Behind The Scenes - Every Podcast Mistake We’ve Made In 85 Episodes

27:05But when they do, it's usually really salacious stuff. So those are like tensions around it. But the in-person thing has been really beneficial, too. And I think we realized that during that stretch. A hundred percent. And to your point about consistency, because I've gone back and forth of like, does it really matter? I think it matters for a few reasons. One, it's just like holding yourself accountable to actually doing something. Because if you give yourself license like, ah, we'll just release on Sunday, it's a very slippery slope to Sunday becomes Monday to becomes, ah, we'll just skip this week and we'll go next week.

27:34Well, maybe we should just do it every other week. And then all of a sudden, like you're not producing nearly as much as you would. And so that's the first point. The second point ties to a broader thing of just like building trust with your audience, which is what this is all about. No one episode is going to make you a huge podcast. You might get a banger and it'll get you some new listeners and they'll come along for the ride. But like, ultimately, you need to be doing something consistently over time very well and giving your listeners the sort of the certainty that like, you know, I have a workout class every Tuesday.

28:09I go home. I make dinner. I put on YouTube and my show is going to be there. And if it's not there, I'm a little disappointed. And so like. And you go find something else that's going to fill that spot. And you risk, it's interesting the slope of the line and the graph that we have on low listenership. And I'm going to describe this for people that aren't watching a video here. But basically, when you start, everyone, you get a ton of like drive by people that are willing to listen because it's like, oh, maybe this is a product for me. Yeah. And it turns out like for the vast majority of them, it's not a product for them.

28:43And this is if you launch with something of an audience, like I had a big Twitter audience. And so the vast majority of people didn't like the product. They were like, oh, this guy's not as funny as I thought he was. Or like, he's a little, this is not what I expected. Like, you know, make some more jokes. And so you get a bunch of churn initially. And that continues to happen. People will give you a second shot, a third shot, a fourth shot, or whatever it is. But then you bottom out at some point. And then you start to compound on the way back up. And so the consistency of building that audience of people that listen to you is just really important.

29:17important and what they're coming for is delivering it every time and setting the expectations that you're consistently going to deliver that. One of the interesting dichotomies as well is like you suck when you initially start. You just do. Like no one's naturally good at any of this stuff. And so when your bias is like, oh, let me get the biggest guess I possibly can as my initial episode. And weirdly, that's kind of a terrible idea because you're going to be at your worst. at that point in time. And your audience is going to maybe come in, but then bottom out because they're not going to like you or they're not going to like the product or whatever it is.

29:56And so there's this weird tension of like, how big of a guest do you launch with keeping them going and incremental, but also you being bad. And that's a very weird thing is like you're at your worst and you're trying to get more people to come on. And so I think the best podcasts, for the most part, start out random. And then they compound the people like aren't notable people in the industry for whatever reason. And then they compound over time as they get better. And so by the time most people discover it, they've refined how they do things, right? And so we go look at the people that I admire, like talk to or whatever.

30:34I mean, the Acquired guys started out with a very small listenership and just kept compounding over time. Patrick O'Shaughnessy, same thing. Harry Stebbing, same thing. Lenny started a newsletter and then to a podcast, same thing. Lex Friedman, same thing. All these folks started in relative anonymity and this built a good product and got more people to come in. And I think that's an interesting sort of thing that you just need to work through. You're not going to be very good initially, right? I don't know if we still are, but we're better than we were. So we kept at that. Weirdly kind of times to the rebrand as well, for the most part.

31:08I think by early December, we were mostly doing the same product, doing standalone single interview releases, I think, for the most part by November, December of last year, without a ton of news. I don't exactly remember the timeline. But then we rebranded in January. And we've been more or less the same product since then, for the most part, with the occasional exception of like, whatever, SBF or SBF, but SBF too, but SVB goes under or whatever, like Elon bought Twitter, some like topical episodes and stuff, which I think we'll continue to do, or we don't, we don't have a guest booked and we just sort of talk about ourselves for a while.

31:48Yeah. Well, this is the first of its kind of maybe the last, but we'll see how it does. Hey guys, Rashad here. I'm the producer of the Logan Bartlett show and wanted to take a quick second to make an ask. We are close to 10 ,000 subscribers and are trying to get there by the end of the year. If you're enjoying this conversation and these episodes, please consider subscribing to the YouTube channel. Now back to the show. So how would you describe it? Because we've gone back and forth on trying to create a tagline for the show. And it's some combination of like untold stories of, you know, Silicon Valley to we emphasize a lot of like tactical.

32:25You can learn something from this to go apply it to if If you're a founder, an operator or even an investor, like there are stories that you can take away from this or things that from a hiring perspective, the best question to ask when you're interviewing executives or, you know, how to launch your second product. Yeah, I don't even know what the right description is. And this is why we don't have a good tagline, obviously. But it's some combination of stories, which are certainly interesting and powerful at times. And then the actual insights as well. And I think the stories are the entertainment and the insights are the education, right?

33:00It's sort of like when you think about that dichotomy. And so pulling those things out, everyone has a story to tell, but there's only so many elements of someone's life that is particularly interesting. And so going all storytelling and narrative narrows your TAM a little bit. And then going all actionable insights, I think, can work. And if I had to bias, I would probably bias towards more actionable insights. But I personally enjoy the human side of pulling things out of people as well. And so I don't want to give up on the storytelling thing and elements of that. And so I think the product that I hope people walk away with, both the guest and the listener, is something of a definitive account of, at that moment in time, that person's journey as well as their learnings.

33:52And I don't know what pithy little tagline that ties into, but I think that's the consistent product we've kind of come on. And now we've reached this. There's this funny referential element of like when you you keep up leveling your guests, but the guests also want validation from other people coming on. And so there's this funny little flywheel that you just keep building on of like, well, X person went on and X person is important. So like, okay, now, and each person, no one wants to feel like it's the most important podcast they've ever been on. That was actually a funny, I reached out to Naval one time we were in, or I bumped into him in Miami and I asked him and he's like, you know, I went on Rogan, I think it was.

34:36And he's like, and I never wanted to go on a podcast less important than the one I've been on before. And so I'm never doing another podcast. That's what he said. He's like, I'll do Tim Ferriss because he helped break me in the early days and like make me important. but he's like, I'm not doing podcasts anymore. And I was like, interesting. Uh, so if you, if you break that in a ball, you motherfucker, uh, you lied to me, but it's an interesting thing of like, that's a, that's a funny social proof of, uh, just the compounding that people want the validation. We think about that, right? I like, I will, I still do all the outreach today, uh, to guests.

35:08Um, I still do all the prep today. We've tried to outsource that. And I just, I don't know, I'm too OCD at some point scalably. I might need to more support than I actually do from a research standpoint. But there is a funny thing of how I craft cold emails to whatever, public company CEOs and say why they should come on. And I would say half our, maybe half our guests at this point are cold outreach and half our guests are some referral in. And the cold outreach, it's like, okay, well, I know this person probably views that person as a peer or someone that I know will entice them a little bit.

35:49And that's like an interesting thing of keeping all this stuff going. Is this the same outbounding strategy that you use to get founders to talk to you? A hundred percent. Yeah, it's the exact same thing. It's just like, what is - I've seen some of your notes and I'm like, this is, yeah, yeah. It's like, what can I interestingly and uniquely say to get this person to spend time doing this? And there's a staging as well of like waiting for, okay, I'll wait for that episode to release because then the other person will be more inclined to go do it. Right. And I also think we've by not screwing over PR teams at times by doing a ton of research in advance, we we try to walk away with the other person feeling like they really enjoyed it.

36:34And now I think people recommend it to other people. And I get I get former guests referring in their friends and being like, oh, yeah, you should. I think we've been like since we've we kind of started doing that naturally. And now we've kind of built that into our brand of like we want to be one one of the most well researched interviews that you're going to hear. So you can go listen to 15 interviews of Mark Cuban. But like the one that the Logan Barlett show does is going to be more in depth, more nuanced. Like clearly we have done the prep coming in. And then also the guest is going to like us coming out of the interview.

37:08Yeah, that's an important. Certainly a goal. Like you don't want to be confrontational. I could probably count if we've I don't know how many interviews you've done, 65 or something. I could probably 70. I don't know what the number is, but there aren't many people that walked away, I think, feeling like they didn't get what they asked. They signed up for in it. So I think for the most part, I don't like giving questions in advance to people. But if they really want it, you know, it's like whatever. At the end of the day, I want them to be proud of the product as well, which we found is actually an important thing.

37:43The sharing and all that I think is an interesting. Harry Stebbings originally did a really good job of that, of like making sure the guests shared it and then asking other people for questions in advance and then asking those people to share it on the behalf. And there's like that was definitely something I thought we were above was like asking guests to share the episode. So important. But it's it's that's been an unlocked in the last whatever six months, nine months of just like leaning into that as well, which is just a little lesson. And it feels like you're above like, oh, I don't want to plead with my guest to share it or whatever.

38:13I don't want to plead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes you play because it makes a huge difference. And it's like they're sharing it with their audience. So we'll have, you know, Jody Bonsall on and he has 50 ,000 LinkedIn followers that have been following him for years because of what a great, you know, executive he is. and then he'll be like, here's an hour and a half of me sharing my operating secrets. Yeah. And then you retain X people. Of course they're going to listen to that. That's the thing is there's a very natural bounce rate of people, but you retain and compound, right, over time. And the N you start with is important, then the consistency of delivering what their expectations are, are important.

38:52And then you retain some percentage of them and then that compounds over time, right? I want to hit some of these others sort of like, again, not we are far from a perfect product. We have room to evolve. How embarrassed are we going to be in like a year when we look back on this thing and we're like, oh, God, this is so we thought we had any insights to share with people. It's more framed as mistakes of things that we've completely fucked up so far. But what are some other moments that we've looked at each other and like, fuck, man, it's episode 58. eight why have we not been doing this the whole time i think um some other ones i can think of is is like really leaning into video we we made it a point to i think episode one is on youtube still like we were releasing a video and honestly we made not we we probably shouldn't have released that video on video now episode one definitely isn't on youtube but like episode four or something or whatever but like we should take that down we didn't know how to do video at all we didn't know how to like we did we were just treating it as a listening product on youtube so i kind of treat like i think we treat listening and maybe spotify is just in the middle because they they actually accept video but then youtube is its own beast and then listening as its own beast but um with spot with with the listening platforms there's only so much you can do to get people to listen it's a dumb rss pipe that if you listen to apple podcasts like there's no algorithm the analytics you get back are terrible.

40:15There's no like algorithm that's recommending anything. You can favorite a show or you can follow a show. I don't even really know what that is. But that's it. But it's not like you it's very simple and it's all feed based, like like like just an RSS feed. It's a the benefit of that is that, like, I think you'll have more recurring listeners or or like once people are, you know, that sort of Tuesday night, I'm going to listen to it while I go for a run type listener. They're going to keep coming back to it. And that's definitely the biggest historical market for podcasts. Podcasts, quote unquote, is that, like Apple Podcasts.

40:49Right. I'm cooking, put it on, and make my dinner while I learn how to get better at my job. Yeah. Shows that call themselves podcasts, the majority of those are consumed on Apple Podcasts, for sure. Now, then there's Spotify, which is a little bit in the middle of, like, it's more algorithmic. There's recommendations. We get better analytics back from them. You can do video on it. ratings all that stuff is chapters chapters you have some level of interactivity but for the most part it's still kind of a dark hole of like you publish it like anyone can go release a podcast publish it it'll show up the same as uh a very well established podcast yes and they're getting better at it they're they're they're pushing on a lot of the algorithmic iterations and maybe one day they'll figure out discovery but until then like it's really not worth devoting our attention on those things because all we can do is produce the best podcast listening show that we can and then release it and hope that people go listen to it now youtube is where we probably it's not the majority you know i don't know what percentage of our listenership it actually makes up but it's certainly where we spend the majority of our time it's by far the fastest growing and it's the fastest growing and you have the opportunity for like these mega bangers i don't know what eliezer did probably close to 200 000 views like you're just not going to get that on some of these other platforms it goes viral it like it quite literally goes like viral within the youtube algorithm which is which is not something like you can't go viral on the spotify algorithm or you can't go viral in the apple podcast algorithm right youtube is its own beast so as much of more of a pain in the ass it is so it's it's like it's like 500 more work to to do a podcast that has video but um the reward is like i mean the potential and the number of knobs you can twist on it's more fun i find it way more fun than like but it's infinite it's actually do you hear mr beast talk about this stuff yeah yeah it's it's it's insane the level of algorithmic sophistication and like content iteration you can do.

42:52I mean, our thumbnails, how enticing you make the thumbnails to click on the intro, how long it takes you to set up a guest, how you, whatever, introduce the person, what kind of context you give in advance versus getting right into the conversation itself. Like, there's just so many dials that you can twist on YouTube, not to mention YouTube shorts, which is its own kind of algorithmic, whatever, TikTok clone. There's just descriptions, chapters, intros like how you entice someone to click through and then how you get them engaged in the first minute and then how you retain them like we literally have a different video editing treatment for the first 15 minutes because we know that that's the most important time for and then it compounds right and so if you get better click-through rates because of the thumbnail and you get better uh like listener like less drop-off and it shows more people and so it's it's just all the effort that you can put into that uh is rewarded in an algorithmic way and it's just like you have to iterate on it and just keep getting better each episode we're like a little better at youtube and we're still not great at it you i i don't know would you recommend to someone today to to start youtube first uh and if you're thinking you want to do a podcast is this like worth the squeeze of everything or like first validate that you at least want to do 12 episodes or 20 episodes or 50 episodes and then go there over time.

44:22If you don't have the time, if you're if all of your attention is going on the show itself, I'd say it's better. It's better used there. If you feel like you have a good premise, though, and you have a decent show idea and you have some time to focus on video, then I'd say it's worth uploading. It's it. And the other thing is YouTube's the only one that has a listener and viewer numbers public. Right. And so it's, if you're, if you're starting, it's a delicate balance of like starting and everyone's going to see how many people listen to it unless you're like, yeah. And so you're going to want to keep improving it and you're rewarded for improving it, but it's a ton of fucking effort to improve it.

45:02And the amount of iterations and stuff, I think today, if you were to say, let's take out the core product itself, like the stuff that for the most part, my research, outreach, whatever, all that stuff. And then the scheduling, we get someone there and we get a product set up and recorded everything in post. What percentage of time do you think goes to YouTube versus Spotify and Apple, Spotify and Apple in a bucket together? It's got to be 80 plus. That's what I would guess is 80%. Maybe we don't actually do much to the actual episode, Like the conversation that gets had between you and the guest is for the most part what gets published, with the exception of the PR stuff and whatever.

45:43I would say and I would say everything that goes into Apple and Spotify benefits YouTube. And so like that's a base of what an episode is. And then all the bells and whistles is incremental on top of that and different for YouTube, which has been a very interesting learning. learning. And I guess it's just something that you need to keep working at and getting better. And on an Apple podcast, making one episode or thumbnail or title better than the prior one, you'll never know if it actually worked on YouTube. Like the click through rate percentage that you can see on the episode is just like it's very incremental from one episode to the next.

46:23And so you learn so much more and you can keep improving and optimizing. And it's fun to sort of obsess. I mean, sometimes it drives you crazy, but like, at least you have some visibility like Spotify. It's like, oh, this episode got X thousand downloads. Like, OK, great. I don't really know what was driving that or what wasn't on YouTube. You're like, oh, this many people are coming in from a LinkedIn promotional post that we you can literally see like the inbound traffic. You can see what the click through rate is. You can see how many people YouTube is showing to. and all of those things are very motivating if if you're the sort of operator behind the scenes like trying to make this thing uh big yeah like gives you something to go off of to be like okay next week i hope we do uh better in these different things and i think that ties to a point of just like if you are thinking about doing a podcast or doing a podcast and you're it can be so frustrating at times because you fucked up the intro and it published and you're like god that was a really good episode, but it's so important to just like put that behind you, keep going forward and, um, really just focus on like getting all of the things that you need for a good episode.

47:34Right. And it's so many things, but like, and none of, none of them individually will make or break an episode, but you just got to keep doing them all right. I found that like learning, like looking back, but not agonizing over it and looking in the distance, like looking one episode back and learning, but not agonizing. And then keeping your eyes on downfield on how many you need to do is the most important psychological thing. And so like every episode we do a postmortem on like what we did right, what we didn't do right, all that we learn from it. But then it's kind of snap and move on with the exception of the Keith Reboi Miami incident when they fucked up the audio.

48:15And I still want to if I if I see those guys in the street, I I don't think I've ever been so emotionally distraught from something that happened at work. Yeah. As I was with. Do you want to tell the story of? Well, I mean, the production we hired a production company in Miami, like we have our New York guys. We have our SF people because that's most, you know, 90 percent of the episodes we shoot. But Miami Tech Week, we always do an episode with Keith Raboy. So we had this like local production crew in Miami. I always want to like link that. No, dox them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they just like, they were an audio crew and they just messed up the audio.

48:50They just fucked up the audio. And then we're just like very unapologetic about it after the fact. And they were like, yeah, no, we mentioned it to Logan like midway through the interview. Like we asked him to re-record. It's like, motherfucker, we're not going to re-record 45 minutes. Keith Raboi has 90 minutes to record with us. This is a very important time. And you have one job. Yeah, just monitor the fucking camera. Just tell us that it's good to go, right? Gosh. So with the exception of that, that still pisses me off. I think everything else is kind of like snap and move on after you do the postmortem.

49:24But keeping your eyes downfield on... Get incrementally better each episode, but keeping your eyes... I committed to, I said, four episodes and 12 episodes. And I think it was six months, then 12 months, then another year. And so January 31st or whatever of this year, we'll sign up mentally. There's no obligation. We don't have any advertisers or anything. But we're going to sign up for another season, presumably. And that will be another year. And we'll see if we want to keep doing it. But psychologically, just the commitment to keep going is helpful and not to agonize too much about the past.

49:59The other interesting thing from an interview conversation, like standpoint, and I think I can probably speak to that best, although we obviously tried other formats, is your inclination is to tell a story kind of linearly in a way of like, OK, give me your background and where you went from there. And I found that jumping around and we don't really reorder the episode in terms of how it happens. But sometimes we've pulled forward a segment of the conversation. Right. Just we feel like it's appealing and we'll reorder. Your first 20 minutes matters more than your last 20 minutes. More people are listening.

50:41So we want to. And like if they're if they stuck with you for an hour, right, they'll stick with you most likely for another 15 minutes versus the chances that they don't make it past the 10th minute. If the content isn't interesting is decently high. But asking questions in a way up front that makes people feel comfortable, but then also be willing to dive into the meat of like what you want to get to is an interesting just like tactical thing. And so one of the things that I do when I get together, most of these people at this point, I've never met before. And maybe we've interacted on email a little bit and maybe had good banter or maybe got passed off to a PR team pretty quickly.

51:23But getting like 10 minutes, ideally, with them, just riffing initially, making them feel a little comfortable. And even when we start recording the first like five minutes or something, talking to them in a way that allows them to warm up a little bit rather than if you if you went to the gut of the conversation that you wanted to really ask about initially, their guards definitely up a little bit more. And so I found the longer I spend with people in advance, the more I kind of am able to warm them up if they get there 15 minutes early. Generally, I know that we'll have a great discussion. I've tried to do some prep calls before with people to get them on and say, these people are so busy and it feels it's probably worthwhile.

52:08Maybe that'll be something in a year that I'll look back on. As we have grown, we've earned the license to ask for more from our guests. We used to do one hour. Now we do two hours. And that can be one thing that we ask for in the future. That's decently onerous, actually, of people is we're asking at least two hours from all of these people. And with the most part, we get that. And these are very busy, important people in the world. Hourly rate on. Yeah. Yeah. Per hour rate. Daniel Eck. Yeah. Yeah. Not worth fucking up their audio. Yeah. So so I think that's been something that we've been able to do with time.

52:44And I think when you look at Lex Friedman or Joe Rogan or some of those, like they've gotten longer because they've earned the right to be longer with the guests. The guest is going to come in and sit there and really go through all the different stuff in their career. And I feel like we've gotten more to a point that not only is our guest quality gotten better, but their willingness to dedicate the time to doing it has gotten a lot better, too. So do you want to talk about people are mean and how you've maybe balanced, like taking the feedback we get in the comments on YouTube? Some of it we've actually like because because it can be mean and true.

53:20Oh, totally. I think actually I actually think every every episode has a fair thing to criticize. and uh and uh stylistically there's a lot of things that you can criticize me for that i uh yeah i want to be better at the question asking thing is like the most recent one where i think i'm like in my effort to make people feel comfortable at times i can be a little circular in my question asking and i've gotten better at it but someone called it out one time i don't know if we want to tell people this because now they'll be listening to like hear me ask uh ask you know random questions and stuff.

53:57But, but someone was calling, they're like, just get to the fucking question already. And I'm like, ah, good feedback. Yeah. You hurt my feelings, but this guy spends more time building up to a question than asking it or something. And I'm like, oh, I actually put them up to that. Yeah, exactly. Paid him, paid him to do it. But it is a funny balance of like, that feedback is definitely true. My energy is to get people more comfortable. And so I don't go to the crux of the question initially sometimes, which can definitely be. And it's easy to look at that comment and be like, have the attitude of like, well, you fucking interview, you know, whoever or like, you know, you don't understand.

54:37It's really it's tough. Like you're you're you're you're you're yelling at it in a non Twitter or like YouTube reply person. Yeah. But it's important to take that stuff in. And we know I actually you're actually very accessible. This is something people, if you're made it this far, should know is like you are very accessible on Twitter. I think you respond to a lot on email like YouTube comments. I think every nice comment I've ever gotten, I've tried to respond to in some way in whatever format that that is. And that's gotten harder as it's gotten whatever bigger. But but I think that's really important in the feedback people give or when people reach out and say stuff, I internalize it for good and for bad.

55:21And so when when people are I don't read all the TikTok comments, I guess, to be fair, that's an example of that's a black vortex of of Gen Z people. Very upset with with mostly not me, mostly the guest. But going down the rabbit hole of TikTok comments is like a really funny thing. The most common thread I would say on the people getting the rage on TikTok is usually a more tenured CEO talking about like, hey, I expect my employees to like work hard. And people in the comments are just like, well, it's not fucking fair. Yeah. Oh, typical patriarchal society mindset. Capitalism is like trying to, you know, whatever.

56:06if you'll just like flip out anything it's when someone work is remote work that's my favorite when a ceo i people have stopped sort of taking uh bait on on that because i think it's sort of uh settled out a little bit when it was up in the air a little bit of how things were going to evolve if you asked someone and they were like yeah you know i think we want our people coming in person just tiktok gen the gen z tiktok people will get so fucking mad about like typical boomer mindset wanting us to show up to work and be employed. You know, it's like I that is a funny example. But to your point on the comments.

56:41Yeah, I mean, that is an interesting thing. If you're going to do this and especially if you're going to do what our original product was, which is commentary and opinions and all that stuff, like just be prepared for people to be upset and disagree, where if you have one opinion, the internet will find the people with the other opinions to argue with you about it. And so that's something you do need to have, even as benign and innocuous as like, oh, interviewing tech executives or investors about their career and their operating. Like, that's a pretty benign concept. But still, people find stuff to be outraged about or criticize you for.

57:27Now, the good side of it is, I think, for the most part, our listeners, at least the ones that I've interacted with, are all very respectful and thoughtful and considerate and kind. People that gravitate towards this type of content tend to be people that agree with that sentiment in general. Yes, I have a friend that does a sports podcast and and it's it's really big and it's under the barstool umbrella. And like the stuff he gets said back, he'll be like, oh, you know, whatever. The Giants sucked yesterday. And his comments are like from Giants fans being like, you know what? You suck and you're whatever.

58:04It's like your parents don't love you. And like it's probably because you were adopted as a child or something. And it's like, where did all he said was the football team was bad. And so thankfully, it's not quite that level, but you'll still get it no matter what content you put out there. You'll get people criticizing, which I think is a feature, not a bug of this. If people are willing to invest the time with you, inevitably, like to have 100 ,000 people listen to have 100 ,000 people listen. If you have a 90 percent approval rating, that means 10 ,000 people are going to dislike you in some way, which is that's just a feature of all of large numbers.

58:42And 10 ,000 people saying mean stuff to you can be pretty mean. And if you ever want to be like entertained with that, go to any big podcast or whatever reality show, I'm sure is Reddit sub forum or something. Or go to the YouTube comments or go to their TikTok page and just read the comments from people that presumably even like the show enough to subscribe to the Reddit forum or something. And they are just like brutal to the to the people at all times. Right. And so it's just it's something you got to know going in, especially if you're going to have some level of success. I also think that's an important other thing is what is success for you is an interesting thing to ask yourself going into it because it can be insatiable of just pursuing the next rung in the ladder of, well, you just want the numbers to go up, right?

59:35And to keep bigger, keep growing and be better than before. And at some point you need to acknowledge what success actually looks like and what you want it to be and who you want to emulate. And also when to quit if it's not working. Right. Or if you hate your life. Yeah. Which could be not working. Like if it's not working, it could be you're miserable with it. Right. Finding something that actually resonates with you because it is a grind. We said it earlier, but it's 100 % like the amount of work. I think next week we have right now, I think it's four separate episodes, two hours each. Normally, obviously, number wise, I don't have all those stacked in together, but just the way the scheduling kind of worked out.

1:00:23Yeah. And I'm very underprepared for it. And I need to sit down and do a ton of research. And I'm going to do it over the weekend and spend my whole weekend just kind of listening to other podcasts or reading news articles or just sort of thinking or reaching out to people to ask questions that I should ask. And you need to uniquely enjoy it and also recognize that the journey, no single episode will ever feel fulfilling. And it's like, oh, yeah, if I just get XYZ guest, it's like, no, the second that episode is published and you get the gratification of it being out there, it's on to the next one.

1:01:04And so I think acknowledging that if you don't enjoy the journey, there's no milestone at the end that you're going to get to that's going to feel like, oh, yeah, once you hit whatever, 10 ,000 subscribers, it's like so much better. It's you know, it's not it's like it's just the same. It's the numbers are a little bigger and there's more people saying nice stuff and more people saying mean stuff. And like that's maybe you get better guests on. But the process is no different than what it was before. Well, hopefully this has been some combination of entertaining, educational to our guests. Probably a good opportunity to just thank people that have tuned in and listened to the show.

1:01:44It's grown pretty significantly, especially as we've sort of figured out based on feedback what's worked and what we've enjoyed. Yeah, yeah, no, it's been a really fun. And I mean, any of the one, any of the lessons, I guess, that we have here or postmortem and retrospective with a caveat that I still think we don't know. We know some things, at least the mistakes we've made, but we still don't know. We don't have it figured out. Like we're not we're certainly not the, you know, the top charting podcasts in the world or whatever. These are just sort of our own antidotes, which is, I guess, a good plug to please share with your friends.

1:02:23So we are the top performing podcast in the world. But I think, yeah, it's been gratifying doing this. And the people we've met along the way, both on the listener side as well as the guest side, it's been a fun experience. And I think I'm much better as an investor. Interestingly, I got asked the question now of why I keep doing it by a guest that we're going to have on at some point in the next couple weeks. He's like, why do you do this? And I was like, I kind of I just enjoy it. And I think it makes me a better board member to the companies I work with, both because of the network I've been able to build around it and also the insights.

1:03:09It's one thing to like go learn for the sake of learning. It's another thing to learn to study for an interview with someone. Right. Because you're about to put on a show in front of thousands of guests. You're not going to want to look stupid. So you are going to read every book that - You're going to take notes in a way that goes above and beyond what you would do otherwise. And so I am really appreciative of everyone kind of allowing this to exist because I am, I think, better at my job in a meaningful way as a resource for founders, both because of the network I've been able to build as well as the lessons I've learned along the way.

1:03:47So it's been super fun. So thank you, everyone, for the journey. And, yeah, we'll see. I promise there won't be any more naval gazing episodes here for a little while and we'll get back to your regular scheduled programming by next week but yeah just thank you to everyone for coming along the way

1:04:22Ptyο-icho de movimento Thank you.