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

[00:00] - 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. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - The actual content creation, you on the ad sales side. - John's one of the few people, and certainly, like, at the top of the list of people where [00:16] when I talk about the things that I'm good at, like he's consistently bringing ideas together. [00:21] that are [00:21] better than my own, to come to John with an idea in a space that I'm good at generating ideas in.

Let's say it's an advertiser that we're working for, 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... [00:40] That sounds great. And I'm not getting one-upped. And so when you have a partnership, it's like you want to be getting one-upped all the time. The other thing that's real is we never run out of things to talk about. If it's a Friday and John is driving to Santa Barbara, I'm going to Malibu.

And instead of taking my drive, I'll just send the driver home separately. And I'll be like, I'm riding with John. Yeah, we got to hang out more. [01:10] 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 Geordi.

Like I'm pitching an idea to Geordi. It's like there's a little bit of like Geordi capture in the sense of like I'm trying to find something. I'm not trying to find something that will make you happy. I'm actually trying to make something that will make you like tee off. [01:39] I don't want to bore you. You have a pretty clear vision into what the show looks like in 30 years, and it's not... [01:46] Vice News where you have a bunch of other people doing other shows. We're not building a media company, a platform with a bunch of other things where it's like, oh yeah, thank goodness, we don't have to podcast today because we hired hosts.

It's like, no, we're building a show. 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? That means you have to show up every day. [02:13] 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 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, [02:26] every single day. We know when the product is great. [02:29] We feel it. We end the show every day and we're talking through, OK, this section could have been better. That story, that interview was really slow. We got to 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. 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. [02:59] 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. [03:07] at breakfast and ship it like two hours later. So that iteration is just like super addictive. I'm laughing because you're talking about how addictive media is. And I think we're on the fifth hour of podcasting for the day.

Welcome to Dialectic episode 33 with John Coogan and Jordy Hayes, aka TBPN. [03:25] For those of you who are not as terminally online as I am, [03:29] 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. [03:37] And their daily live show didn't start that way. But what has become a daily live show has... [03:43] 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...

[03:54] interesting and substantive and compelling, right? [03:57] but particularly how fun [03:59] TB Pianis [04:00] Getting to watch that has been really awesome. And it's so a surprise they have so many fans. [04:05] I was able to crash the Ultra Dome, which is their studio in Los Angeles, [04:09] and have a conversation with them about [04:12] 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 [04:23] at references and borrowing from historical ideas, other industries, et cetera.

[04:29] You can look at the media world and the fashion world and see all of the ways they do that. [04:35] One of the things John and Jordy talk about is how [04:37] many ideas they've taken from other industries, and that's part of it. [04:41] of what has made TBPN 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 Party Round, aka Capital, most recently, [05:01] Branded Native, which is a YouTube and podcasting ad network he built, [05:04] early on in his career, as well as several others.

It was really cool, too, to see just... [05:09] why their collaboration makes so much sense and what they bring to the table that both overlaps and contrasts. You'll hear that in the very first question when I ask them about, [05:18] technology versus business. This was so fun. I think you'll see the amount of thoughtfulness and process and consideration that goes into [05:27] a show that sometimes can feel really light and fun and easy. [05:31] was inspiring for me. In many ways, dialectic and TBPN are on very opposite ends of the spectrum.

[05:37] And it was cool to meet in the middle. And I learned a lot. I hope regardless whether you're. [05:42] interested in the media side of things or not, I think there's so much to learn from Johnny Geordi today. [05:47] about [05:48] technology and culture and business and attention and [05:52] how to build something that actually feels differentiated and fresh and unique. [05:56] in a world where they're [05:58] so much competition and there are so many people trying to do very similar things. [06:03] With that, here is John Coogan and Jordy Hayes.

[06:07] TPPN. [06:08] All right. John Coogan, Jordy Hayes. We're here. Thank you for having me. [06:14] Thank you for having us. Coming to the Ultradome. [06:17] Physically and spiritually. We're going to start really serious. Okay. Okay. [06:22] This is you. You've spent the last year building a show about technology and business. [06:27] And so I need to know, what do you love more? [06:30] technology, or business. [06:33] Thank you. [06:34] I think John loves technology more. I love business more. That's fair. Yeah. [06:38] And that's why we're a good duo.

[06:42] Easy. Beautiful. [06:43] Like, John really gets, I would say, like, deeper... [06:48] Super nerdy. Get nerds out. Technical stuff. Much more from a technical standpoint. Meanwhile, like I've, John started multiple companies. I've done... [06:58] a lot more like deals, right? So investing, helping put companies together. And so that's kind of what I'm bringing to the table. And then it's super important when we're [07:09] 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. Yeah. [07:21] Was that clear coming in or when you first started talking about this? Was that something that kind of... [07:26] was part of the calculus at all? No. [07:28] Not at all. [07:29] No, I... [07:31] The story of TVPN is two guys decide they should do a podcast and [07:38] and [07:39] It's not much deeper than that. [07:41] like we we had we had [07:43] talked about doing something together. We had talked about what the right format would be and, um, [07:49] John had figured out the format and...

[07:51] I, at one point, texted him. 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 there. [08:03] Yeah, I think if you go back and you look at, like, the first or second episodes... [08:06] 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 Fio. Oh, yes. I found this.

And the second product was the Meta Ray-Bans. [08:19] 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. Except David Senra. 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. [08:49] it. [08:50] But if you go and you look through like the nature of our discussion about the meta Ray Bans, [08:56] 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. [09:26] 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. [09:35] It's also funny to go back. The pacing is a little different on the early episodes. Oh, yeah. Was it more rapid fire? I don't even remember. No, no. It was literally like you guys were just hanging out. Like, oh, yeah, I guess. [09:49] Oh, John has this energy.

Also, did John... [09:52] John didn't actually climb all those mountains, right? No, no, no. I've known him for a long time. That is not... You mean the 14ers? Yeah, I mean, I think early on, early on we had a lot of bits that were just really extreme. [10:03] 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 was really just making it for like a group chat, basically.

And then over time, we realized, like, OK, we got to dial some of these bits back. I we're both very sarcastic. Yeah. And. [10:23] 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. Do you remember the story of Figma? Oh, so we have a really good story. Tell the story. We were, Figma launched, like, the most, like, normal, somewhat modest product update. I don't even remember. 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. [10:53] It was a feature that people had wanted for a long time. The heads. And they finally shipped it. [10:59] And we were riffing on 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. It was crazy. This person made this over – we published it. And within – [11:20] By that evening, and this was, again, we had very little attention on the show or anything like that.

[11:29] uh hundreds of posts and comments from one person i was still working at founders fund as an entrepreneur residence the guy was messaging peter teal saying you have to fire this guy because because this is just not true it's just not true like i mean he was like i lying he was like i i live in brooklyn this never happened he thought it was like fake news instead of just obviously a joke obviously people are protesting for better figma tools we love fig maybe that's [11:59] We were. It was a lot of fun.

We were kind of like, man, we got to lock down what we say. Maybe our location, this guy seemed kind of crazy. I want to talk a little bit about [12:10] the business of media, which is [12:12] more or less with [12:13] all of this is obviously a lot to do with technology to Patrick O'Shaughnessy's interview with Jeremy Giffen or Kifan a few years ago, they were talking about how podcasting is still low status. Um, and maybe that's less true than it was then, but I think it's still partially true.

Um, and I think you guys have talked a lot about how media is actually the thing. Um, if there's not a fun, there's not a bunch of other stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Um, or like, no, it's actually very hot. No, no. Our, our, our decision, our key decision was making it even [12:43] How can you be more low status than a podcaster? Be a lower status than a tech podcaster? You can be a tech podcaster who also runs host-read ads constantly. That's incredibly low status. We love ads so much. We did ads before we had any sponsors.

Yeah, right. And if you listen to the early episode. The first time I did it, I think I ambushed you, right? Yeah, yeah. And John goes, and now I need to tell you about FeedShip. [13:12] Feedship is one of the world's premier yacht builders in the world. And at no point did we ever say Feedship is a sponsor. We just read. It was aspirational. We just were covering that. Yeah, it was just like, before I tell you about the next thing, I need to tell you because it's amazing. 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. Hotag. Yeah. [13:42] The next level is you get sued by somebody who's mad that you're pretending they're a sponsor of you. We dialed it back pretty quickly. We also never said they were sponsors. No, we never did. We just enjoyed talking about them. [13:53] I think media used to be, at least more consensus, a great business when there was a lot more scarcity. Sure. 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...

[14:09] I don't want to say it's resting on your laurels, but having one of those, it's almost like a taxi medallion or something. There was a lot of inbuilt scarcity. [14:17] I think you guys have sort of zagged and embraced the opposite and [14:22] leaned into abundance. Like quite literally, I think the feeling over the last year of the rise has partially been, [14:28] you guys just flood the airwaves. Yeah. Like you can't, there's just so much TBPN. 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, [14:41] crazy volume and frankly ramping up the volume over the last [14:45] eight months, and making sure [14:47] You're not just like, oh, people know about us, and as long as we show up, it's fine. [14:51] Thank you. [14:52] Yeah, so one thing he 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. If they went and tried to start being a content creator on the Internet – [15:05] 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 have 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 is hyper competitive. What [15:34] We noticed in tech specifically, [15:37] is that... [15:38] There's a lot of podcasts in tech, but they are all...

[15:43] 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, 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 that that was why the show broke through. [16:04] you know, originally. [16:06] 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... [16:14] uh... [16:15] If you look over the last year, I don't think there are many... [16:20] people in the industry that have put in the number of hours that we have. So like part of it is just outworking. [16:27] Yeah. [16:27] Three hours a day is a lot, but if you look at the ratio between – it's probably six hours of prep that goes into every three-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 – [16:45] 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. Like 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. [17:15] audience because [17:17] tech loves startups, loves growth, loves, you know, iteration. I think everyone's really accepting of that. Yeah. And 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... [17:35] a week, they can take a long weekend and the product's still going to function as is. It's [17:41] With news, we're in the news business, right? If we're not, like, there is no... Are you definitely in the news business? Is that how you think about it? That's, like, another... [17:49] We can maybe go down that. [17:52] kind of path in a second, but there's no value to TVPN if we don't show up.

[17:57] There's very little catalog value as opposed to consider David Senra's founder's podcast. Or acquire. Or invest like the best. Right. And so we took a barbell approach. And so – [18:09] Uh, that is, that, that means you have to show up every day. [18:13] But it's also an opportunity to iterate every day. 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? [18:31] Um, and so, uh, that w w 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. [18:45] We feel it. We end the show every day and we're talking through, OK, this section could have been better. That story. We didn't we didn't have the right even information to give the best sort of takes on that.

That sex, that interview was really slow. We got to, 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. [19:09] rest and sort of sit back and there's no [19:14] There's never been a moment where we were like, oh, that was a great interview. Like we can take the next week. Next week will be easy, right? It's like every single day is new and bringing that, 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. [19:31] 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. [19:43] and how to make it better. And I think we'll do that for a very, very, very long time. [19:48] What ends up being interesting is is that if you want to we've had a lot of people be.

[19:56] 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. [20:06] going from zero to what we are today would be like even 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. Yeah. [20:17] One camera, two mics. [20:20] talking through some posts, then we added another show, then we added another camera, then we added new microphones, then we added this, then we added an overlay, then we added live, then we added guests, then we added...

[20:29] Five days a week. Then we added new channels. Then we did, you know, there's just like this constant kind of compounding. 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 effect shot. Because I put, I wanted a more moody cinematic lighting setup. So I put the light stand behind us so that we would be backlit. So we'd kind of have this like dark room vibe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wanted something more cinematic.

Yeah, exactly. [20:59] I [21:00] 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 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 I 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.

[21:30] and 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 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 like clone all this on day one.

[22:00] by TBPN and be like, I want to take media seriously. And maybe you start as like, you know, some things are inspired, but like all the different things, they're all like happy accidents that like came together, different ideas, and they kind of grew and found their place within the show. And it would be very hard to try and like, [22:19] Yeah, it would be very hard to copy-paste all of this. It would have been hard for you guys to plan a whole bunch of that stuff. [22:26] Yeah. [22:26] There's another element of this that is...

[22:28] Maybe a little less true for you given the YouTube stuff, but [22:31] I think still broadly true, which is [22:33] you both [22:34] been serial entrepreneurs and you've done a whole bunch of different types of things. [22:38] are in this, you are both entrepreneurs and you are also talent. There's a line where you say, we are the talent and we'd like to remain the talent and not build an empire. [22:48] And I think on one hand, like the world has certainly started. I think this is also something you said, like.

[22:54] and [22:55] Because of the Internet, media has rewarded networks, like platform networks, and it has rewarded creators. Yes. And the middle is really, really hard. Barbell is a super key concept that we love and we want to keep coming back to as much as possible in this. [23:09] I [23:09] And 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. Obviously, there are elements of this. [23:20] where you're having sort of leverage.

Um, [23:24] And so I'm curious what that maybe even especially more so for you, like as someone who. [23:29] I think was always like... [23:30] Always thought a lot about distribution, but was not in the spotlight. [23:35] What that experience has been. [23:37] to sort of manage the-- [23:39] 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. [23:45] But that's a little less typical for the typical internet creator. [23:50] Yeah, I mean, often... [23:53] 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 R. and finance orgs and whatnot. [24:07] I think it's actually not that hard because we've both done it multiple times and you sit on top of, you know, all these different SaaS products. So you can really leverage software in a lot of places, whether it's. [24:20] you know, set up a, you know, payroll software or whatever you need to like build your business. It's pretty... [24:26] 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 I would push as hard as possible on iterating the content, finding new formats, up-leveling 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, [24:56] than I think a lot of, at least my previous YouTube channel, [25:01] I never really turned it into a business.

And so I never really thought about like, oh, what would it look like if I, if I put a hundred K into this? Yeah. It's like, it's like my Twitter account is what, how I thought about my YouTube account. And I, I didn't think about it as like, okay, well, if you, [25:18] 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, like those two things aligned really, really quickly. And so we were able to just – [25:36] It was very easy for us in just the course of a couple months to go from like, 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 it. Yeah, as much as it was unplanned, right? We didn't plan to... [25:57] We didn't have a crystal ball and say to ourselves, like, if you had asked either of us.

[26:03] a year ago. Yeah. [26:05] Maybe maybe not a year ago because we had started doing the show, but two years ago. Do you have any interest in would you have any interest in being on camera for three hours a day? You know, you know, creating some type of like technology television show. And we would have said like, like maybe we'd. [26:20] 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, [26:27] It feels like TBPN is the natural evolution of everything that we've worked on.

Right. I decade ago, I spent a summer helping a podcast monetize for the first time they had gotten to. [26:39] top 10 [26:41] in the fitness charts, and they hadn't monetized at all. [26:45] 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 learned the business side of that.

That work ultimately turned into a company called Branded Native, which is a YouTube ad network that's still running and growing to this day. And so through building Branded Native. [27:09] I did... [27:10] literally thousands of advertising deals between [27:14] companies and creators of all different types, right? So mom and pop creators, established media companies like Donut Media. We talked about them earlier on the show. And so I had done thousands of deals on the revenue side of the kind of business that we're building and then went on to build Party Round, which is when we met.

[27:33] And that was taking everything I knew about media [27:37] And then really, when you look at Party Round's best work, it was like entertaining the industry. Right. We would do things that. [27:44] got a lot of attention and we'd funnel that attention into our FinTech product. But [27:49] 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. [27:57] It's the... [27:58] effectively like the media side. And so I'd got to experience having...

[28:02] I think we had like marketing market fit, right, at a time when [28:07] we didn't have [28:08] The product at that time, you know, [28:10] We had a lot of demand during the craziness of 2021. [28:14] Um, but, uh, but like taking that and then you fast forward to starting, um, [28:20] This show, it's like John had been... [28:23] If you look back and like Soylent is one of the most iconic [28:26] It's the most iconic CPG company ever in the history of like tech specifically. Right. So when you look back and you can find like it's like.

[28:35] Okay, it makes sense that, you know, a decade later, John would have, like, [28:39] 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 and, [28:52] 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 the thing that I always come back to is John's understanding that 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. [29:22] 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. [29:35] We don't take ourselves very seriously, and I think 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. [29:45] We love the industry. [29:49] But at the same time, we can recognize the silliness. But one thing that's always been. [29:54] Uh, [29:54] that we've always maintained is taking the work super seriously. And so we can have a lot of fun. It's fun to go to work. I look forward to starting the day every day, but we're taking the actual work very seriously. And part of that is we're forced to, right? Like we have to... [30:10] physically speak the product into existence, right?

We have to perform. And so if we're not having fun or it's not going well, [30:17] 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. So you can tell. Yeah. You can tell when somebody is on camera and they're not having fun. You can tell. Yeah. It's 100% right. [30:34] I think there's something that's pretty common in [30:37] at least in the creator part of the world, but increasingly as people gain audience, [30:43] Part of it is audience capture, but part of it is just like the simple ego that comes when [30:47] A critical part of why you're successful is your distribution.

[30:52] 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... [31:02] Yeah, how you're able to, whether it be between the two of you or there are other people, [31:07] Sort of like... [31:08] maintain [31:09] a healthy amount of ego and also be checked or challenged. Yeah, I was thinking about that just today. So we've been, uh, [31:16] We've been growing this newsletter. [31:18] 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 – [31:30] There's a little bit of like I'm writing for 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 Geordi. Like I'm pitching an idea to Geordi. And. [31:48] It's like there's a little bit of like Geordi capture in the sense of like I'm trying to I'm trying to find something. I'm not trying to find something to make you happy.

I'm actually trying to make something that will make you like tee off. [31:58] I don't want to bore you. I want you to be like, I have a strong point. The newsletter is we meet at 6.30 every morning. We try not to adjust. [32:07] the schedule at all. We've tried it. We've tried to fit a breakfast in with external people. It doesn't work at all. And so we try to have the exact same morning. [32:16] every morning leading up into the show. [32:18] And our the process that's worked well as we show up and from six thirty to nine fifteen, 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, we're going to be doing a lot of work. [32:35] Uh, 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. Um. [32:46] for whatever we're working on in the business, and John starts just writing.

- Cool. - And so-- - And I've never had writer's block, because I'm just kind of like transcribing the discussion that we already had. [32:55] Yeah, the wheel's already spinning. Yeah, I'm just kind of like rephrasing it to be like, oh, are there some data points? You know how if you're in an argument with somebody, eventually you go and look up the facts, get some facts? And so I do a little bit of that, and then I bring that to the show, and we kind of rehash what we've already talked about.

But we kind of know the general parameters of the key discussion for the day, and then that can kind of lead to… [33:25] get to the studio and you have like 20 minutes and you go live and that feels just terrible. It's really like it's such an important part of the day that. [33:34] whatever. It's effectively three hours of just like, [33:37] fun debate on what we want to do. It's also a very unique thing about this particular show. Like, if you go to any traditional media... [33:46] like, daily show, like, there is a room of writers that are putting together a monologue.

And it's very rare that the hosts are doing all of the work. [33:58] Yeah, sometimes I see clips from other shows. [34:03] And I just assume that everyone does their own homework. And I don't think that's the case at all. But that's part of what makes the show great is that we want to keep that [34:13] conversational feel, right? This is... [34:16] This is two people trying to understand the world with guests, right? And we try to lean on guests. We can't be – we talk on any given week. We're covering – [34:27] 30 different industries.

[34:30] You know, every every, you know, there's such a broad spectrum. And so we can't possibly be experts. It has to be conversational. [34:37] and it has to feel like [34:39] You're sitting here, you're hanging out with us, and you're just trying to understand... [34:42] the world. [34:43] And so even from... [34:45] 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 live stream where it's high and low together. It's a little bit.

It has the aesthetics of the polished TV that has a whole writer's room and a teleprompter. But there isn't one. It's much more like watching somebody flip through the news. [35:10] on their computer on a live stream like you'd see on Twitch, just chatting, right? And so we've kind of like pulled these two things together, like Twitch just chatting, [35:19] and then... [35:20] 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.

[35:31] There's also just like, I'm sure you guys have talked to Senator 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 are so not getting. [35:41] Oh, my gosh. If there's like a, yeah, 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. Yeah. [35:50] There's only one intern in today. Yeah, it's clear that it's you guys.

[35:56] One last thing on the business thing, I guess, would be, and you started to talk about it, [36:01] the reciprocal nature between the [36:03] the content and the business. Sure. [36:05] Why, 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. Yep. [36:17] What about advertising is so powerful? Price discrimination. [36:21] There are people that follow the show that are... [36:24] Billionaires.

[36:25] There are people that follow the show that are in college. [36:28] And so if you find a great product, [36:32] that you can, where that company can get both of those people as a client and extract literally $1 billion from the multi-billionaire. [36:42] who runs a massive company, and then also... [36:45] help the college students start their first company and extract 200 bucks a month on the SAS revenue once they get to 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 like a T-shirt.

And you say, do you mind paying 100 bucks? [37:08] media companies and creators love more than what they love about the subscription business model [37:15] 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. Yeah, that or just it's really easy to understand, like, okay, I can – [37:29] Your lifestyle is just very consistent. It's predictable, right? [37:33] What I love and why we were excited about advertising was that, I mean, obviously for what John said, but also there's – [37:44] We have never charged a member of our audience a dollar.

[37:48] Right. And over a year, we we haven't even sold merch. Right. All every all the merch that we've made, we've just given away. And that is a beautiful thing that that there's like roughly 15 or so companies that have like. [38:03] effectively finance TBPN so that it's free for the entire world, right? And I actually think that's a beautiful [38:10] beautiful thing. Uh, I think where advertising gets a bad, uh, [38:15] RAP is... [38:16] non-targeted advertising. So if you're getting ads that every once in a while I'll get an ad and I'm like, why did I get this ad?

That's like actually... [38:25] not a great experience. And then high ad loads. So we have a higher volume of ads than the average podcast, but we actually have a much lower percentage of [38:34] of the actual content is advertising, right? Way lower than TV. Yeah, so TV is... I mean, if you watch a TV show, it's 22 minutes and a 30-minute segment. That's 10 minutes of ads. We're not... You know, we're an 180-minute show, three hours. There might be five or 10 minutes of total ads across that, which is, you know, less than 10%.

And the content and the ad is actually much closer together. Totally. Obviously, that's been the case for... Maybe I guess one other criticism would be that [39:01] broadly, not necessarily for you guys, is that it just shifts the incentives? 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, but they're companies that... [39:13] that the world does not [39:15] 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 [39:26] that should not be waking up in the morning thinking, like, how can I be the next Cluely, right? Like, they should be thinking, how do I build a, you know, fantastic product that I can, you know, get a meaningful amount of our market and figure out new products. You know, like, 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? [39:56] 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 [40:19] 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. Goldman Sachs has a podcast, Blackstone, BlackRock. I'm pretty sure they both they both have podcasts, but they also advertise on F1 or TV or CNBC like they run ads because they need awareness. [40:42] That's a great point. Yeah, the main thing is content just wants to be free. Ask any creator that... [40:48] that I would even say Ben Thompson... [40:51] probably realizes that he wouldn't [40:54] Uh, he, his show was born at a time when X was happy to, to promote your links.

Right. And he was super early to, uh, a generational trend. And it would be very hard to like recreate that of having this massive base of, uh, [41:09] paid subscribers. There was just like less competition, I think, for like truly great [41:15] technology analysis. Now you're fighting gravity. And, um, yeah. And the other thing is like, you know, we, we wanted to create a business that didn't require us to, um, [41:24] do other things, right? We've seen, it's pain, it pains me that, uh, for the last, [41:30] however many years, everyone has been on this path of, "I make content that's great enough to justify doing something else."

And every time somebody does that, [41:40] they then are in competition with somebody who doesn't have the other thing to do. Yes, yes. 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... [41:52] there are a bunch of people that want your audience, they want the attention that you have, and they don't have a venture fund, and then you go and you... [42:00] you're a media creator and you start a venture fund, it's like, well, who's your customer now?

Is it your LPs? Is it the founders? Is it your audience, right? I generally predict that, uh, [42:11] that people will continue to distract themselves, but we wanted to build a business that we weren't like, okay, now we've had a little success. We have some momentum. Now let's diversify, right? It's like staying ruthlessly focused on the content itself. [42:28] because that's what our audience deserves right um we every single day i wish that i wish that i had an extra three hours to like prep for some story that we want to talk about because people are tuning into the show every day and they deserve to get the best possible experience 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 we're all doing that in so many little ways [42:55] Throughout, like, it's just so tempting to focus on like, just, oh, I'll just do a little bit else.

It even happens within the context of we have been, you know, extremely focused on media. We haven't done a fund or company or spin out tech product or anything like that. But even within the context. [43:13] Even within TBPN, we've thought about – [43:16] you know, is the newsletter too much of a distraction? Yeah. Or is it actually synergistic? I think we got it to a place where it's synergistic because it serves as a way to prep the show. It serves as a way to prep discussions that will happen on the show.

The actual newsletter is exactly. Yeah. And it's the most efficient way to consume the show. Right. Watching. If you if you have the luxury of watching the live stream every day, it really is luxury. Right. And it's not an efficient way to get news. And that's OK. Right. [43:46] for generations have liked having a TV on in the office and doing their work day and being able to sort of passively understand the, [43:55] what's going on through that but um the newsletter again is like the most efficient way if you want tbpn in two minutes that's how you do it yes okay

[44:04] This show began as something called Technology Brothers. [44:09] You mentioned earlier, Party Round and Capital, like I think more than almost anything else, you were amazing at tapping into like [44:14] the technology culture zeitgeist. Obviously you've done [44:18] Over 250 videos, not only tech, but like a whole lot about... [44:23] 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.

[44:43] Maybe the way you... [44:44] relate to that or think about? Like, are you, is that something you're kind of like... [44:49] consciously, maybe another way of asking... I think technology is too inspired by technology. [44:58] If you think about... [45:01] The best example of this is the browser company. Novel way to name a company. [45:06] And they were able like that. That was just the name naming of that company was valuable because it stood out like, wait, this is a consumer tech company. They're creating a browser. They have this like, you know, cursive logo mark.

It just stood out immediately. Right. And you could. Yeah. And you could tell that it was inspired. Right. [45:25] It wasn't like they were the first company. They weren't the first company in the world to name themselves like the blank company. Yes. But they were the first people in tech to do it and do it really well. Yes. [45:34] And since then, over the years, we've, you know, we've seen like probably a hundred companies created with that. Right. And it pains me. [45:42] It pains me every single time because... [45:46] 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 in the industry. [45:55] to-- [45:56] say that like, you know, the best people copy, right? Great artists steal. [46:00] And it's like... [46:02] I think that great artists actually steal from elsewhere, right? They're not like, oh, this great artist did something. I want to be a great artist, so I'm going to do art exactly like... A perfect copy of the Mona Lisa. Creativity is almost definitionally like diverse inputs. Of course. Yeah, yeah, diverse inputs, and so... [46:18] So I think what we what we you know, one of the things that we've done well, I did, you know, I did this historically with.

[46:24] with kind of everything that I've worked on is like, [46:28] It's great to copy. It's great to get heavily inspired, but do it. [46:31] 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 in like a cursive font. [46:45] uh, [46:46] They probably got a little bit of attention because it was still somewhat novel. But now we're seeing like. [46:51] the fifth and sixth and seventh wave of naming companies in this way.

And it's like the biggest anti-signal to me, right? It says like, you are not an original thinker. [47:01] And maybe you just didn't want to take the time to find a unique domain name. But even that says you're not... [47:07] You're not heavily inspired. And so what... [47:10] what TVPN has done is, [47:13] always borrowed from outside the industry right so like we borrowed suits right we borrowed mahogany we yeah we borrowed uh mahogany right the official wood of business right that was not it wasn't a wood that uh well that's that's it i just call it that um but uh but yeah we yeah so so yeah some sales cultures but certainly not like a common tech totem yeah and then if you [47:43] Center for LinkedIn, which is hilarious because it's probably a great way to explain it to somebody that reads the New York Times.

[47:50] But [47:51] We've never I've maybe watched an hour of SportsCenter my entire life across. [47:56] 29 years, right? An hour of SportsCenter. So that wasn't even the inspiration, even though aesthetically... [48:02] we drew some inspiration if you look at our graphics packages and things like that. And then from an advertising standpoint, like – [48:10] I told every advertiser earlier that we were building a Formula One team, right? And that we weren't just going to give you a host route ad here or there. [48:21] bring you into the entire world that we were built in, right?

And so we're constantly borrowing, but we're trying not to borrow anything. [48:28] We even had we were working on something interesting. [48:31] we had an entire product drop that we were going to do. We were going to send TBPN, like whey protein, to like a thousand companies that are, you know, friends and friends of the show and things like that. And another company did like a supplement drop before and we just dropped it because we were like, we had done all the work to do it. We just we hadn't hit go on the PO.

And we just said, like, it's no longer going to be that interesting. And we don't want to fast follow within the same within our same kind of like world. Right. [49:01] I think that's my biggest critique of tech is like there's a really big world and you can go and borrow from anywhere. [49:08] You guys do a really good job of being insider outsiders. [49:11] um, [49:12] both maybe personally also like we're here in Hollywood. We're not in Silicon Valley. Like, [49:17] It's one thing to say, like, have diverse inputs.

I'm curious how, for both of you... [49:22] that [49:22] has actually, how that, like, is that a super intentional thing? Is that... [49:26] Just kind of your natural curiosity. I think it's very clear that... [49:32] If you look for [49:34] inputs on how to make a [49:36] TV show look good in Silicon Valley, you're not going to find a bunch of great examples. And so it's much better to just go where they make great stuff and pull from that. And so Hollywood was dying, man. Like I know they had no good ideas.

I don't mean Hollywood specifically. So I think Hollywood doesn't have maybe a ton of amazing new ideas, but the beautiful thing, and we come up with ideas all the time of like, okay, you take that show, that format and, [50:05] 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 will be new to me. And people will be like, wow, they're geniuses. I mean, when we were thinking about, like, how do we want the look of the show to feel, we didn't just look at Pat McAfee and SportsCenter and CNBC.

I also looked at, like, how news shows have been filmed throughout history. [50:35] or it featured a cut to, you know, let's go to the new show. What does that look like? What's that aesthetic? How does Hollywood portray... [50:41] a news studio when they have cinema gear and they can do proper lighting. And everybody has something in their head when they think of that. Yeah. And that's partially a, [50:50] Product of Cultural Time or whatever. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, there's an Apple TV show called The Morning Show. There's a whole variety.

[50:58] Aaron Sorkin has a show about the news as well. And there's been a bunch of places where we've pulled, like, visual references. I mean, even right now, like, this set design is much more moody and contrasty than pretty much any show. [51:12] TV show, Pat McAfee, CNBC, Fox News, ABC, like all of those are much brighter sets. Ours 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. And like I wouldn't even know to find that.

I wouldn't find that reference in tech specifically. Yeah, I would say we... [51:37] we have maybe... [51:39] found one idea within tech to make the show better this year, and we found hundreds from outside of tech. [51:45] And so... [51:46] whenever I'm watching... [51:48] or consuming any type of media [51:51] That's non-tech media. [51:53] I'm like pausing, screenshotting it, sending it to John, sending it to Ben, saying, hey, look at this. This is cool. We should implement this kind of thing. And that just doesn't. And again, like tech is just kind of very circular.

They're saying like, oh, this other VC podcast did this thing. We should do that. There's no broader field of view. And by the way, other industries are like fashion is a great example of an industry that's really good at this. They're constantly looking elsewhere. Totally. There's something. No, it's the best. It's the best example of that.