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

Speaker A: I mean, the early thing was that we both had years and years of experience in the things that were important, which was YouTube, but on different sides. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Me on the actual content creation, you on the ad sales side. Speaker B: John's one of the few people, and certainly like at the top of the list of people where when I talk about the things that I'm good at, like he's consistently bringing ideas that are better than my own. To come to John with an idea in a, in a space that I'm good at generating ideas in, let's say it's a, it's an advertiser that we're working for and and I'm like, I want to pitch them on this concept and I come with an idea and he's like, okay, what if you did it this way?

Typically when I pitch those ideas to people, they're just like, that sounds great. You're not getting one-upped. And I'm not, I'm not getting one-upped. And so when you have a partnership, it's like you want to be getting one-upped like all the time. The other thing that's real is like we never run out of things to talk about. If it's like a Friday and John is like driving to Santa Barbara, I'm going to Malibu and like instead of taking my driver, I'll just send the driver home like separately and I'll be like, I'm riding with John.

Like John, yeah, we gotta hang out more. John goes out of the way because we're like, Ah, like I didn't get quite enough time. Speaker A: We've been growing this newsletter. Every day I write a couple hundred words just to kind of summarize my thoughts on like the current thing or whatever is in my mind. And I realized like we posted on X as well and we're kind of writing for that audience and I have a vague idea of who's on the newsletter subscription, but I'm not super in there. And I was thinking like, really, like I'm writing this for Jordy.

Like I'm pitching an idea to Jordy. It's like there's a little bit of like Jordy capture in the sense that like I'm trying to find something. I'm not trying to find something that I'm I'm actually trying to make something that will make you, like, tee off. I don't want to bore you. You have, like, a pretty clear vision into what, like, the show looks like in 30 years. And it's not Vice News, where you have a bunch of other people doing other shows. Like, we're not building a media company, a platform with a bunch of other things where it's like, oh yeah, thank goodness.

We don't have to podcast today because we hired hosts. It's like, no, we're building a show. You can look at what Rogan's organization looks like and Huberman's organization looks like. And you can see that you can be doing $100 million a year to offset line with a team of 10. So why not just do that? Speaker B: That means you have to show up every day, but it's also an opportunity to iterate every day. A baker gets to show up every day, they make bread, but every single day they can change tiny little things.

They can change— what if you change the temperature? What if you change the amount of yeast? What if you change the amount of flour? When we think about making the show every single day, we know when the product is great. We feel it. We end the show every day and we're talking through, okay, this section could have been better, that story, that interview was really slow. We gotta like adjust the schedule for tomorrow to make sure that doesn't it again. And so every single day is an opportunity to make the product better.

Every single day is new and trying to really compound it. And I think we've done a good job of that. If you look at just one shot of the show every single day over the last year, you would see very clearly there's like minor iterations happening every single day. And every single day we've learned something new about the show and how to make it better. And I think we'll do that for a very, very, very long time. If you enjoy making things, there's nothing better than content to me because like we can have an idea.

At breakfast and ship it like 2 hours later. So that iteration is just like super addictive. Speaker A: I'm laughing because you're talking about how addictive media is, and I think we're on the 5th hour of podcasting. Speaker C: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 33 with John Coogan and Jordy Hayes, a. N. For those of you who are not as terminally online as I am, they have taken the tech world and the world of Twitter in particular, X in particular, by storm over the last year. They only launched about a year ago and their daily live show, uh, didn't start that way, but what has become a daily live show has absolutely become kind of a center of gravity for the tech world.

I've known Jordy for a while and met John more recently, but getting to watch what they put together and not only how interesting and substantive and compelling, um, but particularly how fun TBPN is. Getting to watch that has been really awesome, and it's no surprise they have so many fans. I was able to crash the Ultradome, which is their studio in Los Angeles, and have a conversation with them about, among many other things, podcasting, building media business, tech culture, building a brand. Something I'm particularly interested in, which is the notion that the tech industry is particularly weak at references and borrowing from historical ideas, other industries, et cetera.

You can look at the media world and the fashion world and see all of the ways they do that. And one of the things John and Jordy talk about is how many ideas they've taken from other industries. And that's part of what has made TBVN feel so fresh and so new. John and Jordy are both serial entrepreneurs. John was an EIR at Founders Fund and made technology-oriented YouTube videos, as well as founding Lucy Nicotine and Soylent, if you remember that. And Jordy has founded a number of companies and invested many more.

Including PartyRound, aka Capitol, most recently BrandedNative, which is a YouTube and podcasting ad network he built early on in his career, as well as several others. It was really cool too to see just why their collaboration makes so much sense and what they bring to the table that both overlaps and contrasts. Uh, you'll, you'll hear that in the very first question when I asked them about technology versus business. This was so fun. I think you'll see, uh, the amount of thoughtfulness and process and consideration that goes into a show that, that sometimes can feel really light and fun and easy was inspiring for me.

In many ways, Dialectic and TBPN are on very opposite ends of the spectrum, and it was cool to meet in the middle. Um, and I learned a lot. Uh, I hope regardless whether you're interested in the media side of things or not, I think there's so much to learn from John Igeordi today about, uh, technology and culture and business and attention and how to build something that actually feels differentiated and fresh and unique. In a world where there is so much competition and there are so many people trying to do very similar things.

With that, here is John Coogan and Jordy Hayes, TPPM. All right. John Coogan, Jordy Hayes. We're here. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having us. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker C: Yeah. Speaker B: Coming to the Ultradome physically and spiritually. Speaker C: Um, we're gonna start really serious. Speaker A: Okay. Speaker C: This is— you, you've spent the last year building a show about technology and business, and so I need to know, what do you love more, technology or business? Speaker B: I think Jon loves technology more. I love business more.

Speaker A: That's fair. Speaker B: And that's why we're a good duo. Speaker C: Yeah, easy, beautiful. Speaker B: Okay, like, Jon really gets, uh, I would say, like, deeper like, super nerdy, super nerds out, technical stuff, much more from a technical standpoint. Meanwhile, like, I've— John started multiple companies. I've done a lot more like deals, right? So investing, helping putting— helping put companies together. Uh, and so that's kind of what, what, what I'm bringing to the table. And then, uh, it's super important when we're doing an interview with somebody, uh, John hits them with a question that they're not expecting from like two non-technical podcasters.

And it just opens up an interview so much more. I think it's really powerful. Speaker C: Yeah. Was that clear coming in or when you first started talking about this? Was that something that kind of was part of the calculus at all? Speaker A: No, not at all. Speaker B: No, I— the story of TVPN is two guys decide they should do a podcast and It's not much deeper than that. Like we, we had, we had talked about doing something together. We had talked about what the right format would be, and John had figured out the format.

And I at one point texted him, we should, it would be really hard to find the original text, but I was like, the name of the podcast is Technology Brothers. And then we just ended up recording the first episode within a couple weeks from that. Speaker C: Yeah. Speaker A: Yeah. I think if you go back and you look at like the first or second episodes, It was actually a crazy full circle moment because in the second episode we reviewed two products. One was an energy drink from our friend John FEO.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, so I found this. Speaker A: And the second product was the Meta Ray-Bans from Meta, of course. And then within a year we were interviewing Mark Zuckerberg and the entire Meta team about the latest Ray-Bans, which at Meta campus at the SportsCenter desk, very different from the second episode, which was recorded in this like, you know, kind of tiny conference room, just two people. I don't even think there were any team members there. There was no like No one was watching it. It was literally— Speaker B: Except David Cenera.

Speaker A: I think Ben— no, no, but I think Ben was sick that day. And so I had to push the button to hit record. So it was just me and you in the studio that day. Speaker C: That was it. Speaker A: But if you go and you look through like the nature of our discussion about the Meta Ray-Bans, from a technical perspective, it's not like we were tearing it apart and looking at the specs. And from a business perspective, it's not like you were pulling up like the financials of the company and trying to like do some deep dive there.

It was more of like just a fluid conversation about some of the lineage of the tech, some of the technology decisions that were made, and then also some of the, you know, branding, marketing, business decisions on who they partnered with. You made a very strong case for the Luxottica partnership being bullish, and we kind of just went back and forth on personal experiences, our thoughts on the technology, how this fits in with Apple and other companies. We just kind of noodled on it for like 35 minutes or something. It was a lot of fun.

Speaker C: It's also funny to go back. The pacing is a little different on those early episodes. Speaker B: Oh yeah, was it more rapid fire? I don't even remember. Speaker C: No, no, you're just— it was literally like you guys are just hanging out, like, oh yeah, yeah, I guess. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker C: Oh, John has this energy. Also, did John— John didn't actually climb all those mountains, right? Speaker B: That's— no, no, no, no, that was like— Speaker C: I've known him for a long time. Speaker A: That is not— I mean, the 14ers.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I, I think early on, early on we had a lot of bits that were really extreme. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: And that was what part of what I think made it magic. And we had a handful of people that were like our very close friends that would listen to it. And so we were really just making it for like a group chat, basically. And then over time we realized like, okay, we got to dial some of these bits back. I— we're both very sarcastic. Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I think a lot of people appreciate that. But there's certainly probably thousands of people out there that like didn't understand sarcasm in a specific moment. Oh, so we have a really good story. So tell the story. We were— Figma launched like the most like normal, somewhat modest product update. I don't even remember. Speaker A: It was the ability to dynamically resize modals or like certain UI elements. You could, you know, say I want this to be 30% of the screen or something like that. It would like dynamically resize the things.

Speaker B: It was a feature that people had wanted for a long time. Speaker C: The heads. Speaker B: And they finally, they finally, they finally shipped it. And we made— we were riffing on, you know, how, how there had been protests in the streets of Brooklyn for weeks demanding that Dylan Field and the team release this update. And we got— somebody crashed out harder than I think I've ever experienced. I've ever experienced. It was like this person made this over. We published it and within, like, by that evening. And this was again, we had, we had like nobody was really very little attention on, on the show or anything like that.

Speaker B: It was a feature that people had wanted for a long time. Speaker C: The heads. Speaker B: And they finally, they finally, they finally shipped it. And we made— we were riffing on, you know, how, how there had been protests in the streets of Brooklyn for weeks demanding that Dylan Field and the team release this update. And we got— somebody crashed out harder than I think I've ever experienced. I've ever experienced. It was like this person made this over. We published it and within, like, by that evening. And this was again, we had, we had like nobody was really very little attention on, on the show or anything like that.

Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: And it was hundreds of posts and comments from one person. Speaker A: I was still working at Founders Fund as an entrepreneur in residence. The guy was messaging Peter Thiel saying, you have to fire this guy because this is just not true. It's just not true. Speaker C: He was like, I'm lying. Speaker B: He was like, I live in Brooklyn. This never happened. Speaker A: He thought it was like fake news instead of just obviously a joke. Obviously people are protesting for better Figma tools.

We love Figma. Speaker C: Maybe that's how you knew you were on to something. You were moving the people's spirits. Speaker A: We were. We were. It was a lot of fun. We were kind of like, man, we got to lock down what we say and maybe our location. This guy seemed kind of crazy. Speaker C: I want to talk a little bit about the business of media, which is more or less what all of this is. Obviously, a lot to do with technology too. Patrick O'Shaughnessy's interview with Jeremy Giffen or Giffen a few years ago, they were talking about how podcasting is still low status.

Yeah. And maybe that's less true than it was then, but I think it's still partially true. And I think you guys have talked a lot about how media is actually the thing. There's not a fund. There's not a bunch of other stuff. Speaker C: I want to talk a little bit about the business of media, which is more or less what all of this is. Obviously, a lot to do with technology too. Patrick O'Shaughnessy's interview with Jeremy Giffen or Giffen a few years ago, they were talking about how podcasting is still low status.

Yeah. And maybe that's less true than it was then, but I think it's still partially true. And I think you guys have talked a lot about how media is actually the thing. There's not a fund. There's not a bunch of other stuff. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Or like, no, it's actually very hot. No, no. Speaker A: Our decision, our key decision was making it even more low status. So we made it— how can you be more low status than a podcaster? Be lower status than a tech podcaster? You can be a tech podcaster who also runs host-read ads constantly.

That's incredibly low status. You can also— we love ads so much. Speaker B: We did ads before we had any sponsors. Speaker A: Yeah, right. Speaker B: And if you listen to the early episode, the first time I did it, I think I ambushed you, right? Yeah. Speaker C: Yeah. Speaker B: And John goes, and now I need to tell you about Feadship. Feadship is one of the world's premier yacht builders in the world. And at no point did we ever say Feadship is a sponsor. We just read. Speaker C: We just were covering that.

Speaker A: Yeah, it was just like before I tell you about the next thing, I I need to tell you because it's amazing. Speaker B: I think we changed this now, but the YouTube channel originally had a section that said this wouldn't be possible without— and it was like Amon, Gulfstream, Feedship. Yeah, yeah. Speaker A: Yeah, it was just like before I tell you about the next thing, I I need to tell you because it's amazing. Speaker B: I think we changed this now, but the YouTube channel originally had a section that said this wouldn't be possible without— and it was like Amon, Gulfstream, Feedship.

Yeah, yeah. Speaker C: Maybe the next level is you get sued by somebody who's mad that you're pretending they're a sponsor of you. Speaker B: We dialed it back. Yeah, we also never said— we never said they were sponsors. Speaker A: No, we never did. Speaker B: We just enjoyed talking about them. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker C: I think media used to be at least more consensus, a great business when there was a lot more scarcity. Speaker A: Sure. Speaker C: Like we live in a world where media is sort of fundamentally abundant and you don't get to lean on, hey, there's only so many channels and there's only so many hours.

And we have like, I don't wanna say it's resting on your laurels, but having one of those slots, it's almost like a taxi medallion or something. Speaker A: Mm-hmm. Speaker C: Um, there was a lot of inbuilt scarcity. Um, I think you guys have sort of zagged and embraced the opposite and leaned into abundance, like quite literally. I think the feeling over the last year of the Rise has partially been you guys just flood the airwaves. Yeah, you can't— there's just so much TVP. And yet I think there's also clearly a consideration around making sure that there's trust and credibility and quality.

I'm curious what it's been like to balance crazy volume and frankly ramping up the volume over the last 8 months. And making sure you're not just like, oh, people know about us and as long as we show up, it's fine. Speaker B: Yeah. So one thing you said early that's worth noting is there's a lot of cable news anchors that would not survive in a free market, right? Yes. They, if they go, if they went and tried to start being a content creator on the internet, they would not win. They win because they work for a company that has distribution that they control, right?

They have a network that they can, distribute content on. And so what you're getting at is that due to the internet and other factors, you had the cost of producing content and the cost of distributing content basically go to zero, right? If you have a cell phone, you can be a media company. And so it is, it is hypercompetitive. What we noticed in tech specifically is that there's a lot of podcasts in tech. Uh, but they are all, uh, they were all almost the same. There was, there was not a lot of formats, right?

And so we had a lot of interview shows, uh, not a lot of other kind of like experimentation around format. And so John's initial insight of what if we did no guests? What if we just had a stack of papers and we just talked through topics? And, uh, that, that was why the show broke through, you know, originally. After that, I think some factor is just that we show up every single day and we try to put on a great show. And so the— if you look over the last year, I don't think there are many people in the industry that have put in the number of hours that we have.

So like part of it is just outworking. Speaker B: Yeah. So one thing you said early that's worth noting is there's a lot of cable news anchors that would not survive in a free market, right? Yes. They, if they go, if they went and tried to start being a content creator on the internet, they would not win. They win because they work for a company that has distribution that they control, right? They have a network that they can, distribute content on. And so what you're getting at is that due to the internet and other factors, you had the cost of producing content and the cost of distributing content basically go to zero, right?

If you have a cell phone, you can be a media company. And so it is, it is hypercompetitive. What we noticed in tech specifically is that there's a lot of podcasts in tech. Uh, but they are all, uh, they were all almost the same. There was, there was not a lot of formats, right? And so we had a lot of interview shows, uh, not a lot of other kind of like experimentation around format. And so John's initial insight of what if we did no guests? What if we just had a stack of papers and we just talked through topics?

And, uh, that, that was why the show broke through, you know, originally. After that, I think some factor is just that we show up every single day and we try to put on a great show. And so the— if you look over the last year, I don't think there are many people in the industry that have put in the number of hours that we have. So like part of it is just outworking. Speaker A: Yeah, 3 hours a day is a lot. But if you look at the ratio between— it's probably 6 hours of prep that goes into every 3-hour show, plus what the team's prepping, it's probably the same ratio of input to output as many other shows.

And so you, you can keep the quality bar high. There's also just the fact of like just leaning back on like authenticity and you with how fast we've ramped the volume, we certainly are not as polished as a highly produced new show with commercial breaks and perfect graphics. All of that is like the startup mentality of like iterate towards it, make the overlay or the chyron a little bit better every single day, make the graphics better. But the audience, because tech loves startups, loves growth, loves, you know, iteration, I think everyone's really accepting of that.

Speaker B: Yeah. With content, you don't have time to rest, right? If you're building enterprise software, you can build a product, you can build some features, you can build some functionality, and the entire team can go on vacation, right? For a week. They can take a long weekend and the product's still gonna function as is. It's still gonna deliver value to consumers. With news, we're in the news business, right? If we're not like— there is no— Speaker C: definitely in the news business. Is that how you think about it? Speaker B: That's like another— we can maybe go down that, uh, that kind of path in a second, but there's, there's no value to TVPN if we don't show up.

Speaker C: definitely in the news business. Is that how you think about it? Speaker B: That's like another— we can maybe go down that, uh, that kind of path in a second, but there's, there's no value to TVPN if we don't show up. Speaker A: There's very little catalog value as opposed to, uh, consider David Senter's Founders Podcast or Acquire or Invest Like the Best, right? Speaker B: And so we took a barbell approach, and so That is, that means you have to show up every day, but it's also an opportunity to iterate every day.

And so, what we, like a baker gets to show up every day, they make bread, but every single day they can change tiny little things. They can change, I really don't understand the process that would go into making bread, but you can understand like, what if you change the temperature? What if you change the amount of yeast? What if you change the amount of flour? And so, that when we think about making the show, Every single day, we, you know, one, the product kind of flows through all of us. It flows through the team, it flows through us.

And so we know when the product is great, we feel it. We end the show every day and we're talking through, okay, this section could have been better. That story, uh, we didn't, we didn't have, uh, the right even information to give the best sort of takes on that. Uh, that sec— that interview was really slow. We gotta like adjust the schedule for tomorrow to make sure that doesn't happen again. And so Every single day is an opportunity to make the product better and you don't have any opportunity to, uh, rest and, and sort of sit back and, uh, there's no, there's never been a moment where we were like, oh, that was a great interview.

Like we can take the next week. We, next week will be easy, right? It's like every single day is new and bringing that, uh, trying to really compound it. And I think we've done a good job of that where it's like if you look at just one shot of the show every single day over the last year, you would see very clearly there's like minor iterations happening every single day. And some of that is like actually in the content and the ordering and things like that. But every single day we've learned something new about the show and how to make it better.

And I think we'll do that for a very, very, very long time. What ends up being interesting is, is that if you want to— we've had a lot of people be Inspired by TVPN, we've had a lot of people be a little too inspired, maybe copying, but going from zero to people see what we're doing today, going from zero to what we are today would be like even impo— like almost impossible for us. Like it would be like, it would be very, very challenging because we started with a once a week show, one camera, two mics, talking through some posts.

Then we added another show, then we added another camera, then we added new microphones. And we added this, then we added an overlay, then we added live, then we added guests, then we added 5 days a week, then we added new channels. Then we did, you know, it's just like this constant kind of compounding. Speaker A: Even the first episode. I mean, I think a lot of people don't realize this, but the wide shot on the first episode is technically a visual effects shot because I put— I wanted, I wanted a more moody cinematic lighting setup.

So I put the, put the light stand behind us so that we would be backlit. So it kind of have this like dark room vibe. Yeah, I wanted something more cinematic. Yeah, exactly. But when you do that, if you don't have like, you know, a huge lighting rig that can actually rig something out of frame to the ceiling, you wind up with a light stand in the background. Eventually we just wrapped American flag about it, around it, because I was sick of doing the VFX. But I went in and like painted out— no way!

Yeah, I mean, I think it did like AI insertion or whatever, but like I did like content-aware fill and then overlaid that over the shot. And so you can't see the light in the shot, but it— but we're lit from the back and it has this kind of like hanging out in an old school law firm vibe. And even that was like a very considered decision that was built on, you know, I was making videos for years and had experimented with like, what happens when you just point the camera, point the light directly at your face?

Well, it looks kind of bland. What if you put it off to the side? It looks a little bit better. What if you put it behind them? It looks even better and kind of iterating through that. So yeah, it's a tough challenge to try and clone all this on day one. I think that it's something that— it's fine to be inspired by TVPN and be like, I want to take media seriously. And maybe you start as like, some things are inspired. But all the different things, they're all happy accidents that came together, different ideas.

And they kind of grew and found their place within the show. It would be very hard to try and like, it would, yeah, it'd be very hard to like copy paste all of this. Speaker C: Well, it would also be, it would, it would've been hard for you guys to plan totally a whole bunch of that stuff. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker C: There's another element of this that is maybe a little less true for you given the YouTube stuff, but I think still broadly true, which is you've both been serial entrepreneurs and you've done a whole bunch of different types of things.

You are in this, you are both entrepreneurs and you are also talent. Mm-hmm. Speaker A: Um, yeah. Speaker C: There's a line where you say, we are the talent and we'd like to remain the talent and not build an empire. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker C: Um, and I think on one hand, like the world has certainly started, I think this is also something you said, like, um, because of the internet media has rewarded networks, like platform networks and it has rewarded creators. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker C: And the middle is really, really hard.

Speaker A: Barbell is a super key concept that we love and we want to keep coming back to as much as possible in this. Speaker C: The other element of this though, I think at least coming from the business world and from the entrepreneurial world is on some level you're like kind of labor. You're not really capital. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker C: Obviously there are elements where you're having sort of leverage. And so I'm curious what that maybe even especially more so for you, like as someone who I think was always like always thought a lot about distribution, but was not in the spotlight.

What that experience has been to sort of manage the, the dual role as the guy on camera and the showrunner and the business guy, like all of those things at once. Obviously some people do, but that's a little less typical for the typical internet creator. Totally. Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, often, like with other more mature shows, there's people in every seat and the talent comes in to host the show and that's merely one piece, and then there's a whole ad sales organization and HR and finance orgs and whatnot. I think it's actually not that hard because we've both done it multiple times.

And you sit on top of all these different SaaS products, so you can really leverage software in a lot of places, whether it's set up payroll software or whatever you need to build your business. It's pretty turnkey now to like set up the business around it. Of course, there's like other key decisions, but I think the key flywheel that we really embraced early on was, um, I would push as hard as possible on iterating the content, finding new formats, upleveling the production. And Jordy was really good at the business side, setting up the business, but also bringing on advertisers and building the vision of like what that flywheel could be.

And once that flywheel got going, it paid for this UltraDome and whatnot. And we were able to take this way more seriously than I think a lot of— at least my previous YouTube channel, I never really turned it into a business. And so I never really thought about, oh, what would it look like if I put $100K into this? It was just like, yeah, yeah. It's like my Twitter account is how I thought about my YouTube account. Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, often, like with other more mature shows, there's people in every seat and the talent comes in to host the show and that's merely one piece, and then there's a whole ad sales organization and HR and finance orgs and whatnot.

I think it's actually not that hard because we've both done it multiple times. And you sit on top of all these different SaaS products, so you can really leverage software in a lot of places, whether it's set up payroll software or whatever you need to build your business. It's pretty turnkey now to like set up the business around it. Of course, there's like other key decisions, but I think the key flywheel that we really embraced early on was, um, I would push as hard as possible on iterating the content, finding new formats, upleveling the production.

And Jordy was really good at the business side, setting up the business, but also bringing on advertisers and building the vision of like what that flywheel could be. And once that flywheel got going, it paid for this UltraDome and whatnot. And we were able to take this way more seriously than I think a lot of— at least my previous YouTube channel, I never really turned it into a business. And so I never really thought about, oh, what would it look like if I put $100K into this? It was just like, yeah, yeah.

It's like my Twitter account is how I thought about my YouTube account. Speaker C: Fascinating. Speaker A: And I didn't think about it as, OK, well, if you go and find partners that can actually invest and promote or pay to advertise in the content, you can make better content. And of course that makes sense. I never really took the plunge with the video essay or documentary channel. But with this, those two things aligned really, really quickly. And so we were able to just— it was very easy for us in just the course of a couple months to go from, oh, this is kind of cool, to let's invest everything in this and put every dollar possible into it and every moment of time because this can really feed off of each other.

Speaker C: Fascinating. Speaker A: And I didn't think about it as, OK, well, if you go and find partners that can actually invest and promote or pay to advertise in the content, you can make better content. And of course that makes sense. I never really took the plunge with the video essay or documentary channel. But with this, those two things aligned really, really quickly. And so we were able to just— it was very easy for us in just the course of a couple months to go from, oh, this is kind of cool, to let's invest everything in this and put every dollar possible into it and every moment of time because this can really feed off of each other.

Speaker B: Yeah. As much as it was unplanned, right? We didn't plan to— we didn't have a crystal ball and say to ourselves— Speaker A: 3-hour livestream. Speaker B: If you had asked either of us a year ago, maybe not a year ago, because we had started doing the show, but 2 years ago, do you have any interest in— would you have any interest in being on camera for 3 hours a day, creating some type of technology television show? And we would have said, like, ah, maybe we'd hear it out, but it wasn't, certainly wasn't on the roadmap.

And at the same time, when you look back through our careers, it feels like TBPN is the natural evolution of everything that we've worked on, right? I, a decade ago, I spent a summer helping a podcast monetize for the first time. They had gotten to top 10 in the fitness charts and they hadn't monetized at all. They had somebody reach out to them and say, hey, like, I like the show, could I sponsor? And they were like, sure. Like, we were doing this for fun, but if we could make some money from it, then great.

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

And then went on to build PartyRound, which is when we met. And, uh, that was taking everything I knew about media. And then, uh, really when you look at PartyRound's best work, it was like entertaining the industry, right? We would do things that got a lot of attention and we'd funnel that attention into the, into our fintech product. But ultimately, when I look back in the work that I'm most personally proud of from that, from that era that I can say like, this wouldn't have happened without me, it's the effectively like the media side.

And so I'd got to experience having, I think we had like marketing market fit, right? At a time when we didn't have, uh, the product at that time, you know, kind of, you know, we had a lot of demand, right, during the craziness of 2021. Um, but, uh, but like taking that and then you fast forward to starting, uh, this show, it's like John had been— if you look back and like Soylent is one of the most iconic, it's the most iconic CPG company ever in the history of like tech specifically, right?

So, uh, when you look back and you can find like, it's like, okay, it makes sense that that, you know, a decade later, John would, would have like a show for the industry, right? A media product. And so you add John spending years like understanding the craft of creating content, right? And you combine everything I knew from the entertainment side in terms of just like creating things that were entertaining and fun. And then everything I knew from the revenue side of modern media businesses And then you apply John's understanding of the craft of making content and understanding, understanding content at a deeper level.

And, um, the thing that I always come back to is, uh, John's understanding that with, with content, your product is not like the, the, the file that you upload to YouTube. It's the format of what you're doing. And so all you add all of those key insights together. And I feel like we both started working on TVPN like a decade ago. Right? And so able to like stack those learnings and then combine that with— we don't take ourselves very seriously. And I think that, that, that's an important part of the show, right?

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

We have to perform. And so if we're not having, if we're not having fun or it's not going well, like we have to like viscerally, we've all met founders that will like things aren't going well and they can kind of check out, right? They can kind of just like— Speaker C: Also, you can tell. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker C: You can tell when it's— when somebody is on camera and they're not having fun, you can tell. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: It's 100% right. Speaker C: There's, uh, I think there's something that's pretty common in, at least in the creator part of the world, but increasingly as people gain audience, um, part of it is audience capture, but part of it is just like the simple ego that comes when a critical part of why you're successful is your distribution.

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

And I realize like there's a little bit of like I'm writing for like we post them on X as well and we're kind of writing for that audience. And I have a vague idea of who's on the newsletter subscription, but I'm not super in there. And I was thinking, like, really, like, I'm writing this for Jordy. Like, I'm pitching an idea to Jordy. And it's like, there's a little bit of, like, Jordy capture in the sense of, like, I'm trying to find something. I'm not trying to find something that'll make you happy.

I'm actually trying to make something that will make you, like, tee off. I don't want to bore you. I want you to be like, I have a strong story. Speaker B: The newsletter is— we meet at 6:30 every morning. We try not to adjust the schedule at all. We've tried to fit— breakfast in with external people, it doesn't work at all. And so, we try to have the exact same morning every morning leading up into the show. And the process that's worked well is we show up and from 6:30 to 9:15, we just talk about what we're planning to talk about on the show and we debate a bunch of stuff and we sort of sharpen our thinking and just go back and forth.

And so, the entire time that we're working out in the morning, it is just back and forth on whatever is top of mind, whatever we think we're going to be talking about, um, the most. And so by the time you show up to the office, usually I get immediately start getting on Zoom meetings for whatever we're working on in the business, and John starts just writing. Speaker A: And so I've never had writer's block because I'm just kind of like transcribing the discussion that we already had. Yeah, but I'm like, like, yeah, the wheel's already spinning.

Yeah, I'm just kind of like rephrasing it to be like, oh, are there some data points? You know how if you're in an argument with somebody, eventually you go ChatGPT, look up the facts, get some facts. And so I do a little bit of that and then I bring that to the show and we kind of rehash what we've already talked about, but we kind of know the general parameters of like the key discussion for the day. And then that can kind of like lead to— Speaker B: There's been like maybe 2 shows where one of us like got arrived late and you just got to kind of go right.

You got like get to the studio and you have like 20 minutes and you go live and that feels just terrible. Speaker A: Yeah. Because it's— Speaker B: It's really like, it's such an important part of the day that whatever, uh, it's effectively 3 hours of just like fun debate on what you want to talk about. Speaker B: There's been like maybe 2 shows where one of us like got arrived late and you just got to kind of go right. You got like get to the studio and you have like 20 minutes and you go live and that feels just terrible.

Speaker A: Yeah. Because it's— Speaker B: It's really like, it's such an important part of the day that whatever, uh, it's effectively 3 hours of just like fun debate on what you want to talk about. Speaker A: It's also a very unique thing about this particular show. Like if you go to any traditional media, like Daily Show, like there is a room of writers that are putting together a monologue and it's very rare that the hosts are doing all of the work. Speaker B: Um, and I think that, yeah, sometimes I see clips from other, other shows and, uh, I just assume that everyone does their own homework, and I don't think that's the case at all.

But that's part of what makes the show great, is that we want to keep that conversational feel, right? This is, this is two people trying to understand the world with guests, right? And we try to lean on guests. We can't be We, we talk on any given week, we're covering 30 different industries. Uh, you know, every, every, you know, there, there's such a broad spectrum. And so we can't possibly be experts. It has to be conversational and it has to feel like you're sitting here, you're hanging out with us and you're just trying to understand the world.

Speaker A: And so even from like, we have a lot of aesthetics of linear TV and in traditional media. But I think that our audience generally holds us to the bar of a livestream where it's high and low together. It's a little bit of— it has the aesthetics of the polished TV that has a whole writers' room and a teleprompter, but there isn't one. And it's much more like watching somebody flip through the news on their computer on a livestream like you'd see on Twitch, just chatting. Right. And so we've, we've kind of like pulled these two things together, like Twitch just chatting and then, you know, traditional NBC, ABC, Fox or whatever, and kind of combine those a little bit to kind of create this new thing.

Maybe it kind of hits different. Speaker A: And so even from like, we have a lot of aesthetics of linear TV and in traditional media. But I think that our audience generally holds us to the bar of a livestream where it's high and low together. It's a little bit of— it has the aesthetics of the polished TV that has a whole writers' room and a teleprompter, but there isn't one. And it's much more like watching somebody flip through the news on their computer on a livestream like you'd see on Twitch, just chatting.

Right. And so we've, we've kind of like pulled these two things together, like Twitch just chatting and then, you know, traditional NBC, ABC, Fox or whatever, and kind of combine those a little bit to kind of create this new thing. Maybe it kind of hits different. Speaker C: There's also just like, I'm sure you guys have talked to Sinner about this too, where he's like, he's had people be like, why don't you hire somebody to read the books for you? Oh yeah, you're so not getting like, oh my gosh, if there's like a, yeah, all, there were 25 interns who came in.

I came in this morning and they all told me that they showed me all the lines they wrote for you guys just now. Speaker A: Yeah. There's only one intern in today. Speaker C: It's, yeah, it's, it's clear that it's you guys. One last thing on the business thing, I guess, would be, and you started to talk about just the reciprocal nature between the, the content and the business. Speaker A: Sure. Speaker B: Why? Speaker C: Also, we talked about the low status part, but why, what do you love about the business of advertising and why is it such an empowering, like advertising kind of gets a bad rap.

Maybe especially in tech, ironically. Speaker A: Sure. Speaker B: Why? Speaker C: Also, we talked about the low status part, but why, what do you love about the business of advertising and why is it such an empowering, like advertising kind of gets a bad rap. Maybe especially in tech, ironically. Speaker A: Yep. Speaker C: What about advertising is so powerful? Speaker A: Price discrimination. There are people that follow the show that are billionaires. There are people that follow the show that are in college. And so if you find a great product that you can— that where that company can get both of those people as a client and extract literally $1 billion from the multi-billionaire who runs a massive company, and then also help the college students start their first company and extract— Speaker C: maybe win them for life— Speaker A: $200 a month on the SaaS revenue once they get into YC or something like— you can actually capture value from both, and that's only possible with advertising.

If you're selling t-shirts, the billionaire shows up and says, "I'd like a t-shirt," and you say, "Do you mind paying $100?" Yeah, I think what independent media companies and creators love more than subscri— Speaker B: like, what they love about the subscription business model is that they have some amount of revenue consistency, right? They like feeling— and it's really easy for them to think, okay, if I get to 1,000 subscriptions, if I get to 10,000, if I get to 100,000, raise money on that. It's really— yeah, yeah, that, or just it's really easy to understand, like, okay, I can, uh, your lifestyle is just very— it's predictable, right?

And so Uh, what I love, uh, what I love and, and why we were excited about advertising was that, I mean, uh, obviously for, for what John said, but also there's, uh, we have never charged a member of our audience a dollar, right? And over a year, uh, we, we haven't even sold merch, right? All, every, all the merch that we've made, we've just given away. And, uh, that is a beautiful thing that, that there's like roughly 15 or so companies that have like effectively financed TVPN so that it's free for the entire world.

Right. And I actually think that's a beautiful, beautiful thing. Uh, I think where advertising gets a bad, uh, rap is, uh, non-targeted advertising. So if you're getting ads that, that, uh, every once in a while I'll get an ad that I'm like, why did I get this ad? That's like, that, that's like actually not a great experience. And then high, high ad loads. So like we have a higher volume of ads than the average podcast, but we actually have a much lower percentage of the actual content is advertising. Speaker A: Way lower than TV.

Speaker B: Yeah. So TV is— Speaker A: When you watch a TV show, it's 22 minutes in a 30-minute segment. That's 10 minutes of ads. We're an 180-minute show, 3 hours. There might be 5 or 10 minutes of total ads across that, which is less than 10%. Speaker C: And the content in the ad is actually much closer together. Speaker A: Totally. Speaker C: Obviously, that's And that's been the case for— one, maybe, I guess one other criticism would be that broadly, not necessarily for you guys, is that it just shifts the incentives.

Speaker B: Yeah. So here's the thing. As much as possible, we're trying to work with the most boring companies on Earth. They're not boring to us. Speaker C: Right. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: They're companies that the world does not wake up every day and say, I want to learn about this company. Right. And so we sell attention to those companies. Right? And there's a lot of companies in the world that should not be waking up in the morning thinking like, how can I be the next Clueless? Right? Like, they should be thinking, how do I build a fantastic product that I can get a meaningful amount of our market and figure out new products?

There's so many other things that they should work on. And so there are companies like OpenAI that doesn't have to spend a lot of money on advertising because people just talk about OpenAI all day long, right? We cover there's not a day that has passed probably that we haven't talked about OpenAI, right? You have the birth of a new hyperscaler, right? It's the thing that people are fixated on. And so, you know, we even joke that we expect venture capital firms to eventually realize instead of making a derivative podcast that people— that's not actually going to be a great product.

Why don't I take that money that I was going to spend on producing a show that no one's going to listen to and just advertise with great podcasts that I love. Right. And so that will happen eventually. It's already happened in finance, right? Flip through the Wall Street Journal, flip through any important magazine, and you'll, you'll, you'll find advertising. Speaker A: Goldman Sachs has a podcast. Blackstone, BlackRock. I'm pretty sure they both have podcasts, but they also advertise on F1 or TV or CNBC. Like they run ads because they need awareness.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great point. Speaker B: Yeah, the main thing is content just wants to be free. Ask any creator that, uh, that, uh, I would even say Ben Thompson probably realizes that he wouldn't, uh, he, his show was born at a time when X was happy to promote your links, right? And he was super early to a generational trend. And it would be very hard to like recreate that of having this massive base of of paid subscribers, uh, there was just like less competition, I think, for like truly great technology analysis.

Speaker C: Now you're fighting gravity. Speaker B: And, um, yeah. And the other thing is like, you know, we, we wanted to create a business that didn't require us to do other things, right? Uh, we've seen, it's pain. It pains me that, uh, for the last however many years everyone has been on this path of I make great, I make content that's great enough to justify doing something else. And every time somebody does that, they then are in competition with somebody who doesn't have the other. Yes. Speaker C: Yes. Speaker B: And so, like, you know, we joke about venture capitalists like taking a lot of vacations.

But if you are trying to make a media business and you're competing in a market where there are a bunch of people that want your audience, they want the attention that you have, and they don't have like a venture fund. And then you go and you— you're a media creator and you start a venture fund. It's like, Well, who, who's your customer now? Is it your LPs? Is it the founders? Is it your audience? Right. I generally predict that, uh, that, you know, people will continue to distract themselves, but, uh, we, we wanted to build a business that didn't, that, that we weren't like, okay, now we've had a little success.

Uh, we have some momentum now let's diversify. Right. It's like staying ruthlessly focused on the content itself, uh, because that's what our audience deserves. Right. We every single day, I wish that, I wish that I had an extra 3 hours to like prep for some story that we want to talk about because people are tuning into the show every day and they deserve to get the best possible experience. They don't care that I, if I were to start a venture fund or we have a venture fund and we're like, oh yeah, like couldn't prep for the show this morning because I was trying to win this deal, right?

Why does the audience care about that? Speaker C: We're all doing that in so many little ways throughout like it's just so tempting to focus on like, just, I'll just do a little bit else. Speaker A: It even happens within the context of— we have been extremely focused on media. We haven't done a fund or company or spin-out tech product or anything like that. But even within TVPN, we've thought about, is the newsletter too much of a distraction? Or is it actually synergistic? I think we got it to a place where it's synergistic because it serves as— a way to prep the show.

It serves as a way to prep discussions that will happen on the show. Speaker B: The actual newsletter is exactly— Yeah, and it's the most efficient way to consume the show, right? Watching— if you have the luxury of watching the livestream every day, it really is a luxury, right? And it's not an efficient way to get news. And that's okay, right? People for generations have liked having a TV on in the office and doing their workday and being able to sort of passively understand what's going on through that. But, um, the newsletter again is like the most efficient way.

If you want TVPN in 2 minutes, that's how you do it. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker C: This show began as something called Technology Brothers. Um, you mentioned it earlier, PartyRound and Capital. Like, I think more than almost anything else, you were amazing at tapping into like the technology culture zeitgeist. Obviously you've done over 250 videos, not only tech, but like a whole lot about about the business of and the culture around technology and its entrepreneurs. I think tech is often criticized as being sort of like lacking in culture or unaware of culture, but clearly technology has its own culture as well.

And in many ways, like as much as this is a show about technology and business, it is a show about the culture of the technology industry. Can you talk about maybe the way you relate to that or think about, like, are you, is that, is that something you're kind of like consciously? Like, maybe another way of asking— Speaker B: I think, I think the meta— I think technology is too inspired by technology. Uh, if you think about, uh, uh, best example of this is like the browser company, right? Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Novel way to name a company, and they were able— like, that, that was just the name— naming of that company was valuable because it stood out. It's like, wait, this is a consumer tech company, they're creating a browser, they have this like cursive logo mark, uh, it just stood out immediately. Right. And you could— Speaker A: videos. Speaker B: Yeah. And you could tell that it was inspired. It wasn't like they were the first company. They, they weren't the first company in the world to name themselves like the blank company.

Yes. But they were the first people in tech to do it and do it really well. And since then, over the years, we've, uh, you know, we've seen like probably 100 companies created with that. Right. And it pains me. It pains me every single time because is the, the, the, the, the, one of the things that people in tech do is they just copy from within the industry, right? Because we've been trained, we've been retrained to say that like, you know, the best people copy, right? Great artists steal. And it's like, I think that great artists actually steal from elsewhere, right?

They're not like, they're not like, oh, this great artist did something. I want to be a great artist. I'm going to do art exactly like— Speaker A: Copy of the Mona Lisa. Speaker C: Creativity is almost definitionally like —of course. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Diverse, diverse inputs. And so, uh, so I think what we, what we, you know, one of the things that we've done well, and I did, you know, I did this historically with, uh, with, with kind of everything that I've worked on is like, it's, it's great to copy.

It's great to get heavily inspired, but do it not for the category and the industry that you're competing in with the original person, right? Or not even competing with mindshare, right? So the second company to do after the browser company to do the blank company and like a cursor a cursive font. Uh, they probably got a little bit of attention because it was still somewhat novel, but now we're seeing like the 5th and 6th and 7th wave of naming companies in this way. And it's like the biggest anti-signal to me, right?

It says like, you are not an original thinker. And maybe you just didn't want to take the time to like find a unique domain name. But even, even that says like, you're not, you're not, you're not like heavily inspired. And so What TVPN has done is always borrowed from outside the industry. Right. So like we borrowed suits, right? We borrowed mahogany. Yeah. We borrowed mahogany, right? The official wood of business, right? That was not a— it wasn't a wood that I didn't know. Well, that's— I just call it that. But yeah, we— is a good example.

Yeah. Speaker A: Copy of the Mona Lisa. Speaker C: Creativity is almost definitionally like —of course. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Diverse, diverse inputs. And so, uh, so I think what we, what we, you know, one of the things that we've done well, and I did, you know, I did this historically with, uh, with, with kind of everything that I've worked on is like, it's, it's great to copy. It's great to get heavily inspired, but do it not for the category and the industry that you're competing in with the original person, right?

Or not even competing with mindshare, right? So the second company to do after the browser company to do the blank company and like a cursor a cursive font. Uh, they probably got a little bit of attention because it was still somewhat novel, but now we're seeing like the 5th and 6th and 7th wave of naming companies in this way. And it's like the biggest anti-signal to me, right? It says like, you are not an original thinker. And maybe you just didn't want to take the time to like find a unique domain name.

But even, even that says like, you're not, you're not, you're not like heavily inspired. And so What TVPN has done is always borrowed from outside the industry. Right. So like we borrowed suits, right? We borrowed mahogany. Yeah. We borrowed mahogany, right? The official wood of business, right? That was not a— it wasn't a wood that I didn't know. Well, that's— I just call it that. But yeah, we— is a good example. Yeah. Speaker A: So, yeah, even some sales cultures, but certainly not like a common tech totem. Yeah. Speaker B: And then if you look at the show, the New York Times on Sunday called us like LinkedIn or SportsCenter for LinkedIn.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is hilarious because, yeah, it's probably a great way to explain it to somebody that reads the New York Times. But we've never— I've maybe watched an hour of SportsCenter in my entire life across 29 years. Right. An hour of SportsCenter. So that wasn't even the inspiration, even though aesthetically We drew some inspiration if you look at our graphics packages and things like that. Uh, and then, and then from a, from an advertising standpoint, like I told every advertiser earlier that we were building a Formula 1 team, right?

And that, uh, we weren't just gonna give you a host read ad here or there. We were going to bring you into the entire world that we were building, right? And so we're constantly borrowing, but we're trying not to borrow Uh, we even had, we were working on something, uh, we, we had a, uh, an entire product drop that we were gonna do. We were gonna send TBPN, like whey protein to like 1,000 companies that are our, you know, friend, friends and friends of the show and things like that. And another company did like a supplement drop before and we just dropped it cuz we were like, we had done all the work to, to do it.

We just, we hadn't hit go on the PO and we just said like, it, it's no longer gonna be that interesting. and we don't wanna fast follow within the same, within our same kind of like world. Right. And so I think that's my biggest critique of tech is like, there's the, a really big world and you can go and borrow from anywhere. Speaker A: So, yeah, even some sales cultures, but certainly not like a common tech totem. Yeah. Speaker B: And then if you look at the show, the New York Times on Sunday called us like LinkedIn or SportsCenter for LinkedIn.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is hilarious because, yeah, it's probably a great way to explain it to somebody that reads the New York Times. But we've never— I've maybe watched an hour of SportsCenter in my entire life across 29 years. Right. An hour of SportsCenter. So that wasn't even the inspiration, even though aesthetically We drew some inspiration if you look at our graphics packages and things like that. Uh, and then, and then from a, from an advertising standpoint, like I told every advertiser earlier that we were building a Formula 1 team, right?

And that, uh, we weren't just gonna give you a host read ad here or there. We were going to bring you into the entire world that we were building, right? And so we're constantly borrowing, but we're trying not to borrow Uh, we even had, we were working on something, uh, we, we had a, uh, an entire product drop that we were gonna do. We were gonna send TBPN, like whey protein to like 1,000 companies that are our, you know, friend, friends and friends of the show and things like that. And another company did like a supplement drop before and we just dropped it cuz we were like, we had done all the work to, to do it.

We just, we hadn't hit go on the PO and we just said like, it, it's no longer gonna be that interesting. and we don't wanna fast follow within the same, within our same kind of like world. Right. And so I think that's my biggest critique of tech is like, there's the, a really big world and you can go and borrow from anywhere. Speaker C: You guys do a really good job of being sort of like insider outsiders. Um, both maybe personally also, like we're here in Hollywood, we're not in Silicon Valley.

Like that, it's one thing to say like have diverse inputs. I'm curious how for both of you, that has actually— how that, like, is that a super intentional thing? Is that just kind of your natural curiosity? Speaker A: I think it's very clear that if you look for inputs on how to make a TV show look good in Silicon Valley, you're not going to find a bunch of great examples. And so it's much better to just go where they make great stuff and pull from that. Speaker C: And so Hollywood's dying, man.

Like, I don't know, I thought they had no good ideas. Speaker A: I, I don't mean Hollywood specifically. Speaker B: Actually, I totally— so I think Hollywood doesn't have maybe a ton of amazing new ideas. The beautiful thing is we come up with ideas all the time of like, okay, you take that show, that format, no one's done that in tech. If you do that, it will be a hit. And if you do it well, it'll be a hit. It'll be new to me. People will be like, wow, they're geniuses.

Speaker A: I mean, when we were thinking about like, how do we want the look of the show to feel? We didn't just look at Pat McAfee and SportsCenter and CNBC. We also— I also looked at like, like how news shows have been filmed throughout history. Like what in the 1980s? Yeah, yeah, yeah. If there was a movie about a news show or it featured a cut to, you know, let's go to the news show. What does that look like? What's that aesthetic? How does Hollywood portray a news studio when they have cinema gear and they can do proper lighting?

Speaker C: And everybody has something in their head when they think of that. Yeah. And that's partially a product of the cultural time or whatever. Yeah, that's really cool. Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, there's a— there's an Apple TV show called The Morning Show. There's a whole variety. Uh, Aaron Sorkin has a show about the news as well. And there's been a bunch of places where we pulled like visual references. I mean, even right now, like, this set design is much more moody and contrasty than pretty much any TV show. Pat McAfee, CNBC, Fox News, ABC, like all of those are much brighter sets.

Well, ours is— has a lot more contrast, a lot more like— it has a lot more cinema in there. We're even filming on cinema cameras instead of TV cameras. Like, that's a deliberate choice. Um, and, and like, I wouldn't even know to find that. I wouldn't find that reference in, in tech specifically. Speaker B: Yeah, I would say we we have maybe found one idea within tech to make the show better this year, and we found hundreds from outside of tech. And so whenever I'm watching or consuming any type of media that's non-tech media, I'm like pausing, screenshotting it, sending it to John, sending it to Ben, saying, hey, look at this.

This is cool. We should, we should implement this kind of thing. And that just doesn't— and again, like tech is just kind of very circular. Yeah, they're seeing like, oh, this other VC podcast did this thing. Yeah, we should do that. There's no, no broader field of view. Speaker C: And by the way, other industries are like— fashion's a great example of an industry that's really good at this. They're constantly looking elsewhere. Speaker C: And by the way, other industries are like— fashion's a great example of an industry that's really good at this.

They're constantly looking elsewhere. Speaker B: Totally. There's something— oh, it's the best. It's the best example of that. They'll, they'll, they'll— a fashion brand for that is planning their, their fall/winter 2026 season now. Is going into the archive of another brand, or they're finding like some ad campaign from Coca-Cola, and they're like, look at this, like, this is amazing, let's bring that into the present. Speaker A: This is true in, in other like Silicon Valley companies. Like, we were just looking at, uh, Android launched a new augmented reality headset. It's like, that's not pulling from what Boeing is doing.

Speaker B: They pulled it from Call of Duty. Speaker A: They pulled from Call of Duty. It pulled from like anime. It also pulled from tech, which is not defense, which is the industry that they're actually in. Like, we're not a tech company, really. We're a media company. They're really a defense company, but they're a tech defense company. And so, like, they're clearly pulling from other references. They're not just going to, "What does Lockheed do? What does Boeing do?" And that's always the nature of these things. Speaker C: On some level, you are making a show about the culture of tech, though.

Yes. One, I think, thing that you've done a good job of so far is sort of like playing to a certain niche and playing enough inside base stuff. Like The Metas List is like a great example, like the most inside baseball. It's like AI researcher Twitter. Of course, there are parts of tech like Apple and Instagram that are way more broadly appealing, both now and in the future. I'm curious how you think about toeing that line. I think it seems clear you are making a show for people interested in tech.

The business side of the tech world, but like, how do you think about dialing the aperture wider or more narrow? Speaker B: We're not going wider. I agree. I think we're— it's so critical because we have no plans to retire from the mics until we're just done. Yeah, yeah. Actually retired. It's so critical that the content that we put out every day, the things that we talk about are deeply interesting to us, right? And there's a lot of tech content that, you know, if you look on YouTube and you just look for tech content, you're going to see like iPhone reviews, SpaceX news from 2 years ago, you know, some— Speaker A: political critique of tech.

That's really popular. And so retail trading. Speaker B: Yeah, retail trading. Speaker A: What stock should you buy? There are whole creators that are tech creators, but they would never talk about a private company because their audience is like, I don't care. Yes. We're almost the opposite. We're like, yeah, once they go out and they're mature, like, we'll talk about them a little bit, but it's more about the lessons from— Speaker C: Well, and you guys might not care as much about that. Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Speaker B: Yeah, and the thing that we said— We're the private markets guys.

Yeah, the thing that we said early on, and I think it's still true, it's like, we make content for 200,000 people in the world. These are people that run companies, that invest, that work at the most important tech companies in the world, that are— you know, it's the founder that just applied and got into YC, right? It's like, it's a very small group of people and we're okay to make just, we, we're very intentional about making sure that the content is interesting to them. We're not always gonna get it right, but in general, if it's interesting to us, it's probably interesting to that group.

And what we've seen, the funny thing is I, we got a, um, like a review, I think, uh, uh, last week or something. And somebody said like, I'm a dentist on the East, or I'm a doctor on the East Coast. I've never worked in technology. I started listening to TVPN and I listen every single day now. And I think it's great if those kind of people like adopt the show and enjoy it and get value out of it and use it to understand the world. But we would never adjust the content to try to get more of those type of people.

Right. And that would be like doing tech reviews. Right. And making it more shallow. And yeah. Or just being like, what's the next 100x stock? Speaker A: We could 100x 100x every single view, impression, subscriber number in 3 months if we wanted to. Like, I've done it before. I got to half a million subscribers on YouTube. My biggest videos were like the history of Donald Trump, the history of Xi Jinping. Like, you know, you just stop making the stories. Speaker B: Yeah, so history and politics are the two things that would— Speaker A: so yeah, it's so easy if you're just chasing views.

And but that's not what we're doing here because we're actually building it business, not just as like some sort of vanity. Speaker C: The business part almost makes it— it's almost a constraint that's helpful. Speaker A: Totally, totally. Because as soon as you go there, you're just selling different products. CPMs are different. There's a whole bunch of things. And I don't think we'd enjoy it as much. And then it's way more competitive because there's so many great shows about politics or what's going on in the public markets. I mean, you look at like CNBC and Bloomberg, like those are actually great products if you're a retail trader and you actually want to look at the stock chart for the day.

But we're rarely pulling up stock charts. Because a lot of times you're talking about private companies, right? Yeah. Speaker B: And I think another thing that's notable is a lot of traditional business television, the formats and the structure of the shows were created at a time when people didn't have a cell phone in their pocket. So it was like deeply valuable to have a screen that was just like flashing charts of what is gold doing? Yeah, yeah. What is gold doing? What is this stock doing? You know, the S&P is down 1%, like That was really valuable.

You could have it on because you didn't have like a phone that would give you exactly what you're— so, and so our coverage is something we've— a challenge has been not being too inspired by television, right? People want to put a label on it and say like, oh, it's like a new CNBC or it's this and that. But it's important to not— not— it's important to be inspired but create some constraint. Speaker A: What was it that the New York Times used to have box scores? For every game that would be played in sports because you just couldn't look them up.

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

Like ASMR. So actually, I don't want to, like, count that out as, like, a bad thing. But yeah, I mean, in general, like, we want to do a show that assumes the modern trappings of technology and modernity. Speaker B: Yeah. We're also— you said, are you news? It's a good question. I would say we are not the delivery mechanism for news. Yes. We're like the conversational layer that happens on top of it because oftentimes I find out news from the chat right here. Yeah. Somebody says like all caps, they'll just put it in the chat and I go to X and I'm like, oh yeah, this broke 5 minutes ago or whatever.

Yeah. Speaker A: I mean, everyone has that group chat now where they send posts from X to the group chat. Yeah. And they're hoping that there's a little bit of discussion around it and we just kind of like like productize that, basically. It's just like, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll talk about it. We'll give you a couple sound bites on either side of whatever, whatever tweet is going viral right now that, you know, maybe there's a little bit in the quote tweets and the DMs and whatnot, but we're just an extra layer on top of that.

Speaker A: I mean, everyone has that group chat now where they send posts from X to the group chat. Yeah. And they're hoping that there's a little bit of discussion around it and we just kind of like like productize that, basically. It's just like, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll talk about it. We'll give you a couple sound bites on either side of whatever, whatever tweet is going viral right now that, you know, maybe there's a little bit in the quote tweets and the DMs and whatnot, but we're just an extra layer on top of that.

Speaker C: Let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah. I think, um, this story, there's a lot of things that went into the success you guys have had in the last year. Um, but I think maybe more than anything else aside from your own ability is Thinking sort of medium first around X or Twitter. Um, the first viral stuff was you log on, you had a viral tweet and you see two guys in a suit reading your tweet on a printed piece of paper. Yep. Um, amazing line from you this morning.

You said X is the internet's dive bar. The drinks have always been cheap, the bathroom faucet perpetually broken, and the whole place has changed ownership multiple times. Ultimately, it's where groups of friends go to hang out regularly, and that aspect compensates for its rough edges, but you can't act surprised when a fight breaks out. Um, And in many ways, like, it was like half me, half him. Speaker A: They were workshopping together. Speaker C: In many ways, like, I think, I don't know, I've been meeting people on Twitter for the last decade and I've always struggled to explain it to people.

And there is this sort of unique thing where maybe it's 200,000 people. I don't know exactly how big, but there's a few. Speaker B: I don't think there's that many people. Speaker A: No, no, no, no. If you're in true tech Twitter and you make a banger about like Josh Kushner, for example, he's like pure inside, no one outside really knows. Yet, like 1,000 likes or a couple thousand likes is like, yeah, did it. Yeah, everyone loves it. Speaker B: I don't think there's that many people. Speaker A: No, no, no, no.

If you're in true tech Twitter and you make a banger about like Josh Kushner, for example, he's like pure inside, no one outside really knows. Yet, like 1,000 likes or a couple thousand likes is like, yeah, did it. Yeah, everyone loves it. Speaker C: You got it. You can, you can go hang out with people the next day and say, start referencing, like you can basically reference the tweet. Not really that specifically. Oh, I saw that. Oh, I saw that. Speaker A: Exactly. Because it is a very small corner. It's a small table at the, at the dive bar.

What is it? Speaker C: Maybe you've already talked about a little bit, but yeah, I'm curious what you love about that medium and maybe more importantly, how over the course of the last year you guys have evolved with it. It as kind of the main kind of playing field? Speaker B: So I think that people mistake— they want to pin our success on growth hacks. So like, right, clipping was a growth hack. Virality. Yeah. Like, there are people out there that believe we have had success because we figured out a good growth strategy, and that has certainly contributed to the success.

But the— that is not like why we are successful. And so I think we're constantly thinking about growth levers and new ways to distribute the content. But fundamentally, the thing that we actually care about is the show and like every single day making it slightly, slightly better. I think like it is accurate to say that TVPN is a media company or it's a show that was born on X. And that is an entertainment is like a companion product to X, but, but it's not any specific strategy. I think one of the way that the thing that I think is really powerful is I know personally I would use podcasts to understand current events, but it's like wildly, it's like a wildly inefficient way to do it because you're like, okay, I found this podcast that was recorded 3 weeks ago.

They're going to talk about one of these things and it was published a week ago. And they talked about this thing that I'm reading about now. But now the set of events has changed. And so there wasn't like a bleeding edge there. Like TVPN, as at its core, is like a bleeding edge commentary on the— you know, we went off air at 2 m. Pacific today. We won't be back on until 11 tomorrow. There's going to be some stuff that happens in between there. But in general, it's like always present.

Speaker C: You're reacting —two tweets that have been tweeted while you've been live. Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that that much more than a specific growth hack or clipping or things like that or a specific thing we did with the brand or the suits or anything like that is why it's a— it was a unique media product and got traction, right? Because people see the clips, they don't see the tens of thousands of people that are tuning in daily to the show, right? That happens below the surface.

And so I think people have tried to kind of overanalyze the— of course, tech people are thinking, okay, TVPN is like, like they're, they're like they realize that like clipping is the only thing that matters. You took, you took that medium seriously. Speaker C: There's no gotchas. That's my point is that maybe for the first time, a truly X-native media thing. And that was a really powerful thing. Speaker A: I do love growth hacks. It's really fun to figure out what works in the current X algorithm. It's constantly changing. I think we knew we had this idea of like, you know, sort of Paul Graham's do things that don't scale, but also just this idea of like love letters to Silicon Valley.

And so when you think about, you post a tweet, maybe it gets 1,000 likes, but at a certain point, your phone just kind of like explodes and it just kind of abstracts into just like your refreshing. It's like another 500 random people liked it. Like, it's exciting, but it gets old if you post a lot, and, uh, and you lose the connection of like— and sometimes you can see, okay, this, this person that I am actually friends with in real life liked it. That's exciting. Um, but the number getting bigger and bigger, like, that gets old really fast.

Yes. Um, and you can reply and you can quote tweet, but quote tweeting with a video, it's like a 4K of us in suits with your tweet printed, was just like the super quote. It was it was the highest honor that you could do. And then it was just like, this post is so important. Speaker C: Now it's the scorecard, the player cards or the wedding announcement on TV. Speaker A: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so finding like, like that, that, that, that player card format has been used in, in all sorts of Instagram accounts for certain like box scores for sports events.

And Complex does it. There's a lot of folks that use that kind of format. But bringing that to X again was another kind kind of interesting like growth hack. There's been a whole bunch of those that are fun to innovate on, but I think we've never lost sight of the fact that just like content wants to be free and so advertising is a natural fit, content also wants to be everywhere. But that doesn't necessarily just mean take the same thing and put it on every platform. Every platform is unique. And so from a very early stage, we were on RSS everywhere, on YouTube also, and a lot of podcasts.

Podcasts. They were audio only, and then they realized like, okay, we need to do video at some point. So they added a video component, but it's just them sitting in like their like kind of bland, like, you know, a little corner of the office with some slat walls and stuff. It's not, it's not opinionated. And so we said like, well, for YouTube, like you, what you really want to do is build a set that's like opinionated for your video podcast. You guys have built a world here. A world. There's a world here.

Exactly. And so, and so like you can think about this world. This world is not matter visually. The visual world does not matter for the RSS product, but the RSS product does need us to contextualize things that we're looking at. And so as we're doing the show, we will be describing what we see. That's a— that's us thinking for the RSS feed. Then this set design is us thinking for the YouTube channel. Then how we clip on X and what context we give you, the subtitles, all of that is thinking for X.

On Instagram, vertical, uh, it needs to be a little bit tighter. 1 to 3 minutes, that's a different format. So like the medium is the message. The medium's really important on all these different platforms and kind of thinking about you create all this content, how do you actually make it feel native in that particular platform? Speaker B: And each platform is basically a full-time job. Yes. You know, companies still have this mindset of like, I'm gonna hire a person to do social. And I don't believe that, you know, ask anyone on X, that's like growing an account on X really quickly, how they're doing on, on Instagram if they're not maybe a full-time content creator.

And, you know, every one of these platforms is different. And so we've been, uh, takes a long time to like start, you know, chopping them down. Speaker C: What makes— I do want to talk a little bit about other platforms, but you guys long before this were both pretty good at Twitter. Yeah. Um, or at X. So I'm old habits. Um, What makes somebody good at that platform? Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, just thinking about your question about taking, taking X, taking Twitter seriously, I think that to close that part out, it really was just that like the 200,000 most important people in tech and business in the private markets, that's where they hang out.

That's their Bloomberg chat, that's the Bloomberg terminal. And so it doesn't matter how senior you get at the most tier 1 fund, everyone's glued to Twitter. Like they just, and if something's happening on Twitter, they're talking about it in a group chat. Speaker B: They might not post, they might be like, I love, I love, I love when a, like a multi-stage, like, like VC that doesn't use Twitter. Oh, I don't really go on Twitter. Speaker A: And then you tweet something with their name, not even tagging them, and they text you within 5 seconds and you're like, oh, okay, so you're extremely online.

Um, that, yeah, that definitely happens. But, uh, yeah, so, so I just think in general it's It's like the 200,000 most valuable, most important people in tech are there. Advertising them is obviously important, so you want to go there first. You want to nail that and then kind of flow through from that. In terms of what it takes to be good at Twitter, there's a whole bunch of things, but the distillation that I heard that was the most succinct was from Dwarkesh Patel. He said tweet like you're lobbing texts in a group chat.

And don't actually think about trying to like open a doc and turn it into a post or like a blog post. Actually just think like, oh, I would text this to a couple friends. It's like I'm texting to a couple friends and that does well. Do you have any other insights? Speaker A: And then you tweet something with their name, not even tagging them, and they text you within 5 seconds and you're like, oh, okay, so you're extremely online. Um, that, yeah, that definitely happens. But, uh, yeah, so, so I just think in general it's It's like the 200,000 most valuable, most important people in tech are there.

Advertising them is obviously important, so you want to go there first. You want to nail that and then kind of flow through from that. In terms of what it takes to be good at Twitter, there's a whole bunch of things, but the distillation that I heard that was the most succinct was from Dwarkesh Patel. He said tweet like you're lobbing texts in a group chat. And don't actually think about trying to like open a doc and turn it into a post or like a blog post. Actually just think like, oh, I would text this to a couple friends.

It's like I'm texting to a couple friends and that does well. Do you have any other insights? Speaker B: I think every poster is great for a different reason. Yeah. You know, I've seen people try to adopt like the Clueless style, like the Roy Lee style of posting, and you can I could say, uh, maybe there's people out there that don't like his style, but they still watch, right? Speaker C: By the way, critically, when he first got going, it was— I don't know how much of it, like, was it good?

Up to you. It was different though, to go back to your influences thing. Yeah, obviously the same thing. Like, he is definitely doing something different. You can hate it. Yeah, but it is not the same style that everybody else is trying. Speaker A: Yeah, I think the— yeah, the meta changes a lot sometimes. It's memes or really pithy kind of one-liners. Long posts seem to be doing really well recently. I've noticed that. Like, as the algorithm changes, one day I'll just open it and be like, oh, I'm getting like every post that is served to me is basically like an essay by a technologist.

Yeah, yeah. Decoupled from sliders. Yeah, yeah. There's basically an essay by a technologist about something that's like pretty deep. And then sometimes you'll just get slopped up with like, you know, I think it's the same thing you see too. Speaker A: Yeah, I think the— yeah, the meta changes a lot sometimes. It's memes or really pithy kind of one-liners. Long posts seem to be doing really well recently. I've noticed that. Like, as the algorithm changes, one day I'll just open it and be like, oh, I'm getting like every post that is served to me is basically like an essay by a technologist.

Yeah, yeah. Decoupled from sliders. Yeah, yeah. There's basically an essay by a technologist about something that's like pretty deep. And then sometimes you'll just get slopped up with like, you know, I think it's the same thing you see too. Speaker B: There's accounts out there that are getting like 10 million impressions a month that are basically worthless accounts. Like they could not sell 100 copies of a book if they wrote it. Yeah. And then there's accounts out there that have like 600 followers that are getting like 300,000 impressions a month and they could raise like a $30 million seed round.

Yep. Right. Yep. And so it's the same thing of understanding, um, yeah. And just under understanding the, it's the quality of the content, it's who's, who's actually watching. Or who's, who's actually engaging with the content, who, who gets value. And that can be inversely correlated with like size. Speaker A: I mean, with all these platforms, like there is something valuable about volume. You see this with a lot of the accounts that post a lot of viral stuff. If you actually click on the account, it's like, oh, well, they had 10 flops on the path to that really, really big one.

And, uh, and, and so there's a little bit of like, if you're posting a lot, you build the muscle. And that's just true. Speaker B: I still think it's the most efficient way to become known in tech, like to like break through. Like, yeah, it's still like you can have somebody who is an outsider break into the industry just by the quality of their thoughts. Right. Speaker B: I still think it's the most efficient way to become known in tech, like to like break through. Like, yeah, it's still like you can have somebody who is an outsider break into the industry just by the quality of their thoughts.

Right. Speaker C: On the other platforms, obviously you're doing a lot in a lot of places already. I think the Substack stuff, to your earlier point, is great. Who knows, maybe it's even your guys' cameos on Sora. I'm curious how you think about that and maybe what near-term priorities there are within the context of what we were talking about earlier, which is you're not going for people outside of that 200,000 people. So you can make the case that actually like Instagram doesn't matter. Speaker A: No, Instagram does matter because those same 200,000 people are also on Instagram and I want to hit them there.

Speaker C: You want to hit them there with the right— Speaker B: with different content. With different— yes, yes. Speaker A: Same audience, slightly different content. Right. Because if you look at the Wall Street Journal, you open it up, there's the there's the business section, but there's also the mansion section. And so what we're going to send, hopefully those exact same people, we're going to send them on Instagram something that's a little bit more sugar. Yeah, it's going to be a little bit less. Yeah. Whereas, whereas on X you get like, you know, 400 words for me, it's like kind of a debate about a thing or some sort of technical deep dive we might be talking about, or we might do an interview with some, you know, AI researcher one day.

That's going to be a little bit less like Instagram focused. Speaker B: Exist, but you can take people everywhere. Yeah. I think there's a stated versus revealed preference phenomenon happening as well, where you have people that say— like, nobody wants to— like, no, like, high-powered executive wants to go out and say, I love Instagram. I use Instagram for, like, 2 hours a day. It's awesome. I'm on there. That's, like, my main thing. I just love Instagram. But let's be real. There's certainly a bunch of high-powered CEOs out there that are using Instagram a lot, right?

Maybe they're not your heroes, but they're, they're people that are able to move markets. And so, uh, I, I learned that, um, uh, my wife, uh, started posting on TikTok in 2022 and the, uh, the, the quality of just inbound people coming through LinkedIn was insane. Just from, I saw your TikTok, like, I'd love to talk to you. Speaker B: Exist, but you can take people everywhere. Yeah. I think there's a stated versus revealed preference phenomenon happening as well, where you have people that say— like, nobody wants to— like, no, like, high-powered executive wants to go out and say, I love Instagram.

I use Instagram for, like, 2 hours a day. It's awesome. I'm on there. That's, like, my main thing. I just love Instagram. But let's be real. There's certainly a bunch of high-powered CEOs out there that are using Instagram a lot, right? Maybe they're not your heroes, but they're, they're people that are able to move markets. And so, uh, I, I learned that, um, uh, my wife, uh, started posting on TikTok in 2022 and the, uh, the, the quality of just inbound people coming through LinkedIn was insane. Just from, I saw your TikTok, like, I'd love to talk to you.

Speaker A: People would go to LinkedIn. Speaker B: They would leave TikTok, go to LinkedIn, and And also for these people, Twitter doesn't exist. Speaker A: Sure. Sure. Yeah. Now that I think about it, I got a lot of that from YouTube too. People would DM me on LinkedIn. Speaker B: Yeah. So, so part, yeah. So part of it is, yeah, understanding that X is this, like, uh, it's an ecosystem. It's like relatively small. And if you want to have an impact on the world, you have to break out of X, right?

You have to break out. And, uh, everybody that has built a, you know, audience on X has experience just, you know, meeting somebody that uses X and they're like, oh, how's it going? It's great to see you. And then meeting some, like meeting somebody that's like, might be important, but they're on LinkedIn and they're like, who, who are you? Like, what do you do? Yeah. Oh, you have a manufacturing, like manufacturing company. That's cool. Like, you know, they don't have the context. Right. So it's just, right. Speaker C: Um, there's a, I guess like a meta thing, which is, I, I mentioned this a few times.

You guys are both. Of amazing internet marketers, um, within this context and without it. I think my best version of trying to distill what that is, is making content or products that other people want to share. Mm-hmm. Um, or even more, um, they want to like share their reaction to, or them talking about. Yeah. Speaker B: Um, I think it's much, I think it's much more like the way that I think about it is everything you do from a marketing standpoint should entertain people, should inspire them, or educate them. And there's like, I don't know that many other buckets that stuff can fit into.

All right. So we, we talk with companies all the time that are like, hey, I'm doing this, like, I'm gonna do this campaign, or I'm gonna work with this person, or I'm gonna do this stunt. And I can, like, you, you, you sharpen your intuition enough and you understand like, okay, does this fit into the bucket of, is is it wildly entertaining? Is it wildly inspirational? Is it wildly informative? And is it actually bringing novel information to people? And for me, if it doesn't fit into those buckets, like it's just not gonna hit, and you can have something hit in any of those buckets, right?

You can, uh, some, uh, uh, like for a poster, for example, can entertain. They can just post something that's like super funny, perfect timing, and it can get, you know, a million views, you know, a, a, a video that like feels emotional and inspiring, right? Uh, the, the Founders Fund, the iconic Founders Fund vibe reel. First vibe reel ever. Speaker A: Yeah, so that— That was before my time. Speaker B: Yeah, but that is an example of novel format hadn't really been done in tech, but it was inspiring. And when we did— Speaker A: A lot of stuff we do, I think even more narrowly around entertainment, I just think of funny.

I think a lot of this stuff is just like, is this funny? And then people might share it. But I feel like we keep coming back to humor as just like, like if we're laughing about the concept and, and simp— Speaker B: and simplicity, right? Like good, super, like virality hates complexity, right? Uh, like if you launch a complex idea that requires a lot of context, yes, it will not go, it will not go viral. You can kind of, people try to brute force it. They get the wrong, uh, they get the kind of the wrong signal, right?

Like somebody will launch something that is complicated and confusing and they will get hundreds of people, like they'll send the post to a bunch of people and be like, like this, please comment, repost, quote, quote it. And, and you can kind of like manufacture it, but you can actually see it in the data. You can be like, this is not getting any reach because people don't actually like it. And like the actual ratio, like of engagement is like bad. Yes. Uh, so it like, it looks like it was a successful launch, but it was really just like engagement farming.

Speaker C: This is what Gabe, uh, Mischief says he's like, we want ideas that slap in one sentence and slap harder in 3. Yeah, but make sure it slaps in one sentence. And I think a lot of the, a lot of people on Twitter and in tech, the tendency, including my own, is to like, I'm trying to do a 3-order, like, like you need all this context. And it's like, no, actually starting simple is a really, really strong place. Speaker C: This is what Gabe, uh, Mischief says he's like, we want ideas that slap in one sentence and slap harder in 3.

Yeah, but make sure it slaps in one sentence. And I think a lot of the, a lot of people on Twitter and in tech, the tendency, including my own, is to like, I'm trying to do a 3-order, like, like you need all this context. And it's like, no, actually starting simple is a really, really strong place. Speaker B: Yeah. So when people pitch, when people pitch us marketing ideas, I tell them, I have more context on your business than 99.9% of people in the world. Right. And I'm gonna need you to repeat that that marketing idea back to me because I'm still confused.

And if you hit the timeline with this, you're going to have a bunch of people that if their immediate reaction is like, "Wait, what's going on?" And so, they're certainly not entertained because being confused is not a great state to be in. They're certainly not inspired. They're not like, "Oh, I want to take action now," or, "I'm feeling an emotion." And then, they're certainly not being educated because they're just sitting there like, "I just watched this video," or, "I just watch 30 seconds of this 90-second video and I don't know what's going on and I'm on to the next thing, right?

Speaker A: And so why do you think the original Technology Brothers launch video went viral? Speaker B: Because it was— nobody in tech would do something as silly as that. Speaker A: It was funny. It was certainly entertaining. It didn't— it didn't— well, I want to go back to like the idea of like make it shareable. Because we never thought about like, oh, there'll be something in here that people have to share. But maybe we did in the sense that like, if you see this, you can just send it to your friend.

Speaker A: It was funny. It was certainly entertaining. It didn't— it didn't— well, I want to go back to like the idea of like make it shareable. Because we never thought about like, oh, there'll be something in here that people have to share. But maybe we did in the sense that like, if you see this, you can just send it to your friend. Speaker B: Well, yeah. And if you look back at what the criticism of that video was, it was like, it was like, okay, Timu succession. Oh yeah. So I was like, that is, that is what we were going for.

That is what we were going for. Speaker C: That is shareable too. Cause you are setting up somebody else's punchline, which is really powerful. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that, that I was like, okay, you nailed it. That's what we're going through. We, we filmed a Succession-style vibe reel for a podcast that is 3 months old. Speaker A: It doesn't have revenue yet. It's a couple thousand viewers, uh, listeners. Speaker B: And so, yeah, it, I think, um, self, self-awareness too is like super key. Speaker A: I do think there was something that might be like inspiring in the sense that it's just like, oh wow, like they're taking this really seriously.

Like people in tech like to see that people are taking things seriously. Speaker C: It's the high and low together again. Exactly. It was like there, It was clear you were taking it seriously enough to do the video, but also you were making fun of yourself a little bit. Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. So I think, I think it's this interesting dynamic where the audience is really smart. Like they will see through whatever, like you need to be authentic because they're gonna see through it, especially over time. Right. Maybe you could get away with like a launch video.

People don't really realize that, that this is not a serious team or whatever, but over time in the fullness of you trying to market to your industry, people figure out but they have no— they don't have an appetite to, to have to work to understand what you're doing. And so, yeah, you can assume that they're smart, but assume they're not going to put any effort into really understanding because they just don't care. Right. And that's, that's fine. Speaker C: You, maybe even more than marketers, are two kind of like quietly brilliant brand guys.

Like when I think about the stuff you guys have done historically, Both Lucy and Jordy's earlier point, so let me be more than almost anything else and everything you've done, it spiked on a bunch of dimensions, but especially brand. It goes back to our influences conversation. I think tech as an industry, there's maybe nothing tech is worse at than brand or maybe even nothing that tech cares less about. I'm curious how, maybe what does brand mean to you and two, what actually makes a great brand. But by the way, talk about a great brand.

Speaker A: Jordy's way better at this than I am. I've been along for the ride with most of the other brands. But Jordy's— Speaker B: Yeah, I think part of it goes back to branded native and working with so many companies and understanding what is working both from like a strategy channel standpoint and then how brands actually get made. Like great brands do not start with spending $300,000 on a branding agency. And doing this like brand package. Like they're typically very, they typically happen very organically. A great brand is not a logo.

A great brand is not a website. A great brand is like the culmination of what you make a group of people feel over time, right? So it's that going back to that, a great brand is educating the audience. A great brand is like not, you know, not sometimes you can do multiple of them, um, but a great brand is like making people feel something over and over and over and over and over until you stick in their mind. And so I just think that it's, it's like a brand is the, again, uh, basically average out everything that you've made somebody feel, an individual person on a, on an individual level, you as a brand and that individual person.

And so when you look at TVPN, it's like people like the TVPN brand because we've we've probably entertained them, we've made them laugh, like, hopefully a few times, right? Hopefully a bunch of times, right? And that's like one of our KPIs is just like, again, like making, making people laugh, like making people not, uh, like on the second, third, fourth, fifth times are as good or better too. Speaker C: Yeah. Speaker B: Which I think is, so we joke, we joked originally, like, uh, I, I forget at some point or another we were like, you know, this wouldn't be possible if we, we weren't able to, you know, fork over like $300,000.

People would ask us like, how much did you spend on the, The Technology Brothers brand is so great. Like, how did you pull it off? And we were like, you know, we just put the capital to work. And it's like, no, it's actually like we worked with, uh, I think part of it's like building up a group of people. Uh, usually, you know, I think that great brand work is actually done externally. Like we, any, any sort of key role, things that are done every single day in the organization, we in-house, right?

We're not going to have production out of house, right? There's a lot of people that, that are professional podcasts that outsource production, right? And it's like, that's crazy. Like, your job is to make a piece of content and make it better every day. Brand where you're creating these like artifacts that are sometimes evergreen, like a logo mark, sometimes, you know, something that just is used for a moment, like ad creative that is really effective to constantly be going out outside of the organization to bring in new ideas, right? It's like, and those people are thinking, oh, I, you know, like I saw this campaign that you've never heard of.

Let's bring that in. And so part of it's like having that relationship with a group of people and then not getting too, not getting stuck with one. So it's like we've worked with different people for merch, we've worked with different designers. We have core partners that we go back to a lot, but we're constantly willing to bring in, uh, bring in new people. And I do think that, um, Um, yeah, taste is, taste is a, taste is a factor. You look at two logos that, but, but it's ultimately just a personal thing.

Speaker C: It's like, I was gonna say, you, you have a point of view critical, like you clearly know how to work with all kinds of different great external creatives, but that does not work if you don't know what you like. And I think that might be one of the other challenges is like, you go to— Speaker B: I also, we also don't, uh, I also cherish that dynamic, right? Like I don't, I don't negotiate heavily with like creative talent, and that might sound crazy because your job is to like get great services for the lowest possible price.

But if you go into a dynamic with a designer, like I certainly will get like a proposal and I'll think like, that is wildly more than I value what we're trying to do here. Like, thank you. Like, we're gonna go elsewhere. But if I'm like close in the ballpark with a creative that I want to do work with, I'm not sitting there being like, hey, like you pitched us, you know, $20K, like our budget is $6K because sometimes they'll opt in, but then in their head they're thinking like, I'm doing $6K work.

Speaker A: Right. Yeah. On the branding thing, I feel like every brand is like spiky in a bunch of different ways. There's a bunch of different elements that kind of describe the brand and it's not just an arrow in like one direction. It's like a whole bunch of things. And we've kind of done that with the brand world. And I feel like one thing that we've had a lot of fun with is like when we find a thread to pull on that we're getting some like brand value out of, we just keep pulling on it as long as possible.

And at some point we were riffing about, about horses being like, like it was, it was related to like technology journalists being rich and nepo babies and they, they all have horses. And, uh, and then that turned into like, we're into horses and we recommend buying horses. Speaker B: And I said, if your daughter's not a horse girl by the time she's 5, you failed. Yeah. Speaker A: And then, and then at some point I was like, I'm actually gonna go and become a horse expert. And so I like reworked my entire YouTube algorithm to just serve me dressage content and understand all these different horse breeds.

And it's something where it's just like, and that's probably manifested in like the horse behind us. Exactly. Like the horse behind us. And so it's just like all these little things that are not— it's not just like, oh, we need a statue of the horse. It's like there's this like lineage in the brand. Speaker B: This is the world of branding. There's also, there's also, yeah, so there's two, two more things that I pull on. One, we're in an era where, uh, you have less control over your brand than ever because your brand is created by, in our case, like we have a bunch of people here in the studio.

Like when Tyler posts, that is part of our brand. When Ben posts, that's part of our brand. When Brandon posts, that's part of our brand. Brand. Speaker C: When fans post about you, it's a little bit part of your brand. Speaker B: Yeah, that was even with the merch, like part of like we didn't sell merch originally because we wanted to effectively like control who was wearing our logo. And over time, over time, that will— you can't keep total. But I remember one day I texted John, somebody like had a TVPN hat and I was like, how did this person get it?

Because this person is not somebody that I wanna align with. Speaker A: Just off brand. Speaker B: And yeah, it's just, and so yeah, one, you have more control over your brand than ever because you can constantly adapt and you can change. You can change, it's not like we have packaging that's like, oh, if we wanna change the logo, it's like 6 months. So, we have to do a new run. It's like, no, we could change anything at any time, but you have less control because your team is constantly creating it.

And this goes the same, is the same for every company. Company. Yeah. Oh, oh, one, one more thing I forgot, because I said there was a second part to that. Something that we did early on, and I think every company should do this, is like we made a sheet of like, oh yeah, these are the Bible, these are our friends, these are our enemies, this is what we, this is what we— yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like, it was like, uh, HVAC, uh, roll-ups, yeah, yeah, it was like the CCP.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, it was silly, silly stuff, right? It's not like we're sitting— this a spite show, uh, but, uh, silly stuff. Speaker A: Just off brand. Speaker B: And yeah, it's just, and so yeah, one, you have more control over your brand than ever because you can constantly adapt and you can change. You can change, it's not like we have packaging that's like, oh, if we wanna change the logo, it's like 6 months. So, we have to do a new run. It's like, no, we could change anything at any time, but you have less control because your team is constantly creating it.

And this goes the same, is the same for every company. Company. Yeah. Oh, oh, one, one more thing I forgot, because I said there was a second part to that. Something that we did early on, and I think every company should do this, is like we made a sheet of like, oh yeah, these are the Bible, these are our friends, these are our enemies, this is what we, this is what we— yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like, it was like, uh, HVAC, uh, roll-ups, yeah, yeah, it was like the CCP.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, it was silly, silly stuff, right? It's not like we're sitting— this a spite show, uh, but, uh, silly stuff. Speaker A: And, and we kept it on the table, but also, also memes and sections and phrases and phrases, all the, all this again to the world, but the world of the brand language as well. And who was, who were people that we were going to go back to, ideas, themes that we were going to go back to, all of that was super, super helpful. Speaker B: Yeah.

And so we, we constantly update that, and that is part of how you do the world building. You don't just, you don't want to leave it to chance of like, hey, this thing was super funny on episode 6, we want to bring that back, right? And so, there's people in our audience, if we're talking about a car, they'll be like, "Ah, it looks cool, but it's not as nice as a Nissan Cross Cabriolet, like 2012 or whatever." And it's like, that's just a riff that we've had of like, it might be the perfect car.

It's like a— Speaker A: It's a two-door convertible SUV. What more do you need? Speaker B: There's not a lot of options if you want a two-door convertible SUV. Speaker C: It's kind of the best Yeah, there's something to come back to too that makes— that's a payoff for the person who's been with you, which is really fun. Speaker A: Exactly. Speaker B: Yeah, also a super steep learning curve with the show. Like, we don't tell you— we're making a decision to not say what AWS is. We don't— traditional television will be like, AWS is a cloud computing division of Amazon.

It goes back to everything we were talking about earlier. And it's like, part of that steep learning curve is very powerful because people ramp up, and then they're like, OK, I'm I'm really a part of that. Speaker C: And it feels like you're actually talking to me. Speaker A: I mean, you can see it in the New York Times, like SportsCenter for the LinkedIn crowd. Like more people would be like, Clips for Teapot. Like that would be another way to like frame the show, you know? But like they needed to put it in like these like, you know, universal terms and like when we do a little bit of that, but not a lot here.

Yeah. Because we're focused on that niche audience. Speaker C: I love that. Maybe the Bible will be exposed. The brand Bible will be exposed someday. Yeah, we talked about it a little earlier. You have this amazing pace, and I think you guys are both very, like, pro-experimentation. On the other hand, you've talked a lot about the, like, Senra or Munger-ish idea of, like, doing one thing and being really focused. You had a bunch of interns here. You have a few less now, but I wonder what goes in, maybe just for the two of you or broadly the thing you're building, like, what goes into fostering a culture that is super pro-experimentation on one hand, and then also, like, knows what to hold onto and not change and what to say no to?

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

And then you need to figure out stuff that like works momentarily but is not durable. And there's a lot of that on the internet where if you can create something novel, Vibreal, like a cinematic video that worked really well earlier this year, and by summer— It's a company thing. Yeah, yeah, and by summer it stopped working well. We couldn't do a Vibreal every month. It's just not possible. Physically, physically we could. Oh, yeah, yeah. We have the talent. Speaker A: We were doing them in a day, and they were turning out every month.

But it shined. Yeah, it lost its— it was like novel. It was not like durable, something that people want to consume on a regular basis. Speaker C: What was— what's most— what do you think would have been most surprising to you either 6 or 12 months ago about this? Speaker A: Probably the Meta Connect moment. Like, like the second interview is us talk— or the second video that we filmed, the one that I mentioned earlier, is us talking about the Meta Ray-Bans alone in this room. And then what, 10 months later, we're interviewing Mark Zuckerberg about that exact— by the way, also Jim Cameron, which was like this crazy Yeah, I would say though, I would say, uh, just because like my initial idea for the format was like no guests ever, no traveling ever, just two people.

Like I was like, that's the secret sauce. Speaker C: What was— what's most— what do you think would have been most surprising to you either 6 or 12 months ago about this? Speaker A: Probably the Meta Connect moment. Like, like the second interview is us talk— or the second video that we filmed, the one that I mentioned earlier, is us talking about the Meta Ray-Bans alone in this room. And then what, 10 months later, we're interviewing Mark Zuckerberg about that exact— by the way, also Jim Cameron, which was like this crazy Yeah, I would say though, I would say, uh, just because like my initial idea for the format was like no guests ever, no traveling ever, just two people.

Like I was like, that's the secret sauce. Speaker B: How great is it to have a podcast and you don't have to worry about guests? Speaker A: You don't have to book guests and you have to travel. Like this is the secret to success. This is amazing. Let's just do this forever. Speaker B: But at the same time, I think that that while we are open to experimenting in real time, we're hyper-calculated. Yeah. And I would say when we were early on talking with Ramp at the end of last year, they had seen like about like 6 weeks of the show and they were like, okay, this is cool.

But pretty much everything about this year has been premeditated. Like we knew we were gonna go live, we knew we were gonna add guests, we knew we were gonna we knew we were going to do an extraordinarily high volume of guests. Speaker A: And yeah, we did after like a couple of weeks, like the first. Yeah. When we, when we sat down to record the first episode, we were like, no guests. And then like 3 episodes and we were like, but what if? Speaker A: And yeah, we did after like a couple of weeks, like the first.

Yeah. When we, when we sat down to record the first episode, we were like, no guests. And then like 3 episodes and we were like, but what if? Speaker B: So, so yeah. Yeah. So I'll give you an example though. So, uh, we love the name Technology Brothers and we've told the story before, but unfortunately it would get abbreviated. So people would call us the Tech Bros. Which made our skin crawl, basically. Speaker C: And one is literally the thing you were— Speaker B: yeah, we were trying to avoid, right?

Um, and so, and, and we had realized that we wanted to do this for decades, and so we wanted to adapt. And so the name TBPn was chosen, one, because it was a— we could get a com, which is insane, which is, which is a beast at this stuff. Speaker A: Now all the handles are available too, so we're like like, at— Speaker B: well, they weren't available, but we've pretty much figured out how to do it. Speaker C: They weren't actively used. Speaker A: There was no trademarks and stuff, so it was like, it was gettable across everything, which is awesome.

Speaker B: But the reason that that made sense— it didn't make sense because we weren't building a network, but it made sense because we were like, we want this to be a place that the Mag7 comes on regularly, and they are much more likely— their PR departments are much more likely to be like, sure, I reviewed TVPN, it looks cool, you should go on TVPN, than you should go on technology. Go hang with the tech bros. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. As opposed to like, like Theo Von can be a comic, but then he can just be like the name Theo Von, and the name can evolve to mean anything, and now it means a more serious tech bro.

I, I seem to remember at some point we, we, we did pick TBPN because of the initialism Technology Brothers, TB, but then we were like, we shouldn't keep the TB around. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. As opposed to like, like Theo Von can be a comic, but then he can just be like the name Theo Von, and the name can evolve to mean anything, and now it means a more serious tech bro. I, I seem to remember at some point we, we, we did pick TBPN because of the initialism Technology Brothers, TB, but then we were like, we shouldn't keep the TB around.

Speaker B: That was the— well, no, it was It was like I was looking for short, like, uh, you know, short domains that featured TB. Yeah. But we, from the beginning it was Technology Business Programming Network inspired by ESPN. Yeah. Speaker C: Um, there you go. You've referenced, I think it was you referenced the, uh, MKBHD idea where like basically if you don't love the content, you're not gonna be able to do it forever. You guys are currently doing 3 hours of live broadcasting every single day. Yeah, that's a lot of endurance for a year, let alone 5.

Or if you really want to go crazy, like Charlie Rose and Johnny Carson did this for 30 years. Speaker B: I don't know what you're— Jim Cramer just did 30. He just celebrated 30. Speaker C: How do you, you, how do you set yourself up for that kind of endurance? Even just— Speaker B: there's never, there's never like— the news has been something I've loved my entire life. Like since I could read, I would read the newspaper every morning. It would be on the— my dad would get it before me, it'd be on the coffee table.

He would have looked through it already. I would pick it up, I would read through it. My interest in terms of the content, you know, evolved. You know, I used to be probably more into geopolitics, uh, than I am now, uh, and, and just like political content in general was probably like more appealing when I was, when I was younger and just trying to understand, uh, the world. But even as soon as I was like in middle school and high school, it was like I would I would get home from school and I would refresh TechCrunch and I'd be like, what happened today in tech?

Yeah. And so there's never— and then even continuing into my, uh, adult life, no matter what I was working on, I was still interested in, in what was happening broadly. And so, uh, I think that the confidence that we have around being able to do this for decades is that I cannot imagine a world in the future where I wake up and I'm not interested in understanding and talking about what's going on in the world. Speaker A: It would be impossible if we had to do the exact same show every day.

Like, if it was a play with a script and we had to tell the same story, the story of Apple, and it's like the story of Apple every single day for 3 hours, and then the story of Apple the next day, that would be a waking nightmare. But the fact that the news cycle changes and you can go wherever you want within this particular niche of technology, I mean, I mean, I saw this on my YouTube video, my YouTube channel. I would, I would talk about AI and then defense tech got big.

I talked about defense tech. I did some videos on the metaverse and VR and crypto and you can move around within the— and you're not, you don't need to be that niche. Speaker C: If you were to try to speculate on what will be different in 5 years about the format, is there anything, or maybe even aspirationally, is there anything you would hope that will change? Speaker A: I think the chat experience will change a little bit. You know, most linear— I think all TV actually doesn't have a chat. It would be funny if Bloomberg, like, read the Bloomberg chat.

You know, I was thinking about that the other day. But I believe Pat McAfee does read from the chat, but only at a certain interval. So the chat's going crazy all the time because there's so many people chatting all the time. But then they will take questions at a certain moment And I think that right now we kind of go to the chat if they have a zinger or go to the chat if they have a— Speaker B: Today we were live and the chat was saying, guys, you're on TV in France.

Yeah. Speaker B: Today we were live and the chat was saying, guys, you're on TV in France. Yeah. Speaker A: So we kind of had to react to that. But I think that— The sequel. I think that as a streamer, one thing I heard from a very popular streamer was he was saying that like he sees reading chat as a skill. Speaker C: I mean, have you ever watched Speed? Yes. Speaker B: Like that is Twitch 15 years later. Incredible. Incredible. Speaker A: Right. It's a— it's very Truman Show plus.

Yeah, it's very clearly its own skill. And we have the skill to keep a conversation going. And if I notice, you know, Jordy has to, you know, talk to a guest on a text message, I can just go to the camera and say, okay, let me read from this Wall Street Journal article. Yeah. The other thing that's so cool about handoff, like we can, we can pass the ball back and back and forth very easily, but integrating chat, chat will change a lot. Speaker B: But the chat is part of the show too, because we'll be talking about something.

I remember last week we were talking about, uh, uh, model adoption on, on OpenRouter. And we missed a key thing, which was like 2 out of the 3 top models were free and the others were paid. And like very, very obvious, but in the moment we didn't, we didn't put that together. Somebody in the chat is like, this is important. And so not only did that make the analysis better, it was like community sourced. If you're listening to the recording, which a large amount of our, the majority of our audience is not watching live today, you now get that extra context that if Jon and I were just recording by ourselves, we never would've made it in.

And so that feedback loop is super powerful. Speaker A: And that's a very, very important network effect and something that's very, very durable over time because it actually makes the show better and it feeds back into itself in a way that is, it's important in a very different way than just like, you got a lot of listeners. Speaker C: Yes. Yes. And when you get to a certain scale too, and you have enough affordances with the chat, they are going to learn that they can— this is what the crazy high-end speed do.

Kyle, or excuse me, speed will literally be like, I have created a choose-your-own-adventure. I'm going to do one of two things. Chat, which should I do? Exactly. Which is cool to see. One thing that a few people asked me to ask you on Twitter that I like is I'd love to hear what just like a day looks like from end to end for both of you. Speaker A: It's fun. Speaker B: Same day every day. Gym 6:30 to 8, breakfast 8 to 9, studio here at 9. Again, John quickly goes into writing the newsletter.

I typically will have some amount of like Zoom meetings during that time that are more just like focused on the business. And then, yeah, we have 9 to 11 to prep the show. We usually, if we're running ahead of schedule, we're actually dressed before, before, like, ought to mention before a lot of, a lot of times if you see the timer, 5 minutes, 4 minutes, 3 minutes, we're getting dressed. And so there's, yeah, there's really, there's not, there's no time to be creative in that window. What I love about it is that your mood doesn't matter, how you feel doesn't matter, right?

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

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

And then we're discussing during that 9 to 11, I'm writing the newsletter, but I'm also piecing together the order and I'm bouncing ideas off, off Jordy, like, hey, there's this Wall Street Journal article, there's these posts, like, what do you want to kick off with? Yeah. Yeah. Speaker B: So 24/7 we're sourcing content for the show, getting closer You're kind of compressing. Exactly. Yeah. So, so, and then the show ends. Usually we're pretty much caught up on the news, like we try to make sure we're ending the show covering what's been happening.

Yeah. During the show effectively. Sometimes it's live, other times we're kind of catching up and then immediately there's new content being created, right? That, that is going into tomorrow's show. And so after the show, we'll eat lunch. We're usually talking about what what worked well, what didn't, what we should change. We'll oftentimes like change the show for the following days, be like, okay, that was too many guests. We didn't get enough. Like the main thing we're trying to protect is like 90 minutes a day that we can just hang out, right?

Ah, for sure. Uh, cuz like when you think about it, one, one of the challenges of, uh, of, of doing guest segments on any type of media is that they're wildly unreliable. Loose control. Right? Like at times, It will be, it will be, you know, interviewing Andrew Sorkin today was like super energizing. It made the show better. Super interesting. We would have been happy to like keep doing that for much longer. Speaker A: And the whole chat was like, this is amazing interview. Great interview. I love this. Speaker B: Like, yeah, they're just really excited to hear from him, right?

And it's helpful that he is a professional TV host, right? It's like it's not his first rodeo. And so the variability in the guests is a huge challenge because if somebody is coming on for 15 minutes and they come on, it's like we know to show up with high energy and we're here to, we're here to put on a show, but they might come in with like very low energy. And it's a big part of the reason for the— it can, can. Speaker A: Yeah, it can completely— gong really hard.

It's like if you're a founder and you raise $10 million, even if you're building like some sort of boring SaaS thing and you're not the most high-energy person, like you can at least— we're resetting. The, the energy level up here and you can laugh and you can kind of be like, okay, well, yeah, like, but yeah, we, we would see it, we see it in the, we see it in the metrics, right? Speaker B: Like guests have, uh, much lower retention than the two of us. And so it's about protecting that time that we can just hang out.

That's the most fun, energizing time for me. But if you think about it, it's like 2 out of 10 guests make the show better. There's like a power law there. So maybe 1 is like this is amazing. Like, I wish that we had 90 minutes with this person. And there's also 8 out of 10 are actually making the show slightly worse. It's like, well, that's like, that's not a great hit rate. We still want to talk to those people because they help inform the content and they allow us to like build relationships with people and understand that there's always some insight and some learning and some takeaway.

Speaker A: And some people are good on a random Tuesday. Other people are amazing at a certain moment, like like a, like a, a VR founder, uh, who's building something completely independently and can talk trash about whatever the big companies just launched. Like, they're great on that launch day, right? But then on an average day, you're just kind of like, oh yeah, like, you don't even have a product to launch right now. Like, what, what are we talking about here? Speaker A: And some people are good on a random Tuesday.

Other people are amazing at a certain moment, like like a, like a, a VR founder, uh, who's building something completely independently and can talk trash about whatever the big companies just launched. Like, they're great on that launch day, right? But then on an average day, you're just kind of like, oh yeah, like, you don't even have a product to launch right now. Like, what, what are we talking about here? Speaker B: Yeah, the other thing is the live nature means that we have to adapt to what's happening. Like, there's been times where we have 4 guests slated and then some big story breaks and suddenly we have to say, hey, we actually killed this product entirely.

Speaker A: We early— one of the big viral days was Crypto Day and we had the most insane lineup. Chris Dixon, Balaji, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase. We had so many killers came on. Speaker C: It was a mini event, sort of like the Meta thing. Speaker A: But yeah, it was, it was very cool. But then what we realized was we tried to do it again with like an AI day and we had a whole bunch of AI researchers But then that was the day that Trump and Elon broke up.

And so they— all the chat was just like— and we didn't have these screens reading the chat. And so Jordy just was reading the chat on his computer and was like, John, we got to talk about this. Like, we got to pivot. And so we canceled a bunch of people, brought them on later, and we kind of realized like, wait, you can't actually have like a conference about a specific topic if there's something else crazy that happens. Yeah. Speaker B: And they're live going in another story. So we were at the New York Stock Exchange for the Klarna IPO, and about 2 hours ago— Figma was flawless.

Speaker B: And they're live going in another story. So we were at the New York Stock Exchange for the Klarna IPO, and about 2 hours ago— Figma was flawless. Speaker A: Figma was the biggest story of the day. It was the current thing on tech Twitter. Speaker B: And we were even— and it's hard to displace an IPO in terms of like mindshare, especially a company like Figma, which is like universally used and loved. Everyone knows. But, uh, at the Klarna IPO, I got a text from the team. John didn't have his laptop pulled up, and they were Charlie Kirk just got shot, like, open your computer.

And I opened the computer and, you know, you see immediately the video. And so that dynamic is— how do you talk about buy now, pay later in that? Yeah. And you go, you go from the euphoria of like, we're here to celebrate this team's like, you know, 15-year journey getting to this point. And then suddenly you have this like absolutely horrific, tragic event. and we do have to adjust to it. Yeah. Um, and, uh, yeah, it's a unique thing about news. Speaker C: Yeah. Speaker B: And so I mean, whereas like a podcast, like there could be something amazing or tragic that happens during the show and it's not, you know, when people listen to this, they're not thinking, yeah, that was actually, you need to, you need to respond to this.

And I, we haven't, I haven't seen my phone. I, you know, I have no idea what's happening in the outside world. Speaker A: Yeah. That, yeah, that was actually a point where I thought it was really it's really good to look to what— how legacy TV deals with that. And so on CNBC, they do a breaking news alert. They cut away from the business content and they say, we have some breaking news, some very— we had tragedy has occurred, here are the facts. And then they go back to it, but they're basically just kicking you over to NBC if you want to follow the full story because that's the way the breaking news will live.

And I remember early, we were in the gym at our first studio and the Blue Origin launch had just happened with Katy Perry, and Jeff Bezos is there looking absolutely shredded. And it was very funny to see because there were 6 TVs up on the wall, all to different channels, and you could see how each of them covered it differently. And so CBS, I believe, has Gayle King, who went to space. And so for her, it was like, for the entire channel, I mean, imagine if one of your coworkers just went to space, like you're going to be like, It's wall-to-wall coverage all day.

It's the Super Bowl for us. Like the, the person that you as a fan of this channel know is in space. We got to cover this all day long. Then on, on ABC, they didn't have one of their anchors go, but it was still like a great story. So they had some real cameras there. They probably spent like half an hour on it. On, on CNN, they did like 10 minutes. And then on CNBC, they just put it picture in picture. The rocket came back, it's landed. Now let's go back to the stock market.

And so, like, just sizing stories for your audience is really, really key. And knowing, okay, this one is a breaking news one-liner. This is 5 minutes. This is a full hour. This is— Speaker A: Yeah. That, yeah, that was actually a point where I thought it was really it's really good to look to what— how legacy TV deals with that. And so on CNBC, they do a breaking news alert. They cut away from the business content and they say, we have some breaking news, some very— we had tragedy has occurred, here are the facts.

And then they go back to it, but they're basically just kicking you over to NBC if you want to follow the full story because that's the way the breaking news will live. And I remember early, we were in the gym at our first studio and the Blue Origin launch had just happened with Katy Perry, and Jeff Bezos is there looking absolutely shredded. And it was very funny to see because there were 6 TVs up on the wall, all to different channels, and you could see how each of them covered it differently.

And so CBS, I believe, has Gayle King, who went to space. And so for her, it was like, for the entire channel, I mean, imagine if one of your coworkers just went to space, like you're going to be like, It's wall-to-wall coverage all day. It's the Super Bowl for us. Like the, the person that you as a fan of this channel know is in space. We got to cover this all day long. Then on, on ABC, they didn't have one of their anchors go, but it was still like a great story.

So they had some real cameras there. They probably spent like half an hour on it. On, on CNN, they did like 10 minutes. And then on CNBC, they just put it picture in picture. The rocket came back, it's landed. Now let's go back to the stock market. And so, like, just sizing stories for your audience is really, really key. And knowing, okay, this one is a breaking news one-liner. This is 5 minutes. This is a full hour. This is— Speaker C: this goes back to not trying to be everything for everyone as well.

Exactly. Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Speaker C: I have a few questions about you guys. Please. First and foremost, we talked about it a bit, but what makes this partnership special? And maybe when did you know? That there was something here? Speaker A: I mean, the early thing was definitely just the fact that we both had years and years of experience in the things that were important, which was YouTube, but on different sides. Yeah, yeah, the actual content creation, you on the ad sales side. And so there was just a lot there.

But then, uh, John's like one of the— Speaker B: yeah, John, John's one of the few people, and certainly like at the top of the list of people where when I talk about the things that I'm good at, like he is consistently bringing ideas that are better than my own. Mm. And so that dynamic is super powerful. And to be like, you know, entirely fixated on this. And I think we have like distinct skill sets and distinct kind of focus areas in the business that made it powerful. Yeah, but, uh, to consistently come to John with an idea, uh, and, and it's some, you know, an idea in a, in a space that I'm good at generating ideas in.

Like, let's say it's a, it's an advertiser that we're working for and I'm like, hey, I wanna, uh, I wanna pitch them on this concept. It's not related to TVPN, it's a campaign for their next product launch. And John will, and I come with an idea and he's like, okay, what if you did it this way? And typically when I pitch those ideas to people, they're just like, that sounds great. You know? And I'm not, I'm not getting like, I'm not getting one-upped. And so when you have a partnership, it's like you want to be getting one-upped.

Yes. Like all the time. That's like what makes a partnership great is that, is that two people combining or creating something better than, um, than, than any one of them would do individually. The other thing that's real is like we never run out of things to talk about. Mm-hmm. So like, if we're, if it's like a Friday and John is like driving to Santa Barbara and, and like I'm going to Malibu and like instead of taking my— I have a driver because it's like an hour both ways every day. It's a lot.

And I'll just be like the driver. I'll just send the driver home like separately and I'll be like, I'm riding with John. Like, John, we got to go more. John goes out of the way because we're like, ah, like I didn't get quite enough time. Speaker C: There's a line in the New York Times profile, the show doesn't look very different from when we're hanging out offline. I think that's very clear. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. There's every single day, there's moments off air that I wish were on air because it's pretty impossible to recreate that, how we got to a conclusion or like a specific bit, a line that you can't really recreate.

Speaker A: And yeah, also it's like if we had a, if we had a line that we were like dying laughing at in the gym and you deliver it on the show again, it's hard to week with my reaction the first time. Speaker C: Yeah, I've had to do this a couple times where I had an interview where like we lost an hour and we redid it and it's, it's a different thing. Yeah. Is, uh, maybe the dumbest way to ask this question is how important was Will Manitas? Was he as important as he claims to the formation of this partnership?

Speaker B: Uh, he introduced us. He introduced us and he's, he's, he's made a number of like truly incredible introductions to people that— Cool. Never— we never would have reached. Speaker A: I think also just Will has a particular way in expressing his belief and, uh, and just positivity and like cheering for you in a very quantitative, like hyperbolic way. And so probably for the first like 6 months Every time we would text with him just about like some mundane decision we were making, he was like, yeah, that's great. I just told— and he would drop the name of some tier 1 fund.

He's just like, I just told them that we're oversubscribed at 400 post. And it's like, we weren't fundraising. We weren't doing anything like that. But he was like, oh yeah. And like, so-and-so bought it hook, line, and sinker. Speaker B: He would say, we would just like, we have a group chat with a few other buddies and we'd say something. Or something would happen, like he would just post one of our own like assets in the chat and he'd be like, I'm updating our like 2026 guide. The guide. Speaker A: Yeah.

He would refer to the guide. You were like, we were a public company. Yeah. He would also, uh, yeah, he'd also do these funny things just being like, yes, I've, I've, I've updated my thinking. He would, he would use the language of like, uh, like a philosophical venture capitalist. Yes, I've updated my thinking on TVPN and I no longer You think it will merely destroy all podcasts, but I think it will actually destroy all of media. Yes. We're like, what are you talking about? I think there's also— Speaker B: there's also— we have a, we have a beautiful relationship with, with posters, obviously.

And so if you look back at all the shows, it's probably like 80% of shows have featured one of Will's posts, right? Because he's very good about kind of putting his own spin on what's happening in the world. And there's like a— there's a number of people like that that I can think of. Of, uh, you know, the Runes of the World, the Buko Capital. And so like, we've curated all these amazing, you know, thinkers that are constantly putting information and takes out into the world, and we're like curating those.

And, and they are, uh, fundamentally like a key part of the show. Speaker A: And interestingly, the sports world has done a great job of embracing posters. Like, uh, Stephen A. Smith reacts to random people with hot takes about basketball or, or sports, and Pat McAfee will elevate a post about something. But for some reason, maybe it's just the private markets thing, but like business television has not— I don't know. I feel like it would have seen if Rune had ever been on Bloomberg, for example. Yes, that would be an amazing moment.

And from my perspective, I look at a lot of our, a lot of our guests. I don't want to call them out too much because maybe they'll start getting calls. But a lot of our guests, I'm like, how are they not getting called every single day? Speaker A: And interestingly, the sports world has done a great job of embracing posters. Like, uh, Stephen A. Smith reacts to random people with hot takes about basketball or, or sports, and Pat McAfee will elevate a post about something. But for some reason, maybe it's just the private markets thing, but like business television has not— I don't know.

I feel like it would have seen if Rune had ever been on Bloomberg, for example. Yes, that would be an amazing moment. And from my perspective, I look at a lot of our, a lot of our guests. I don't want to call them out too much because maybe they'll start getting calls. But a lot of our guests, I'm like, how are they not getting called every single day? Speaker C: It's like their influence out punches their credibility. Speaker A: Yeah. And it's also just like it's so many extra steps to introduce someone like Arun to a Bloomberg audience on TV.

Right. Whereas us, it's like, it's supernatural. So yeah, because we've told the story so many times and the show's ex-native, as you mentioned. And so it's a little bit, it's a little bit easier. Speaker C: But was there, were there any other ideas you guys considered doing together, podcast or media-wise or otherwise? Speaker B: The first thing we worked on was kind of a drop activation for Lucy. Oh, right. The Excel thing. Yeah. The idea was the original idea, and I made this whole deck on it that I sent to John, was an energy drink for like white-collar workers, sort of like displacing Diet Coke or Red Bull or Celsius.

Speaker A: Because all of those speak different— Speaker B: because they're obviously loved, like those, those products are loved by the laptop class. But obviously, like Celsius is not leaning into Wall Street, right? It's just sort of like a happy accident that Wall Street has said, yeah, they've made Celsius their own. And so we kicked around the idea for, for, yeah, a beverage company. I thought you could do a lot of this like style of like marketing and media that we do to support a new, a new energy drink. We were just, I think, both fascinated with that category.

At the same time, neither of us had any interest in creating a consumer packaged goods business like John. I've invested— Speaker A: Because all of those speak different— Speaker B: because they're obviously loved, like those, those products are loved by the laptop class. But obviously, like Celsius is not leaning into Wall Street, right? It's just sort of like a happy accident that Wall Street has said, yeah, they've made Celsius their own. And so we kicked around the idea for, for, yeah, a beverage company. I thought you could do a lot of this like style of like marketing and media that we do to support a new, a new energy drink.

We were just, I think, both fascinated with that category. At the same time, neither of us had any interest in creating a consumer packaged goods business like John. I've invested— Speaker A: It's such a grind once you break through Zero to One. It's such a grind. You're just at a trade show, you know, 20 minutes from O'Hare in Chicago every week forever, like talking to some local chain distributor. I got this, and there's 25 other people with the exact same label claim, and they don't know you, and you gotta be a killer operator.

And I think both of us recognized that neither of us wanted to be a CPG operator. Right, right. Because we both like kind of, I'd been in that space and we both like tasted it and been around it. Speaker B: And so. But yeah, we put out like an entire campaign around it and we put out like at least a 5-minute video of us riffing basically in the characters that became the original Technology Brothers show. So we filmed a full hour. Speaker A: We sat down and Ben was filming it over there.

Speaker B: Yeah, Ben was like, did you guys script this? Rip that. He was like, what was that? And we were just playing this hilarious character. Speaker A: We sat down and Ben was filming it over there. Speaker B: Yeah, Ben was like, did you guys script this? Rip that. He was like, what was that? And we were just playing this hilarious character. Speaker A: We just kind of completely melted into it, and we were like, this is great. And, and then we also did an overlay, and we made it retro, and we had a lot of like graphics and just like funny things.

Speaker B: And we even worked with Day Job on the packaging, and the, uh, there was like a PR box that we sent out to people that had this like comically large tin of Lucy's. It was like this big. It was massive. This huge, massive box inside, and a Rolex that like had the branding on it. It was just I think we executed on it really well, sent it to a bunch of people, but that was the first time we actually made content together. Speaker A: Cool. And we kind of realized— and then we did two, I believe we did two test episodes on Riverside recorded, and then we started recording in person, and we shipped the first episode that we recorded.

But in terms of formats, I was pretty convicted on the two-person in-person, like, you know, reaction show as a seed. I'd seen it in other categories and it seemed like, it just seemed like a very clear white space. And so I'd actually done some similar experiments. I did 2 test episodes with Lulu Maservi and we kind of clipped that up and I saw that that was kind of interesting, but she was very focused on comms. Comms and we weren't able to like go all over the place. So if there wasn't a comms story that week, we were just like, what would we talk about?

And then I did a test video with Jason Karman that was like highly cinematic. We were like on the phone talking to each other, had this weird vibe. And that was cool. But like he was just very clearly like making documentaries and didn't want to like become a, like a hot takes like newsman. Newsmaxer. Yeah. But even though— So me and Jordy were just like, oh, we— when we put together the first, the first, like, test episode on Riverside, we were— it was just, like, super easy to talk about everything because we're just super comfortable.

Speaker B: Yeah, the thing that ended up, like, realizing, you know, in hindsight, we both wanted to continue to be a part of the private market ecosystem, venture startups, etc. Like, this is where we've spent our entire adult lives. This is like the thing that we spend the most amount of mental energy thinking about, but we didn't want to go and do a traditional, you know, venture-backed business. We didn't want to become a venture capitalist, not, not because like we just didn't feel like called to do those things again in that moment.

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

But the idea of like building a tech company in LA is like a joke to me. Like, it's just not something that you really— I'm sure you can do it, but, you know, again, ignoring El Segundo because that's its own thing. And so we were in a position where like we both have, we both have kids. Kids. We have— John has 3, I have 2, all under 5. Like, they're set up in their communities. Like, we had no desire to— I really felt like if I wanted to build another company, I had to move to San Francisco or New York, and I didn't necessarily want to do that.

I like LA County, right? I love where I live. And so media was the perfect business to start and stay involved with the world that we love and get to talk all day long with our friends like you that are in and around the industry while building a business that is extremely well suited to build in Hollywood and build in LA. And to you guys, because like, we are not looking to hire— we don't, uh, we don't— we're not looking to hire 50 engineers in the next 2 years, right? Like, we're looking to hire, uh, and we're actually not even really— we're hiring for a couple roles now, but it's like like, where can you build, uh, where's the best place in the world to build a media and entertainment company?

It's like LA, right? Speaker C: I mentioned before, I interviewed Gabe Whaley for Mischief recently, um, and he brought up Soylent. There's an excerpt in the Mischief, like, employee guideline handbook where it says Soylent could have been a speculative artwork. Instead, it's real. Yeah. And then Gabe went on to say you could have done it as a small batch, or an artist could have lived off it as a performance for 20 years, documented everything, had a video, and then done a gallery show about about it, living off the powder. Instead, it was a business.

It was a company. They put it out into the real world and that's rad. That's cool. Speaker A: That's awesome. Speaker C: Um, obviously that partially applies to you, but I think it sort of like, it captures this like earnest, just try stuff. Yeah. I mean, even, even what you were describing of, of getting to this and like a whole lot of iteration cycles that people didn't see. Yeah. That were real thing. Like, yeah. I'm curious what goes into your guys' inclinations to just like, That's an interesting idea. Let's see if it— let's put it into reality and see if it works.

Speaker A: I think there's seeds in humor, like things that— because humor gives you the permission to do something low status or do— I mean, even the Soylent thing, it was definitely like a social experiment. We didn't even know if it was just a complete joke the whole time. But then it went viral and people wanted to buy it. Like as a YC company starting like a consumer packaged goods company was extremely low status. Also the literal name. Yeah, crazy, right? So everything was like trollish, insane. And so there were a variety of like just when you start with the lens of humor or performance art, it gives you the ability to broaden the aperture to get really weird.

And then this started as something really weird, like just two guys reading the newspaper, which isn't really a thing, and that's not really a show. And now we've kind of shaped it into something that does look like a real news product and a real media product. But it allows you to kind of start from scratch, a really blank canvas, as opposed to being like, this is what a podcast is, or this is what a show is. And then I have to take what is already a thing and then try and find a little bit of differentiation.

Instead, you just We can start from like— Speaker B: or we can— yeah, the other— the other thing that is very real is I think we both like creating things, right? John created Soylent and then Lucy. Uh, I, going back to like my very first company, I created a skateboard company when I was 12, and that was like realizing that there were people out there that would manufacture skateboards. And if I created a logo and gave them that logo and I gave them the artwork, that I could, as a 12-year-old, I like called up my aunt.

I was like, I need $500. That's, that's like the boards were like $17.50 to make. And I was like, I'm going to buy these and I'm going to sell them locally and in stores and at the skate park and to my friend's parents who would then gift them to their kids for birthdays. Right. It was just that realization that you could make things that happened at a young age. The thing about making things like in the physical world and even software and companies is like the feedback loop is just so, it takes so much time, right?

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

So that iteration is just like super addictive where if you, if you like generating ideas and you think you have decent ideas and you want to see like the challenge with startups is like I've seen this. It's like, I'll meet an entrepreneur and I'm like, "Okay, you have a good idea." You don't know if it's actually truly a good idea. See you in 12 to 18 months. Yeah, even more. I've had companies that I thought were literally dead because they weren't sending updates, and then they send an update and it's like, "Yeah, we just crossed $1 million a month in revenue and it's working finally."

And so, the thing that's so addictive about media is just, again, that like, uh, we love generating ideas and you can, sometimes it takes like 3 hours to make, sometimes it takes 20 minutes to make, et cetera. Speaker A: I'm laughing because you're talking about how addictive media is and I think we're on the 5th hour of podcasting for the day. Speaker C: We sat down, I'm like, are you guys sure you're ready to do this? And they're like, we could podcast. Literally, we are, we are almost out of time.

I, I would love to just do a quick speed run of a few miscellaneous things if, if you guys are up for it. Of course. Um, How do you do a great 15-minute interview? Speaker A: You got to ring a gong, a big one ideally. Yeah, fair. Speaker B: We don't do life stories. This is not a place where you're going to learn everything there is to know about people. It takes some amount of context. Speaker A: Most VCs wish that every meeting that they had with entrepreneurs was 15 minutes, right?

And we just have the affordance to be like, it's 15 minutes. Yeah, they're so— intro. What do you do? And then the news, you've got to be news-driven. So we ring the gong or talk about the product announcement. And then pretty quickly it's like, give us, get us just one layer deeper. Not a soundbite. I don't even think about it like that. I think about it like, take me one layer deeper in understanding your business, your market. Because if you come on and you're, we had somebody on who was building AI for ambulance chasers.

What was that? It was personal injury attorneys. And I was like, I don't really know anything about the personal injury market. I'll just ask one question to get me like a little bit more information on how that, how that market works. So then maybe I come out of that interview just understanding like how many personal injury attorney firms are there? What's the average size? Speaker B: What's the average salary? Yeah, and I was gonna say like the reason that a, if we do a 15-minute interview, the reason that it's great is probably that historically it would have been a 90-minute interview.

And that was like way too much time for that person at that point in their career, that moment. Right. And so we just recognized it's, it's much more interesting to hear for 10 minutes from somebody like in a specific moment in time than, than, than 90 minutes. Right. Like a lot of— we talked to a lot of like seed, Series A, Series B founders that are just kind of like starting their journeys. And someday they might be like an Alex Karp or a Palmer Luckey or Marc Andreessen in that they can just talk and talk and talk and talk and it's entertaining, but they're not at that point yet.

And so like, let's give them the format where they can come in and introduce themselves to the world and we get to hear how they're thinking in that moment. The other thing when we do like at Meta Connect and at YC Demo Day, like we think it's a very interesting media product to interview like an entire management team. In 3 hours because you're getting to hear how all those people are thinking. Not generally, not over, like you could piece together interviews from an executive team over a quarter, right? But it's not all like in that one moment where they're launching this new product or, or our Demo Day content with YC.

It's like you get a really good sense of the batch from listening to a bunch of 3-minute interviews, right? You get a good read much more than just kind of like reading, hearing Gary talk for 45 minutes about all of them even. Yeah, yeah, you're getting like real— yes, that's cool. Speaker B: What's the average salary? Yeah, and I was gonna say like the reason that a, if we do a 15-minute interview, the reason that it's great is probably that historically it would have been a 90-minute interview. And that was like way too much time for that person at that point in their career, that moment.

Right. And so we just recognized it's, it's much more interesting to hear for 10 minutes from somebody like in a specific moment in time than, than, than 90 minutes. Right. Like a lot of— we talked to a lot of like seed, Series A, Series B founders that are just kind of like starting their journeys. And someday they might be like an Alex Karp or a Palmer Luckey or Marc Andreessen in that they can just talk and talk and talk and talk and it's entertaining, but they're not at that point yet.

And so like, let's give them the format where they can come in and introduce themselves to the world and we get to hear how they're thinking in that moment. The other thing when we do like at Meta Connect and at YC Demo Day, like we think it's a very interesting media product to interview like an entire management team. In 3 hours because you're getting to hear how all those people are thinking. Not generally, not over, like you could piece together interviews from an executive team over a quarter, right? But it's not all like in that one moment where they're launching this new product or, or our Demo Day content with YC.

It's like you get a really good sense of the batch from listening to a bunch of 3-minute interviews, right? You get a good read much more than just kind of like reading, hearing Gary talk for 45 minutes about all of them even. Yeah, yeah, you're getting like real— yes, that's cool. Speaker C: Yeah, you're getting like a flash pulse check with a bunch of different flavors. Um, what's the difference between— what is the conscious difference between what you guys do in journalism? Speaker B: We don't break news. Speaker A: Yeah, we rarely break news.

We're, we're very happy for the news to break at 9 AM on Tech Twitter acts like it normally does. You announce a fundraise, come on and give us more context. Let's react to the reaction. How are people perceiving it? Your launch video got 10,000 likes, got a lot of hate. Let's talk about why. Speaker B: What are you going to change? Yeah, we could break news, but it puts us in a very adversarial position because we like that in general, we think it's good and healthy that founders are generally able to control tell their own narratives and decide when news should break.

Like, we've both been in positions where, you know, a journalist is like breaking a story or like telling you this news is going out in an hour, let me know if you have a comment. And I think that there's general— there's like, there's a lot of value to fact-finding and like original reporting, and there's stories that do need to be told, told. And there's certainly stories that don't want to be told that still need to be told. But we think that it's important for our position kind of in the ecosystem to not be like— I, we have no interest in scooping.

I have no interest in telling a story and being the one— yeah, being the one to deliver a story that doesn't want to be delivered. Speaker A: There's a, there's commentary, there's Shams, and there's Steven. Speaker A: There's a, there's commentary, there's Shams, and there's Steven. Speaker C: Exactly right. Yeah. Speaker A: And then there's also like the newswire for like the sports scores, which used to be printed and now it's digital. And so all these different pieces have moved around to different different sections of the ecosystem, but you just got to know your lane and thrive in it.

Yeah. Yeah. Speaker B: And an example being CNBC is not in the scoop business, right? They're not like trying to break— Wall Street Journal is. Speaker C: Yeah. YouTube sure is, by the way, what to expect from you if you— Speaker A: Exactly. Speaker C: You had a bunch of interns here. I'll pick on Tyler as a general example, but maybe him specifically. Someone who's— Speaker B: Tyler's also the, the only intern, only remaining, and he's not really an intern, right? Speaker C: So somebody like that who is generally smart and capable and could probably do a lot of things in tech that are not media, um, how— why does someone like that stick around here for another year or 5?

Speaker A: It's gonna ask him, bring him over. Speaker B: Uh, Tyler will have— I can imagine a bunch of different paths for Tyler. Yeah, post-DBPN, I can imagine a world where he stays with us for 30 years and is just a personality on the show. And it's, it's an incredible personality to bring to the show because like he has more time than we do. He can go out and like nerd out about something, come back. He can be interested. Yeah, different, different set of interests. So he's bringing something novel to the show.

Uh, but, uh, yeah, I mean, Tyler is unique in that he's the, uh, you know, recurring like personality on the show. But if you think about what his optionality will be after, if he decides at some point in the future— one, he's still in college, hasn't officially dropped out. He's on a gap semester. But if he decides to go back to school and still be a part of what we're doing, or just go back to school and just be a student, or stay with us and then a year from now decide, I want to start a company, I want to go work at a venture firm, like he's going to have like truly infinite optionality.

Speaker A: One of the thousand companies we interviewed this year that we can easily make an intro to. Speaker B: Yeah. One more thing that I would add, like retention, like talent retention, to put it in like corporate speak. Yeah. Like we want, we want to create an environment where the people that are at the company today are riding with us like across like decades. And certainly people will go off and do other things. But, um, you know, to date we haven't had somebody like, like decide to leave themselves. And, uh, and part we're like hyper-conscious of like creating ways so that people can grow in the industry because there's not like, if you, if you're, if you're deciding to work in tech media, like I don't know that many other places that you can go that are going to be fulfilling after you work in this type of environment, right?

You might decide— Speaker A: I see it much more like a law firm's partnership than a C-corp that is growing and changing and cycling people through. It's like the people who get in develop a unique set of skills that work very tightly together. It's a small group for a very long time, and everyone everyone participates in the upside for a long time. Speaker C: That's definitely rare in media. Speaker A: Yeah. As opposed to like, you know, the, hey, we're all going to be on a 4-year vest and then we're going to get out and sell this thing and then we're all going to— Speaker C: But also like content creators, like people don't— it's pretty rare for like there to be real durability around something like that.

Speaker C: That's definitely rare in media. Speaker A: Yeah. As opposed to like, you know, the, hey, we're all going to be on a 4-year vest and then we're going to get out and sell this thing and then we're all going to— Speaker C: But also like content creators, like people don't— it's pretty rare for like there to be real durability around something like that. Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's that we have like a pretty clear vision into what like the show looks like in 30 years. And it's not Vice News where you have a bunch of other people doing other shows.

Like, we're not building a media company, a platform with a bunch of other things where it's like, oh yeah, thank goodness we don't have to podcast today because we hired hosts. It's like, no, we're building a show. And so you can look at what Rogan's organization looks like and Huberman's organization looks like, and you can see that you can be doing $100 million a year top line with a team of 10. So why not just do that? Speaker C: I think you guys have talked about the sort of like maybe it was you, John— like the sort of speculation culture, the feeling that it's stupid to not use leverage.

You have 2 years to escape the permanent hard baggers. Yeah. What would you say to young people who are feeling that? Speaker B: I think it's a very toxic mindset. Speaker C: Or if you guys were 21 and you were trying to— Speaker A: I mean, just game theoretically, it's clearly there's immense alpha in not participating in that culture, right? Because if everyone else in your your college class is, is participating in get-your-bag culture, get-rich-quick schemes, and they're hustling and they're flexing and you're just compounding, like you're going to win and it's going to be even less competitive because you're actually— Speaker B: it's also like the advice, the advice that we give, the financial advice that we give to the team.

And I'm saying that in sort of a joking way, but it is financial advice is to like, if you were in your 20s, trying and you have like relatively modest cash flow, trying to YOLO into investments in order to escape the permanent underclass is like such a ridiculous concept because one, you're not deploying size like two, it's going to distract you from the main thing that's important, which is I think the fear is what else could the main— Speaker B: it's also like the advice, the advice that we give, the financial advice that we give to the team.

And I'm saying that in sort of a joking way, but it is financial advice is to like, if you were in your 20s, trying and you have like relatively modest cash flow, trying to YOLO into investments in order to escape the permanent underclass is like such a ridiculous concept because one, you're not deploying size like two, it's going to distract you from the main thing that's important, which is I think the fear is what else could the main— Speaker C: like, are there even any main things left? There's tons of main things left.

Speaker A: Yeah, obviously. Like, the power laws get steeper all over the place. Just be at the top end of the power law. Speaker C: And maybe to go back to what we were talking about earlier, look at more— a more diverse set of inputs of like what creativity is going to come from. Speaker A: Yeah, don't fall into the status traps because I guarantee you that like the best pottery maker in the world is going to be pulling 7 figures if they're, you know, world's best ceramicist. Exist, right? I think about high demand.

Speaker B: I think about this so much because when I was in college, I like was obsessed with startups. I would be refreshing TechCrunch, right? I'd be on Tech Twitter at the time. Like, I was so like obsessed with venture capital, and yet my first real business was a company that didn't raise money, that just grew profitably and has continued to grow profit— profitably for my entire adult life. And that is the entire reason that I was able to just decide we were able to be like, okay, we can just— John was an EIR at Founders Fund.

I didn't have anything else that I needed to do with my time. I had, I had. And so it's like you want to not like— and it was being really into startups and having a lifestyle business. It was at times like kind of miserable because I'd be sitting there being like, like I'm making like real cash flow here. And nobody like is going to look at my LinkedIn and like, oh, it doesn't feel like I'm in the big leagues. Yeah, it wasn't— you didn't feel like I was in the league at all, right?

It's like no one— if you have a lifestyle business, like, get ready to make like a lot of money, but like no one is going to care about you at all, right? Because you're not providing a way for other people to— you're not— you might be providing value to like a set of customers, but you're not like giving people an opportunity to make money. Like if you're raising venture capital, And so I think that's like somewhat of a great point. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's really sad, right? Like if you're just chugging away building a business, like no one cares.

Speaker A: Like David Sanger will care in 50 years if you build a lifestyle. Speaker C: But by the way, it also does— yeah, it takes a long time. Speaker A: It takes a long time for you to get recognition. Speaker C: Uh, how have the wives of TBPN, uh, influenced or made this thing better? Speaker A: Honestly, focus on like like building something like in, in person was like a no-brainer for sure. We want to be home with the families and whatnot. And so this idea of like, oh, we're on the road all the time, it just raises the quality bar for like, yeah, we'll travel for Mark Zuckerberg, but are we going to travel for some random thing just because it's like fun or trendy or like there's a 1% chance that it's good?

It's like really, really focused and just continue to raise the bar. Speaker B: I think they're both incredible. Incredible mothers, which means that we get to spend, you know, we both wake up before the kids, we're at the office before the kids, or we're like meeting up, like starting the workday before the kids are even up. And then they are like such incredible moms that like we get to go home after the show and like the kids are happy, they're thriving, we just get to hang out. And they're carrying the burden of the household and running that.

And having the ability to be live on the air for 3 hours and not be thinking, are the kids eating lunch? Or is— we're not thinking about— Speaker A: The only time we've had to pull the stream because of family stuff was literally during the LA fires. Wow. And that was completely reasonable to be like, get home. But other than that, I mean, yeah. Speaker A: The only time we've had to pull the stream because of family stuff was literally during the LA fires. Wow. And that was completely reasonable to be like, get home.

But other than that, I mean, yeah. Speaker C: Yeah, it's been fantastic. My final question, I'm not sure who this quote actually should be attributed to. I think it's either you or Will, but "Podcasting has little to do with profit. Podcasting is about domination of the spirit." Where did that— Speaker A: So, that is a— Speaker B: It might be Senreth. Speaker A: So, someone else said that in business. And I think it was, "Business has little to do with profit. Business is about domination of the spirit." And then I think I said it at one point.

Speaker B: You just used it in a job post. Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think I used it in a group chat, and then Will posted it publicly in reply to me. And then that reminded me, and so I posted it in the job post. But yes, I mean, one of the things was that we take podcasting really seriously. We don't see it— we don't care about the status. Maybe it's low status, maybe it's high status, whatever. We're doing it. We're all in. We're going very hard on it. But just to take the edge off a little bit, we throw in a little bit of humor.

But we do kind of feel that. Yeah. Speaker B: My question was gonna be how are you guys? Yeah. No, a better, a better line is David Senra. We were hanging out and he goes like, I wish media was a zero-sum game. He's like, I'm mad that it's, you know, I'm mad that, that, that like I, I can, I can win and someone else can win even though I'm— Speaker A: Media is so brutally competitive and he's like, I wish it was more competitive. I love it. Speaker A: Media is so brutally competitive and he's like, I wish it was more competitive.

I love it. Speaker C: It's amazing. Gentlemen, thank you very much. Speaker A: Thanks very much. Speaker B: This was wonderful. Super fun. This was great. Speaker A: Cool. Good times. Thank you.