How TBPN Built the Luxury Brand of the Creator Economy

30:05John Coogan:And then we'll have like random breakout moments. Like we got this exclusive interview with this guy, Soham Parikh. Yeah, I saw that. That's your most viewed. Six different jobs in Silicon Valley all at once. At the same time. And it was like a moment on the internet. And like a lot of people were tuning in right there. I think that stream was like 100 ,000 people. It's your most viewed YouTube videos. Yeah. And so just being there for like those weird moments. And that's another benefit of being live is that live daily, like I'm sure there were a lot of other podcasts that could have said, oh, I'll do the definitive interview.

30:38John Coogan:But for someone like that, it's so news driven. He doesn't really have a three-hour story. to tell. He's still early in his career and it's sort of just this controversial moment. Being able to have a show that someone can just hop on, do that. Everyone can go hear the full story from the person right there. That's been something that we've been coming back to again and again, where there's a conversation that's happening in tech, in business. How do we extend that conversation on our show and then clip the show and distribute the show in a way that that conversation can continue in the comments of those clips quote tweets of those tweets of those yeah a big a big thing too is we we from the very beginning of the show we had this number like 200 000 like that is the core that is the audience that we're building for meaning that's like the total addressable market we have 10 million subscribers like we've pivoted something's Something's gone wrong.

31:38John Coogan:Something's gone wrong. We're not niche enough. Yeah. And so, and that's people that are building startups, businesses, working at the companies that we cover, investing in the companies we cover and being okay with a niche and not being, you know, the dopamine that comes from, you know, putting out a video that gets a bunch of views is very real, but we are not willing to let that guide the content. If we wanted to do that, we would get into politics. If we wanted to optimize for views, we'd get into sports. And I've sort of done that on my previous channel. I sort of figured out how to get a million views on a video.

32:14John Coogan:I was never perfect at it, but like I was following that optimization path. And I sort of feel like, okay, I understand that story. And it was time for a new story. And the reason that we need to do that, it's sort of an imperative, is that we hand make the show every single day. So we're not building a company. This is a show that we are the hosts of. And so imagine if we start like the things that we are obsessed with, the conversations that we have in group chats and on the weekend and all these things are the same things that we talk about on the show. And as soon as you start getting into and that's just niche content and that's OK.

32:52But as soon as you start expanding out into content that we're not already talking about, like amongst our friends, it becomes like just a job. And then and then we love what we do. So we're like, hey, if we can figure out, if we can just stay niche and do this forever, that sounds great. And it's been fun to see the different people that have picked up the show that maybe aren't a part of that 200 ,000. But again, it's like we care a lot about that person and care about continuing to deliver the content that they started watching in the first place. It also gives you... So a couple of things.

33:32The one thing we haven't talked about is how influential that$200 ,000 is. And I think that is obviously a very important note that if I'm an advertiser and I want to be one of these advertisers on the screen, on the Chiron or on the ticker, it trades at a high price because this is a very highly influential group of people. Yeah. I think one way to look at it is purchasing power. Yes. So like the average YouTube viewer, you could probably do the math and they might actually be responsible for. They might have like five thousand dollars a year of discretionary spending like they're deciding.

34:11John Coogan:So it's like a T-shirt. Yeah, I'm going to buy a T-shirt or a chocolate bar or a subscription to this app that helps me save money or something like that. Whereas our audience spends like a million dollars a year on software. Because they're business owners. Yeah, they're business owners or they're investing$100 million a year. Almost all of our sponsors are business to business companies. We have a few business consumer companies, but almost entirely business to business. And they're also essentially all like variable pricing, price elasticity. Yeah. So when somebody hears an ad and they make a decision, it could be a hundred thousand dollar a year annual contract.

34:56Or if they work with ramp who we talked about earlier, they might go on to spend tens of millions of dollars on ramp the platform, right?

35:05John Coogan:There's companies where we've like converted a big company to that software and that will be a contract that's huge and last a really long time. And so there's a big value to selling something that doesn't just have a fixed price because when a bigger client shows up, they make more money, right? And so the way this is manifested in more consumer-focused shows is through investing products or through gambling products, right? Because if you get a whale, even in a mobile game, if I'm advertising Game of War or one of those mobile games and a really wealthy person shows up, they could become a whale and they're going to generate a ton of revenue.

35:52John Coogan:The same thing exists in business-to-business software. We don't call them whales. We just call them Fortune 500 companies. We call them great companies. We call them great companies. And if they show up and they buy a particular piece of software, they're running their database on this one or their cloud on this one or using this API, then they could scale and wind up spending millions and millions of dollars. And so I capture a fraction of that value. I do think that also aiming for a small niche community is obviously that's been a thing that has happened quite a bit on the internet that internet unlocked that.

36:22But I think more and more I'm watching it and noticing that when I have such an abundance of content, like I want to go to the place where I understand the inside jokes more than ever. Right. And I think your guys show is a show where there's inside jokes. And if you get that. I had a line today that was funny. I was talking about a company that was having an insane holiday party, like Vegas style DJs, all that. The CEO was drinking on video and I was riffing on it. I was like, John, I mean, I know what they're trying to say here. This is like an if you know, you know. I mean, this means that they must be doing billions of dollars of revenue and we just don't know about it.

37:06So that was me being like -

37:08John Coogan:This is like very dry reference humor. Very dry, sarcastic. Callback to a joke we made eight months ago and someone in the chat was like, this is OG content. It was like, whoa, okay. Yeah, they're paying attention. It was great. Yeah. And one thing that we did early on is not relying on kind of like randomness to like curate inside jokes. so like we actually had a piece of paper this is funny that we'd print out and it had like every one of our inside jokes in like different quadrants and if we had a riff on the show that was fun we just write it down and uh even even like who are our allies and it was like our close friends our friends companies who are our enemies and it was like you know like Xi Jinping or someone you Or like stagnation, like the lack of technological progress.

37:58Or podcasts that don't run ads.

38:00John Coogan:Rockets that blow up, right? It's like we built this whole world of little phrases and elements that could continue to build some sort of brand in the thing. Yeah, because as you grow, you forget the inside jokes. You forget. I think a lot of this year was like remembering we got to a point where we were doing like eight guests a show because there was so much demand. And we had to remember, go back to the early days of like what made us so excited to drive to the studio when it was just talking ourselves. So we made changes. We were like, we're not going to do any guests in the first 90 minutes.

38:39Got it. That is a non-negotiable. That's what makes the show great. That's what people tune in for. That's what we have a monopoly on. Anyone else can get Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Satya Nadella on a podcast. No one else can get us on a podcast unless we decide, let's do it. Like we're doing it. And it's not like we're happy to go on other shows, but this is like the one thing that we, this is the resource. I mean, that's like a long-term strategy, right? Getting Sam Altman on can be a big hit, but it's not a daily tactic you can use to get people to tune in. It's a growth hack. So it's a long-term strategy to just put you two up there for 90 minutes in the beginning of every show and just build inside jokes that take time.

39:26Yeah. And we even see this in the viewership. Because we're live, we'll see as soon as we have guests immediately, 25 % of the audience will just be. To me, that's like, and from guys who run a guest show. Yeah. You know, because like basically over the past five years, what we've noticed and what we were chasing for a long time, what was challenging to chase was the variance of viewership and guests. And I noticed this with my own habits with like Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert or Smartless. It's like Smartless is a great example. Those three guys are very funny. I would just listen to them three talk about what's going on in the world.

40:04But if I don't care about the guest, then I'm not listening. And I didn't put those pieces together as a creator of a podcast as quickly as you would imagine. But I also want to take a step back to something you said, Jordi, and have you explain the distinction because I think it's really important. You said we're not building a company, we're building a show. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between a media company and a show? because I think those two things came together with the rise of the creator economy where the assumption was creators need to build scalable things. Yeah.

40:37Right. And I actually, like, I think a lot of the, even the energy towards advertising, it's like, oh, advertise is not a scalable product for you. Like you got to build your own thing. And why are you doing ads for someone else when you can be doing ads for your own thing? This is like the advice that was given to creators over the past five years has been, you know, okay, you got a hot thing. Great. Can you build the next talent under you. Yeah. Right. So just make the distinction between a company and a show and why you have conviction in building a show, not a company. Yeah. So I would say as the creator economy has exploded, you've seen all these incredible personalities emerge that have gone on to become like many empires in themselves.

41:18Mr. Beast, Joe Rogan, things like that. Alex Cooper. Dave Portnoy, Alex Cooper, right? And the things that have actually been durable out of that are the personality themselves. So a lot of, we started this business having started venture-backed companies in the past. We made the decision we didn't want to start a venture-backed startup. We didn't want to start a venture fund. And part of that is because we're in LA and we have young families. And we were just like, we want a business that's aligned to our life and aligned to LA. And these are, this is not the place to really, I would argue to build either a venture backed startup or a venture fund just because the tech industry is really not here.

41:58Right. And so, um, we came into this, uh, uh, being, being comfortable with there being a relative like ceiling on the business, which is very counter to like the whole Silicon Valley philosophy everything in silicon valley is about scale and getting to a hundred million dollar run rate and then getting to a billion dollar run rate and we think that's super admirable like a lot of the companies that come on the show are already doing that or plan to do that or will die trying do it die trying to do that and so coming into this this show like i talked about earlier is about like anti-scale right it's like be okay with your niche figure out what your niche is deliver the best product for them.

42:40Would it be good for our audience if we launched some product that was suddenly taking up 20 hours of our week? Would that actually make the show better? And we've run that. John's very good about running that analysis on every single thing that we do of does it make the core show better? And pretty much always it's a no, right? Even going out to dinner, it's like, does that make this short show better? You could argue you're going to hang out with somebody and maybe they'll come on the show but in reality you end up like going to sleep later and you get a bad night's sleep and the show next day is bad um or and so there's so many decisions that we make are like does this make the show better and we've had to like learn all of those things over and over and like actually learn what makes the show better what makes the show better is we get to the gym at 6 30 we start talking about what we want to talk about on the show that day.

43:32We get to the office at nine, we prep the show for two hours and we do it. And like, actually like having that rhythmic nature to making the show is what makes the show better. And I think a lot of people, investor types have pitched us, have you guys thought about buying a cable network? Have you guys thought about building out a talent network? And we, we've thought about everything, like truly tried to think about everything and haven't come up with something that makes the show better, which is that the show is the show is our business. So I think if you look at Dave Portnoy and you look at the funny thing is there's like a chain of creators learning the same lesson, which is like, even if you do the impossible thing, which is identify exceptional talent.

44:17So like Dave Portnoy is like Alex Cooper, you're a star, we're going to build a show around you. What happens? Right. Right. As right. As she's reaching like the sort of peak of her earning potential, she ends up going independent and gets a however many nine figure Spotify deal. And then she, funny enough, to my knowledge, has run effectively the same playbook with other creators, Alex Earl. As soon as Alex Earl is a star, you lose it. And so the way that the internet works today and the way that content production works used to be that like media companies could retain incredible talent because the cost to produce and distribute the content was so expensive that a creator would be like well I have to work with these guys because I don't have 20 million dollars a year to spend building my own media business and now a content creator can be like if I have my phone or I have a microphone and a computer I can be I can launch a competitive product and so we've just made the conscious decision to focus focus on ourselves and focus on the show and we're very like commercial you can tell like we care a lot about running a great business but there's no like ego tied to our decision making so we're never going to make a decision where we're like well we need to get to 100 million dollars a year in revenue otherwise we won't feel like we're worthy or we won't sure it's like we want to run a great business we want to change the lives of our team um through that business but we're there's no we're not trying to prove anything to anyone uh and and scale is again not

45:57John Coogan:the thing that we're we're optimizing i tend to visualize it like a barbell i think value accrues in media to the platforms so youtube spotify netflix these companies have been fantastic businesses just grown and grown and grown and then on the other side the most extreme you have like the individual creator, the Joe Rogans, the individuals that we mentioned. And then in the middle, you sort of have this messy middle where there's someone who's like trying to roll up a bunch of talent and put them in a bucket and capture some value. But at any moment, those people could leave and do the why I quit X, go viral on YouTube.

46:35John Coogan:And then boom, they have 100 ,000 followers in a business the next day. And so the barrier to leaving one of these like talent roll ups is so low that it's just very hard for the actual talent roll up or whatever you media company to capture any meaningful value because you can't keep these people and you've documented it johnny harris try guys cleo abram like all these folks basically got a paid education at one firm and then went and started their own thing and for us and for us we have the flexibility with the show to be collaborative with so many people and provide a channel for other businesses other content creators other writers other business owners you can like if we want to have a conversation they can come on the show and we can talk we don't need to try to poach them from for sure we have an amazing relationship with joe weisenthal he's at bloomberg he has odd lots it's a fantastic podcast he's been there for a decade he came on the show eight times this year we did eight interviews with him on our show yeah but we're not asking him to come full-time or anything he's just like when he does something cool come over here promoting he's growing his audience from coming on tpn like we're having a fantastic conversation our audience will enjoy it's it's it's like very that's like what i see there are certain cases where i can see talent like management companies still doing well the one that i've identified is um writers specifically journalists that do like scoop driven writing which is like i am out in the world trying to find four interesting stories a year and i want to break a story do the original fact finding right break the story and so we see that in tech there's been a lot of um there's been a lot of people leave legacy media companies start a sub stack uh and the challenge is for as a consumer i want to subscribe to one place that's going to get like the maximum amount of interesting new information a year like scoops right but if i'm subscribed to an individual creator maybe i want to support them but they may only get like two three super interesting stories a year and that's amazing if you're at a big media company but it's hard to build a business around that because it's not a massive amount of value on an ongoing basis historically it's the wall street journal because if you open up the journal like you know that they're going to at least cover every single story it's very hard for an individual creator to guarantee for their audience that they are sort of a one-stop shop on the 360 view of it.

49:03Yeah. So I think that's like the durable platforms, like talent management style media companies is people that are doing original reporting and fact finding. But if you're just a television personality, you can probably go independent like anytime, right? I resonate with everything you just said about building a show. And I think I think it is very easy in our world, and I'll say we are not immune to this at all, to get attracted to the entrepreneurship of what comes with building an audience. It's very exciting. And you watch what happens with other creators and you're like, oh, I think I'm supposed to build a CPG brand or I'm supposed to build a software.

49:41I'm supposed to diversify this revenue when actually the biggest outcomes in our world have been people who built great shows. Getting a nine-figure outcome is no joke. And the fact that a Joe Rogan dealer and Alex scooper deal are nine figure deals on a short term basis where they retain the ownership of the show is actually completely insane. And I realized this through, I saw a lot of creators back in the kind of 2018 era, like create a product and launch it. And even the biggest creators in the world don't have a big enough audience to just use that audience to create a standalone business.

50:19You actually have to be building top of funnel. You have to invest in building top of funnel, even if you have an audience of millions and millions of people. Yeah. It's equally, you give yourself like a 1 % advantage on overall success. I agree with that. And people think that it's like you give yourself like a - 50 or 60%. Yeah. A much, much greater advantage.

50:41John Coogan:And it's just hard because just mathematically, you can just go to a brand that has an existing company and say, hey, I have an audience. If I bring you my audience, can you give me the economically fair amount of share in the profits or the LTV or however you want to calculate? So if the idea that you have to start the company to effectively monetize your audience is really just you're sort of telling on yourself for not actively pricing your advertising product correctly, because you could, as long as the product exists, every once in a while, there's a product that just doesn't exist. But if the product exists, you should be able to just advertise it and say, hey, I brought 100 ,000 people.

51:19John Coogan:Each of them are worth 10 bucks. That's a million dollars. Give me half. You get half, I get half. You should be able to do that. Yes, it's hard to attribute sometimes. But I think what I love about just how you also talked about the ad product is we were together at a Google event maybe a month ago. And I was just observing how people were reacting to you guys and to Ben and David from Acquired. And I started writing afterwards about the luxury brands of the creator economy, because I think you guys fit into that world. I think Ben and David from Acquired, that is the Rolex of podcasting, right?

51:58Yeah. And we have an amazing... It's interesting. I feel like we have an amazing relationship with them because we have so much respect for what they do and they respect what we do, but we have like complete opposite ends of the spectrum. We talked about this on our show earlier, like we're fast content, they're slow content. I will watch an acquired episode today that was released three years ago.

52:26John Coogan:Insane catalog value. Crazy catalog value. It's a long time. But the way that people, like again, I think maybe what we lost sight of in the creator economy was brand building over the past couple of years. To be honest, I think we looked at viewership and metric building as like the end all be all. It's like, let me show you that I can get a hundred million views and that will trade at a high value. Forgetting that when you build a brand, and it's hard to explain to someone what a brand is. We were talking about this before that like what you guys have done here with TBBN is tangibly different than what you did with the John Coogan channel, although you made video, a video I watched of yours, the meta video.

53:06That has like 8.6 million views. You have multiple videos with millions and millions and millions of views. And I knew about you and I watched your stuff and I had met you, but you didn't carry the weight as a brand. It wasn't a thing. No, not at all. This is a thing. TBBN is a thing and it stands for something. And there's a, I can close my eyes and imagine it and there's a color to it and a tone to it. And I think we lost sight of that. And that has created scarcity with those who create brands in our space. And I think that's where I'm noticing that there's luxury brands. And the three that I was just writing about internally was like TBBN, Acquired, and Feed Me.

53:42I think Emily Sundberg is in that luxury brand space. Whereas Mr. Beast, and this is not at all like he's a friend, there's not at all a dig, but he's McDonald's, right? He's available to everyone. And he is looking for global expansion and to be available in every country and every continent and something for everyone, right? His content can talk to a 12-year-old and talk to an 80-year-old. And that is what he wants to build. Whereas the luxury brands in our space are more just focused on reaching an audience that's hard to reach in a way that's hard to do. yep right you guys do a hard thing by being daily and being live and making it making it a brand and being consistent acquired does a hard thing by researching and recording for 15 hours and cutting it down to six hours like i just think also yeah the luxury brands traded a different you guys get to do things that are different like you get to command with your advertiser for 2026 you get to say you get to set a very there's also there's also exclusivity so for us right we won't work with two companies in the same category.

54:53There's a number of different categories, so there's a scarcity element to it. But I would say the way that we've approached brand building and the way that I think a brand gets built is not by just obviously getting the most reach and getting the most number of people to be aware of you, but it's getting how many people have you made actually feel something multiple times, right? And so it's probably like something, you know advertising they say it's like you need to reach somebody seven times in seven different ways to get them to like get to the point where they'll convert and i think with building a brand you need to make somebody like feel something a certain number of times before before you've actually like imprinted in their mind and so for us there's a lot of things that we do that have no I don't know...

55:40There's no direct value to the show other than there's a few people in the world that we know are going to laugh and they're going to be super entertained by it and they're going to text us about it. We do this kind of thing multiple times a week where we'll put out something that we know only 200 people in the world will find funny and we know we're successful when six of them text the team and they're like, this is hilarious. Have you ever read an example of that? An example is like we do trading. The profile photo? Yeah. So we do these like, we do like use images to like share various news.

56:16Sometimes it's a fundraising announcement or M &A or somebody gets hired. Those are hilarious. A lot of times it's very serious. So over the weekend, the hiring announcements are like when someone gets traded on a sports team.

56:26John Coogan:Exactly. Exactly. But also on the cover of the Wall Street Journal business section today is a story about OpenAI changing their vesting schedules for how they - Cliffhanger. and we just took it and posted like try and come up with something a little bit fun twist on it just to give you the news but then also we had a friend who Jackson Dahl who interviewed us and we're buddies with him and he had a new profile picture and so we put him a credit card just for that you know and it's like these are nowhere near as and we'll do like wedding announcements wedding announcements all sorts of have you guys read the book um unleashing the idea virus by seth godin no yeah i seth godin's like oh gee oh gee so so is the book that got me into youtube okay it's nothing about youtube it's about his era of like helping yahoo and hotmail um you know scale and the hotmail thing was so interesting because obviously that was the first email product that had like sent with hotmail and you could click to make an account and so he was like the product is the marketing but the thing he said in that book that i think relates here is he he talked about being remarkable which a lot of people talk about, which is literally worth making a remark about.

57:36But he talked about if an idea is like a virus and it's supposed to spread, you have to get into these small pockets and small communities where he coined the term sneezers, where you find the sneezers, the ones who are going to sneeze all over everyone else and can't stop telling them about the thing. But that only works if you're in the confines of how you guys have approached this of, we're going to talk to technology employees as a subset of our audience, because now you can spread through a slack. You can spread through an office building. And when our first YouTube channel 15 years ago was about the sport of lacrosse.

58:13And whenever I would tell Colin, who are we making this for? We're making it for the kid in the stretching lines that during practice while they're stretching turns to everyone else and says, did you guys see that one video? And if we can make it for that kid, we will get 60 people on the team to watch our stuff. But I think that's how I view what you guys have done is like you make something really exceptional for that one guy in the office who will just go around being like, are you guys watching this? I need someone to talk to this about. But then from a macro perspective, it's super easy to explain.

58:45Just even visually, like in a second when I'm on Twitter and I see TPVN, I'll get like SportsCenter for Tech and Business. Yeah, yeah. Like SportsCenter for Tech and Business. I see it. I'm like, yep, I can self-friend that immediately.

58:55John Coogan:One, I love the sneezers. I love the viral analogies. It is funny. People think going viral and they think, you know, the Mr. Beast video. The algorithm just picks up and just organically sends to a million or 8 million people or 10 million people. but we when we started the show we had this strategy where we would take a random person's tweet no matter how small they were as long as we liked what they had to say we would print it out physically on a piece of paper we would hold it up read it and we would react to it and we're here in suits and we're in suits shot in 4k on these same cameras right and so and but all of that was like fine you're watching it you're kind of like okay these guys are doing this weird bit whatever this is odd but what we would do is we would cut the section where we were reacting to your tweet about whatever yeah and then we would quote tweet your tweet with our video smart and so you you've had posts go viral yeah you know what it feels like you know the first hundred likes are your friends and people you actually know businesses those and you're like oh cool like john like this one you know okay we're all good and then and then eventually the numbers just turns into like 1 ,000, 5 ,000, 10 ,000 likes, and you just kind of tune it out.

1:00:09John Coogan:You maybe mute the notifications. You kind of move on. Maybe you go in the comments and see, oh, somebody said something interesting. But eventually, it just becomes all like pixels on a screen. But when someone quote tweets your tweet with a video of them in suits printing out your tweet, it's completely undeniable. You have to watch it. So it's like this crazy super like. Yeah. And you might have to retweet it. You might have to send it to your friend. And so we described it as just like love letters to Silicon Valley. Let's just send love letters to the people in Silicon Valley that we think are interesting, that we think are cool.

1:00:40John Coogan:And there was no presumption of who we are in the social hierarchy, who you are in the social hierarchy. It was purely on the basis of like ideas, humor, interest. If you said something cool that we liked, we would talk about it and laugh about it and maybe debate it, maybe disagree, maybe agree, maybe love it, maybe laugh at it. But you would get a video and it was like this like weird other thing that had never happened before. Yeah. And we, there was this interesting phenomena, which was that we would talk about even early. So Q4 of last year, we would highlight somebody's posts and then you'd be able to see like a billionaire immediately.

1:01:18Like we'd highlight like a college student's post about something startup related. And then you'd see like a billionaire would go and follow that person. uh and that that was like and and we've always uh tried to maintain even with the content of the show on the same episode that we'll have somebody that has a hundred billion dollar company we'll have somebody with a five million dollar company or uh you know in startup land that means like they've raised their friends and family right it sounds like a big number but it's um uh i mean a

1:01:47John Coogan:couple weeks ago we had like a 13 year old on the show who's like starting a yc company just because he went viral and i think like the same episode we probably had like someone probably a public company ceo i can't i can't even remember because it was definitely we had like a big person small in my opinion like twitter actually needed a show which is funny it is to think about and i remember like you know we used to have a tagline technology needed a podcast because it was so obvious that technology didn't need a podcast right because it was so obvious it was our joke but twitter actually did need a show twitter needed a live show it's it's weird that it needed it actually in a i don't like three years ago when elon bought twitter yeah he hosted the zoom call with a few other creators colin and i were part of the call and he was asking what we what we thought he should do sure uh and and my pitch to him was he should try and compete with twitch and make it the best live platform because i go to twitter for what's happening right now interesting right like i because he was talking about youtube and i was like that's again like you guys mentioned it's slow content like you're not gonna win that's not what twitter is at all yeah um and and i think twitter needed a live show yeah because what you're just describing of like a 13 year old at the same time as a billionaire is the same time as a public company so that's that's twitter that is like you're getting a take from so you guys you guys would appreciate this john went on eric tornberg's show yeah like three almost three years ago maybe two years ago way before we had even started thinking about uh tbpn or even doing our first episodes and he made like the full pitch for tbpn around like no one had cracked just accidental tech i wasn't thinking about it but he was like oh where else do you think there's opportunity white space in white space and media like tech media seems really saturated and i said well no one has cracked tech live streaming.

1:03:36John Coogan:And because I had done technology focused video essays, and I wasn't the first person to do a video essay, obviously, there was a long lineage of people doing video essays for film critique or video game reviews or lore or politics. And I was just the first person, at least one of the first to really focus on like startup business tech content in video essay, right? In video essay work. And I was like, everything comes to tech eventually it just takes time to niche down and so if i see what speed is doing or not which is funny because tech created the platform exactly and part part of that is that uh being a content creator in tech is relatively low status right uh which sounds insane because like young people in the out in the world they're like i want to i'd rather be an influencer than an astronaut uh but in tech uh for good reason right people can come into this industry and and create a hundred billion dollar company right it's possible it doesn't happen it's rare uh but you come into this industry for glory and to to have a billion dollars under management or to have a a unicorn you don't come into the industry to like make funny videos have a lifestyle yeah and that's that's ultimately created an opportunity for people that do want to come in and take it extremely seriously.

1:05:01So I feel like you guys are to Twitter almost what like Subway Takes is to Instagram in a way that like every time I open Instagram, the first thing I see in the morning is Subway Takes. Yeah. Which is so interesting that like each platform needs like a native.

1:05:15John Coogan:Yeah. So yeah, I think about this, like on the show, we're trying to cover like, how do we think about the topics? What are the topics that we're covering every day? What is the content on the show? And the content is very driven by what is the conversation that's happening on Twitter, on X. And oftentimes, I believe, it's funny, in the New York Times, they call this the sports center for the LinkedIn crowd. And I was like, it's funny because I do think our content in the long term can do well on LinkedIn when we repurpose it properly. I think we'll do well there eventually. But I couldn't tell you what the current thing on LinkedIn is today, but I bet you there is a current thing.

1:05:53I don't know. I think that's actually, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, but I don't think there's like a pulse there is a pulse there's a pulse on instagram and on instagram yeah for sure

1:06:01John Coogan:which is yeah their whole like story arcs john's analogy which has been great is that x is the internet's dive bar yeah so wait so it's do you are you this for youtube i don't know because mr mr misification was the conversation that youtube had for sure and i feel like you were a focal point i would say we were okay i think youtube has grown and expanded into so many different directions, but there was a pocket of time for sure when like there's people who associate the term creator economy with us. Totally. Like saying that we came up with it. Yeah. I don't think we came up with it. I don't remember if we did or didn't.

1:06:39I assume we didn't. Yeah. We definitely said it a lot in certain - Popularize it. Yeah. Once people started saying it, we were like, oh, that's what we've been talking about for the last couple of seconds. Well, yeah. So the reason - I used to kind of mock the VCs. I think you're going to say us. Yeah. No, no, no. No, no, no. Not at all. I used to mock the VCs that would go on X and talk about the creator economy and how creators are the fastest growing category of small businesses. I used to think it was so funny because I'd been in the space myself for a while since I was like how I was paying for my life in college was like doing ad deals between creators and brands.

1:07:23And I knew that all the creators just use like quickbooks and they just use like a regular bank account and so vcs like started talking about this trend like it was happening now but i was like look back for the lot this has been happening for a while and we also were all good on software we didn't need like exactly we didn't need quickbooks for creators help because quickbooks existed yeah like yeah that was a funny moment um creator economy company but sony so that's a creator economy company totally They made the FX3. Everyone has 10. So one thing, I mean, obviously this happened to us in the same time where we became that show on YouTube very quickly.

1:08:00If something starts working and you see the ad dollars and it's like everyone starts doing the same show. And that also happened to us, right? It's like a lot of people did the same show or similar shows and competing for guests got hard. And I would say pretty quickly after you guys made the show, I started seeing this show attempted by other people. Even just from like an artwork perspective. You didn't have all the nuts and bolts, but you were like, visually, they're trying to do something.

1:08:24John Coogan:But it's the same thing with your thumbnails. Of course. Our thumbnails are everywhere. Thumbnails are perfectly. People sell our thumbnails, actually, as a template. Yes. So it's everywhere. Yeah. People will probably sell TBPN overlays. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure. This overlay is probably, somebody probably templatized it. But I think that's, I was curious about how you guys felt about that. That's why you go back to brand. Yeah. That's why brand matters. There will always be knockoffs. We had Evan Spiegel today, how he felt about copycat. Yeah. Because he's been copied. Right. He's a good person to talk about that.

1:08:51Totally. What's his LinkedIn bio?

1:08:54John Coogan:I mean, people are, there's a fake merch store for our merch. We don't sell merch yet. Multiple places on the internet you can buy fake TPPN merch. Oh, wow. Maybe you shouldn't sell merch. Maybe. I don't think. The only reason I think the sport team, like similar like Red Bull, if you're a Red Bull athlete, you can't get the Red Bull hat. Yeah, we've never wanted to use merch as a revenue stream. The reason I like making it is just from a quality standpoint. Everything we make is something that you would pick off the shelf at a retailer. But what did Evan say to you guys about people copying the show?

1:09:28Because we've been invited on shows like this. And actually, I don't feel compelled to go on a similar show just because I'm like, I want to go on the real. I want to go on the real. Totally. Totally.

1:09:38John Coogan:Yeah. I mean, I think it comes back to brand, but also what do you have control over monopolizing? and that's yourself and actually the individual creator, like the host, the host being very important. And then there are some tactical things where if you are out in front and you just don't take your foot off the gas, like I honestly think that we would, the copycats could defeat us if we were like, okay, let's rest on our laurels and then also start a company on the side and also do some guests, right? Yeah. And I've seen that a ton of times where you're like, wait, that person was amazing. What happened?

1:10:18John Coogan:How'd the new person come up? And it's like, oh, well, that person, they got sick of doing that thing. And so of course someone came and ate their lunch. And sometimes that's fine. They're like, yeah, I kind of wanted my lunch eating. I was sick of doing what I was doing. I'm happy with the new thing. I've noticed a lot of people that I think every single person that has a niche that they care about should focus on learning from outside that niche right so copy but copy from other parts of the internet right so if you're doing gardening go look at what people do in politics right like take from all over the internet and so for us everything that we do we think it's funny that people copy us because we're like well like we just look like television that's existed right yeah it's yeah it looks like we look like our format is like a talk show that transitions into having guests has been around forever And so anybody that's like, like very clearly copying from one show is not actually taking inspiration from the world and then recombining it for themselves.

1:11:19Right. And the things that they're interested in. And so I think ultimately, you know, people copy without knowing really what they're copying. They're just like, this thing works. I should copy and paste that thing into what I'm doing. And the best, the best shows are going to be some combination of a bunch.

1:11:34John Coogan:The next big tech and business show won't be a direct clone of us. It'll be something that is so new and different that we're just like, oh, we hadn't even ever thought about that. That's awesome. I guarantee they're going to come on our show immediately. So we had a cool moment with Jim Cramer because in some ways he's like multi-decade career. He's truly in the game because he just loves talking about markets and stocks and talking with CEOs. and we had this cool moment because he's seen a bunch of different podcasts but he was like you know i just he he just said he's like i really some something to the effect of like i really respect what you guys are doing and and i always thought someone would do this but i no one ever did it and it was and it was like a lot of people have done sort of this but it was it was clear that he saw like the whole and the brand and like the unique pieces puzzling together and was like this is and also and also the energy depending on your energy as a as a person that's going to be on camera the show needs to be built around that like kramer has like crazy chaotic energies running around yelling he's ranting we aren't that but we have our own energy and we have our own dynamic yeah and and yeah it was a cool moment he could have he could have said no to the interview he could have come on and i don't know like just been low energy but he brought his he was excited.

1:12:57John Coogan:So that was really cool. So yeah, I want to, I would love to see more people that call it copying, call it being inspired, but take this concept of a highly produced live stream and then apply it to other things, right? We've talked about a huge opportunity to do this for cooking, right? You can imagine a set like this in a beautiful kitchen and somebody every day says on Monday, I'm going to cook this Tuesday. I'm going to cook this. People can order. That's cool. And then the host can just hang out and cook this meal and you can still clip it. And you can do guests. It's a great DoorDash. Yeah.

1:13:30So there's so many ways you can. There's an element of like this chef went here. This restaurant opened here. There's also like the slight business of restaurant.

1:13:38John Coogan:Then if there's like the sports center for cooking, it's probably also like the kaisenat for cooking. Yes. The feed for cooking, right? And we've seen this also with like there's some creators that travel all the time. And that's a very different lifestyle. But it gives you a different flavor of content. So can you go inside of a company? Can you go tour it? Can you go do a walk and talk? Like, that's not us. And so by default, we're not competing with you if you're creating that different type of content. Is there anything that this show doesn't have yet that you think would make it better when you think about the next year or the year after that?

1:14:12A bigger gong. A bigger gong. That's obvious.

1:14:14John Coogan:I think that's doing like a proper like LED wall, which would be fun. Yeah, that's cool. I think this is a little low contrast right now. So there's like gear stuff. Sure. I'm trying to think. I definitely think sports-wise, like allowing you to get up and draw on something. Working on labs, actually. Okay, that would be cool to me. Yeah, so we've been testing that movement, walking around. I like when you did the meta show. That was like that. Like this almost game day. Yeah, so we want to do more of those. And when do we do those and where? So the big thing is like there are a set of conferences where a lot of business leaders come together.

1:14:48John Coogan:And those are very – they're just difficult puzzles because you have to get the whole team there set up. the 10 book everything it's like the it's the super bowl and you know pat mack if he does this on college game day right so it's like what is our college game day yes it's metaconect but it's also some of the conferences that that bring right or i'd gather i totally yeah that's a great polishing that and the figma remember larna ipo this year next year is going to be there's uh uh god willing there will be a lot of ipos uh the uh the ipo window is wide open right now so you see a bunch of companies spacex will go out probably some monday's to model open ai yeah and so those moments are amazing because it's just the culmination of usually a decade of incredibly hard work by a big group of people story moment yeah so much so much risk and so much emotion going into those moments so that's those are really i would say are like super bowl moments but they only i guess better than the super bowl because they come up hopefully a couple times a year.

1:15:49But realistically, there will be one IPO next year that is the thing that we will remember. It's so amazing because it actually is an underserved market. A company that has their IPO day, who was - Well, I mean - You can go on Squawk, but it's a small hit. That's a different... We went on Squawk. That's a very small hit. I think we were on for seven minutes. Yeah. I think it's underserved just in... It's a small hit, but it's also underserved in that uh your guys show feels like a for us by us like from the inside out type of yep so production

1:16:21John Coogan:yeah i mean and we we still even though we're much more we're much more like constrained than a normal live stream if you look at what a lot of the live streamers are doing some of them will just go live like whenever and they'll just log off whenever or they'll be like you know i'm throwing on a youtube video i'm going to react to it and i got to go to the bathroom right and watch in the chair, right? And that sometimes causes consternation, but we're a little bit more structured than that, but we're still less structured than a TV show where if we are having a great conversation, we can go an hour with basically no ad breaks or anything.

1:16:54John Coogan:We can really get on our show today, we went 25 minutes over or something like that. Yeah, and it's like that we just have a little bit of the affordance, but we still have, so it's like this weird half and half, but you try and play to the strengths of both. so i want to come back to talking a bit about business because i think one thing that i thought was amazing and again a part of the the brand you guys have built this year was um your spot with axios and what they covered afterwards which was that you guys are almost sold out of your inventory in 2026 i looked at that and i was like that is unbelievable and i imagine that is a multi-million dollar tweet.

1:17:33John Coogan:Someone quoted me saying, they're running ads for ads now. Yeah. I was like, but this is a multi-million dollar tweet. No, you want to know what was going on there. If you look in the comments of that Axios article, so links have not done well on Twitter. Maybe they're coming back. But that article, there were a number of articles. That one got hundreds of likes. So that's the true fans. Who's liking the fact that we're selling out ads? Yeah, but that's the inside. Again, people being so down with this and being like, hell yeah. Yes. And yes ads. Hell yeah. In the chat, when an advertiser comes on, because, you know, like ramp raised money, they come on the show.

1:18:10John Coogan:Normally, the vibe would be like, oh, is he paying to be here? And in the chat, they'll be like, it's TBPN royalty. This guy makes this thing possible. Right. It's amazing. And so in the response to that post, there were so many people that were like, they deserve it. That somebody quotes me and was like, is they deserve it a meme or are people just being wholesome? Right. I think a big part of that is we see anytime a startup raises a lot of money, right away the whole industry is like, is this legit? Are they priced ahead of their progress? Is this warranted? Are they worth a billion dollars?

1:18:45Are they worth$100 million? And so there's just this immediate kind of frenzy. A lot of it happens in group chats. Some of it happens on the timeline. I think what's about you know the the reason you saw the dynamic that John just described is that it's been even if you even if you don't watch the show I think people can appreciate the work that we put in because we've missed two days this year that we were like traveling to do like like out of we've done hundreds of shows this year and really put in like put in the actual work and so So I think when people see that you are being rewarded for, you know, really focused hard work, I think people appreciate that.

1:19:31I think you're underrated. Like truly, like for those group of people that feel like they're there with you. They're like, people don't know how hard they're working and how good this show is. Right.

1:19:42John Coogan:Yeah. That's how they feel, especially in like a year one, year two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, I do, I always do like to reality check the other side of the equation, right? Like the business has grown a bunch and should make a lot of revenue next year. But, you know, it's like, what's the grounding on that? Are we getting the actual impressions? And I mean, I think we're on track to do like 5 ,000 host red ads next year. And so when you - 5 ,000 host red ads. Wow. Yeah. Because you do 20 an episode. 20 an episode. Wow. 250 episodes a year. So you have 20 sponsors? Yeah. And for 2020, you have around 20 sponsors.

1:20:22and is, I imagine that trades at a pretty high level to be one of those 20 spots. Safe to say that trades in six to seven figures.

1:20:31John Coogan:Yeah. And so if you work backwards from - That's a lot of revenue, guys. 5 ,000 ad reads, what's an ad read? What's a host read ad read cost? Do you do the math and it all maths out? Yeah. And also I think association is a very important by-product of advertising. Association is one that I think we should talk about. Way more. Like advertising works on me. To your point, Jordy, I've been a fan of advertising my whole life. Actually, one of the things that connected Colin and I early on was how much we like ads and how cool advertising is. And the association component matters a lot more than like the direct call to action.

1:21:07Totally. Like I mean, when I think about you guys, I associate Ramp, 8 Sleep, Wander. Like I can name so many of these sponsors. Which is crazy. Public, Polymarket. Yeah. Like I can name your sponsors. That's crazy. It's crazy. that I can call them out like that. And I think - If you're a fan of an F1 team, you can name their sponsors. Yeah, you can name them too. Exactly. Yeah, you can name them too. And I think that's, you guys have done that in a really cool way. But even just seeing that, like the terminology, I think vernacular matters so much. And talking about inventory and being sold out and having your community be excited.

1:21:38Like I think - Totally. Like what you said earlier is that a lot of creators are trading month to month. And be clear, that was like one question out of a 20 minute talk that we gave. And I just answered it - Best case scenario. Actually, and they - They did go well. Yeah. Best case scenario. Again, that's scarcity. It's like luxury brand scarcity. If you want in, you got to act now. There's only 20 slots. They're all exclusive category slots. It trades at a very high price. We're not negotiating. It's just, do you have the money? Yeah. There's another thing that I think we now have the luxury of advertising, understanding there's predictability to what we do.

1:22:15Right. It's not like we are three days a week doing a lot of content. and then we go dark for a week. We are very consistent. You have a very trustworthy process. We like the labor of this. We like that it sounds silly and hopefully this doesn't get clipped out of context, but we like the fact that it's this kind of rhythmic, cyclical, we show up in the morning, we prep the show, we do the show, we go hang with our families, we come back and do the next day.

1:22:44John Coogan:And I think for our entrepreneurs, it's very easy to, to not have structure in your life and just say yes to us. Oh yeah. Like, but may you got invited to this amazing week long retreat. You got to say yes to this. You can't turn down an interview to go hang out. Like we've turned down a lot of stuff, but just because like the show doesn't happen if we don't do it. And so we'll be like, yeah, I would love to go to this crazy place and with all these cool people for this time. But it's like, it just, then the whole thing. You have to optimize for what your status quo is. Totally. for what the true, reliable, everyday experience your life is.

1:23:17The weekend getaway is not... It's not a thing. It's very much just like rhythmic running.

1:23:24John Coogan:It feels like being a distance runner. It feels like being a distance runner just every day. That's good. I like that. The other thing is getting... We've been super proud of the progress this year, but at the same time, remembering that we're a year old. We want to do this for decades. And so going into next year, it's it's I feel very fortunate that we're not trying to do we're constantly going to be trying to innovate on different formats and distribution methods and a number of different things. But we're not trying to do anything that is wildly different. We're not trying to add something new that takes another 10 hours of our week or anything like that.

1:24:08And so it's this constant just like refinement and making the show. It's really been a thing of like, how can we make what we do 1 % better every day? Sometimes it's just Ben or Scott or Michael mounts a camera differently. Sometimes it's changing the lighting. Sometimes it's changing the flow of the show. Sometimes it's -

1:24:31John Coogan:Just the interview, like how you ask a question. I feel like, I mean, I've done interviews before, but doing so many interviews and like being an interviewer this year, I've used this metaphor of like, it's like having a race car on the track. Like I can sit down with Mark Zuckerberg and not be nervous and I can keep the car on the track. Right. And I'm not going to embarrass myself. He's not going to come away being like, I never want to talk to that guy ever again. but to put on a really great performance and actually find some very interesting moments and very interesting learn about each other and have fun together and create something special i feel like that's just decades of work and and and so i'm so i i'm not nervous when i go into a big interview but i'm also not excited about my performance yet i feel like i have so many i can shave seconds off and i've seen it with the with the greats walt mossberg interviewing steve jobs right it's like they had a life together and so when he when he was pushing him later about the iphone and all the different things like they had rapport and building rapport is something that i think interviewers don't take seriously in the moment in the in the time of like i gotta book the big guests everyone's like i gotta check the box i gotta get this person and that person instead of like how can i be the how can i be interviewing them 30 years from now well something that yeah something we lost with podcasts was just an interviewer in, you know, somebody interviewing somebody multiple times, multiple times a year.

1:26:03We have the luxury of a lot of our guests have come on the show multiple times, or some guests don't like to do as much press. So they'll come on, uh, once a year, but we have a lot of people that will come on four times a year. And I think that more shows should look to do that because it's something beautiful when you build up that trust over multiple. And we're the, the trust that somebody has to have with us is comparable to television and that there's like half a second of delay. And so they have to, they're coming into our world and we're having a conversation. They have to trust that we have respect for them.

1:26:38And it's about finding this line of like asking the questions that need to be asked while also, you know, not never trying to do a, we've had CEOs say some things that have gone viral that were like, we didn't even set, you set yourself up.

1:26:52John Coogan:Gave them enough rope. Right, right. No, and sometimes, yeah, sometimes, you know, people, some guests want to take it to a crazy place. Yeah. But yeah, Kramer had a wild, he had a wild arc where he interviewed Tim Cook 10 years ago. The stock was getting trashed because iPhone sales had finally leveled off. And this was before the app store was growing so big and the stock went on a massive run again. But he had to ask the hard question of like, Wall Street, my viewers don't like your stock right now. Right. But he was bullish. And he was saying, I say, don't trade it, own it. And so his true belief was Apple is going to do great over the next decade.

1:27:35John Coogan:He was right about that. But his viewers were down on Apple. So he had to ask the hard questions. He did the interview. I think it went very well. And then like 10 years later, he was like doing this on-site interview with Tim Cook again, 10 years later. And they have this like big open story loop that goes over a decade. And you see this with like Sorkin and a bunch of other of the great interviews. Anyway, sorry. I was going to ask you guys about the Polymarket ticker. Sure. Were you the first live show to have a prediction market? I think so. CNN and Calci just made a deal where they're going to be doing the exact same thing.

1:28:12Yeah. you guys have that ticker yeah like you the first time i'd ever seen it was your show yeah and then when i saw the cnn calci um it felt like a reaction to the internet and a reaction to any way to kind of yeah capture attention i have you know not a great viewpoint on prediction markets i don't think they're they're great but i wanted to ask about that like i even as i was sitting in there i will say i thought it was really fun to look at and colin looked at me And he goes, look at how many people think, because he's been talking about how he thinks Gemini will be the LLM of the year next year.

1:28:45Sure. That came across the screen. 95 % of people agree with that. Yep. Yeah. So prediction markets are an interesting category because you have like a massive amount of speculation happening. People making trades, taking a bet one side or the other. but then the end product is like an interesting data point on a bunch of different parts of the world and the economy and the markets and what's happening in tech and so we've always looked at it in this bucket uh we've never uh we don't trade on prediction markets we've never we don't take sides we don't say oh i like you know on uh esb you'll be like this is my parlay we're not like Like we, John and I, like two weeks ago, we were in Vegas for F1 and like didn't gamble at all on the whole weekend.

1:29:35And, you know, we don't have that. We're more on the Kramer side. We like to own companies that we love. And so we always thought it was a fascinating data point. And it's like very much like a hot button issue within tech and I think outside of tech. And we'll probably continue to percolate. percolate, but it's been a very interesting data point to try to understand the future and provide some context for the news because around elections, you have polling, which gives you like some indicator of how an election might go. And this is like that same type of data, but for kind of everything.

1:30:15John Coogan:So it's been a weird year for prediction markets because there's sort of two ways that any market can break. One could be it's heavily institutionalized and it's like hedge fund guys and they know the risks that they're taking and no one really feels bad for them if they lose their shirt betting on the election the wrong way. But then there's like retail traders betting on sports. And if that becomes the predominant consumption vehicle, then I think people have a lot more sort of moral qualms with it. And I think this year has been the year where people have been grappling with that and we'll see where it lands.

1:30:47John Coogan:A lot of it will be determined by regulation and where things can go. But we found it useful to just add a layer of context around tech events like the Gemini thing. I'm with that. I was at DealBook and saw, did you see what Brian Armstrong said about prediction markets? So his POV was that insider trading with prediction markets is a positive. It could be argued that it's a positive thing. Sure, sure. Because it's a better indicator if someone knows what's about to happen. Yeah, and that's the challenge. If you are just an observer of these markets, you want the insider trading to be happening.

1:31:26Because it gives you more accurate information. Because otherwise it's just - Data is better if someone says, yeah, this is going to happen. But the problem I have is CNN and CalShare have this partnership that you can bet on CalShare almost every night what Anderson Cooper is going to say on the show. That's wild. I don't know that I would be surprised if that - Stays. That stays as they roll out an official partnership. I mean, we've had prediction markets. Prediction markets pop up for certain interviews that we do, and I find it to be a terrible experience.

1:31:55John Coogan:That example is not a good example of what Brian Armstrong is talking about because there is value. Which was a crazy one to also bring up. Maybe there is value because you're like, oh, I want to know what Anderson Cooper will say on tonight's show. let me pull up the prediction market where he is insider trading it yeah it's like did we really create anything i guess we did but who's trading against that if it has interesting cooper but i mean and and to be clear so we've had markets pop up on some of our shows this year and about your show about our show yeah and then people will come into the comments and they'll be like say this or that and we very anytime that's happened we've just told the team like hey look if any one of you trades on this you'll be fired immediately like we have zero tolerance for this and i mean the platforms themselves have rules against insider trading but there are also laws against insider trading even in commodity markets which is how these things are regulated but how do you enforce it oh well you have to like like find proof like it's like insider trading in a stock like maybe there's a whistleblower maybe there's some you know yeah and the debate or like there's some big windfall and somebody's like or shows up these are these are commodities right so historically if you were a farmer and like you could be like wow this year is really rough like we're not going to have a bountiful harvest i need to hedge so you could go to a commodities exchange and hedge your like production and that's actually good and that's that's that's legal it's good right and so there's because you have inside information that your harvest is going to fail And so you go out to the market and say, I want insurance against me failing my harvest.

1:33:39John Coogan:And so it is driven by sort of insider trading, but we've determined that in porn, it's okay. I don't know why we landed there. But that is not, from my understanding is that that is not considered insider trading. Insider trading in that situation would be like, you know that some other company, that you have not public information that some other company is literal literal insider trading is a different is a different thing but also like the nature of a commodity market is that there shouldn't be a monopoly on it like there shouldn't be anyone who's like oh i control enough power in the market to actually effectively insider trade because if there's just one farmer who's corn futures you know like who needs to trade corn futures like they shouldn't be able to actually move the entire market off of one person insider information so even though they know that they're worried about their corn failing they're not making such a big bet that it's moving the market which is like a weird nuance yeah so there's going to be a whole like regulatory debate about this for sure i feel like just proof of lack of opportunity to me that might be for young people yeah for young people for oh that people are excited about it they feel like proof of lack of opportunity that like that there potentially is a lack of opportunity a lack of jobs and here is a new surge of gambling, low-cost gambling opportunities to hopefully spend money and spend your time on.

1:35:03We have a relatively... But I also find the data interesting at times again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, it's interesting and potentially...

1:35:08John Coogan:It's certainly better than some of the crazy crypto stuff that's gone on. I find it to be more of an indicator that our tolerance for story has gone really high. Story. Meaning like, again, things are more interesting when the stakes are high. A good story has stakes. TVA is more interesting if I can win or lose money based on what you say. Or just alongside a show. But again, that's been... I don't think the people that we've seen trade prediction markets based on our show are not real fans. They are just out betting on a bunch of things. Interesting. And so our core fan base has never cared.

1:35:49In fact, they get annoyed. They're like, all these people are in the chat and they're not from here, basically. Oh, interesting. So yeah, I would say we - People do that with the stocks too.

1:35:57John Coogan:Like we would see - Yeah, but we also don't do - So CNBC has like, is retail trading. They're focused on the stock price. They're focused on how it's going to move before - Yeah, while the guest is on. They put up the stock chart and based on what the stocks - But it's not insider trading. And so that's great content for a certain part of the internet. Our audience is more so they're like building a company that might be worth$2 million today. They want to make it worth$2 billion. They're trying to better understand the world. They might be listening to Satya Nadella on our show to understand how he's thinking about co-pilot.

1:36:34And so they may make business decisions based on that, but none of our coverage is actually focused on individual stock prices or anything like that. And I think we push the, something that uh we've you know we pride ourselves in having a we have a small team but we care a lot about each individual person and making sure this can be transformative this role can be transformative for their life and that we can keep like helping them grow year over year as we grow as a show and we encourage them and i'd say this to all young people that i talk to about this is like you're not you it's very very difficult to change your life by being a better investor right by like trading earnings in fact it's like oftentimes a total distraction even to own a thousand dollars of a of a stock in a company because it's like you're getting a notification it's like it's down it's like what should i should i sell this should i not and it doesn't matter what the price point is it's wildly distracting and more and i we do think it's bad that you're seeing like sports betting explode on college campuses and you see this in like la boo-boos people effectively gambling on on all all different types of things in the market and we tell people constantly both in our lives and on the show it's like you're the best possible thing that you can do is like increase your skill set increase your capability like increase your power level as an individual through the things that you can do the people that you know the things that you're working on and that's how you that's how you change your life you're not going to change yourself like uh the best hedge funds in the world will put up like 30 a year so run the numbers on your personal portfolio if you are more elite than the best hedge funds in the world at trading but you're starting off of a ten thousand dollar base like you're not you're still not going to be able to afford like the house that you want when you're in you know in your city and so like you need to develop skill sets you need to create things you need to um be in the right circles work at the right companies uh to change your life and so i think like the more people that can put out that messaging to young people the internet's just been dominated by info products i see i see like a lot of a lot of young people that are interested in entrepreneurship think that they need a personal brand it's like yeah i i don't think you do i didn't i didn't like we have like a personal brand now by nature of building tbpn and doing a daily show but i had a lot of success in my career, just building companies, right?

1:39:07I built a - Yeah. Having a personal brand is just, for me, it's like, are you a rational person who does the thing that you say you're going to do? Meaning internally - Reputation. Yeah. Your reputation is your personal brand. If you do produce media, sure, that's another thing. But focusing on your reputation is the most important thing. Yeah. And I just think young people think, oh, to be an entrepreneur, I need a Lamborghini and an info products because I want to make content that these people, you know, end up like in the cycle of looking up to entrepreneurs that sell courses. And I think that the course bros kind of like change, they kind of shape shift, but it's still this, they're still getting like more impressions and reach and views than ever.

1:39:59So you still have this generation of people that are growing up on the internet thinking that that's how, that's the path that I should go on. Right. Um, not realizing that, uh, if you become successful or you create anything great, you will just like get the personal brand through that. You don't need to make videos in order to, to get that right. It's, it's, uh, much better to be patient. I want to ask one last question for you guys. Cause I, uh, we've, I don't want to go as long as, as your show here. So you double up today. Um, but I'd have to imagine that you've gotten the call from a CNBC or maybe a network like that as the world of streaming and the world of traditional media is looking for something like this.

1:40:46And I imagine the world of business media is like, here's our guys. And they're making something that looks like the thing we make on TV. So have you considered that or would you consider that? Why or why not? If a legacy network says, we want to bring you on. I don't even know what that means.

1:41:04John Coogan:So we actually have a sort of tongue-in-cheek word for our genre. So, I mean, obviously we've talked about new media. We have, what do we call it? Neotrad media? Neotraditionalist media. We did this media map. That was ours. That was your media map. You saw it, but you didn't. Yeah, I didn't. You should have put a logo on it. You should have put ads on it. Yeah. But the whole joke of neotraditionalist media was the idea that we are both new and old simultaneously. No one in tech and businesses is like, we literally stream the show on Twitch. No one's doing that. But also we have a Chiron and we look like something out of the 80s.

1:41:42John Coogan:And so it's like, are we 80s or are we 20, 25? We're both. And that was the neo-traditionalist. And we have a couple of friends that fit in the same bucket where they're new media, but they're doing a print magazine. Like that is an old school format that they're bringing back. And so it does slot in well, and I could see it working in the future. I think that we're still early in our journey. And I think we do, back to that track analogy of how you shave off seconds in the interview, I feel like there's a lot more that I want to do personally before we go that direction. But at the same time, I do think that there's content wants to be everywhere.

1:42:25You'll probably be able to see us on cable. No, no.

1:42:28John Coogan:Next year. Is that true? At the same time. Really? John wants to be. Content wants to be everywhere. And so just like I definitely want to be on Spotify, on YouTube, on RSS, on you go on Transistor, check every single podcast player. Also, I want to be on LinkedIn. I want to be on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, all of them. TV is another outlet. And so we 100 % want to be there. And you will be there in 2020. I would expect so. I mean. It'd be fun. But again, we're also, you know, we've talked to the networks that we like admire and there's interest. But at the same time, it's like coming back to being like, we started this effectively in Q1 of this year in this format.

1:43:18And we want to do this for decades. And so.

1:43:23John Coogan:The most important thing is that it is not a win condition. people people often come to us with this question yeah as a win condition yes and and they try and frame it in the same question as like oh will you sell yes win condition so so for a lot of creators it's like you're you you win the game everyone wants to know what does it take to win the game and for a long time it was uh everyone wanted to be like doug demero which means you start a company and you and you sell a slice of it and you get the car of your dreams and then you've won And I'm sure everyone who's ever won knows that you never win and there's only something more and you just keep going.

1:43:59John Coogan:And so now the new win condition that has been placed at our – the gauntlet has been thrown down as like get on TV for some reason. And that's not the win condition. The win condition is the number of years that you do this. It is the 30-year career. It is closing out that story arc of what does it look like to interview Mark Zuckerberg in 2055? What does it look like to talk to Sam Altman in 2045 when we can go back and say, oh, we were talking in 2025 and we're still talking. And the condition for doing traditional cable is that it doesn't change the core show at all. It'll already make three hours a day of content.

1:44:37Exactly. And some of that is suitable for other platforms, but we're not going to sacrifice the product that we've built until this point. And our motivation is to keep making that better and better and better. And we know the things that we need to improve. And we want to keep that magic of waking up in the morning at 530 and being genuinely excited to drive to work. It would be very easy to break the format and break what's special. How exciting is it to be sitting basically a year or so in and thinking, okay, next year we're going to be on TV? I still think for guys of our age, I still think there's something special about showing up on those screens.

1:45:22in front of those days.

1:45:23John Coogan:This isn't Casey Neistat have the story about who he wanted to be on the silver screen then he got to the silver screen. That was his win condition and it wasn't enough. I fully internalized that. I think you guys are, like I, if I was to just say like my perspective on the year, like I think you guys showed us of the value of craft and brand and I think that matters a lot and that's something that I think we lost a bit of sight of. That means a lot coming from you. Everything you guys have said, that's truly what I have recognized is like what you just said of like, the show is first, the product is first and serving the people who love the show is what matters.

1:46:00And I think our world, our industry has lost a bit of sight of that. Yeah. You ended the show with us today. So we just kept kind of podcasting. Everyone was texting us.

1:46:13John Coogan:You guys need to rap. no but but the yeah you see like that we get off the show and we're not like oh pack up let's go home and do something else or it's just like what what was great about that what wasn't yeah what do we change for tomorrow we're oftentimes like making changes to the next day's show immediately after getting off and so it's just that um not enough uh uh our friend david senra who was our first listener to our knowledge because we made the show and didn't share it anywhere and sent it sent it to him and uh yeah yeah exactly uh and he listened and and encouraged us to he we were like how seriously should we take this because it was a we made a couple episodes and he was like you should take it deadly seriously he saw something in us and uh he like goes back to this quote i don't know who the original i'll attribute it to him but someone else uh may may have i think came up with it but like take a simple idea and take it super seriously and not enough people a lot of people will take a simple idea seriously for a little bit and then they'll have some success and they'll be like i gotta think bigger i gotta do other things i gotta do new things yeah just the joy of yeah he gives the example of todd graves chicken fingers chicken finger dream guy is massively successful and the idea is just a chicken finger restaurant but when it's executed extremely well it turns into a multi-billion dollar enterprise with offices and employees and it turns into this massive massive thing uh and david center has a lot of respect for that and i think i think just like one show not uh we're not talent management we're not trying to sell ads on the side or do, I mean, you know, events and this and that and this and that, uh, just the focus on the one simple thing and just, just, just repeat it has been really good.

1:48:08I love that. I love that. Well, thanks guys. Appreciate the time. Uh, hope you guys get a good night's rest and get back in the saddle tomorrow morning. Can't wait. Just one more sleep till we go live again. Thanks, guys. Awesome. Thanks for having us.

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