probably templatized it but I think that's I was curious about how you guys if that's why you can go back to brand”

Yeah, that's what we had is yeah, we've never we'd be knock off sevens people today how he felt about a coffee cafe

Yeah, he's been copying He's a good person Let's just link in bio. I mean you have products like metal or people are there's a fake merch store for our merch We don't sell merch yet multiple places on the internet. You can buy fake TBPN merch. Oh, maybe you shouldn't sell merch Maybe I don't think the only reason I only have to find the real hard board game

Like when we're like readily like you if you're readable athlete you can't get the revenue You never wanted to like use merch has like a revenue stream the reason I like making it is just from a quality Yeah, everything we make is something that you'd pick off the shelf at like a retailer But what did Evan say to you guys about people copying the show because we've been it. I did on shows like this And actually I don't feel compelled to go on a similar show just because I'm like I want to go on the real

We're gonna go on the real

“Yeah, I mean, I think I think it comes back to brand but also what do you have control over monopolizing and that's your cell”

And actually the individual creator like the host the host being very important And then there are some tactical things where you know if you are if you are out in front And you just don't take your foot off the gas like I honestly think that we would the copycats could defeat us if we were like Okay, let's rest on our laurels and then also start a company on the side and also do something And I've seen that a ton of times where you're like if you just focus on the show what happened

How did the new person come up and it's like oh, well that person like they got sick of doing that thing And so of course someone came and ate their lunch and so sometimes that's like fine They're like yeah, I kind of wanted my lunchy and I was sick of doing what I was doing I've noticed a lot of people a lot of people that I think every single person that has an issue they care about Should focus on learning from outside that niche right so

Copy but copy from other parts of this right so if you're doing gardening go look at what people do in politics

Because we're like well, like we just look like television that's existed

Yeah, we look like we look like our format it like a talk show that transitions into having guests has been around forever And so anybody that's like like very clearly copying from one show is not actually taking inspiration from the world And then recombining it for themselves right and the things that they're interested in

“And so I think ultimately you know people copy without knowing really what they're copying”

They're just like this thing works. I should copy and paste that thing into what I'm doing And the best the best shows are going to be some combination of a bunch of it The next big tech in business show won't be a direct clone of us. It would be something that is so new and different

That we're just like, oh, we hadn't even ever thought about that. That's awesome. I guarantee they're going to come on our show

So we had it. We had it cool. We had a cool. We had a cool moment with Jim Cramer because in some ways He's like multi-decade career. He's truly in the game because he just loves talking about markets and stocks and talking with CEOs We had this cool moment because he's seen a bunch of different podcasts But he was like, you know, I just he just said he's like I really some something to the effect of like I really respect what you guys are doing

“And and I always thought someone would do this, but I know whenever did it and it was and it was like”

A lot of people have done sort of this, but it was it was clear that he saw like the whole and the brand and like the human pieces Puzzing together and was like this is in also in also the energy depending on your energy as a as a person That's going to be on camera. The show needs to be built around that Like Cramer has like crazy chaotic energies running around yelling he's granting We aren't that but we have our own energy and we have our own dynamic. Yeah, and

And yeah, it was cool moment. He could have said no to the interview. He could have come on and I don't know like just been low energy But he brought his he was excited. So that was really yeah. I want it. I would I would love to see more people that Call it copying call it being inspired but take this concept of a highly produced live stream and then apply it to other things Right, we've talked about cool huge opportunity to do this for cooking right you can imagine a set like this in a beautiful kitchen

Somebody every day says on Monday. I'm going to cook this to say I'm going to cook this people can order that's cool and then the host can just hang out and cook this meal And you can still clip it and you can do gas and it's like door dash Yeah, so so you could there's so many ways you can on a minute Like yeah, I was at a government of like this chef went here this restaurant opened here like there's also like the slight business So then then you know if there's like the sports center for cooking probably also like the costs and not for cooking right and like and we've seen this also with like

There's some creators that travel all the time and that's a very different lifestyle but it gives you a different flavor of content So can you go inside of a company can you go tour it can you go do a walk and talk like that's not us and so by default we're not competing with you if you're creating that different type of Is there anything that this show doesn't have yet that you think would make it better when you think about the next year

“The year after that bigger gong a bigger gong that's what we're doing like a proper”

Like LED wall, which would be fun Yeah, I think this is a little low contrast right now. So there's a gear stuff chair I'm trying to think different sports wise like allowing you to get up and draw on something working on labs actually Yeah, so we've been testing that movement walk around. I like when you did the meta show that was like I like the almost game day before Why do more of those and then call it game day shows and where and so the big thing is like there are set of conferences

Where a lot of business leaders come together and those are very they're just difficult puzzles because you have to get the whole team there set up the 10 book everything It's like the it's the Super Bowl and you know pat back if he does this on college game day. Right, so it's like what is our college game day? Yes, it's met a connect, but it's also some of the conferences that that bring more people together I know, I know, yeah, to polishing that And then, yeah, Figma, Marna IPA this year next year is going to be there's

God willing there will be a lot of IPA's IPOs, the IPO windows wide open right now. See a bunch of company space x will go out probably some mid day stream model open

Yeah, they drop it down. He's doing it and so those moments are amazing because it's just the culmination of usually a decade of incredibly hard work by a

big story moment. So much so much risk and so much emotion going into those moments. So that's those are really I would say are like Super Bowl moments But they only I guess better than the Super Bowl because they come up hopefully a couple times a year.

Yeah, who was well, I mean, I know they're going to squawk, but it's like the squawk hit that's a different we went on the squawk, it's a very small hit. I think we're on for seven minutes.

Yeah, right. It's under and it's just in it's a small hit, but it's also underserved in that your guys show feels like a for us bias like from the inside at type of Yeah, so production. Yeah, I mean, and we we still even though we're much more were much more Like constrained than a normal live stream if you look at what a lot of live streamers are doing. Some of them will just go live like whatever and those just log off whenever or they'll be like, you know, I'm throwing on a YouTube video. I'm going to react to it. And I got to go to the bathroom right and watch the chair right.

And that sometimes causes consternation, but we are a little bit more structure than that, but we're still less structure than TV show where if we are having a great conversation, we can go an hour with basically no ad breaks or anything. We can really get on our chair tonight. We went 25 minutes over something. Yeah, and it's like that we just have a little bit of importance, but we but so but we still have so it's like this weird half and half, but you try and play to the strengths of both.

“So I want to come back to talking a little bit about business because I think one thing that I thought was amazing and again, a part of the the brand you guys have built this year was.”

Your spot with Axios and what they covered afterwards, which was that you guys are almost sold out of your inventory in 2026. I looked at that and I was like.

That is unbelievable and I imagined that is a multi-million dollar.

The running ads for ads now. Yeah, but this is a multi-million dollar tweet. No, you want to know what was going on there. Like if you look in the comments of that Axios article. So links have not done well on Twitter. Sure, maybe they're coming back, but that article, there were a number of articles that one got like hundreds of likes. So that's like the true fans, like who's liking the fact that we're selling out?

Yeah, but that's like the inside, again, people being so exact down with this and being like, yes, hell, yes, and yes ads, hell, yes. In the chat, when an advertiser comes on because you know, like ramp raise money, they come on the show, normally the vibe would be like, oh, is he paying to be here? And in the chat, they'll be like, it's TPP and royalty. This guy makes this thing possible. Right. It's amazing. And so in the in the response to that to that post, there were so many people that were like, they deserve it.

That somebody quotes me, it was like, is they deserve it a meme or people just being wholesome? I mean, I think a big part of that is, you know, we see any time a startup raises a lot of money. Right away, the whole industry is like, is this legit? Yeah, right.

Yeah, right to head of their progress is this warranted, are they worth a billion dollars, are they worth a hundred million dollars?

And so there's just like this immediate kind of frenzy, a lot of it happens in group chats, some of it happens on the timeline. I think what's, you know, the reason you saw the dynamic that John described is that it's been even if you don't watch the show. Yeah. I think people can appreciate the work that we put in because we've missed two days this year that we were like traveling to do like, like out of, we've done hundreds of shows this year and really put in like put in the actual work. And so I think when people see that you are being rewarded for, you know, really focused hard work, I think, I think people appreciate that.

And you're underrated, like, truly like for those group of people, like, if that feel like they're there with you, they're like, people don't know how hard they're working and how good this show is. Right. Yeah.

“That's how they feel, especially in like a year one year.”

Yeah. But I mean, I do, I always do like to reality check the other side of the equation, right? Like the, the business has grown a bunch and should make it a lot of revenue next year, but, you know, it's like, what's the grounding on that? Are we getting the actual impressions and, I mean, I think, I think we're going to, we're going to try to do like 5,000 host red ads next year. And so when you 5,000 host red ads, wow, because you do 20 in episode 20 in episode. Wow.

250 episodes a year. So you have so many more sponsors. Yeah. And for 20, 20. So you have 20.

Around 20. And I imagine that trades at a pretty high level to be one of those 20 spots. And they just say that trades and so it is six to seven figures. Yeah. And so if you work backwards from, that's a lot of revenue, guys.

5,000 ad reads, what's an ad read, what's a host red ad read cost? Do you do the math and it all math's out?

“Yeah. And also I think association is a very important byproduct of advertising.”

Association is one that I think, what's he talking about way more.

I've been a fan of advertising my whole life.

It's actually one of the things that connected Colin and I early on was how much we like ads and how cool advertising is. And the association component matters a lot more than the direct call to action. Right.

“Like I, I mean, when I think about you guys, I associate ramp.”

Eight sleep. Yeah. Like I've named so many of these sponsors. This is crazy. Public polymarket.

Yeah. Like I can name your sponsor. That's crazy. That I can call them out like that. And I think you're a fan of an F1 team.

You can name your sponsor. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I can name them too.

And I think that's, that's, you guys have done that in a really cool way. But even that just seeing that like the terminology, I think vernacular matters so much and talking about inventory and being sold out and having your community beaks. Like I think. Totally. Like what you said early is that a lot of creators are trading.

That was, that was like one question out of a 20. Sure. Talk that we gave and I just answered it. Best case scenario. Actually.

And did they go up? Yeah. Best case scenario. Yeah. Yeah.

Best case scenario. It was, it was. Again, that's scarcity. It's like luxury brand scarcity if you want in. And then you got to act now, you know, there's only 20 slots.

There are all exclusive categories slots. Yeah. It trades at a very high price. We're not negotiating. Yeah.

Do you have the money? Yeah. There's another thing that.

“I think we now have the luxury of advertising.”

Understand, understanding. There's like predictability to what we do. Right. It's not like we are three days a week doing a lot of content. Then we go dark for for a week.

Like we are very consistent. We have a very trustworthy process. Yes. If this is like, yeah. Yeah.

We like the labor of this. Like we like that it sounds like silly. And hopefully this doesn't get clipped out of context. But we like the fact that it's like this kind of rhythmic, cyclical, you know, like we show up in the morning.

We prep the show. We do the show. We go hang with our families. We come back and do the next day. Yeah.

I think there are entrepreneurs. It's very easy to to not have structure in your life. And just say, yes. Oh, yeah.

You got invited to this amazing week long retreat.

You got to say yes to this. You can't turn down in the interview to go hang out. Like we've turned down a lot of stuff. But just because like the show doesn't happen if we don't do it. And so we'll be like, yeah, I would love to go to this crazy place.

And with all these cool people for this time. But it's like it just, you know, then the whole thing. It optimized for what your status quo is. Really? For what the true reliable every day experience.

Yeah. Your life is. Right. The weekend getaway is not. It's not a thing.

Very much. Just like rhythmic running. This is like getting a distance runner. It feels like being a distance runner. Just every day.

Let's get it like that. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing is getting. You know, we've been super proud of the progress.

This year. But at the same time remembering that we're a year old. We want to do this for. Yeah. We want to do this for decades.

And so going in the next year, it's. It's. I feel very fortunate that we're not trying to do. We're constantly going to be trying to innovate on different formats and distribution methods. And a number of different things, but we're not trying to do anything that is wildly different.

We're not trying to add something new that takes. Another 10 hours of our week or anything like that. And so it's this constant just like refinement and. Yeah. In the show, it's really been a thing of like how can we make what we do.

1% better every day. Sometimes it's just. Banner, Scott, or Michael, amounts of camera differently. Sometimes it's changing the lighting. Sometimes it's changing the flow of the show.

Sometimes it's you know, interview like how you ask a question. I feel like I mean, I've done. I've done interviews before, but doing so many interviews and like being an interviewer this year. I've, I've used this metaphor of like it's like having a race car on the track. Like I can, I can sit down with Mark Zuckerberg and not be nervous.

And I can keep the car on the track. Right. And I'm not going to embarrass myself.

He's not going to come away being like, I never want to talk to that guy ever again.

But to put on a really great performance and actually find some very interesting moments and very interesting. Learn about each other and have fun together and create something special. I feel like that's just decades of work. And so I'm, so I'm not nervous when I go into a big interview. But I'm also not excited about my performance yet.

I feel like I have so many I can shape seconds off.

“And I've seen it with the with the great Walt Mossberg interviewing Steve Jobs, right?”

It's like they had a life together. And so when he was pushing him later about the iPhone and all the different things, like they had rapport and building rapport is something that I think interviewers don't take seriously in the moment in the in the time of like, I got to book the big guests.

Everyone's like, I got to check the box. I got to get this person and that person. Instead of like, how can I be the, how can I be interviewing them 30 years from now?

you know, somebody interviewing somebody multiple times, multiple times a year. We have the luxury of a lot of our guests have come on the show multiple times. Or some guests don't like to do as much press, so they'll come on once a year. But we have a lot of people that will come on four times a year.

“And I think that more shows should look to do that because it's something beautiful”

when you build up that trust over multiple. And we're the, the trust that somebody has to have with us is comparable to television and that where there's like half a second of delay. And so they have to, they're coming into our world and we're having a conversation. They have to trust that we have respect for them.

And it's about finding this line of like asking the questions that need to be asked.

Well, so, you know, not never trying to do.

We've had CEO say some things that have gone viral that we're like, we didn't even set, you set yourself up. Don't give them enough rope, right? Oh, well. And sometimes, yeah, sometimes, sometimes, you know, people, some guests want to,

want to take it to a crazy place. Yeah. But the, the Kramer had a wild, we, we, he had a wild arc where he interviewed Tim Cook ten years ago. The stock was getting trashed because I found sales had finally leveled off. And this was before the app store was growing so big.

And then stock went on a massive run again.

But he had to ask the hard question of like Wall Street.

My viewers don't like your stock right now. Right. But he was bullish. And he was saying, I say, don't trade it on it. And so his true belief was Apple is going to do great over the next decade.

He was right about that. But his viewers were down on Apple. So he had to ask the hard questions. He did the interview. I think it went very well.

And then like 10 years later, he was like doing this onsite interview with Tim Cook again. And 10 years later, and they have this like big open story loop that goes over and decade. And you see this with like, sorkin and a bunch of other of the great interviews. Anyway, sorry. I was going to ask you guys about the polymarket ticker.

Sure.

“Were you the first live show to have a prediction market?”

Because I like, so CNN and Kalshi just made a deal where they're going to be doing the exact same thing. Yeah. You guys have that ticker. Yeah. And then when I saw the CNN Kalshi, it felt like a reaction to the internet and a reaction to any way to kind of capture attention.

I have, you know, not a great viewpoint on prediction market. So I don't think they're they're great. But I wanted to ask about that. So like, even as I was sitting in there, I will say, I thought it was really fun to look at and call and look to many girls. Look at how many people think he's been talking about how he thinks Gemini will be the LM of the year next year.

Sure. Yeah. That came across today. There's like 95% of people agree with that. Yep.

Yeah. So yeah. So prediction markets are an interesting category because you have like a massive amount of speculation happening. People making trades, taking a bet, one side of the other. But then the end product is like an interesting data point on a bunch of different parts of the world and the economy and the markets and what's happening in tech.

And so we've always looked at it in this bucket. We've never, we don't trade on prediction markets.

We've never, we don't take sides. We don't say, oh, I like, you know, on. Yes, yes, be it and you'll be like, this is my part of it. Or we're not like we, John and I, like two weeks ago, we were in Vegas for F1 and like didn't didn't gamble at all in the whole weekend. And you know, we don't, we don't have that. We're more on the creamer side. We like to own companies that we love and and so we always thought it was a fascinating data point and it's like very much like a hot button issue within tech.

“And I think outside of tech and we'll probably continue to to percolate, but it's been a very interesting data point to try to understand understand the future and provide some context for the news because around elections.”

You have polling, which gives you like some indicator of how an election might go. And this is like that same type of data, but for kind of everything. So it's been a year for prediction markets because there's sort of two ways that any market can break. One could be it's heavily institutionalized and it's like hedge fund guys and they know the risk that they're taking and no one really feels bad for them if they lose their shirt betting on the election the wrong way. But then there's like retail traders spending on sports and if that becomes the predominant consumption vehicle, then I think people have a lot more sort of moral qualms with it.

And I think this year's been the year where people have been grappling with that and we'll see where it lands. A lot of it will be determined by regulation and where things can go, but we found it useful to just add a layer of context around tech events like that gem and I think.

Yeah.

“I was at dealbook and sub, do you see what Brian Armstrong said about the election markets?”

So his POV was that insider trading with the election markets is it could be argued that it's a positive sure because it's a better indicator if somebody knows what's about to happen.

That's that's the that's the challenge. If you are just an observer of these markets, you want the insider trading to be happening. Because it gives you because otherwise it's just data is better if someone says, yeah, this is going to happen. Yeah, but the problem I have is like CNN and Calshy have this partnership that you can bet on Calshy almost every night what Anderson Cooper is going to say on the show. Well, you can I don't know that I would be surprised if that stays that stays as they roll out an official partnership. I mean we've had prediction markets also addiction market pop up for certain interviews that we do and I find it to be a terrible experience.

That example is not that is that is not a good example of what Brian Armstrong is talking about because he was talking about the situation. Yeah, I mean, maybe there was a crazy one. It's also bringing up. Maybe there is value because you're like, oh, I want to know I want to know what Anderson Cooper will say on tonight's show. Let me pull up the prediction market where he is insider trading it's like, do we really create anything? I guess we did, but who's trading against that if Anderson Cooper.

I mean, and to be clear, so we've had markets pop up on some of our shows this year and out your show about our show. Yeah, and then people will come into the comments and they'll be like, say this and we very any time that's happened. We've just told the team like, hey, walk if any one of you trades on this you'll be fired immediately like we have zero tolerance for this and the I mean the platforms themselves have rules against insider trading. There are also laws against insider trading even in commodity markets, which is how these things are regulated. How do you enforce it? Oh, well, you have to find proof like it's like insider trading in a stock like the maybe there's a whistleblower, maybe there's some, you know,

and then the debate or like there's some big windfall and somebody's like or shows on these hacks. These are some oddities, right? So historically, if you were a farmer and like you could be like, wow, this year is really rough. Like we're not going to have a bountiful harvest. I need to hedge so you could go to a commodities exchange and hedge your like production and that's actually good and that's.

“And so you have the insight information that your harvest is going to fail and so you go out to the market and say, I want insurance against me failing my harvest.”

And so it is it is driven by sort of insider trading, but we've determined that that you know that's okay. Yeah, but that is I don't know why we landed there, but that is not from my understanding is that that is not considered insider trading. And that's a situation would be like you know that some other company, you know, not looking information that some other company is literally insider trading is a different thing, but also like the nature of a commodity market is that there shouldn't be a monopoly on it, like there shouldn't be anyone who's like, oh, I control enough power in the market to actually effectively insider trade.

Because if there's just one farmer who's corn futures, you know, like who needs to trade corn futures, like they shouldn't be able to actually move the entire market off of one person insider information.

So even though they know that they're worried about their corn failing, they're not making such a big bet that it's moving the market, which is like we're weird nuance.

Yeah, so there's going to be a whole like regulatory thing about this for sure, for you to like just proof of lack of opportunity to me, then right for young people. Yeah, for young people for that people or something about a feel like proof of lack of opportunity, but like that there potentially is a lack of opportunity, a lack of jobs and here is a new surge of gambling, low cost gambling opportunities to. - Yeah, really, like, been funny at the very end of the time. - I'm more at relatively. - But I also find the data interesting at times again.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - It is certainly better than like the

“some of the crazy crypto stuff that's gone.”

- But I find it to be more of a indicator that are tolerance for story has gone really high. - Story. - Meaning like, again, things are more interesting when the stakes are high.

- A good story has stakes. - So it's more interesting. - It's more interesting. If I can win or lose money based on what you say. - Or just hold on to that again.

- But again, that's been, I don't think the people that we've seen trade prediction markets based on our show are not real fans. They are just out, mind-badding.

- Like, it's just, you know, a bunch of things. - Interesting. - And so I have like, our core fan base has never cared of. In fact, they get annoyed.

They're like, all these people are in the chat.

- And they're just from here, basically.

- Oh, interesting. - So, yeah, I would say, people do that with the stocks too. - Like, we would have seen a lot of stuff. - Yeah, but we also don't do. So, our show.

- CNBC has like, is retail trading.

They're focused on how it's going to move before - Yeah. - For all the guest's earnings. - They put up the stock chart and based on what the stocks are.

But it's not inside of trading, I mean. - And so, that's great content for a certain part of the internet. Our audience is more so. They're like building a company that might be worth

$2 million today.

They want to make it worth $2 billion.

They're trying to, better understand the world. They might be listening to Sauch in Adela on our show to understand how he's thinking about co-pilot. And so, they may make business decisions based on that. But none of our coverage is actually focused on individual

stock prices or anything like that.

“And I think we pushed something that we've,”

you know, we pride ourselves in having a, we have a small team. But we care a lot about each individual person and making sure this can be transformative. This role can be transformative for their life

and that we can keep like helping them grow year over year. As we grow as a show and we encourage them. And I'd say this to all young people

that I talked to you about this is like,

you're, it's very, very difficult to change your life by being a better investor, right, by like trading earnings. In fact, it's like oftentimes a total distraction, even to own a thousand dollars of a stock in a company because it's like you're getting a notification.

It's like it's down, it's like, what should I, should I sell this, should I not? And it doesn't matter what the price point is. It's wildly distracting. And more, and we do think it's bad

that you're seeing like sports betting explode on college campuses. And you see this in like LeBoubou is people effective, gambling on on all different types of things in the market. And we tell people constantly both in our lives

and on the show, it's like, you're the best possible thing that you can do is like increase your skill set, increase your capability, like increase your power level as an individual through the things that you can do, the people that you know, the things that you're working on.

“And that's how you, that's how you change your life.”

You're not going to change yourself, like the best hedge funds in the world will put up like 30% a year. So run the numbers on your personal portfolio. If you are more elite than the best hedge funds in the world that trading, but you're starting off of a $10,000 base,

like you're not, you're still not going to be able to forward like the house that you want in your city. And so like you need to develop skill sets. You need to create things. You need to be in the right circles,

work at the right companies to change your life. And so I think like the more people that can put out that messaging to young people, the internet's just been dominated by info product, I see like a lot of young people that are interested in entrepreneurship think that they need a personal brand.

It's like, yeah, I don't think you do. I didn't, we have like a personal brand now by nature of building TPPN and doing a daily show, but I had a lot of success in my career just building companies, right? I built a, yeah, having a personal brand is just, for me,

it's like, are you a rational person who does the thing that you say you're going to do? Meaning internally adaptation, yeah, your reputation is your personal brand. If you do produce media, sure, that's another thing.

But like focusing on your reputation is like the most important thing.

Yeah, and I just think young people think, oh, to be an entrepreneur, I need a Lamborghini and an info products because I want to make content that these people end up like in the cycle of looking up to entrepreneurs that sell courses. And I think that the, the course bros kind of like change,

they sort of shape shifts, but it's still this, they're still getting like more impressions and reach and views and ever. So you still have this generation of people that are growing

“up on the internet thinking that that's how, that's the path”

that I should go on right, not realizing that if you become successful or you create anything great, you will just like get the personal brand through that. You don't need to make videos in order to get that, right? It's, it's, it's, my better to be patient.

I want to ask one last question for you guys, because we've, I don't want to go as long as as your show here, so you double up today. But I'd have to imagine that you've gotten the call from a CNBC or maybe a network like that as the world of streaming and the world of traditional media is looking for something like this.

And I imagine the world of business media is like, here's our guys, like, and they're making something that looks like the thing we make on TV. So have you considered that or would you consider that why or why not if a legacy network says, we want to bring you on, I don't even know

So we actually have a, we actually have a sort of tongue and

cheek word for our genre. See, I mean, obviously, we've talked about new media. Yeah. We have, what do we call it? Neo-trad media.

Neo-trad network is media. That we didn't scratch on. Yeah. Yeah. That was your, you saw it, but you didn't do that.

Yeah, I didn't show up on a logo. You should have put it on. But ads on it. Yeah. But the, the, the whole joke of that was a traditionalist media was the idea

that we are both new and old simultaneously.

No one in tech and businesses is like, we literally stream the show on Twitch. No one's doing that. Yeah. So it's like, are we 80s or are we 20, 25?

We're both, and that was the Neo-traditionalist. And we have a couple of friends that fit in the same bucket where they're new media, but they're doing a print magazine. Right. Like that is an old school format that they're bringing back.

And so it does slot in well. And I could see it working in the future.

“I think that we're still, we're still early in our journey.”

And I think we do, to back to that track analogy of how you shave off seconds in the interview. I feel like there's, there's a lot more that I want to do personally before we go that direction. But at the same time, I do think that there's.

I want to go everywhere. I want to go everywhere. I'm going to be able to see it. Okay. No, no.

Next. No, no. Is that true? At the same time. Yeah.

I don't really. John John. So just like I definitely want to be on Spotify on YouTube on RSS on, you go on Transistor. Check every single podcast player. Right.

Also, I want to be on LinkedIn. I want to be on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. All of them. Yeah. TV is another outlet.

And so we own 100% want to be there. And you will be there. In 2020. I would expect so. I mean, we fun.

But again, we're also, you know, we've talked to. The network's that we like admire. And. And there's interest, but at the same time, it's like coming back to being like, we started this effectively and Q wanted this year. Right.

Right. And there's. And we want to do this for decades.

“And so the most important thing is that it is not a win condition.”

People people often come to us during this question. Yeah. As a win condition. Yes. And they try and frame in the same question.

So for a lot of creators, it's like, you're, you win the game. Everyone wants to know what is it take to win the game. And for a long time, it was everyone wanted to be like Doug Dumerro, which means you start a company and you sell a slice of it and you get the car of your dreams and then you've won.

And I'm sure, you know, everyone who's ever won knows that you never win.

And then there's always something more. And you just keep going. And so now the new win condition that has been like placed at our, the, the gauntlet has been thrown down is like get on TV for some reason. And that's not the win condition. The win condition is the number of years that you do this.

It is the 30 year career. It is closing out that story arc of what does it look like to interview Mark Zuckerberg in 25. What does it look like to talk to Sam Altman in 2045 when we can go back and say, Well, we were talking in 2025 and we're still talking in the condition for doing traditional cable. Is that it, it doesn't change the course show.

I don't already ate three hours a day of content and some of that is suitable for other other platforms, but not being. We're not going to sacrifice what the, the product that we've built until this point and our motivation is to keep making that better and better and better. And we know the things that we need to improve and we want to keep that magic of waking up in the morning at 530 and being genuinely excited to like drive to work. It would be very easy to break the format and break what special.

How exciting is it to be sitting basically a year or so in and thinking again next year we're going to be on TV. Like I still think for guys of our age, I still think there's something special about like showing up on those screens. I mean, I'm starting to, it's just in case you guys don't have the story about who we wanted to be on silver screen, then you got to the silver screen that was his wing condition and it wasn't. Yeah, I, I fully internal like that. Yeah, I think you guys are like I if I was to just say like my perspective on the year, like I think you guys showed us of the value of craft and brand.

And I think that matters a lot and that's something that I think we've we lost a bit of sight of and I think every lot come from everything you guys have said.

“That's true truly what I have recognized is like what you just said of like no first the show is first the product is first and serving the people who love the show is what matters.”

And I think our world our industry has lost a bit of sight of that.

You're doing it. You ended the show with us today. So we just kept kind of podcast. Yeah, I was texting. Yeah, you guys need to wrap. No, but but you see like we get off the show and we're not like, oh, pack up. Let's go home and do something else or it's just like what what was great about what wasn't what are we changed for tomorrow. We're oftentimes like making changes to the next stage show immediately after getting off and so it's just that. Not enough.

Our friend David Centra who was our first listener to our knowledge because we made the show and didn't share it anywhere and sent it to him.

“And he listened and encouraged us to he we were like how seriously should we take this because it was a we made a couple of us as he was like you should take it deadly seriously. He saw something in us and he like goes back to this quote.”

I don't know who the original all attributed to him, but someone else may may have I think came up with it, but they take a simple idea and take it super seriously and not enough people. A lot of people take a simple idea seriously for a little bit and then they'll have some success and they'll be like I got to think bigger I got to do other things I got to do things. Yeah, just the joy of. Yeah, he gets the example of Todd Graves chicken fingers chicken for you guys massively successful and the idea is just a chicken finger restaurant.

But when it's executed extremely well it turns into a multi billion dollar enterprise with offices and employees and it turns into this massive massive thing.

And David Centra is a lot of respect for that and I think I think just like one show not we're not talent management we're not trying to sell ads on the side or do. I mean, you know, then some this and that and this and that just the focus on the one simple thing and just just repeat it has been really good. I love that. I love that. Well, thanks guys, appreciate the time.

“I hope you guys get a good night's rest and get back in the saddle tomorrow morning.”

Can't wait.

I'm warning you, I'm Pacific.

I just want me just one more sleep that we go live again. Thanks, Hans. Thanks. Thanks for having us. It's been a while since I was a kid.

It's been a while since I was a kid. It's been a while since I was a kid. It's been a while since I was a kid. It's been a while since I was a kid. It's been a while since I was a kid.

It's been a while since I was a kid. It's been a while since I was a kid. It's been a while since I was a kid. It's been a while since I was a kid. It's been a while since I was a kid.

It's been a while since I was a kid. It's been a while since I was a kid. It's been a while since I was a kid. It's been a while since I was a kid. It's been a while since I was a kid.

It's been a while since I was a kid.