33. TBPN (John Coogan & Jordi Hays) - Inside Tech's Water Cooler

26:55And I ultimately helped them add a bunch of other sponsors and kind of learned the business side of that. That work ultimately turned into a company called Branded Native, which is a YouTube ad network that's still running and growing to this day. And so through building Branded Native, I did literally thousands of advertising deals between companies and creators of all different types, right? So mom and pop creators, established media companies like Donut Media. We talked about them earlier on the show. And so I had done thousands of deals on the revenue side of the kind of business that we're building and then went on to build Party Round, which is when we met.

27:32and that was taking everything I knew about media. And then really, when you look at Party Round's best work, it was like entertaining the industry, right? We would do things that got a lot of attention and we'd funnel that attention into our FinTech product. But ultimately, when I look back in the work that I'm most personally proud of from that era that I can say like, this wouldn't have happened without me, it's effectively like the media side. And so I'd got to experience having, I think we had like marketing market fit right at a time when we didn't have the product at that time, you know, kind of, you know, we had a lot of demand right during the craziness of 2021.

28:15But but like taking that and then you fast forward to starting this show, it's like John had been if you look back and like Soylent is one of the most iconic. It's the most iconic CPG company ever in the history of like tech specifically. So when you look back and you can find like, it's like, okay, it makes sense that a decade later, John would have like a show for the industry, right? A media product. And so you add John spending years like understanding the craft of creating content, right? And you combine everything I knew from the entertainment side in terms of just like creating things that were entertaining and fun.

28:56and then everything I knew from the revenue side of modern media businesses. And then you apply John's understanding of the craft of making content and understanding content at a deeper level. And the thing that I always come back to is John's understanding that with content, your product is not like the file that you upload to YouTube. It's the format of what you're doing. And so you add all of those key insights together. And I feel like we both started working on TVPN like a decade ago. Right. And so able to like stack those learnings and then combine that with. We don't take ourselves very seriously.

29:38And I think that that that's an important part of the show. Right. We're going to have good takes sometimes. We're going to have bad takes sometimes. We we love the industry. But at the same time, we can recognize the silliness. But one thing that's always been that we've always maintained is taking the work super seriously. And so we can have a lot of fun. It's fun to go to work. I look forward to starting the day every day, but we're taking the actual work very seriously. And part of that is we're forced to, right? Like we have to physically speak the product into existence, right? We have to perform.

30:13And so if we're not having if we're not having fun or it's not going well, like we have to like viscerally. we've all met founders that will like things aren't going well and they can kind of check out right they can kind of just like also you can tell yeah you can tell when it's when somebody is on camera and they're not having fun you can tell yeah it's 100 right there's i think there's something that's pretty common in at least in the creator part of the world but increasingly as people gain audience um part of it is audience capture but part of it is just like the simple ego that comes when a critical part of why you're successful is your distribution.

30:51Um, I'm curious how, obviously the one benefit you guys have is that there's two of you. And so I'm sure a huge part of this is pushing each other and challenging each other, but I'm curious, yeah, how you're able to, whether it be between the two of you or there are other people sort of like maintain a healthy amount of ego and also be checked or challenged. Yeah, I was thinking about that just today. So we've been growing this newsletter and every day I write a couple hundred words just to kind of summarize my thoughts on like the current thing or whatever is in my mind. And I realized like there's a little bit of like I'm writing for like we post on X as well and we're kind of writing for that audience.

31:35And I have a vague idea of who's on the newsletter subscription, but I'm not super in there. and I was thinking, really, I'm writing this for Jordy. I'm pitching an idea to Jordy and there's a little bit of Jordy capture in the sense that I'm trying to find something. I'm not trying to find something that will make you happy. I'm actually trying to make something that will make you tee off. I don't want to bore you. I want you to be like, I have a strong point. The newsletters, we meet at 6.30 every morning. We try not to adjust the schedule at all. We've tried to fit a breakfast in with external people.

32:13It doesn't work at all. And so we try to have the exact same morning every morning leading up into the show. And the process that's worked well is we show up and from 6.30 to 9.15, we just talk about what we're planning to talk about on the show. And we debate a bunch of stuff. And we sort of sharpen our thinking and just go back and forth. And so the entire time that we're working out in the morning, it is just back and forth on whatever is top of mind, whatever we think we're going to be talking about the most. And so by the time we show up to the office, usually I get immediately start getting on Zoom meetings for whatever we're working on in the business.

32:48And John starts just writing. And I've never had writer's block because I'm just kind of like transcribing the discussion that we already had. Yeah. But I'm like – Yeah, the wheel's already spinning. Yeah, I'm just kind of like rephrasing it to be like, oh, are there some data points? You know how if you're in an argument with somebody, eventually you go and look up the facts, get some facts. And so I do a little bit of that, and then I bring that to the show, and we kind of rehash what we've already talked about. But we kind of know the general parameters of the key discussion for the day, and then that can kind of lead to…

33:18There's been maybe two shows where one of us arrived late, and you just got to kind of go right. You got to get to the studio, and you have like 20 minutes, and you go live. and that feels just terrible. Yeah, because it's really, like, it's such an important part of the day that, whatever, it's effectively three hours of just, like, fun debate on what we want to do. Getting your muscles warm. It's also a very unique thing about this particular show. Like, if you go to any traditional media, like, daily show, like, there is a room of writers that are putting together a monologue. And it's very rare that the hosts are doing all of the work.

33:59Yeah, sometimes I see clips from other shows, and I just assume that everyone does their own homework, and I don't think that's the case at all. But that's part of what makes the show great is that we want to keep that conversational feel, right? This is two people trying to understand the world with guests, right? And we try to lean on guests. We talk on any given week, we're covering 30 different industries. There's such a broad spectrum. And so we can't possibly be experts. It has to be conversational. And it has to feel like you're sitting here, you're hanging out with us, and you're just trying to understand the world.

34:42And so even from, like, we have a lot of aesthetics of linear TV and traditional media, but I think that our audience generally holds us to the bar of a live stream where it's a little bit. it has the aesthetics of the polished TV that has a whole writer's room and a teleprompter, but there isn't one. And it's much more like watching somebody flip through the news on their computer on a live stream, like you'd see on Twitch, just chatting. Right. And so we've, we've kind of like pulled these two things together, like Twitch, just chatting. And then, you know, traditional NBC, ABC, Fox or whatever, and kind of combine those a little bit to kind of create this new thing maybe it kind of hits different there's also just like i'm sure you guys have talked to center about this too where he's like he's had people be like why don't you hire somebody to read the books for you oh yeah you were so not getting like oh my gosh if there's like a yeah all there were 25 interns who came in i came in this morning and they all told me that uh they showed me all the lines they wrote for you guys just yeah um there's only one intern in today.

35:53It's clear that it's you guys. One last thing on the business thing, I guess, would be, and you started to talk about just the reciprocal nature between the content and the business. Sure. Why? Also, we talked about the low status part, but what do you love about the business of advertising and why is it such an empowering? Advertising kind of gets a bad rap, maybe especially in tech, ironically. What about advertising is so powerful? Price discrimination. There are people that follow the show that are billionaires. There are people that follow the show that are in college. And so if you find a great product where that company can get both of those people as a client and extract literally$1 billion from the multi-billionaire who runs a massive company, and then also help the college students start their first company and extract that.

36:49win them for life 200 bucks a month on no sass revenue once they get into yc or something like you can actually capture value from both and that's only possible with advertising if you're selling t-shirts the billionaire shows up and says i'd like a t-shirt and you say uh do you mind paying 100 bucks you know yeah i think i think what independent uh media companies and creators love more than subscript like what they love about the subscription business model is that they have some amount of revenue consistency, right? They like feeling, and it's really easy for them to think, okay, if I get to a thousand subscriptions, if I get to 10 ,000, if I get to a hundred thousand, it's really, yeah, yeah, that, or, or just, it's really easy to understand, like, okay, I can, uh, it's predictable, right?

37:32And so, uh, what I love, uh, what I love and why we were excited about advertising was that, I mean, uh, obviously for, for what John said, but But also, we have never charged a member of our audience a dollar, right? And over a year, we haven't even sold merch, right? All the merch that we've made, we've just given away. And that is a beautiful thing, that there's roughly 15 or so companies that have effectively financed TBPN so that it's free for the entire world, right? And I actually think that's a beautiful, beautiful thing. uh i think where advertising gets a bad uh rap is uh non-targeted advertising so if you're getting ads that that uh every once in a while i'll get an ad that i'm like why did i get this ad that's like that that's like actually not a great experience and then high high ad loads so like we have a higher volume of ads in the average podcast but we actually have a higher much lower percentage of the actual content is advertising right which is important tv yeah so tv is tv show it's 22 minutes and a 30 minute segment that's in 10 minutes of ads we're not we're you know we're an eight 180 minute show three hours there might be five or ten minutes of total ads across that which is you know less than 10 and the content and the ad is actually much closer together totally obviously that's been the case for one maybe i guess one other criticism would be that broadly not necessarily for you guys is that that's it just shake like it shifts the incentives Yeah, so here's the thing.

39:06As much as possible, we're trying to work with the most boring companies on earth. They're not boring to us. They're companies that the world does not wake up every day and say, I want to learn about this company. And so we sell attention to those companies. And there's a lot of companies in the world that should not be waking up in the morning thinking, how can I be the next Cluely? right like they should be thinking how do i how do i build a you know fantastic product that i can you know get a meaningful amount of our market and uh figure out new product you know like there's so many other things that they should they should work on and so uh there are companies like open ai that doesn't have to spend a lot of money on advertising because people just talk about open ai all day long right we cover there's not a day that has passed probably that we haven't talked about open ai right you have the birth of a new hyperscaler right it's it's the thing that people are fixated on.

40:00And so, you know, we even joke that we expect venture capital firms to eventually realize instead of making a derivative podcast that people that's not actually going to be a great product. Why don't I take that money that I was going to spend on producing a show that no one's going to listen to and just advertise with great podcasts that I love. Right. And so that will happen eventually. This already happened in finance. Right. Flip through the Wall Street journal, flip through any, uh, important magazine and you'll, you'll, you'll find advertising. Goldman Sachs has a podcast, Blackstone, BlackRock.

40:33I'm pretty sure they both, they both have podcasts, but they also advertise on F1 or TV or CNBC. Like they're, they run ads because they need awareness. Yeah. That's a great point. Yeah. The main, the main thing is content, content just wants to be free. Ask, ask any creator that, uh, that, uh, I would even say Ben Thompson probably realizes that he wouldn't, his show was born at a time when X was happy to promote your links, right? And he was super early to a generational trend. And it would be very hard to like recreate that of having this massive base of paid subscribers. There was just like less competition, I think, for like truly great technology analysis.

41:17Now you're fighting gravity. And the other thing is we wanted to create a business that didn't require us to do other things. It pains me that for the last however many years, everyone has been on this path of I make content that's great enough to justify doing something else. And every time somebody does that, they then are in competition with somebody who doesn't have the other thing to do. Yes, yes. And so we joke about venture capitalists taking a lot of vacations, but if you were trying to make a media business and you're competing in a market where there are a bunch of people that want your audience, they want the attention that you have, and they don't have a venture fund, and then you go and you're a media creator and you start a venture fund, it's like, well, who's your customer now?

42:05Is it your LPs? Is it the founders? Is it your audience, right? I generally predict that people will continue to distract themselves but uh we we wanted to build a business that didn't that that we weren't like okay now we've had a little success uh we have some momentum now let's diversify right it's like staying ruthlessly focused on the content itself uh because that's what our audience deserves right um we every single day i wish that i wish that i had an extra three hours to like prep for some story that we want to talk about because people are tuning into the show every day and they deserve to get the best possible experience.

42:42They don't care that I, if I were to start a venture fund or we have a venture fund and we're like, oh, yeah, like couldn't prep for the show this morning because I was trying to win this deal, right? Why does the audience care about that? We're all doing that in so many little ways throughout. Like, it's just so tempting to focus on like, just, oh, I'll just do a little bit else. It even happens within the context of, we have been, you know, extremely focused on media. We haven't done a fund or company or spin out tech product or anything like that. But even within the even within TBPN, we've thought about, you know, is the newsletter too much of a distraction?

43:19Yeah. Or is it actually synergistic? I think we got it to a place where it's synergistic because it serves as a way to prep the show. It serves as a way to prep discussions that will happen on the show. The actual newsletter is exotic. Yeah. And it's the most efficient way to consume the show. Right. Watching if you if you have the luxury of watching the live stream every day, it really is luxury. Right. And it's not an efficient way to get news. And that's OK. Right. People for generations have liked having a TV on in the office and doing their work day and being able to sort of passively understand what's going on through that.

43:56But the newsletter, again, is like the most efficient way. If you want TVPN in two minutes, that's how you do it. Yes. This show began as something called Technology Brothers. You mentioned earlier, Party Round and Capital, I think more than almost anything else, you were amazing at tapping into the technology culture's zeitgeist. Obviously, you've done over 250 videos, not only tech, but a whole lot about the business of and the culture around technology and its entrepreneurs. I think tech is often criticized as being sort of lacking in culture or unaware of culture, but clearly technology has its own culture as well.

44:35And in many ways, like as much as this is a show about technology and business, it is a show about the culture of the technology industry. Can you talk about maybe the way you relate to that or think about like, are you, is that, is that something you're kind of like consciously, like maybe another way of asking. I think, I think the meta, I think technology is too inspired by technology. If you think about, best example of this is like the browser company, right? Novel way to name a company. And they were able, like, that was just the naming of that company was valuable because it stood out. It was like, wait, this is a consumer tech company.

45:15They're creating a browser. They have this, like, you know, cursive logo mark. It just stood out immediately, right? Off videos. Yeah, and you could tell that it was inspired. It wasn't like they were the first company. They weren't the first company in the world to name themselves like the blank company. Yes. But they were the first people in tech to do it and do it really well. And since then, over the years, we've seen like probably 100 companies created with that, right? And it pains me. It pains me every single time because one of the things that people in tech do is they just copy from within the industry, right?

45:52Because we've been trained, we've been retrained to say that like, you know, the best people copy, right? Great artists steal. And it's like, I think that great artists actually steal from elsewhere, right? They're not like, oh, this great artist did something. I want to be a great artist. So I'm going to do art exactly like... A perfect copy of the Mona Lisa. Creativity is almost definitionally like diverse inputs. Of course. Yeah, yeah. Diverse inputs. And so I think one of the things that we've done well, I did this historically with kind of everything that I've worked on, is it's great to copy, it's great to get heavily inspired, but do it not for the category and the industry that you're competing in with the original person, right?

46:37Or not even competing with Mindshare, right? So the second company to do after the browser company to do the blank company in like a cursive font. they probably got a little bit of attention because it was still somewhat novel but now we're seeing like the fifth and sixth and seventh wave of naming companies in this way and it's like the biggest anti-signal to me right it says like you are not an original thinker and maybe you just didn't want to take the time to like find a unique domain name but even even that says like you're not heavily inspired. And so what TVPN has done is always borrowed from outside the industry.

47:16We borrowed suits. We borrowed mahogany. The official wood of business. It wasn't a wood that... I just call it that. The gong is a good example. From some sales cultures, but certainly not like a common tech totem. Yeah. And then if you look at the show, the New York Times on Sunday called us like LinkedIn or SportsCenter for LinkedIn, which is hilarious because it's probably a great way to explain it to somebody that reads the New York Times. But we've never I've maybe watched an hour of SportsCenter my entire life across 29 years, right? An hour of SportsCenter. So that wasn't even the inspiration, even though aesthetically, we drew some inspiration.

48:04If you look at our graphics packages and things like that. And then from an advertising standpoint, I told every advertiser earlier that we were building a Formula One team, right? And that we weren't just going to give you a host red ad here or there. We were going to bring you into the entire world that we were building, right? And so we're constantly borrowing, but we're trying not to borrow. we even had we were working on something we had an entire product drop that we were going to do we were going to send TBPN like whey protein to like a thousand companies that are you know friends and friends of the show and things like that and another company did like a supplement drop before and we just dropped it because we were like we had done all the work to do it we just we hadn't hit go on the PO and we just said like it's no longer going to be that interesting and we don't want to fast follow within the same within our same kind of like world right and so i think that's my biggest critique of tech is like there's the a really big world and you can go and borrow from anywhere you guys do a really good job of being sort of like insider outsiders um both maybe personally also like we're here in hollywood we're not in silicon valley like that it's one thing to say like have diverse inputs i'm curious how for both of you that has actually how that like is that a super intentional thing?

49:26Is that just kind of your natural curiosity? I think it's very clear that if you look for inputs on how to make a TV show look good in Silicon Valley, you're not going to find a bunch of great examples. And so it's much better to just go where they make great stuff and pull from that. And so Hollywood's dying, man. Like, I thought they had no good ideas. I don't mean Hollywood specifically. But actually, I totally... So I think Hollywood doesn't have maybe a ton of amazing new ideas. They have tons of great ideas. We come up with ideas all the time of like, okay, you take that show, that format.

50:05No one's done that in tech. If you do that, it will be a hit. And if you do it well, it'll be a hit. It will be new to me. And people will be like, wow, they're geniuses. I mean, when we were thinking about like, how do we want the look of the show to feel, We didn't just look at Pat McAfee and SportsCenter and CNBC. I also looked at how news shows have been filmed throughout history. What in the 1980s, if there was a movie about a news show or it featured a cut to, let's go to the news show, what does that look like? How does Hollywood portray a news studio when they have cinema gear and they can do proper lighting?

50:46And everybody has something in their head when they think of that, by the way. And that's partially a product of the cultural time or whatever. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, there's an Apple TV show called The Morning Show. There's a whole variety. Aaron Sorkin has a show about the news as well. And there's been a bunch of places where we've pulled visual references. I mean, even right now, this set design is much more moody and contrasty than pretty much any TV show. Pat McAfee, CNBC, Fox News, ABC. see like all of those are much brighter sets well ours is has a lot more contrast a lot more like it has a lot more cinema in there we're even filming on cinema cameras instead of tv cameras like that's a deliberate choice yeah um and and like i wouldn't even know to find that i wouldn't find that reference in in tech specifically yeah i would say we we have maybe found one idea within tech to make the show better this year and we found hundreds from outside of tech and so whenever I'm watching or consuming any type of media that's non-tech media, I'm like pausing, screenshotting it, sending it to John, sending it to Ben, saying, hey, look at this.

51:58This is cool. We should implement this kind of thing. And that just doesn't. And again, like tech is just kind of very circular. They're seeing like, oh, this other VC podcast did this thing. We should do that. There's no broader field of view. And by the way, other industries are like fashion is a great example of an industry that's really good at this they're constantly looking elsewhere totally there's something no it's the best it's the best example of that they'll they'll they'll a fashion brand for that is planning their their fall winter 2026 season now is going into the archive of another brand or they're finding like some ad campaign from coca-cola and they're like look at this like this is amazing let's bring that into the present?

52:42This is true in other Silicon Valley companies. We were just looking at Anduril launched a new augmented reality headset. It's like, that's not pulling from what Boeing is doing. They pulled it from Call of Duty. They pulled from Call of Duty. It pulled from anime. It also pulled from tech, which is not defense, which is the industry that they're actually in. We're not a tech company, really. We're a media company. They're really a defense company, but they're a tech defense company. And so they're clearly pulling from other references. They're not just going to, what does Lockheed do? What does Boeing do?

53:17And that's always the nature of these things. On some level, you are making a show about the culture of tech, though. Yes. One, I think, thing that you've done a good job of so far is sort of like playing to a certain niche and playing enough inside baseball. Stuff like the Metis list is a great example. Like the most inside baseball. It's like AI, research, or Twitter. Of course, there are parts of tech like Apple and Instagram that are way more broadly appealing. Both now and in the future, I'm curious how you think about towing that line. I think it seems clear you are making a show for people interested in tech, the business side of the tech world.

53:52But how do you think about dialing the aperture wider, more narrow? We're not going wider. I agree. I think we're, it's so critical because we have no plans to retire from the mics until we're just done. Yeah. Actually retired. It's so critical that the content that we put out every day, the things that we talk about are deeply interesting to us. Right. And there's a lot of tech content that, you know, if you look on YouTube and you just look for tech content, You're going to see like iPhone reviews, SpaceX news from two years ago. A political critique of tech. That's really popular. And so retail trading.

54:37What stock should you buy? There are whole creators that are tech creators, but they would never talk about a private company because their audience is like, I don't care. Yes. We're almost the opposite. We're like, yeah, once they go out and they're mature, like we'll talk about them a little bit, but it's more about the lessons from. When you guys might not care as much about that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and the thing that we said early on, and I think it's still true, it's like we make content for 200 ,000 people in the world. People that run companies, that invest, that work at the most important tech companies in the world.

55:14It's the founder that just applied and got into YC, right? It's a very small group of people, and we're okay to make just – we're very intentional about making sure that the content is interesting to them. We're not always going to get it right. But in general, if it's interesting to us, it's probably interesting to that group. And what we've seen, the funny thing is we got a like a review, I think, last week or something. And somebody said, like, I'm a dentist on the East or I'm a doctor on the East Coast. I've never worked in technology. I started listening to TVPN and I listen every single day.

55:47And I think it's great if those kind of people like adopt the show and enjoy it and get value out of it and use it to understand the world. But we would never adjust the content to try to get more of those type of people. Right. And that would be like doing tech reviews. Right. And more shallow. And yeah. Or just being like, what's the next hundred? I mean, we could 100x every single view, impression, subscriber number in three months if we wanted to. Like, I've done it before. I got to half a million subscribers on YouTube. My biggest videos were, like, the history of Donald Trump, the history of Xi Jinping.

56:29Like, you know, you just stop making the stories. Yeah, so history and politics are the two things that would. It's so, yeah, it's so easy if you're just chasing views. but that's not what we're doing here because we're actually building it as a business, not just as some sort of vanity metric. Yeah, the business part almost makes it, it's almost a constraint that's helpful. Totally, totally. Because as soon as you go there, you're just selling different products. CPMs are different. There's a whole bunch of things and I don't think we'd enjoy it as much. And then it's way more competitive because there's so many great shows about politics or what's going on in the public markets.

56:59I mean, you look at CNBC and Bloomberg, those are actually great products if you're a retail trader and you actually want to look at the stock chart for the day. But we're rarely pulling up stock charts because a lot of times we're talking about private companies. Right. Yeah. And I think another thing that's notable is a lot of traditional business television. The formats and the structure of the shows were created at a time when people didn't have a cell phone in their pocket. So it was like deeply valuable to have a screen that was just like flashing charts of what is gold doing? Yeah. Yeah.

57:30What is gold doing? What is this stock doing? You know, the S &P is down one percent. Like that was really valuable. you could have it on because you didn't have like a phone that would give you exactly what you're so and so our coverage is um something we've uh a challenge has been not being too inspired by television right uh people want to put a label on it and say like oh it's like new cnbc or it's this and that but it's important to not not uh it's important to be inspired but create some constraint. What was it? The New York Times used to have box scores for every game that would be played in sports because you just couldn't look them up.

58:12And the Wall Street Journal to this day has several pages printed in there of the share price of the top 1 ,000 companies in the world. You know, that's obviously valuable to the folks that didn't evolve their habits. It was just the way it was done. The only reason they're still doing it is the way it's been done. Exactly, exactly. So do we want a segment of the show where we just read off every stock price? I don't think so. Name every stock, John. There actually was a streamer who was doing that for a while, and it was actually pretty effective because people found it very meditative to just hear.

58:45It's like ASMR. So actually, I don't want to count that out as a bad thing. But yeah, I mean, in general, we want to do a show that assumes the modern trappings of technology and modernity. Yeah, we're also, you said, are you news? It's a good question. I would say we are not the delivery mechanism for news. Yes. We're like the conversational layer that happens on top of it. Because oftentimes I find out news from the chat right here. Somebody says like, all caps, they'll just put it in the chat. And I go to X and I'm like, oh yeah, this broke five minutes ago or whatever. Everyone has that group chat now where they send posts from X to the group chat.

59:26and they're hoping that there's a little bit of discussion around it. And we just kind of like productize that. It's just like, yeah, we'll talk about it. We'll give you a couple sound bites on either side of whatever, whatever tweet is going viral right now that, you know, maybe there's a little bit in the quote tweets and the DMS and whatnot, but we're just an extra layer on top of that. Let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah. I think this story, there's a lot of things that went into the success you guys have had in the last year. But I think maybe more than anything else, aside from your own ability is thinking sort of medium first around x or twitter um the first viral stuff was you log on you had a viral tweet and you see two guys in a suit reading your tweet on a printed piece of paper um amazing line from you this morning you said x is the internet's dive bar the drinks have always been cheap the bathroom faucet perpetually broken the whole place has changed ownership multiple times ultimately it's where groups of friends go to hang out regularly and that aspect compensates for its rough edges, but you can't act surprised when a fight breaks out.

1:00:27And in many ways, like... That was where he's lined. It was like half me, half him. The workshopping? In many ways, like, I think, I don't know, I've been meeting people on Twitter for the last decade and I've always struggled to explain to these people and there is this sort of unique thing where maybe it's 200 ,000 people, I don't know exactly how many, but there's a few... I don't think there's that many people. No, no, no, no, no. If you're in true tech Twitter and you make a banger about, like, Josh Kushner, for example, pure inside no one outside really knows yet um like a thousand likes or a couple thousand likes is like you did it yeah everyone loves it by the way you can you can go hang out with people the next day and say start referencing like you can basically reference the tweet not really that specifically oh i saw that oh i saw that exactly because it is a very small corner it's a small table at the at the dive bar what so maybe you've already talked about a little bit but yeah i'm curious what you love about that medium and maybe more importantly how over the course of the last year you guys have evolved with it as kind of the main kind of playing field so i think that people mistake uh they want to pin our success on growth hacks so like clipping was a growth hack virality yeah they're like There are people out there that believe we have had success because we figured out a good growth strategy and that has certainly contributed to the success but the success but the success is not why we have success.

1:01:52And so I think we're constantly thinking about growth levers and new ways to distribute the content. But fundamentally, the thing that we actually care about is the show and like every single day making it slightly, slightly better. I think like it is accurate to say that tbpn is a media company or it's a show that was born on x and that is an entertainment is like a companion product to x but uh but it's not any specific strategy I think one of the way that the thing that I think is really powerful is I I know personally I would use podcasts to understand current events but it's like wildly it's like a wildly inefficient way to do it because you're like okay i found this podcast that was recorded three weeks ago they're gonna talk about one of these things and it was published a week ago and they talked about this thing that i'm reading about now but now the set of events has changed and so there wasn't like a bleeding edge uh there were like tbpn has at its core is like a bleeding edge commentary on the re you know we we went off air at 2 p.m pacific today we won't be back on until 11 tomorrow, there's going to be some stuff that happens in between there.

1:03:06But in general, it's like always present, right? You're reacting to tweets that have been tweeted while you've been live. Yeah. And so I think that that much more than a specific growth hack or clipping or things like that, or a specific thing we did with the brand or the suits or anything like that is why it's a, it's a, it's a, was a unique media product and got traction, right? Because people see the clips they don't see the tens of thousands of people that are tuning in daily to the show right that happens below the surface and so uh i think people have tried to kind of overanalyze the uh of course tech people are thinking like okay uh tbpn is like like they're they're like they realize that like clipping is the only thing that matters you took you took that medium seriously.

1:03:56There's no gotchas. That's my point is that maybe for the first time, a truly X native media thing. And that was a really powerful thing. I do love growth hacks. It's really fun to figure out what works in the current X algorithm. It's constantly changing. I think we knew we had this idea of like, you know, sort of Paul Grahams do things that don't scale, but also just this idea of like love letters to Silicon Valley. And so when you think about you post a tweet, maybe it gets a thousand likes, but at a certain point, your phone just kind of like explodes and it just kind of abstracts into just like you're refreshing.

1:04:36It's like another 500 random people liked it. Like it's exciting, but it gets old if you post a lot and, uh, and you lose the connection of like, and sometimes you can see, okay, this, this person that I am, I'm actually friends with in real life. Like that's exciting. But the number getting bigger and bigger, that gets old really fast. And you can reply and you can quote tweet. But quote tweeting with a video in 4K of us in suits with your tweet printed was just like the super quote tweet. It was the highest honor that you could do. It was just like, this post is so important. Now it's the player cards or the wedding announcement.

1:05:17Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And so finding like that player card format has been used in all sorts of Instagram accounts for certain like box scores for sports events and Complex does it. There's a lot of folks that use that kind of format. But bringing that to X again was another kind of interesting like growth hack. There's been a whole bunch of those that are fun to innovate on. But I think we've never lost sight of the fact that just like content wants to be free and so advertising is a natural fit, content also wants to be everywhere. But that doesn't necessarily just mean take the same thing and put it on every platform.

1:05:55Every platform is unique. And so from a very early stage, we were on RSS everywhere, on YouTube also. And a lot of podcasts, they were audio only. And then they realized, like, okay, we need to do video at some point. So they added a video component. But it's just them sitting in, like, their, like, kind of bland, like, you know, a little corner of the office with some slat walls and stuff. It's not opinionated. And so we said, like, well, for YouTube, like, what you really want to do is build a set that's, like, opinionated for your video podcast. You guys have built a world here. A world. There's a world here.

1:06:26Exactly. And so, like, you can think about this world. This world does not matter visually. The visual world does not matter for the RSS product. but the RSS product does need us to contextualize things that we're looking at. And so as we're doing the show, we will be describing what we see. That's a, that's us thinking for the RSS feed. Then this set design is us thinking for the YouTube channel. Then how we clip on X and what context we give you the subtitles, all of that is thinking for X on Instagram vertical. Uh, it needs to be a little bit tighter one to three minutes. That's a different format.

1:07:00So like the medium is the message. The medium is really important on all these different platforms and kind of thinking about you create all this content. How do you actually make it feel native in that particular platform? And each platform is basically a full-time job. Yes. You know, companies still have this mindset of like, I'm going to hire a person to do social. And I don't believe that, you know, ask anyone on X that's like growing an account on X really quickly, how they're doing on Instagram if they're not maybe a full-time content creator. And every one of these platforms is different.

1:07:35And so it takes a long time to start chopping them down. What makes... I do want to talk a little bit about other platforms, but you guys long before this were both pretty good at Twitter or at X. So it's old habits. What makes somebody good at that platform? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just thinking about your question about taking X, taking Twitter seriously, I think that to close that part out, it really was just that like the 200 ,000 most important people in tech and business in the private markets, that's where they hang out. That's their Bloomberg chat. That's the Bloomberg terminal. And so it doesn't matter how senior you get it.

1:08:16The most tier one fund, everyone's glued to Twitter. And if something's happening on Twitter, they're talking about it in a group chat. They might not post. They might be like, oh, I love it. I love when a multi-stage VC that doesn't use Twitter. I don't really go on Twitter. And then you tweet something with their name, not even tagging them, and they text you within five seconds. And you're like, oh, okay. So you're extremely online. Yeah, that definitely happens. But, yeah, so I just think in general it's like the 200 ,000 most valuable, most important people in tech are there. Advertising them is obviously important, so you want to go there first.

1:08:53You want to nail that and then kind of flow through from that. In terms of what it takes to be good at Twitter, there's a whole bunch of things. But the distillation that I heard that was the most succinct was from Dworkesh Patel. He said, tweet like you're lobbing texts in a group chat. And don't actually think about trying to open a doc and turn it into a post or like a blog post. actually just think like, oh, I would text this to a couple friends. It's like I'm texting to a couple friends and that does well. Do you have any other insights? I think every poster is great for a different reason.

1:09:31I've seen people try to adopt the Clue Lee style, like the Roy Lee style of posting. And you could say maybe there's people out there that don't like his style, but they still watch, right? By the way, critically, when he first got going, it was, I don't know how much of it, like, was it good? Up to you. It was different, though, to go back to your influences thing. Obviously, the same thing. Like, he is definitely doing something different. You can hate it. Yeah. But it is not the same style that everybody else is trying. Yeah. I think the, yeah, the meta changes a lot. Sometimes it's memes or really pithy kind of one-liners.

1:10:13Long posts seem to be doing really well recently. I've noticed that like as the algorithm changes one day, I'll just open it and be like, Oh, I'm getting like, like every post that is served to me is basically like an essay by technologist. Yeah. Yeah. There's basically an essay by a technologist about something that's like pretty deep. And then sometimes you'll just get slopped up with like, you know, I think it's, I think it's the same, the same thing you see too. There's, there's accounts out there that are getting like 10 million impressions a month that are basically worthless accounts. Like they could not sell a hundred copies of a book if they were wrote it.

1:10:46And then there's accounts out there that have like 600 followers that are getting like 300 ,000 impressions a month and they could raise like a$30 million seed round. Right. And so it's the same thing of understanding. Yeah. And just understanding the, it's the quality of the content. It's who's, who's actually watching or who's, who's actually engaging with the content, who, who gets value. And that can be inversely correlated with like size. I mean, with all these platforms like there is something valuable about volume you see this with a lot of the accounts that post a lot of viral stuff if you actually click on the account it's like oh well they had 10 flops on the path to that really really big one and uh and and so there's a little bit of like if you're posting a lot you build the muscle and that's just true for i still think it's the most efficient way to become known in tech like to like break through like yeah it's still like you you can have somebody who is an outsider break into the industry just by the quality of their thoughts right on the other platforms um obviously you're doing a lot in a lot of places already i think the sub stack stuff to your earlier point is great who knows maybe it's even your guys's cameos on sora i'm curious how you think about that and maybe what near-term priorities there are within the context of what we were talking about earlier which is you're not going for people outside of that 200 ,000 people.

1:12:09So you can make the case that actually Instagram doesn't matter. No, Instagram does matter because those same 200 ,000 people are also on Instagram. And I want to hit them there. You want to hit them there. With different content. Yes, same audience, slightly different content. Because if you look at the Wall Street Journal, you open it up, there's the business section, but there's also the mansion section. And so what we're going to send, hopefully those exact same people, we're going to send them on Instagram something that's a little bit more sugar. Yeah. It's going to be a little bit less.

1:12:38Yeah. Whereas on X, you get like, you know, 400 words from me. It's like kind of a debate about a thing or some sort of technical deep dive we might be talking about or we might do an interview with some, you know, AI researcher one day. That's going to be a little bit less like Instagram focused. But we will take people everywhere. I think there's a stated versus revealed preference phenomena happening as well where you have people that say, like nobody wants to, like no high-powered executive wants to go out and say, I love Instagram. I use Instagram for like two hours a day. It's awesome. I'm on there.

1:13:14That's like my main thing. I just love Instagram. But let's be real. There's certainly a bunch of high-powered CEOs out there that are using Instagram a lot, right? Maybe they're not your heroes, but they're people that are able to move markets. And so I learned that. uh my wife started posting on tiktok in 2022 and the uh the the quality of just inbound people coming through linkedin was insane just from i saw your tiktok like i'd love to talk to go to linkedin they would leave tiktok go to linkedin and and like also for these people twitter doesn't exist sure sure yeah now that i think about it i got a lot of that from youtube too people would dm me on linkedin yeah so so part yeah so part of it is yeah understanding that x is this an ecosystem.

1:14:03It's relatively small. And if you want to have an impact on the world, you have to break out of X. You have to break out. And everybody that has built an audience on X has experienced meeting somebody that uses X and they're like, oh, how's it going? It's great to see you. And then meeting somebody that might be important, but they're on LinkedIn and they're like, who are you? What do you do? Oh, you have a manufacturing company, that's cool. They don't have the context.

1:14:35There's a meta thing, which is I mentioned this a few times. You guys are both amazing internet marketers within this context and without it. I think my best version of trying to distill what that is is making content or products that other people want to share. Or even more they want to share their reaction to or them talking about? I think it's much more, the way that I think about it is everything you do from a marketing standpoint should entertain people, should inspire them, or educate them. I don't know that many other buckets that stuff can fit into. We talk with companies all the time that are like, hey, I'm doing this, I'm going to do this campaign or I'm going to work with this person or I'm going to do this stunt.

1:15:28And I can, like, you sharpen your intuition enough and you understand, like, okay, does this fit into the bucket of is it wildly entertaining? Is it wildly inspirational? Is it wildly informative? And is it actually bringing novel information to people? And for me, if it doesn't fit into those buckets, like, it's just not going to hit. And you can have something hit in any of those buckets, right? You can, like for a poster, for example, can entertain. They can just post something that's like super funny, perfect timing, and it can get, you know, a million views. You know, a video that like feels emotional and inspiring, right?

1:16:04The Founders Fund, the iconic Founders Fund, Vibreel. First Vibreel ever. Yeah, so that was before my time. Yeah, but that is an example of like novel kind of like format hadn't really been done in tech, but it was inspiring. and uh when we did uh stuff we do i i think even within even more narrowly around entertainment i just think of funny i think a lot of this stuff is just like is this funny and then people might share it but i i feel like we keep coming back to humor is just like like if we're laughing about the concept and and sim and simplicity right like good super like like uh virality hates complexity right like if you launch a complex idea that requires a lot of context yes it will not go it will not go viral you can kind of people try to brute force it they get the wrong uh they get kind of the wrong signal right like somebody will launch something that is complicated and confusing and they will get hundreds of people like they'll send the post to a bunch of people and be like like this please comment repost quote quote it and and you can kind of like manufacture it but you can actually see it in the data you can be like this is not getting any reach because people don't actually like it and like the actual ratio like of engagement is like bad so it like it looks like it was a successful launch but it was really just like engagement farming this is what gabe um and mischief says he's like we want ideas that slap in one sentence and slap harder in three yeah but make sure it slaps in one sentence and i think a lot of the a lot of people on twitter and in tech, the tendency, including my own, is to like, I'm trying to do a three order, like you need all this context.

1:17:44And it's like, no, actually starting simple is a really, really strong place. Yeah, so when people pitch us marketing ideas, I tell them, I have more context on your business than 99.9 % of people in the world. And I'm going to need you to repeat that marketing idea back to me because I'm still confused. Yes. And if you hit the timeline with this, you're going to have a bunch of people that if their immediate reaction is like, wait, what's going on? And so they're certainly not entertained because being confused is not a great state to be in. They're certainly not inspired. They're not like, oh, I want to take action now or I'm feeling an emotion.

1:18:20And then they're certainly not being educated because they're just sitting there of like, I just watched this video or I just watched 30 seconds of this 90 second video and I don't know what's going on and I'm on to the next thing, right? Why do you think the original Technology Brothers launch video went viral?

1:18:37because it was nobody in tech would do something as silly as that. It was funny. It was certainly entertaining. It didn't, it didn't, well, I want to go back to like the idea of like make it shareable because we never thought about like, oh, there'll be something in here that people have to share. But maybe we did in the sense that like, if you see this, you can just send it to your friend. yeah. And if you look back at what the criticism of that video was, it was like, it was like, okay, a team who's succession oh yeah i was like that is that is what we were going for that is what we were going that is shareable too because you are setting up somebody else's punchline yeah which is really powerful yeah yeah yeah and so that i was like okay you nailed it that's what we're going through we filmed a succession style vibe reel for a podcast that is three months old it doesn't have revenue yet yeah thousand viewers and so yeah it i think um self self-awareness too is like super i do think there was something that might be like inspiring in the sense that it's just like oh wow like they're taking this really seriously like people in tech like to see that people are taking it's the high and low it's the high and low together again exactly it was like there it it was clear you were taking it seriously enough to do the video but also you were making fun of yourself a little bit yep yep yeah so i think i think it's this interesting dynamic where the audience is really smart like they will see through whatever like you need to be authentic because they're going to see through it especially over time Maybe you could get away with a launch video.

1:20:04People don't really realize that this is not a serious team or whatever. But over time, in the fullness of you trying to market to your industry, people will figure out. But they don't have an appetite to have to work to understand what you're doing. And so you can assume that they're smart, but assume they're not going to put any effort into really understanding. Because they just don't care. And that's fine. you maybe even more than marketers are two kind of like quietly brilliant brand guys like when i think about the stuff you guys have done historically both lucy and jordy's earlier point so it may be more than i must say anything else and everything you've done um it's spiked on a bunch of dimensions but especially brand it goes back to our influences conversation i think tech as an industry there's maybe nothing tech is worse at than brand or maybe even nothing that tech cares less about.

1:20:59I'm curious how, um, maybe what does brand mean to you and to what actually makes a great brand? But by the way, talk about a great brand. Jordy's way better at this than I am. I've been along for the ride with most of the other brands. Yeah, I think, I think part of it goes back to branded native and working with so many companies and understanding what is working both from like a strategy channel standpoint and then how brands actually get made like great brands do not start with spending three hundred thousand dollars on a branding agency uh and doing this like brand package like they're typically very uh they typically happen very organically a great brand is not a logo a great brand is not a website a great brand is like the culmination of what you make a group of people feel over time, right?

1:21:50So it's that going back to that, a great brand is educating the audience, a great brand is like, not, you know, not, sometimes you can do multiple of them. But a great brand is like making people feel something over and over and over and over until you stick in their mind. And so I just think that it's, it's like, a brand is the, again, basically average out everything that you've made somebody feel an individual person on an individual level, you as a brand and that individual person. And so when you look at TBPN, it's like people like the TBPN brand because we've probably entertained them. We've made them laugh like hopefully a few times, right?

1:22:29Hopefully a bunch of times, right? And that's like one of our KPIs is just like, again, like making people laugh, like making people not like... Well, in the second, third, fourth, fifth times are as good or better, too. Yeah. So we joked originally, like, I forget, at some point or another, we were like, you know, this wouldn't be possible if we weren't able to, you know, fork over, like,$300 ,000. People would ask us, like, how much did you spend on the Technology Brothers brand is so great. Like, how did you pull it off? And we were like, you know, we just put the capital to work. And it's like, no, it's actually like we worked with, I think part of it's like building up a group of people.

1:23:07Usually, you know, I think that great brand work is actually done externally. Like we, any sort of key role, things that are done every single day in the organization, we in-house, right? We're not going to have production out of house, right? There's a lot of people that are professional podcasts that outsource production, right? And it's like, that's crazy. Like your job is to make a piece of content and make it better every day. Brand where you're creating these like artifacts that are sometimes evergreen, like a logo mark, sometimes, you know, something that just is used for a moment, like ad creative, that is really effective to constantly be going out outside of the organization to bring in new ideas.

1:23:48right it's like and those people are thinking oh i you know like i saw this campaign that you've never heard of let's bring that in and so part of it's like having that relationship with a group of people and then not getting to not getting stuck with one so it's like we've worked with different people for merch we've worked with different designers we have core partners that we go back to a lot but we're constantly willing to bring in uh bring in new people and i do think that um yeah taste is taste is a taste is a factor you look at two logos that but but it's ultimately just a personal thing it's like i was gonna say you you have a point of view critical like you clearly know how to work with all kinds of different great external creatives but that does not work if you don't know what you like and i think that might be one of the other challenges like you go i also we also don't uh i also cherish that dynamic right like i don't i don't negotiate heavily with like creative talent and that might sound crazy because your job is to like get great services for the lowest possible price but if you go into a dynamic with a designer like i certainly will get like a proposal and i'll think like that is wildly more than i value what we're trying to do here like thank you like we're gonna go elsewhere but if i'm like close in the ballpark with a creative that I want to do work with.

1:25:10I'm not sitting there being like, Hey, like you pitched us, you know, 20 K like our budget is six K because sometimes they'll opt in, but then in their head, they're thinking like, I'm doing six K work on the branding thing. Uh, I feel like every brand is like spiky in a bunch of different ways. There's a bunch of different elements that kind of describe the brand. And it's not just an, it's not just an arrow in like one direction. It's like a whole bunch of things. And we've kind of done that with the brand world. And I feel like one thing that we've had a lot of fun with is like, when we find a thread to pull on that we're getting some like brand value out of, we just keep pulling on it as long as possible.

1:25:49And at some point we were riffing about, about horses being like, like it was, it was related to like technology journalists being rich and Nepo babies, and they, they all have horses. And, uh, and then that turned into like, we're into horses and we recommend buying horses. And I said, if your daughter's not a horse girl, by the time she's five, you failed. Yeah. And then, and then at some point I was like, I'm actually going to go and become a horse expert. And so I like reworked my entire YouTube algorithm to just serve me dressage content and understand all these different horse breeds. And it's something where it's just like, and that's probably manifested in like the horse behind us.

1:26:29Exactly. Like the horse behind us. And so it's just like all these little things that are not, it's not just like, Oh, we need a statue of the horse. It's like, there's this like lineage in the brand. There's also, there's also, yeah, so there's two, two more things that I pull on. One, we're in an era where you have less control over your brand than ever because your brand is created by, in our case, like we have a bunch of people here in the studio. Like when Tyler posts, that is part of our brand. When Ben posts, that's part of our brand. When Brandon posts, that's part of our brand. When your fans post about you, it's a little bit part of your brand.

1:27:01Yeah, that was even with the merch. Part of, we didn't sell merch originally because we wanted to effectively control who was wearing our logo. And over time, you can't keep total. But I remember one day I texted John. Somebody had a TBPN hat, and I was like, how did this person get it? because this person is not somebody that I want to align with. Just off-brand. Yeah. And so, yeah, one, you have more control over your brand than ever because you can constantly adapt and you can change. It's not like we have packaging that's like, oh, if we want to change the logo, it's like six months. We have to do a new run.

1:27:43It's like, no, we could change anything at any time. But you have less control because your team is constantly creating it. And this is the same for every company. Yeah. Oh, one more thing. I forgot because I said there was a second part to that. Something that we did early on, and I think every company should do this, is we made a sheet of these are our friends. These are our enemies. This is what we... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like HVAC roll-ups. These are our adversaries. Yeah, yeah. It was like the CCP. Yeah, yeah. It was silly stuff, right? It's not like we're sitting... This is not a spite show.

1:28:21But silly stuff. and we kept it on the table. But also memes and sections and phrases. All this, again, to the world, but the world of the brand language as well and who were people that we were going to go back to, ideas, themes that we were going to go back to. All of that was super, super helpful. Yeah, and so we constantly update that and that is part of how you do the world building. You don't want to leave it a chance of like, hey, this thing was super funny on episode six. We want to bring that back. right? And so there's people in our audience, if we're talking about a car, they'll be like, ah, like it looks cool, but it's not as nice as like a Nissan cross Cabriolet, like 2012 or whatever.

1:29:03And it's like, that's just like a riff that we've had of like, it might be the perfect car. It's like a, it's a two door convertible SUV. What more do you need? There's not a lot of options. If you want a two door convertible SUV, it's kind of the best. Yeah. There's something to come back to, too, that makes, that's a payoff for the person who's been with you. exactly yeah also a super steep learning curve with the show like we don't tell you you know part like we're making a decision to not say what aws is we don't we don't traditional television will be like aws is the cloud computing division goes back to everything we were talking about and it's like part of that steep learning curve is very powerful because people ramp up and then they're like okay i'm i'm really and it feels like you're actually talking to me i mean you can see it in the new york times like sports center for the linkedin crowd like more like more people would be like, clips for teapot.

1:29:52That would be another way to frame the show. But they needed to put it in these universal terms. And when we do a little bit of that, but not a lot here. Because we're focused on that niche audience. I love that. Maybe the Bible will be exposed. The brand Bible will be exposed someday. Yeah, we talked about it a little earlier. You have this amazing pace. And I think you guys are both very pro-experimentation. On the other hand, you've talked a lot about the Senra or Munger-ish idea of doing one thing and being really focused. You had a bunch of interns here. You have a few less now. But I wonder what goes in, maybe just for the two of you or broadly the thing you're building, what goes into fostering a culture that is super pro-experimentation on one hand and then also knows what to hold on to and not change and what to say no to?

1:30:42Yeah. We don't have a hard and fast rule. There is like an algorithm for this, the explorer versus exploit. I think it's mostly just everyone knows what they have to do. They're all chopping wood. They're all knowing what works and getting that done every day. And then we're constantly lobbying new ideas and tests faster than people can go and like actually run the tests and implement them. So they have kind of a backlog of new ideas. But then people also experiment within whatever they're doing. I think, yeah, part of, and this is specific to content businesses where content is ultimately the product.

1:31:22You have to figure out what is evergreen and what you just need to make slightly better every day. And then you need to figure out stuff that like works momentarily but is not durable. And there's a lot of that on the internet where if you can create something novel, like a cinematic video, that worked really well earlier this year. and by summer it stopped working well. We couldn't do a vibreel every month. It's just not possible. Physically, we have the talent. We were doing them in a day.

1:31:55But it was novel. It was not durable, something that people want to consume on a regular basis. What do you think would have been most surprising to you either six or 12 months ago about this? probably the meta connect moment like like the second interview is us talk or the second video that we've filmed the one that i mentioned earlier is us talking about the meta ray bands alone in this room and then what 10 months later we're interviewing mark zuckerberg about that exactly by the way also jim cameron which was like this is crazy yeah i would say though i would say just because like my initial idea for the format was like no guests ever no traveling ever just two people like i was like that's the secret sauce we'll keep it that way forever how great is it to have a podcast and you don't have to worry about guests you don't have to book guests and you have to travel like this is the secret to success this is amazing let's just do this forever but at the same time i think that while we are open to experimenting in real time we're hyper calculated yeah and i would say when we were early on talking with ramp at the end of last year they had seen like about like six weeks of the show and they were like okay this is cool but pretty much everything about this year has been premeditated like we knew we were going to go live we knew we were going to add guests we knew we were going to we knew we were going to do an extraordinarily high volume of guests and yeah we only did after like a couple weeks like the first yeah when we when we sat down to like the first episode we were like no guests and then like three episodes in we were like but what if so yeah yeah so i'll give you an example though so uh we love the name technology brothers and we've told the story before but unfortunately it would get abbreviated so people would call us the tech bros which made our skin crawl basically and as soon as literally the thing you were yeah we were trying to avoid right um and so and and we had realized that we wanted to do this for decades and so we wanted to adapt and so the name tbpn was chosen one because it was a we could get a four letter dot com which is insane which isn't which is a beast at this stuff not only all the handles are available too so we're like at well they weren't available but we've pretty much they weren't actively used there's no trademarks and stuff so it was like it was gettable across everything which is awesome but the reason that that made sense it didn't make sense because we weren't building a network but it made sense because we were like we want this to be a place that the mag 7 comes on regularly yep and they are much more likely their pr departments are much more likely to be like sure i i i reviewed tbpn it looks cool you should go on tbpn then you should go on technology going with the tech bros Yeah, as opposed to like Theo Vaughn can be a comic, but then he can just be like the name Theo Vaughn and the name can evolve to mean anything.

1:34:53And now it means a more serious thing. I seem to remember at some point we did pick TBPN because of the initialism Technology Brothers TB. But then we were like, we shouldn't keep the TB around. we should change it. Well, no, it was like I was looking for short domains that featured TB. But from the beginning, it was Technology Business Programming Network inspired by ESPN. You've referenced, I think it was you, referenced the MKBHD idea where basically if you don't love the content, you're not going to be able to do it forever. You guys are currently doing three hours of live broadcasting thing every single day that's a lot of endurance for a year let alone five or if you really want to go crazy like charlie rose and johnny carson did this for 30 years i don't know what jim kramer just did 30 he just celebrated 30 how do you you how do you set yourself up for that kind of endurance even just there's never there's never like the news has been something i've loved my entire life like since i could read i would read the newspaper every morning it would be on that my dad would get up before me and be on the coffee table.

1:36:09He would have looked through it already. I would pick it up. I would read through it. My interest in terms of the content, you know, evolved. You know, I used to be probably more into geopolitics than I am now. And just like political content in general was probably like more appealing when I was younger and just trying to understand the world. But even as soon as I was like in middle school and high school, it was like I would be, I would get home from school and I would refresh TechCrunch. And I'd be like, What happened today in tech? And so there's never, and then even continuing into my adult life, no matter what I was working on, I was still interested in what was happening broadly.

1:36:49and so I think that the confidence that we have around being able to do this for decades is that I cannot imagine a world in the future where I wake up and I'm not right interested in understanding and talking about what's going on in the world it would be impossible to do the exact same show every day right like if if it was a play with a script and we had to tell the same story the story of Apple and it's like the story of Apple every single day for three hours and then the story of the next day. That would be a waking nightmare. But the fact that the news cycle changes and you can go wherever you want within this particular niche of technology.

1:37:27I mean, I saw this on my YouTube video, my YouTube channel. I would talk about AI and then defense tech got big. I talked about defense tech. I did some videos on the metaverse and VR and crypto and you can move around within the, and you're not, you don't need to be that niche. If you were to try to speculate on what will be different in five years about the format. Is there anything, or maybe even aspirational, is there anything you would hope that will change? I think the chat experience will change a little bit. Most linear, I think all TV actually doesn't have a chat. It would be funny if Bloomberg read the Bloomberg chat.

1:38:10I was thinking about that the other day. but I believe Pat McAfee does read from the chat but only at a certain interval. The chat's going crazy all the time because there's so many people chatting all the time but then they will take questions at a certain moment and I think that right now we kind of go to the chat if they have a zinger or go to the chat if they have a key question. Today we were live and the chat was saying, guys, you're on TV in France. Yeah, so we kind of had to react to that but I think that I think that as a streamer, one thing I heard from a very popular streamer was he was saying that he sees reading chat as a skill.

1:38:49Have you ever watched Speed? Yes. That is Twitch 15 years ago. Incredible. Incredible, right? The Truman Show plus. It's very clearly its own skill. And we have the skill to keep a conversation going. and if I notice, you know, Jordy has to, you know, talk to a guest on a text message, I can just go to the camera and say, okay, let me read from this Wall Street Journal article. Yeah, the only thing that's so cool about... Like, we can pass the ball back and forth very easily, but integrating chat, chat will change a lot. But the chat is part of the show, too, because we'll be talking about something.

1:39:23I remember last week we were talking about model adoption on Open Router, and we missed a key thing, which was, like, two out of the three top models were free and the others were paid and like very very obvious but in the moment we didn't we didn't put that together somebody in the chat is like yeah this is important and so not only did that make the analysis better it was like community sourced if you're listening to the recording which a large amount of our the majority of our audience is not watching live today you now get that extra context that if john and i were just recording by ourselves we never what it made it in and so uh that feedback loop is super and that's a very very important network effect and something that's very very durable over time maybe because it actually makes the show better and it feeds back into itself in a way that is is it's important in a very different way than just like you got a lot of listeners yes yes and and when you get to a certain scale too and you have enough affordances with the chat they're going to learn that they this is what the the crazy high and high and speed do kai or excuse me speed will literally be like i have created a choose your own adventure i'm going to do one of two things chat which should i do exactly which is which is cool to yeah to see um one thing that a few people asked me to ask you on twitter that i like is uh i'd love to hear what just like a day looks like from end to end for both of you it's fun?

1:40:44Same day, every day. Gym, 6.30 to 8. Breakfast, 8 to 9. Studio here at 9. Again, John quickly goes into writing the newsletter. I typically will have some amount of Zoom meetings during that time that are more just focused on the business. And then, yeah, we have 9 to 11 to prep the show. We usually, if we're running ahead of schedule, we're actually dressed before like - A lot of mentions of getting dressed. A lot of times if you see the timer, five minutes, four minutes, three minutes, we're getting dressed. And so there's, yeah, there's really, there's no time to be creative in that window.

1:41:30What I love about it is that your mood doesn't matter. How you feel doesn't matter, right? We have an obligation. to go live every day. There's a countdown. And so in building companies previously, it's like if you wake up and you're feeling under the weather, you're like, oh, maybe I'm not going to add that sales call to my calendar. I'll add it to tomorrow. And so you're constantly kind of like negotiating with yourself. And we don't have the luxury of negotiating because we've made a promise that we go live every week. Taking one day off? Yeah. Yeah. We also took a July 4th off. And then what about post-show?

1:42:05Well, so there's also I would view the daily routine as like a narrowing of the aperture. So when we meet at the gym, we're often talking about stuff that might may or may not make it on the show. Oh, you know, watch this movie or, you know, what was going on just broadly in like group chats and online, like different news stories that are kicking around. And then by the time we're at breakfast, we're kind of honing in on like what the key topics are. And then once we get to the studio, we're actually like taking screenshots that you will see on the show of individual posts or Wall Street Journal articles.

1:42:38And then we're discussing during that 9 to 11. I'm writing the newsletter, but I'm also piecing together the order and I'm bouncing ideas off Jordy. Like, hey, there's this Wall Street Journal article. There's these posts. Like, what do you want to kick off with? Yeah, so 24-7 we're sourcing content for the show. Getting closer, you're kind of compressing. Exactly. Yeah, so and then the show ends. Usually we're pretty much caught up on the news. Like we try to make sure we're ending the show, covering what's been happening during the show effectively. Sometimes it's live. Other times we're kind of catching up.

1:43:15And then immediately there's new content being created, right, that is going into tomorrow's show. And so after the show we'll eat lunch. We're usually talking about what worked well, what didn't, what we should change will oftentimes like change the show for the following days be like okay that was too many guests we didn't get enough like the main thing we're trying to protect is like 90 minutes a day that we can just hang out right because like when you think about it one of the challenges of uh of of doing guest segments on any type of media is that they're wildly unreliable right like at times it will be it will be you know uh interviewing uh andrew sorkin today was like super energizing.

1:43:58It made the show better. Super interesting. We would have been happy to like keep doing that for much longer. And the whole chat was like, this is an amazing interview. Great interview. I love this. Yeah, they're just really excited to hear from him, right? And it's helpful that he is a professional TV host, right? It's not his first rodeo. And so the variability in the guests is a huge challenge because if somebody is coming on for 15 minutes and they come on, it's like we know to show up with high energy and we're here to uh we're here to put on a show but they might come in with like very low energy and it's a big part of the reason for the gong and yeah it can completely gone really hard it's like if you're a founder and you raise 10 million dollars even if you're building like some sort of boring sass thing and you're not the most high energy person like at least we're resetting the the energy level up here and you can laugh and you can kind of be like okay well yeah like but yeah we we would see it we see it in the we see Like guests have a much lower retention than the two of us.

1:44:58And so it's about protecting that time that we can just hang out. That's the most fun and energizing time for me. But if you think about it, it's like two out of 10 guests make the show better. There's like a power law there. So maybe one is like, this is amazing. Like, I wish that we had 90 minutes with this person. And then if eight out of 10 are actually making the show slightly worse, it's like, well, that's like, That's not a great hit rate. We still want to talk to those people because they help inform the content, and they allow us to build relationships with people and understand. There's always some insight and some learning and some takeaway.

1:45:34Some people are good on a random Tuesday. Other people are amazing at a certain moment, like a VR founder who's building something completely independently and can talk trash about whatever the big company has just launched. Like they're great on that launch day, right? But then on an average day, you're just kind of like, oh, yeah, like you don't even have a product to launch right now. Like what are we talking about here? Yeah, the other thing is the live nature means that we have to adapt to what's happening. Like there's been times where we have four guests slated and then some big story breaks.

1:46:09And suddenly we have to say, hey. We actually killed this product entirely. We early, one of the big viral days was crypto day. And we had the most insane lineup. Chris Dixon, Bala G, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase. We had so many killers came on. It was awesome. Sort of like the meta thing. Yeah, it was very cool. But then what we realized was we tried to do it again with like an AI day. We had a whole bunch of AI researchers. But then that was the day that Trump and Elon broke up. And so all the chat was just like, we didn't have these screens reading the chat. And so Jordy just was reading the chat on his computer and was like, John, we got to talk about this.

1:46:47We got to pivot. And so we canceled a bunch of people, brought them on later. And we kind of realized, wait, you can't actually have a conference about a specific topic if there's something else crazy that happens. It's very risky. Yeah, going in another story. So we were at the New York Stock Exchange for the Klarna IPO. And about two hours in. Figma was flawless. Figma was the biggest story of the day. It was the current thing on tech Twitter. And we knocked it out of the park. It's hard to displace an IPO in terms of like mindshare, especially a company like Figma, which is like universally used and loved.

1:47:21But at the Klarna IPO, I got a text from the team. John didn't have his laptop pulled up and they were like, Charlie Kirk just got shot. Like open your computer. And I opened the computer and, you know, see immediately the video. And so that dynamic is. How do you talk about buy now, pay later? Yeah, and you go from the euphoria of we're here to celebrate this team's 15-year journey, getting to this point. And then suddenly you have this absolutely horrific, tragic event. And we do have to adjust to it. Yeah, it's a unique thing about news. Whereas a podcast, there could be something amazing or tragic that happens during the show.

1:48:05And when people listen to this, they're not thinking. you need to respond to this and we haven't seen my phone I have no idea what's happening in that type of work yeah that was actually a point where I thought it was really good to look to how legacy TV deals with that and so on CNBC they do a breaking news alert they cut away from the business content and they say we have some breaking news tragedy has occurred here are the facts and then they go back to it but they're basically just kicking you over to NBC if you want to follow the full story because that's where the breaking news will live And I remember early, we were in the gym at our first studio, and the Blue Origin launch just happened with Katy Perry.

1:48:50And Jeff Bezos is there looking absolutely shredded. And it was very funny to see because there were six TVs up on the wall, all to different channels. And you could see how each of them covered it differently. And so CBS, I believe, has Gayle King, who went to space. And so for her, it was like for the entire channel. I mean, imagine if one of your coworkers just went to space. You're going to be like, it's wall-to-wall coverage all day. It's the Super Bowl for us. The person that you as a fan of this channel know is in space. We've got to cover this all day long. Then on ABC, they didn't have one of their anchors go, but it was still like a great story.

1:49:29So they had some real cameras there. They probably spent like half an hour on it. On CNN, they did like 10 minutes. And then on CNBC, they just put it picture in picture. The rocket came back. it's landed. Now let's go back to the stock market. And so just sizing stories for your audience is really, really key. And knowing, okay, this one is a breaking news one-liner. This is five minutes. This is a full hour. This is - This goes back to not trying to be everything for everyone as well. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I have a few questions about you guys. Please. First and foremost, we talked about it a bit, but what makes this partnership special?

1:50:05And maybe when did you know that there was something here? I mean, the early thing was definitely just the fact that we both had years and years of experience in the things that were important, which was YouTube, but on different sides. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The actual content creation, you on the ad sales side. And so there was just a lot there. but then uh john john's like one of the yeah john john's one of the few people and certainly like at the top of the list of people where when i talk about the things that i'm good at like he's consistently bringing ideas that are better than my own and so that dynamic is uh super powerful and and uh to be like you know entirely fixated on this and and i think we have like distinct skill sets and distinct kind of focus areas in the business that made it powerful but uh to consistently come to john with an idea uh and and it's something you know an idea in a in a space that i'm good at generating ideas in like let's say it's a it's an advertiser that we're working for and i'm like hey i want to uh i want to pitch them on this concept it's not related to tbp and it's a campaign for their next product launch and john will and i come with an idea and he's like okay what if you did it this way and typically when i pitch those ideas to people they're just like that sounds great you're not right and i'm not i'm not getting like i'm not getting one up and so when you have a partnership it's like you want to be getting one up like all the time that's like what makes a partnership great is that is that two people combining or creating something better than um than than any one of them would do individually the other thing that's real is like we never run out of things to talk about so like if we're uh if it's like a friday and and john uh is like driving to santa barbara uh and and like i'm going to malibu and like instead of taking my i uh have a driver because it's like an hour both ways every day it's a lot and i'll just be like the drive i'll just send the driver home like separately and i'll be like i'm riding with john like john yeah we gotta hang out more john goes out of the way because we're like, ah, I didn't get quite enough time.

1:52:19There's a line in the New York Times profile, the show doesn't look very different from when we're hanging out offline. I think that's very clear. Yeah, every single day there's moments off air that I wish were on air because it's pretty impossible to recreate that, how we got to a conclusion or a specific bit, a line that you can't really recreate. Yeah, also it's like if we had a line that we were dying laughing at in the gym and you deliver it on the show again, It's hard to fake my reaction the first time. I've had to do this a couple times where I had an interview where we lost an hour and we redid it.

1:52:53And it's a different thing. It just doesn't quite work.

1:53:00Maybe the dumbest way to ask this question is how important was Will Manitis? Was he as important as he claims to the formation of this partnership? He introduced us. He introduced us. And he's made a number of truly incredible introductions to people that we never would have reached. I think also just Will has a particular way in expressing his belief and just positivity and cheering for you in a very quantitative, hyperbolic way. And so probably for the first like six months, every time we would text with him just about like some mundane decision we were making, he was like, yeah, that's great.

1:53:47I just told – and he would drop the name of some tier one fund. He's just like, I just told them that we're oversubscribed at 400 post. And it's like we weren't fundraising. We weren't doing anything like that. But he's like, oh, yeah, and like so-and-so bought it hook, line, and sinker. No, he would say we would just like we have a group chat with a few other buddies and we'd say something or something would happen. Like he would just post one of our own like assets in the chat and he'd be like, I'm updating our like 2026 guide. The guide. Yeah, he would refer to the guide. We were a public company.

1:54:20Yeah, he would also do these funny things just being like, yes, I've updated my thinking. he would use the language of like a philosophical venture capitalist. Yes, I've updated my thinking on TBPN, and I no longer think it will merely destroy all podcasts, but I think it will actually destroy all of media. We're like, what are you talking about? I think there's also, we have a beautiful relationship with posters, obviously. And so if you look back at all the shows, it's probably like 80 % of shows have featured one of Will's posts, right? because he's very good about kind of putting his own spin on what's happening in the world.

1:54:58And there's a number of people like that that I can think of, the runes of the world, the Buko capital. And so we've curated all these amazing thinkers that are constantly putting information and takes out into the world, and we're curating those, and they are fundamentally a key part of the show. And interestingly, the sports world has done a great job of embracing posters. Like Stephen Smith reacts to random people with hot takes about basketball or sports. And Pat McAfee will elevate a post about something. But for some reason, maybe it's just the private markets thing, but like business television has not.

1:55:37I don't. I feel like I would have seen if Rune had ever been on Bloomberg, for example. Yes. That would be an amazing moment. And from my perspective, I look at a lot of our guests. I don't want to call them out too much because maybe they'll start getting calls. But a lot of our guests, I'm like, how are they not getting called every single day? It's like their influence outpunches their credibility. Yeah. And it's also just like it's so many extra steps to introduce someone like Arun to a Bloomberg audience on TV. Right. Whereas us, it's like it's supernatural. So, yeah, because we've told the story so many times and the show's ex-native, as you mentioned.

1:56:12And so it's a little bit it's a little bit easier. But was there any other ideas you guys considered doing together? podcast or media wise or otherwise the first thing we worked on was uh kind of a drop activation for lucy oh right the excel thing yeah the the idea was the original idea and i made this whole deck on it and i sent to john was an energy drink for like white collar workers sort of like displacing diet coke or yeah or red bull or yeah celsius because all of those because different because Because those products are loved by the laptop class, but obviously Celsius is not leaning into Wall Street, right?

1:56:57It's sort of like a happy accident that Wall Street has said, yeah, they've made Celsius their own. And so we kicked around the idea for a beverage company. I thought you could do a lot of this style of marketing and media that we do to support a new energy drink. We were just, I think, both fascinated with that category. At the same time, neither of us had any interest in creating a consumer packaged goods business. It's such a grind once you break through a zero to one. It's such a grind. You're just at a trade show 20 minutes from O 'Hare in Chicago every week forever, talking to some local chain distributor.

1:57:41I got this and there's 25 other people with the exact same label claim and they don't know you and you got to be a killer operator. And I think both of us recognized that neither of us wanted to be a CPG operator. Right, right, right. Because we both kind of – I'd been in that space and both tasted it and been around it. Yeah, we put out like an entire campaign around it and we put out like at least a five-minute video of us riffing basically in the characters that became the original Technology Brothers show. So we filmed a full hour. we sat down and ben was filming it over there yeah ben was like did you guys script that he was like what was that and we were just playing this hilarious character we just kind of completely melted into it and we were like this is great and and then we also did an overlay and we made it retro and we had a lot of like graphics and just like funny things and we even worked with day job on the packaging and the uh there was like a pr box that we sent out to people that had this like comically large tin of Lucy's.

1:58:39It was like this big. It was massive. This huge, massive puck. With a fake Rolex inside. And a Rolex that like had the branding on it. It was just like, I think we executed on it really well, sent it to a bunch of people. But that was the first time we actually made content together. And we kind of realized. And then we did two, I believe we did two test episodes on Riverside recorded. And then we started recording in person and we shipped the first episode that we recorded. But in terms of formats, I was pretty convicted on the two-person, in-person, like, you know, reaction show as a seed. I'd seen it in other categories, and it seemed like it just seemed like a very clear white space.

1:59:26And so I'd actually done some similar experiments. I did two test episodes with Lulu Miservi, and we kind of clipped that up. And I saw that that was kind of interesting, but she was very focused on comms, and we weren't able to go all over the place. So if there wasn't a comms story that week, we were just like, what will we talk about? And then I did a test video with Jason Carman that was highly cinematic. We were on the phone talking to each other. It had this weird vibe. And that was cool, but he was just very clearly making documentaries and didn't want to become a hot takes newsman. Newsmaxer.

2:00:03Yeah, and so me and Jordy were just like, oh, when we put together the first test episode on Riverside, it was just super easy to talk about everything because we were just super comfortable. Yeah, the thing that ended up realizing, in hindsight, we both wanted to continue to be a part of... the private market ecosystem, venture, startups, et cetera. Like this is where we've spent our entire adult lives. This is like the thing that we spend the most amount of mental energy thinking about. But we didn't want to go and do a traditional, you know, venture backed business. We didn't want to become a venture capitalist.

2:00:49Not because like we just didn't feel like called to do those things again in that moment. And so there's not a lot of options outside of media to actually stay like heavily involved without doing those two paths. Right. And so and being in L.A. too, it's not a tech hub. Right. Where L.A. Tech Week is this week. I haven't seen any technology. out there. I didn't even know. It's like a terrible tech hub, right? Because it's like basically a string of neighborhoods that are like loosely connected by freeways. And there's a couple companies that are somewhat important, but it's certainly not a, you know, and we have El Segundo now, which is its own amazing thing.

2:01:33But the idea of like building a tech company in LA is like a joke to me. Like, it's just not something that you really, I'm sure you can do it. But, you know, again, ignoring El Segundo, because that's its own thing. And so we were in a position where like, we both have, we both have kids, we have, John has three, I have two, all under five, like they're set up in their communities, like we had no desire to, I really felt like if I wanted to build another company, I had to move to San Francisco or New York. And I didn't necessarily want to do that. I like LA County, right? I love where I live.

2:02:17And so media was the perfect business to start and stay involved with the world that we love and get to talk all day long with our friends like you that are in and around the industry while building a business that is extremely well-suited to build in Hollywood and build in LA. And to you guys. Because we're not looking to hire 50 engineers in the next two years. We're looking to hire, and we're actually not even really, we're hiring for a couple roles now, but it's like, where can you build, where's the best place in the world to build a media and entertainment company? It's like LA, right? I mentioned before I interviewed Gabe Whaley for Mischief recently.

2:03:01and he brought up Soylent. There's an excerpt in the Mischief employee guideline handbook where it says Soylent could have been a speculative artwork. Instead, it's real. And then Gabe went on to say, you could have done it as a small batch or an artist could have lived off it as a performance for 20 years, documented everything, had a video, and then done a gallery show about it, living off the powder. Instead, it was a business. It was a company. They put it out into the real world and that's rad. That's cool. Obviously, that partially applies to you, but I think it's sort of like it captures this like earnest just try stuff i mean even even what you were describing of of getting this and like a whole lot of iteration cycles that people didn't see that were real thing like i'm curious what goes into your guys's inclinations to just like oh that's an interesting idea let's let's see if it let's put into reality and see if it works i think there's seeds in humor like things that because humor gives you the gives you the permission to uh do something low status or do I mean, even the Soylent thing, it was definitely like a social experiment.

2:04:02We didn't even know if it was just a complete joke the whole time. But then it went viral and people wanted to buy it. But, like, as a YC company, starting, like, a consumer packaged goods company was extremely low status. Also, the literal name. Yeah, crazy, right? So everything was, like, trollish, insane. And so there were a variety of just when you start with the lens of humor or performance art, it gives you the ability to broaden the aperture to get really weird. And then this started as something really weird, like just two guys reading the newspaper, which isn't really a thing, and that's not really a show.

2:04:42And now we've kind of shaped it into something that does look like a real news product and a real media product. but it allows you to kind of start from scratch a really blank canvas as opposed to being like this is what a podcast is or this is what a show is and then I have to like I have to take what is already a thing and then like try and find a little bit of differentiation instead you just start from like The other thing that is very real is I think we both like creating things, right? John created Zoiland and then Lucy I, going back to like my very first company I created a skateboard company when I was 12.

2:05:18And that was like realizing that there were people out there that would manufacture skateboards. And if I created a logo and gave them that logo and I gave them the artwork that I could, as a 12-year-old, I like called up my aunt. I was like, I need$500. That's like the boards were like$17.50 to make. And I was like, I'm going to buy these and I'm going to sell them locally in stores and at the skate park and to my friend's parents who would then gift them to their kids for birthdays. Right. It was just that realization that you could make things that happened at a young age. The thing about making things like in the physical world and even software and companies is like the feedback loop is just so it takes so much time.

2:06:00Right. So like an example, I started a company with my partners, Brian and Charlie, years ago at this point, which was a consumer water filter business. And like from the time that we were like, hey, let's do this. And like from the seed of the idea to actually like forming the company, to raising money, to developing the product, to developing the brand, to now fast forward to today where we launched a partnership with Andrew Huberman. And like, that was years in the making, right? And so if you enjoy making things, there's nothing better than content to me because like we can have an idea at breakfast and ship it like two hours later.

2:06:40So that iteration is just like super addictive where if you like generating ideas and you think you have decent ideas and you want to see like the challenge with startups is like, I've seen this. It's like, you know, I'll meet an entrepreneur and I'm like, okay, you have a good idea. You don't know if it's actually like truly a good idea. in 12 to 18 months. Yeah, even more. Like I've had companies that I thought were literally dead because they weren't sending updates. And then they send an update and it's like, yeah, we just crossed a million dollars a month in revenue and like it's working finally.

2:07:12And so the thing that's so addictive about media is just, again, that like we love generating ideas and you can, sometimes it takes like three hours to make, sometimes it takes 20 minutes to make, et cetera. I'm laughing because you're talking about how addictive media is and i think we're on the fifth hour of podcasting we sat down i'm like are you guys sure you're ready to do this and they're like we could podcast literally we are we are almost out of time i i would love to just do a quick speed run of a few miscellaneous things if if you guys are up for it um how do you do a great 15 minute interview you gotta ring a gong a big one ideally yeah fair we don't do we don't do life stories you know this is not a place where you're going to learn everything there is to know about people.

2:07:56It takes some amount of context. Most VCs wish that every meeting that they had with entrepreneurs was 15 minutes, right? And we just have the affordance to be like, it's 15 minutes. I think it's like intro, what do you do? And then the news, you've got to be news-driven. So we ring the gong or talk about the product announcement. And then pretty quickly it's like, give us, get us just one layer deeper. Not a sound bite. I don't even think about it like that. But I think about it like take me one layer deeper in understanding your business, your market. Because if you come on and you're – we had somebody on who was building AI for ambulance chasers.

2:08:31What was that? It was personal injury attorneys. And I was like, I don't really know anything about the personal injury market. I'll just ask one question to get me like a little bit more information on how that market works. So then maybe I come out of that interview just understanding like how many personal injury attorney firms are there? What's the average size? Yeah, and I would say like the reason that if we do a 15-minute interview, the reason that it's great is probably that historically it would have been a 90-minute interview. And that was like way too much time for that person at that point in their career or that moment, right?

2:09:06And so we just recognize it's much more interesting to hear for 10 minutes from somebody like in a specific moment in time than 90 minutes. We talk to a lot of like seed series A, series B founders that are just kind of like starting their journeys. And someday they might be like an Alex Karp or a Palmer Lucky or Mark Andreessen and that they can just talk and talk and talk and talk. and it's entertaining, but they're not at that point yet. And so let's give them the format where they can come in and introduce themselves to the world and we get to hear how they're thinking in that moment. The other thing when we do at MetaConnect and at YC Demo Day, we think it's a very interesting media product to interview an entire management team in three hours because you're getting to hear how all those people are thinking, not generally, not over, like you could piece together interviews from an executive team over a quarter.

2:10:06Right. But it's not all like in that one moment where they're launching this new product or, or our demo day content with YC. It's like, you get a really good sense of the batch from listening to a bunch of three minute interviews. Right. You get a good read much more than just kind of like reading. During Gary talk for 45 minutes about all of them even. Yeah. You're getting like real. Yes. That's cool. Yeah. You're getting like a flash pulse check with a bunch of different flavors. Yep. what's the difference between what is the conscious difference between what you guys do in journalism? We don't break news.

2:10:39Yeah, we rarely break news. We're very happy for the news to break at 9 a.m. on tech, Twitter, acts like it normally does. You can talk about it. Come on and give us more context. Let's react to the reaction. How are people perceiving it? Your launch video got 10 ,000 likes, got a lot of hate. Let's talk about why. We could break news, but it puts us in a very adversarial position because we like that in general. We think it's good and healthy that founders are generally able to control their own narratives and decide when news should break. We've both been in positions where a journalist is breaking a story or telling you, this news is going out in an hour.

2:11:25Let me know if you have a comment. And I think that there's a lot of value to fact-finding and original reporting, and there's stories that do need to be told. And there's certainly stories that don't want to be told that still need to be told. But we think that it's important for our position kind of in the ecosystem to not be – we have no interest in scooping. I have no interest in telling a story and being the one to deliver a story that doesn't want to be delivered. There's commentary. There's Shams and there's Steven. Exactly. And then there's also the newswire for the sports scores, which used to be printed, and now it's digital.

2:12:03And so all these different pieces have moved around to different sections of the ecosystem, but you just got to know your lane and thrive in it. Yeah, and an example being CNBC is not in the scoop business, right? They're not trying to break. Wall Street Journal is. Yeah, you teach your audience, by the way, what to expect from you. Exactly. um what you you had a bunch of interns here um i'll pick on tyler as a general example but maybe him specifically someone who's tyler's also the the only intern only remaining and he's not really an intern right so somebody like that who is generally smart and capable and could probably do a lot of things in tech that are not media um how why does someone like that stick around here for another year or five?

2:12:54I was going to ask him. Bring him over. Tyler will have, I can imagine, a bunch of different paths for Tyler post-DBPN. I can imagine a world where he stays with us for 30 years and is just a personality on the show. It's an incredible personality to bring to the show because he has more time than we do. He can go out and nerd out about something, come back. Different set of interests. Yeah, different set of interests. He's bringing something novel to the show. but yeah I mean Tyler is unique in that he's the you know reoccurring like personality on the show but if you think about what his optionality will be after you know if he decides at some point in the future one he's still in college hasn't officially dropped out he's on a gap semester but if he decides to go back to school and still be a part of what we're doing or just like go back to school and just be a student or stay with us and then a year from now you know decide I want to start a company.

2:13:48I want to start, you know, I want to go work at a venture firm, right? Like he's going to have like truly infinite optionality. One of the thousand companies we interviewed this year that we can easily make an intro to. Yeah. One more thing that I would add, like retention, like talent retention to put it in like corporate speak. Yeah. Like we want, we want to create an environment where uh the people that are at the company today are riding with us like across like decades and certainly people will go off and do other things but um you know to date we haven't had somebody like like decide to leave themselves and uh and part we're like hyper conscious of like creating ways so that people can grow in the industry because there's not like if you if you're if you're deciding to work in tech media like i don't know that many other places that you can go that are going to be fulfilling after you work in like this type of environment right you might decide i see it much more like a like a like a law firm's partnership than a c-corp that is growing and changing and cycling people through it's like the people who get in develop a unique set of skills that work very tightly together it's a small group for a very long time and everyone participates in the upside for a long time that's yeah definitely rare in media yeah as opposed to like you know the hey we're all gonna be on a four-year vest and then we're gonna get out and sell this thing and then but also like content creators like people don't it's pretty rare for like there to be real durability around yeah i i think it's that we have like a pretty clear vision into what like the show looks like in 30 years.

2:15:36And it's not Vice News where you have a bunch of other people doing other shows. We're not building a media company, a platform with a bunch of other things where it's like, oh yeah, thank goodness. We don't have to podcast today because we hired hosts. It's like, no, we're building a show. And so you can look at what Rogan's organization looks like and Huberman's organization looks like. And you can see that you can be doing a hundred million dollars a year top line with a team of 10. So why not just do that? I think you guys have talked about the sort of like maybe it was you, John, like the, the sort of speculation culture, the feeling that it's stupid to not use leverage.

2:16:10You have to, you have two years to escape the permanent underclass. Yeah. What, what would, what would you say to young people who are feeling that? I think it's a very toxic mindset. Or if you guys were 21 and you were trying to give you. Just game theoretically, it's clearly there's immense alpha in not participating in that culture. Right. Because if, if, if everyone else in your college classes is participating, get your bag culture, get-rich-quick schemes and they're hustling and they're flexing and you're just compounding, you're going to win and it's going to be even less competitive because you're actually going to - It's also like the advice that we give, the financial advice that we give to the team, and I'm saying that in sort of a joking way, but it is financial advice.

2:16:54If you were in your 20s trying and you have like relatively modest cash flow trying to yolo into investments in order to escape the permanent underclass is like such a ridiculous concept because one you're not deploying size like two is going to distract you from the main thing that's important which is what else could the main like are there even any main things left there's tons of main things left obviously like the power laws get steeper all over the place just be at the top end of the power law and maybe to go back to what we were talking about earlier look at a more diverse set of inputs of like what creativity is going to come from don't fall into the status traps because I guarantee you that like the best pottery maker in the world is going to be pulling seven figures if they're the best ceramicist they'll be in high demand I think about this so much because when I was in college, I was obsessed with startups.

2:17:55I would be refreshing TechCrunch. I'd be on TechTwitter at the time. I was so obsessed with venture capital. And yet my first real business was a company that didn't raise money, that just grew profitably and has continued to grow profitably for my entire adult life. And that is the entire reason that I was able to just decide. we were able to be like, okay, we can just, John was an EIR at Founders Fund. I didn't have anything else that I needed to do with my time. I had, and so it's like, you want to not like, and it was being really into startups and having a lifestyle business. It was at times like kind of miserable because I'd be sitting there being like, like I'm making like real cashflow here and nobody like is going to look at my LinkedIn and like offer me.

2:18:46It doesn't feel like I'm in the big leagues. Yeah, you didn't feel like I was in the league at all, right? If you have a lifestyle business, get ready to make a lot of money, but no one is going to care about you at all, right? Because you're not providing a way for other people to... You might be providing value to a set of customers, but you're not giving people an opportunity to make money if you're raising venture capital. And so I think that's somewhat of a... That's a great point. Yeah, it's really sad, right? Like if you're just chugging away at building a business, like no one cares. Like David Center will care in 50 years if you build a lifestyle.

2:19:23But by the way, also those things, yeah, it takes a long time. It takes a long time for you to get recognition. How have the wives of TBPN influenced or made this thing better? Honestly, focus on like building something like in person was like a no brainer for sure. We want to be home with the families and whatnot. And so this idea of like, oh, we're on the road all the time, it just raises the quality bar for like, yeah, we'll travel for Mark Zuckerberg. But are we going to travel for some random thing just because it's like fun or trendy or like there's a 1 % chance that it's good? It's like really, really focused and just continue to raise the bar.

2:20:00I think they're both incredible mothers, which means that we get to spend, you know, we both wake up before the kids. were at the office before the kids, or were, like, meeting up, like, starting the workday before the kids are even up. And then they are, like, such incredible moms that, like, we get to go home after the show, and, like, the kids are happy. They're thriving. We just get to hang out. And they're carrying the burden of, like, the household and, like, running that and having the ability to be, like, live on the air for three hours and not be thinking, like, are the kids like eating lunch or like is, you know, that we're not thinking about.

2:20:45We've had to like pull the stream because of family stuff was literally during the LA fires. And that was like completely reasonable to be like, get home. But other than that, I mean, yeah, it's been fantastic. My final question. I'm not sure who this quote actually should be attributed to. I think it's either you or, or, or will, but podcasting has little to do with profit. Podcasting is about domination of the spirit. where did that so so so that is a i might be senra so so so someone else said that in business okay and i think it was uh business has little to do with profit business is about domination and spirit and then we and then uh i was i think i said it at one point you just used it in a job post yeah i think i used it in a in a group chat and then will posted it publicly and replied to And then that reminded me.

2:21:37And so I posted it in the job post. But yes, I mean, one of the things was that, you know, we take podcasting really seriously. We don't see it. We don't care about the status. Maybe it's low status. Maybe it's high status. Whatever. Like, we're doing it. We're all in. We're going very hard on it. But just to take the edge off a little bit, we throw in a little bit of humor. But we do kind of feel that. Yeah. My question is going to be, how are you going to secure it? No, a better line is David Senra. we were hanging out and he goes like I wish media was a zero sum game he's like I'm mad that it's you know I'm mad that like I can win and someone else can win even though I'm so brutally competitive and he's like I wish it was more competitive I love it it's amazing gentlemen thank you very much super fun thank you