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 H.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.

[52:23] A fashion brand that is planning 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. This is true in other like Silicon Valley companies. We were just looking at Anderil launched a new augmented reality headset. [52:53] is doing they pulled it from call of duty they pulled from call of duty and pulled from like anime it also pulled from tech which is not defense which is the industry actually yeah like we're not a tech company really we're media company they're really a defense company but they're a tech defense company and and so like they're clearly pulling from other references they're not just going to what does lockheed do what is what does boeing do and that's always the nature of these things [53:19] Thank you. [53:19] On some level, you are making a show about the culture of tech, though. Yes. [53:24] One, I think... [53:26] thing that you've done a good job of so far is sort of like, [53:29] playing to a certain niche and playing enough inside base stuff like the Metis list is 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. Mm-hmm. [53:43] both now and in the future. I'm curious how you think about [53:46] towing that line. I think it seems clear you are making a show for people interested in tech, the business side of the tech world, but how do you think about dialing the aperture wider, more narrow,

[53:56] We're not going wider. [53:58] I agree. [54:01] It's so critical because we have no plans to retire from the Mikes. [54:07] until we're [54:08] just done, actually retired. [54:12] It's so critical that the content that we put out every day, the things that we talk about are deeply interesting to us. [54:20] 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. [54:28] SpaceX news from two years ago. [54:31] A political critique of tech. That's really popular. Retail trading. 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. [54:47] We're almost the opposite. We're like, yeah, once they go out and they're mature, like, we'll talk about them a little bit, but it's more about the lessons from. When you guys might not care as much about that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the thing that we said. Private markets guys. Yeah. The thing that we said early on, and I think it's still true, it's like. [55:03] We make content for 200,000 people in the world. [55:06] These are people that... [55:07] 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, [55:20] okay to make [55:21] Just we were very intentional about making sure that the content is interesting to them. We're not always going to get it right. But in general, if it's interesting to us, it's probably interesting to that group. And what we've seen, the funny thing is we got to.

[55:34] like a review, I think, uh, uh, last week or something. And somebody said, uh, [55:38] Like I'm a dentist on the east or I'm a doctor on the east coast. [55:43] I've never worked in technology. I started listening to TVPN and I listen every single day now. [55:48] and and i think uh... [55:50] It's... [55:50] it's great if those kind of people like, [55:53] adopt the [55:54] show and enjoy it and get value out of it and use it to understand the world. But... [56:01] 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 he more shallow. And yeah. Or just being like, what's the next hundred? [56:15] Every single person. [56:17] view, impression, subscriber number in three months if we wanted to. [56:22] 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. Yeah, so history and politics are the two things that it's so it's so easy if you're just chasing views. [56:38] But that's not what we're doing here because we're actually building it as a business, not just as some sort of vanity metric. Yeah, the business part almost makes it – it's almost a constraint that's helpful. Totally, totally, because as soon as you go there, you're just selling different products. CPMs are different. There's a whole bunch of things, and I don't think we'd enjoy it as much. And then it's way more competitive because there's so many great shows about politics or what's going on in the public markets. I mean, you look at CNBC and Bloomberg. Those are actually great products if you're a retail trader, and you actually want to look at the stock chart for the day.

[57:08] rarely pulling up stock charts because a lot of times we're talking about private companies. Yeah, and I think another thing that's notable is a lot of traditional business television [57:17] the formats and the structure of the shows were created... [57:21] 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, 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... [57:39] a phone that would give you exactly what you're, so, and so, [57:43] Our coverage is... [57:45] something we've [57:48] 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 new CNBC or this and that, but it's important to not... [57:59] It's important to be inspired, but create some constraint. What was it? The New York Times used to have box scores for every game that would be played in sports because you just couldn't look them up. 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. [58:22] you know, that's obviously valuable to the folks that didn't evolve. It was just the way it was done. The only reason they're still doing it is the way it's been done. Exactly, exactly. So do we want a segment of the show where we just read off every stock price? I don't think so. Name every stock, Sean. There actually was a streamer who was doing that for a while, and it was actually pretty effective because people found it very, like, meditative. It's like ASMR. So actually, I don't want to, like, count that out as, like, a bad thing.

[58:52] want to do a show that assumes the modern trappings of technology and modernity. Yeah, we're also, you said RU News. It's a good question. I would say we are not [59:05] the [59:06] delivery mechanism for news. Yes. Like the conversational layer that happens on top of it, because oftentimes I find out news from the chat right here. Somebody says like, [59:16] all caps, they'll just put it in the chat, and I go to X, and I'm like, oh, yeah, this broke five minutes ago or whatever. Everyone has that group chat now where they send posts – [59:24] From Axe to the group chat. [59:27] And they're hoping that there's a little bit of discussion around it, and we just kind of, like, productized that. Yes, yes. It's just like, yeah, we'll talk about it. We'll give you a couple sound bites on either side of whatever tweet is going viral right now that, you know, maybe there's a little bit in the quote tweets and the DMs and whatnot, but we're just an extra layer on top of that. Let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah. I think – [59:46] I'm [59:48] This story, there's a lot of things that went into the success you guys have had in the last year. But I think maybe more than anything else, aside from your own ability, is... [59:57] thinking sort of medium first around X or Twitter. 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. An 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.

[1:00:27] And in many ways, like, I was like half me, half him. The workshopping. In many ways, like, I think, I don't know, I've been meeting people on Twitter for the last decade, and I've always struggled to explain to people. And there is this sort of unique thing for maybe 200,000 people. I don't know exactly how big, but there's a few. I don't think there's that many people. No, no, no, no, no. If you're in true tech Twitter and you make a banger about, like, Josh Kushner, for example. Yes. [1:00:57] and likes is like [1:00:58] You did it. Everyone loved it. You got everyone. You can go hang out with people the next day and say – [1:01:04] start referencing, like you can basically reference the tweet, not really that specifically. Oh, I saw that. Oh, I saw that. Exactly. Because it is a very small corner. It's a small table at the dive bar. At the dive bar. Exactly. [1:01:14] So maybe you've already talked about it a little bit, but yeah, I'm curious what you love about that medium and maybe more importantly, how over the course of the last year you guys have evolved with it as kind of the main kind of playing field. So I think that people mistake... [1:01:27] They want to pin our success on growth hacks. [1:01:31] So, like, clipping was a growth hack. Virality. Yeah, like... [1:01:37] 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. [1:01:49] The... [1:01:50] that is not like why we are successful. And so I think we're constantly thinking about

[1:01:57] growth levers and new ways to distribute the content. But, [1:02:01] fundamentally the thing that we actually care about is the show. And like every single day making it slightly, slightly better. I think like... [1:02:08] It is accurate to say that... [1:02:10] TVPN is a media company or it's a show that was born on X and that is an entertainment is like a companion. [1:02:18] product to X. [1:02:20] 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. [1:02:33] But it's like wildly-- [1:02:35] it's like a wildly inefficient way to do it because you're like, okay, I found this podcast. [1:02:39] that was recorded three weeks ago. They're going to talk about one of these things. And it was published a week ago. [1:02:45] 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. [1:02:53] There were like... [1:02:54] TVPN at its core is like a bleeding-edge commentary on the – you know – [1:03:00] We went off air at 2 p.m. Pacific today. We won't be back on until 11 tomorrow. There's going to be some stuff that happens in between there. But in general, it's like always present. You're reacting to tweets that have been tweeted while you've been live. Yeah. Yeah. [1:03:13] And so I think that that much more than a specific growth hack or clipping or things like that, or a specific thing we did with the brand or the suits or anything like that, is why it's a it's a 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.

[1:03:36] 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, TBPN is like, they realize that clipping is the only thing that matters. You took that medium seriously. There's no gotchas. That's [1:04:00] maybe for the first time, a truly ex-native media community. [1:04:05] thing. [1:04:06] And that was a really powerful thing. I do love growth hacks. It's really fun to figure out what works in the current X algorithm. It's constantly changing. I think we knew... [1:04:17] 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. So when you think about you post a tweet. [1:04:28] 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, you're refreshing. It's like another 500 random people liked it. Like, it's exciting, but it gets old if you post a lot. And you lose the connection of, like, and sometimes you can see, okay, this person that I'm actually friends with in real life liked it. That's exciting. But the number getting bigger and bigger, like, that gets old really fast. Yes. And you can reply, and you can quote tweet. [1:04:58] But quote tweeting with a video in 4K of us in suits with your tweet printed was just like the super quote tweet. Max Fidelity. It was the highest honor that you could do. And it was just like this post is so important. Now it's the player cards or the wedding announcement. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

[1:05:28] events and complex does it. There's a lot of folks that use that kind of format, but bring that to X again was another kind of interesting like growth hack. There's been a whole bunch of those that are fun to fun to innovate on, but I think we've never lost sight of the fact that, uh, [1:05:43] 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. [1:06:04] they [1:06:06] We're audio only. And then they realize, like, OK, we need to do video at some point. So they added a video component, but it's just them sitting in like they're 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 would you really want to do is build a set that's like opinionated for the world, a world. There's a world here. Exactly. And so and so like you can think about this world, this world does not matter visually. [1:06:36] need us to contextualize things that we're looking at. And so as we're doing the show, we will be describing what we see. That's a, that's us thinking for the RSS feed. Then this set design is us thinking for the YouTube channel. Then how we clip on X and what context we give you, the subtitles, all of that is thinking for X on Instagram vertical. Uh, it needs to be a little bit tighter one to three minutes. That's a different format. So like the medium is the message. The medium is really important on all these different platforms and kind of thinking

[1:07:06] about [1:07:07] You create all this content. How do you actually make it feel native in that particular platform? Each platform is basically a full-time job. Yes. Companies still have this mindset of like, I'm going to hire a person to do social work. [1:07:19] And I don't believe that, you know, ask anyone on X – [1:07:24] That's like growing an account on actually 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 in [1:07:36] It takes a long time to start chopping them down. [1:07:41] I do want to talk a little bit about other platforms, but [1:07:44] You guys long before this were both pretty good at Twitter or at X. [1:07:51] What makes somebody good at that pie farm? [1:07:54] Yeah. I mean, just thinking about your question about taking – [1:07:58] taking acts, taking Twitter seriously. I think that [1:08:02] 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. [1:08:15] how senior you get it. The most tier one fund, everyone's glued to Twitter. And if something's happening on Twitter, they're talking about it in a group chat. They might not post. They might be like, oh, I love it. I love when a multi-stage VC that doesn't use Twitter. I don't really go on Twitter. And then you tweet something with their name, not even tagging them, and they text you within five seconds. And you're like, oh, okay, so you're extremely online. Yeah, that definitely happens.

[1:08:43] But yeah, so I just think in general it's like, [1:08:46] 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. [1:09:11] 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 of friends. It's like I'm texting to a couple of friends and that does well. Do you have any other insights? [1:09:26] I think every poster is great for a different reason. [1:09:33] uh... [1:09:34] I've seen people try to adopt the Clue Lee style, the Roy Lee style of posting, and you could say... [1:09:41] Maybe there's people out there that don't like his style. [1:09:45] but they still watch, right? By the way, critically, when he first got going, it was... [1:09:49] I don't know how much of it – like – [1:09:51] Was it good? Up to you. It was different, though, to go back to your influences thing. Obviously, the same thing. Like, he is definitely doing something different. You can hate it. Yeah. But it is not the same style that everybody else is trying. [1:10:02] Yeah. [1:10:03] I think... [1:10:05] 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 –

[1:10:20] Like every post that is served to me is basically like an essay by a technologist. Yeah, yeah. There's basically an essay by a technologist about something that's like pretty deep. And then sometimes you'll just get slopped up with like, you know. I think it's the same thing you see too. There's accounts out there that are getting like 10 million impressions a month. [1:10:39] that are basically worthless accounts. Like, they could not... [1:10:43] sell 100 copies of a book if they wrote it. Yeah. And then there's accounts out there that have like 600 followers and [1:10:49] that are getting like [1:10:51] 300,000 impressions a month and they could raise like a $30 million seed round. Right. And so it's the same thing of understanding. Yeah. And just understanding the, it's the quality of the content. It's who's, who's actually watching, um, [1:11:04] or who's actually engaging with the content, who gets value, and that can be inversely correlated with [1:11:10] like size. I mean, with all these platforms, like, [1:11:13] 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 big one. And so there's a little bit of like – [1:11:28] If you're posting a lot, you build the muscle. And that's just true for anybody. I still think it's the most efficient way to... [1:11:34] become known. [1:11:35] in tech, to break through. That's the town square still.

[1:11:41] somebody who is an outsider, [1:11:44] break into the industry just by the quality of their... [1:11:48] thoughts. [1:11:49] On the other platforms, um... [1:11:52] Obviously, you're doing a lot in a lot of places already. I think the sub-stack stuff, to your earlier point, is great. Who knows? Maybe it's even your guys' cameos on Sora. I'm curious how you think about that. [1:12:01] and maybe what [1:12:02] 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 environment. [1:12:08] 200,000 people. So you can make the case that actually like Instagram doesn't matter. [1:12:12] No, Instagram does matter because the same 200,000 people are also on Instagram. And I want to hit them there. You want to hit them there. With different content. Yes, yes, yes. Same audience. [1:12:22] slightly different content. Right. Because if you look at the Wall Street Journal, you open it up, there's the business section, but there's also the mansion section. And so what we're going to send, hopefully those exact same people, we're going to send them on Instagram something that's a little bit more sugar. Yeah. It's going to be a little bit less. The Porsches. Yeah. Whereas on X, you get like 400 words from me. Right. 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 AI researcher one day. [1:12:52] like Instagram focused, but we will take people everywhere. I think there's a stated versus revealed preference phenomena happening as well, where you have people... [1:13:03] that say... [1:13:05] Like, nobody wants to... Like, no... [1:13:07] high-powered executive wants to go out and say, I love Instagram. I use Instagram for like two hours a day. It's awesome. I'm on there. That's like my main thing. I just love Instagram. But

[1:13:17] 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. [1:13:25] your heroes but there there people that [1:13:27] are able to move markets. And so, uh, I, I learned that, um, [1:13:32] My wife started posting on TikTok in 2022. [1:13:36] and [1:13:37] the [1:13:39] The quality of just inbound people coming through LinkedIn was insane, just from, I saw your TikTok, like, I'd love to talk with you. People would go to LinkedIn. They would leave TikTok, go to LinkedIn. [1:13:50] Also, for these people, Twitter doesn't exist. [1:13:52] Sure, sure. Now that I think about it, I got a lot of that from YouTube, too. People would DM me on LinkedIn. Yeah, so part of it is understanding that X is this. [1:14:02] It's an ecosystem. It's relatively small. [1:14:05] 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 everybody that has built an audience on X has experienced... [1:14:15] you know, meeting somebody that uses X and they're like, "Oh, how's it going? Great to see you." And then meeting somebody that's like, [1:14:22] Might be important, but they're on LinkedIn, and they're like, who are you? Like, what do you do? Yeah. Oh, you have a manufacturing company? That's cool. Like, you know, they don't have the context. Right. So it's just... [1:14:33] Right. [1:14:35] There's a, I guess like a meta thing, which is... [1:14:38] I mentioned this a few times. You guys are both... [1:14:41] amazing internet marketers within this context and without it. [1:14:46] I think my best version of trying to distill what that is, is making...

[1:14:50] content. [1:14:51] or products that other people want to share. [1:14:55] or [1:14:56] even more. They want to [1:14:59] share their reaction to or them talking about. Um, [1:15:03] I think it's much more... [1:15:05] The way that I think about it is... [1:15:07] everything you do from a marketing standpoint should [1:15:11] 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. So we talk with companies all the time that are like, hey, I'm doing this, like I'm going to do this campaign or I'm going to work with this person or I'm going to do this stunt. [1:15:28] And I can-- [1:15:30] like you you you sharpen your intuition enough and you understand like okay does this fit into the bucket of is it [1:15:37] Wildly entertaining? Is it wildly inspirational? [1:15:41] 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 not going to hit and you can have something hit in any of those buckets. Right. You can some like for a poster, for example, can entertain. They can just post something that's like super funny, perfect timing, and it can get, you know, a million views, you know, a video that like feels emotional and inspiring. Right. The founders fund. [1:16:06] the iconic Founders Fund Vibreel. - First Vibreel ever. - Yeah, so that-- - That was before my time. - Yeah, but that is an example of, like, novel, kind of like, format hadn't really been done in tech. [1:16:18] But it was inspiring. And when we did... A lot of stuff we do, I think...

[1:16:24] Even more narrowly around entertainment, I just think of funny. [1:16:29] I think a lot of this stuff is just like, is it funny? And then people might share it. But I feel like we keep coming back to humor as just like, [1:16:36] Like if we're laughing about the concept and and some and simplicity. Right. Like super like like virality hates complexity. Right. Like if you launch a complex idea that requires a lot of context. Yes. [1:16:50] it will not go viral. You can kind of, people try to brute force it. They get the wrong, they get kind of the wrong signal, right? Like somebody will launch something that is, [1:16:59] complicated and confusing and they will get [1:17:02] 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. [1:17:17] And, like, the actual ratio, like, of engagement is, like, bad. So, like, it looks like it was a successful launch, but it was really just, like, engagement farming. This is what Gabe at Mischief says. He's, like, we want ideas that slap in one sentence and slap harder in three. Yeah. But make sure it slaps in one sentence. And I think a lot of people on Twitter and in tech, the tendency, including my own, is to, like, [1:17:40] I'm trying to do a three order, like you need all this context. And it's like, no, actually starting simple is a really, really strong place. Yeah, so when people pitch us marketing ideas... [1:17:50] I tell them, [1:17:52] I have more context on your business than 99.9% of people in the world. And I'm going to need you to repeat that.

[1:17:58] 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 [1:18:07] Like if they're 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 watch this video and I don't or I just watch. [1:18:24] 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. And so why do you think the original Technology Brothers launch video went viral? [1:18:37] I... [1:18:37] Because it was... [1:18:40] Nobody... [1:18:41] in tech would do something as silly as that. [1:18:44] It was funny. It was certainly entertaining. It didn't it didn't. Well, I want to go back to 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. Well, yeah. And if you look back at what the criticism of that video was, it was good. It was like it was like. [1:19:04] okay, Teamu's Succession. Oh, yeah. And so I was like, that is what we were going for. That is what we were going for. That is shareable, too, because you are setting up somebody else's punchline. Yeah. Which is really powerful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I was like, okay, you nailed it. That's what we were going through. We filmed a Succession-style vibe reel for a podcast that is three months old. It doesn't have revenue yet. There's a couple thousand viewers. And so, yeah, I think...

[1:19:33] Self-awareness, too, is super key. I do think there was something that might be inspiring in the sense that it's just like, oh, wow, they're taking this really seriously. People in tech like to see that people are taking things seriously. It's the high and low together again. Exactly. It was clear you were taking it seriously enough to do the video, but also you were making fun of yourself a little bit. [1:19:52] Yeah, so I think it's this interesting dynamic where the audience is really smart. Like, they will see through whatever. Like, you need to be authentic because they're going to see through it, especially over time, right? Maybe you could get away with, like... [1:20:03] launch video, people don't really realize that this is not a serious team or whatever. But over time, in the fullness of you trying to market to your industry, people figure out. But they don't have an appetite to... [1:20:16] to have to work to understand what you're doing. And so you can assume that they're smart, but assume they're not going to put any effort into really understanding because they just don't care. Right. And that's it's fine. [1:20:28] You... [1:20:29] maybe even more than marketers, [1:20:31] are two kind of like quietly brilliant brand guys. [1:20:36] Like when I think about the stuff you guys have done historically, both Lucy and Jordy's earlier point, so it may be more than anything else and everything you've done. [1:20:45] um, [1:20:47] It's spiked on a bunch of dimensions, but especially brand. It goes back to our influences conversation. I think tech as an industry, there's maybe nothing tech is worse at than brand, or maybe even nothing that tech cares less about. [1:20:59] I'm curious how... [1:21:01] Um... [1:21:02] Maybe what does brand mean to you? And two...

[1:21:05] what actually makes a great brand. By the way, talk about a great brand. Jordy's way better at this than I am. I've been along for the ride with most of the other brands. [1:21:12] Yeah, I think part of it goes back to branded native and working with [1:21:15] so many companies and understanding what is working, both from like a strategy channel standpoint and then. [1:21:24] how brands actually get... [1:21:26] made. Great brands do not start with spending $300,000 on a branding agency and doing this brand package. They typically happen very organically. A great brand is not a logo. A great brand is not a website. A great brand is like... [1:21:44] 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. 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 [1:22:10] Again, basically average out everything that you've made somebody feel an individual person on an individual level, you as a brand and that individual person. And so when you look at TBPN, it's like people like the TBPN brand because we've. [1:22:25] probably entertain 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 yeah so we joke we joked originally like uh i i forget at some point or another we were like you

[1:22:48] we weren't able to fork over 300,000. People would ask us, "How much did you spend on the... "The Technology Brothers brand is so great. "How did you pull it off?" [1:22:58] you know, we just put the capital to work. It's like, no, it's actually like we worked with, I think part of it's like, [1:23:04] building up a group of people. [1:23:07] Usually, I think that great brand work is actually done externally. [1:23:12] Like we... [1:23:13] 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... [1:23:23] that are [1:23:24] professional podcasts that outsource production, right? And it's like, that's crazy. Like your job is to make [1:23:30] piece of content and make it better every day. [1:23:33] 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. [1:23:46] outside of the organization to bring in new ideas, right? It's like, and those people are thinking, oh, I saw this campaign that you've never heard of, let's bring that in. And so part of it's like having that [1:23:56] relationship with a group of people and then not getting to not getting stuck with one. So it's like we've worked with different people for merch. We've worked with different designers. We have core partners that we go back to a lot, but we're constantly willing to bring in. [1:24:09] bring in new people. And I do think that... [1:24:13] Yeah. Taste is a factor. You look at two logos, but it's ultimately just a personal thing. I was going to say, you have a point of view. You clearly know how to work with all kinds of different external creatives.

[1:24:27] But that does not work if you don't know what you like. [1:24:30] And I think that might be one of the other challenges. I also don't – I also – [1:24:36] cherish that dynamic. Right. Like I don't, [1:24:40] negotiate heavily with [1:24:43] like creative talent, [1:24:44] 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... [1:24:55] like a proposal and I'll think like that is wildly more than I value what we're trying to do here. Um, [1:25:01] like [1:25:02] thank you, we're going to go elsewhere. But if I'm close in the ballpark with a creative that I want to do [1:25:10] work with [1:25:11] I'm not sitting there being like, hey, like you pitched us, you know, 20K, like. [1:25:15] our budget is 6k because sometimes they'll opt in but then in their head they're thinking like [1:25:19] I'm doing 6K work. On the branding thing, I feel like... [1:25:25] 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.

[1:25:55] Like it was related to like technology journalists being rich and Nepo babies and they all have horses. And then that turned into like we're into horses and we recommend buying horses. And I said if your daughter's not a horse girl by the time she's five, you've failed. Yeah. And then at some point I was like, I'm actually going to go and become a horse expert. And so I like reworked my entire YouTube algorithm to just serve me dressage content and understand all these different horse breeds. [1:26:25] And it's something where it's just like, [1:26:26] And that's probably manifested in 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 lineage in the brand. [1:26:50] in the studio. [1:26:51] Like when Tyler posts... [1:26:53] That is part of our brand. When Ben posts, that's part of our brand. When Brandon posts, that's part of our brand. When your fans post about you, it's a little bit part of your brand. Yeah, that was even with the merch, like part of like... [1:27:05] We didn't sell merch originally because we wanted to effectively control who was wearing our logo. [1:27:15] that will, you can't keep total. But I remember one day I texted John, [1:27:20] somebody had a TBPN hat and I was like, [1:27:22] how did this person get it? Because like this person is not somebody that I went online with. Just off brand. And yeah, it's just. And so, yeah, one, you have.

[1:27:30] You have more control over your brand than ever because you can like constantly adapt and you can change things. [1:27:35] you know, you can change. It's not like we have packaging that's like, oh, if we want to change the logo, it's like, [1:27:40] six months, you know, we have to do a new run. It's like, no, we could change anything at any time. [1:27:45] but you have less control because your team is constantly creating it, and this goes the same way. [1:27:49] is the same for every company. Yeah. [1:27:52] Oh, one more thing. I forgot because I said there was a second part to that. Something that we did early on, and I think every company should do this, [1:27:59] is like we made a sheet of like oh yeah these are 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 up 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 is not a spite show uh [1:28:20] But silly stuff, and we kept it on the table. But also memes and sections and phrases. [1:28:30] All this, again, to the world, but the world of the brand language as well. And who were people that we were going to go back to, ideas, themes that we were going to go back to. All of that was super, super helpful. [1:28:41] Yeah, and so we constantly update that, and that is part of how you do the world building. You don't want to leave it at a chance of like, hey, this thing was super funny on episode six. [1:28:51] 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, [1:28:57] "Ah, it looks cool, but it's not as nice as a Nissan Cross Cabriolet 2012 or whatever." And that's just a riff that we've had of, "It might be the perfect car." It's a two-door convertible SUV. What more do you need? There's not a lot of options if you want a two-door convertible SUV. It's kind of the best in class. Yeah, there's something to come back to, too, that's a payoff for the person who's been with you. Exactly. Yeah, also a super steep learning curve with the show.

[1:29:25] Like we don't tell you, you know, part of like we're making a decision to not say. [1:29:30] what AWS is. We don't, we don't, traditional television will be like, AWS is the cloud computing division. And it's like part of that steep learning curve is very powerful because people ramp up and then they're like, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm really, you're actually talking to me. I mean, you can see it in the New York times, like sports center for the LinkedIn crowd, like more, like more people would be like clips for teapot. Like that would be another way to like, you know, frame the show, you know, but like, like they needed to put it in like these, like, [1:30:00] Like when we do a little bit of that, but not a lot here. [1:30:03] because we're focused on that niche audience. I love that. [1:30:05] Um, maybe the Bible will be exposed. The brand Bible will be exposed someday. Um, [1:30:10] Yeah, we talked about it a little earlier. You have this amazing pace, and I think you guys are both very pro-experimentation. On the other hand, you've talked a lot about the Senra or Munger-ish idea of doing one thing and being really focused. [1:30:24] You had a bunch of interns here, you have a few less now, but [1:30:28] I wonder what goes in, maybe just for the two of you, or broadly the thing you're building, what goes into fostering a culture that is super pro-experimentation on one hand, and then also knows... [1:30:38] what to hold on to and not change and what to say no to. [1:30:42] Yeah, it's – [1:30:44] 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... [1:30:52] Everyone knows what they have to do. They're all chopping wood. They're all knowing what works and getting that done every day. And then we're constantly lobbying new ideas and tests faster than people can go and, like, actually run the tests and implement them. So they have kind of a backlog of new ideas. But then people also experiment within whatever they're doing. I think, yeah, part of –

[1:31:15] And this is specific to [1:31:17] Content. [1:31:18] businesses where content is ultimately the product. [1:31:22] 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. [1:31:33] if you can create something novel, [1:31:36] like a cinematic video, that worked really well. [1:31:39] earlier this year and by summer it company thing yeah yeah and by by summer it stopped working well we couldn't do a vibreel every month like it's just not possible like physically physically we oh yeah yeah like we have the talent yeah we were doing them in a day and and they were but it but it's just like yeah [1:31:56] It was like novel. It was not like durable, something that people want to consume on a regular basis. [1:32:03] What was... [1:32:04] What do you think would have been most surprising to you either six or 12 months ago about the [1:32:08] this? Probably the MediConnect moment. Like, like the second interview is us [1:32:15] The second video that we filmed, the one that I mentioned earlier, is us talking about the meta Ray-Bans. [1:32:21] alone in this room and then what 10 months later we're interviewing mark zuckerberg about that exactly by the way also jim cameron which was like this crazy yeah i would say though i would say uh [1:32:33] Just because my initial idea for the format was no guests ever, no traveling ever, just two people. I was like, that's the secret sauce. We'll keep it that way forever. How great is it to have a podcast and you don't have to worry about guests? You don't have to book guests and you don't have to travel. This is the secret to success. This is amazing. Let's just do this forever and never change anything.

[1:32:55] I think that while we are open to experimenting in real time, we're hyper-calculated. And I would say... [1:33:03] When we were early on talking with Ramp at the end of last year, they had seen like about like six weeks of the show. And they were like, OK, this is cool. [1:33:15] pretty much everything about this year has been premeditated. Like we knew we were going to go live. We knew we were going to add guests. We knew we were going to... [1:33:24] we knew we were going to do an extraordinarily high volume of guests and [1:33:28] And yeah, we only did after like a couple of weeks. [1:33:31] Like the first, when we sat down to record the first episode, we were like, no guests. And then like three episodes in, we were like, but what if we did this? Yeah, yeah. So I'll give you an example, though. So 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. That's quite literally the thing you were talking about. Yeah, we were trying to avoid, right? And so... [1:33:56] And we had realized that we wanted to do this for decades. And so we wanted to adapt. And so... [1:34:02] the name TBPN was chosen [1:34:05] One, because we could get a four-letter .com. Which is insane. Which is important. Jordy's a beast at this stuff. Not only that, but all the handles are available, too. So we're, like, at TDP. Well, they weren't available, but we figured out. They weren't actively used. There were no trademarks and stuff. So it was, like, it was gettable across everything, which is awesome. But the reason that that made sense, it didn't make sense because we weren't building a network, but it made sense because we were, like, we want...

[1:34:29] this to be a place that the Mag-7 comes on regularly. Yep. And they are much more likely, their PR departments are much more likely to be like, [1:34:38] Sure. I reviewed TVP and it looks cool. You should go on TVP and then you should go on technology. Hang with the tech bros. Yeah. Yeah. As opposed to like like Theo Vaughn can be a comic, but then he can just be like the name Theo Vaughn. The name can evolve to mean anything. And now it means a more serious. I seem to remember at some point we we we did pick TVP and because of the initialism. [1:35:01] Technology Brothers TB, but then we were like, we shouldn't keep the TB around. That was the, well, no, it was, it was like, I was looking for short, like, you know, [1:35:15] short domains that featured TB. Yeah, but we from the beginning of his technology business programming network inspired by ESPN. Yeah, um, [1:35:24] There you go. You've referenced, I think it was you, referenced the... [1:35:28] MKBHD idea where basically... [1:35:32] If you don't love the content, you're not going to be able to do it forever. You guys are currently doing three hours of live broadcasting every single day. [1:35:39] That's a lot of endurance for a year, let alone five. Or if you really want to go crazy, like Charlie Rose and Johnny Carson did this for 30 years. I don't know what Jim Cramer just did 30. He just celebrated 30. [1:35:50] How do you how do you set yourself up for that kind of endurance? [1:35:55] There's never the news... [1:35:59] has been something I've loved.

[1:36:01] my entire life. Since I could read... [1:36:03] I would read the newspaper every morning. [1:36:06] It would be on that. My dad would get it before me and 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 than I am now. [1:36:20] 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, [1:36:27] the world, but even as soon as I was like in middle school and high school, it was like I would be [1:36:32] I would get home from school and I would refresh TechCrunch. And I'd be like, what happened today in tech? [1:36:39] There's never, and then even continuing... [1:36:41] into... [1:36:43] My adult life. [1:36:46] No matter what I was working on, I was still interested in what was happening broadly. [1:36:50] And so... [1:36:51] I think that... [1:36:53] the confidence that we have around being able to do this for decades is that [1:36:57] I cannot imagine a world in the future where I wake up and I'm not... [1:37:01] Right. Interested in understanding and talking about what's going on in the world. It would be impossible if we had to do the exact same show every day. Right. Like if it was a play with a script – [1:37:12] And we had to tell the same story, the story of Apple. And it's like the story of Apple every single day. [1:37:17] for three 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 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, 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.

[1:37:41] if you were to try to speculate on [1:37:44] what? [1:37:45] will be different [1:37:47] in five years about the format. [1:37:50] Is there anything, or maybe even aspirational, is there anything you would hope to do? [1:37:55] that will change. [1:37:58] I think the chat experience will change a little bit. Um, [1:38:02] 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. 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 question. [1:38:32] I was saying, guys, you're on TV in France. Yeah, so we kind of had to react to that. But I think that as a streamer, one thing I heard from a very popular streamer was he was saying that, like, [1:38:46] he sees reading chat as a skill. Have you ever watched Speed? [1:38:50] Yes. Like, that is Twitch 15 years ago. Incredible. Incredible, right? 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... Like, we can pass the ball back and forth very easily, but...

[1:39:18] integrating chat chat will change but the chat is part of the show too because we'll be talking about something [1:39:23] I remember last week we were talking about model adoption on OpenRouter. [1:39:29] And we missed a key thing, which was like two out of the three top models were free and the others were paid. And like very, very obvious. But in the moment, we didn't we didn't put that together. Somebody in the chat is like, yeah, this is important. And so. [1:39:41] Not only did that make the analysis better, it was like community source. If you're listening to the recording, which a large amount of our the majority of our audience is not watching live today. [1:39:51] you now get that extra context that if John and I were just recording, [1:39:55] by ourselves, we never would have made it in. And so that feedback loop is super powerful. 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... [1:40:09] it's important in a very different way than just like you got a lot of listeners. Yes. Yes. And, and when you get to a certain scale too, and you have enough affordances with the chat, they're going to learn that they can, this is what the crazy high and high and speed do Kyle or excuse me, speed will literally be like, [1:40:27] I have created a choose your own adventure. I'm going to do one of two things chat. Which should I do? Exactly. Which is, which is cool to see. Um, [1:40:34] One thing that a few people asked me to ask you on Twitter that I like is... [1:40:38] I'd love to hear what just like a day. [1:40:40] looks like from end to end for both of you. [1:40:43] It's fun. [1:40:44] Same day, every day. [1:40:47] Jim, 6.30.

[1:40:48] to 8... [1:40:51] Breakfast 8 to 9. [1:40:53] studio here at nine. [1:40:55] Again, John quickly goes into writing the newsletter and, [1:40:59] I typically will have some amount of like Zoom meetings during that time that are more just like focused on the business. [1:41:06] And then, yeah, we have 9 to 11 to prep the show. We usually... [1:41:11] If we're running ahead of schedule, we're actually dressed before. [1:41:27] There's no time to be creative in that window. What I love about it is that... [1:41:33] your mood doesn't matter. How you feel doesn't matter. We have an obligation to go live every day. There's a countdown. And so in building companies previously, it's like if you wake up and you're feeling... [1:41:47] 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. [1:41:55] And we don't have the luxury of negotiating because we made a promise that we go live every weekend. Taking one day off? Yeah. [1:42:01] Yeah. We also took a 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... [1:42:12] we're often talking about stuff that might, may or may not make it on the show. Oh, you know, watch this movie or, you know, what was going on just broadly in, like, group chats and online, like, different news stories that are kicking around. And then by the time we're at breakfast, we're kind of honing in on, like, what the key topics are. And then once we get to the studio, we're actually, like, taking screenshots that you will see on the show of individual posts or Wall Street Journal articles.

[1:42:42] I'm writing the newsletter, but I'm also piecing together the order and I'm bouncing ideas off Jordy like, hey, there's this Wall Street Journal article. There's these posts. Like, what do you want to kick off with? Yeah, so 24-7 we're sourcing content for the show. Yeah, we're getting closer. You're kind of compressing. Exactly. Yeah, so – and then the show ends. [1:43:03] usually we're pretty much caught up on the news. Like we try to make sure we're ending the show, covering what's been happening during the show. Effectively, sometimes it's live. Other times we're kind of catching up. 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. [1:43:33] we didn't get enough like the main thing we're trying to protect is like 90 minutes a day that we can just hang out right because like when you think about it one at one of the challenges of uh [1:43:43] of doing guest segments on any type of media is that they're wildly unreliable. [1:43:51] It will be, you know, interviewing Andrew Shorkin today was, like, super energizing. It made the show better. Super interesting. We would have been happy to, like, keep doing that for... [1:44:03] much longer. And the whole chat was like, this is an amazing interview. Great interview. I love this. Yeah. They're just really excited to hear from him. Right. And it's helpful that he is a professional TV host. Right. It's like, it's not his first rodeo. And so the, the variability in the guests is a huge challenge because, um,

[1:44:20] If somebody's coming on for 15 minutes and they come on... [1:44:24] It's like we know to show up with high energy and we're here to – [1:44:27] We're here to put on a show, but they might come in with like very low energy. It's a big part of the reason for the gong. Yeah, it can completely. We hit the 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 at least we're resetting. [1:44:46] the energy level up here and you can laugh and you can kind of be like, okay, well, yeah. But yeah, we see it in the metrics, right? Like guests have 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... [1:45:02] fun, energizing time for me. But if you think about it, it's like [1:45:06] Two out of 10 guests make the show better. [1:45:09] there's like a power law there. So maybe one is like, this is amazing. Like, I wish that we had 90 minutes with this person. And then if eight out of 10 are actually making the show slightly worse, it's like, well, that's, [1:45:21] 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. [1:45:34] Some people are good – [1:45:36] on a random Tuesday. Other people are amazing at a certain moment, like a VR founder. [1:45:44] 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? Yeah. The other thing is the live nature means that we have to adapt to what's happening. Like there's been times where we have four guests slated and then some big story breaks and we're suddenly we have to say, Hey, we actually killed

[1:46:14] Early, one of the big viral days was Crypto Day, and we had the most insane lineup, Chris Dixon, Bologi, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase. We had so many killers came on. It was a mini event, sort of like the meta thing. Yeah, it was very cool. But then what we realized was we tried to do it again with like an AI day. We had a whole bunch of AI researchers. But then that was the day that Trump and Elon broke up. And so all the chat was just like – and we didn't have these screens reading the chat. [1:46:44] on his computer and was like, John, we got to talk about this. 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. And the live going in another story. So we were at the New York Stock Exchange for the Klarna IPO. [1:47:06] And, [1:47:07] about two hours in. Figma was flawless. Figma was the biggest story of the day. It was the current thing on tech Twitter. And we knocked it out of the park. And it's hard to displace an IPO in terms of, like, mind share, especially a company like Figma, which is, like, universally used and loved. Everyone knows Dylan. But at the Klarna IPO, I got a text from the team saying, [1:47:25] John didn't have his laptop pulled up and they were like, [1:47:28] Charlie Kirk just got shot, like, open your computer, and I opened the computer, [1:47:33] and, you know, see immediately the video. And so that dynamic is... How do you talk about buy now, pay later? Yeah, and you go from the euphoria of, 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, absolute horrific, tragic event happening.

[1:47:54] And we do have to adjust to it. Yeah, it's a unique thing about news. Yeah. Whereas like a podcast, there could be something amazing or – [1:48:04] tragic that happens during the show and it's not [1:48:07] When people listen to this, they're not thinking, you need to respond to this. I haven't seen my phone. I have no idea what's happening in that type of work. Yeah, that was actually a point where I thought it was really good to look to how Legacy TV deals with that. And so on CNBC, they do a breaking news alert. They cut away from the business content, and they say, we have some breaking news. A tragedy has occurred. Here are the facts. And then they go back to it. [1:48:37] if you want to follow the full story, because that's where the breaking news will live. And... [1:48:42] I remember early... [1:48:44] 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 six TVs up on the wall, all to different channels. And you could see how each of them covered it differently. And so CBS, I believe, has Gayle King, who went to space. And so for her, it was like for the entire channel. [1:49:14] of your coworkers just went to space. You're going to be like, it's wall-to-wall coverage all day. It's the Super Bowl for us. The person that you as a fan of this channel know is in space. We've got to cover this all day long. Then on ABC, they didn't have one of their anchors go, but it was still a great story. They had some real cameras there. They probably spent half an hour on it. On CNN, they did 10 minutes. Then on CNBC, they just put it picture in picture. The rocket came

[1:49:44] Amazing stories for your audience is really, really key. And knowing, okay, this one is a breaking news one-liner. This is five minutes. This is a full hour. This is a show. It goes back to not trying to be everything for everyone as well. Exactly, yeah. [1:49:57] Exactly. [1:49:58] I have a few questions about you guys. [1:50:01] First and foremost, we talked about it a bit, but what makes this partnership special? And maybe when did you know... [1:50:07] that there was something here. [1:50:10] I mean, the early thing was definitely just... [1:50:13] the fact that we both had years and years of experience in the things that were important, which was YouTube, but on different sides. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The actual content creation, you on the ad sales side. And so there was just a lot there. But then – John's like one of the – yeah, John's one of the – [1:50:30] few people [1:50:32] And certainly, like, at the top of the list of people where... [1:50:36] when I talk about the things that I'm good at, like he's consistently bringing ideas. [1:50:40] that are, [1:50:41] better than my own. And so that dynamic is... [1:50:45] uh... [1:50:46] super powerful and and [1:50:49] to be entirely fixated on this and... [1:50:53] And I think we have like distinct skill sets and distinct kind of focus areas in the business that made it powerful. [1:51:00] but to consistently come to... [1:51:03] John with an idea of [1:51:05] uh, [1:51:06] And it's, you know, an idea in a space that I'm – [1:51:11] good at generating ideas in. Like, let's say it's an advertiser that we're working for, and I'm like,

[1:51:16] hey, I want to pitch them on this concept. It's not related to TPPN. It's a campaign for their next product launch. [1:51:22] And John will... [1:51:24] 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 – [1:51:31] 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. [1:51:40] makes a partnership great is that two people combining are creating something better than any one of them would do individually. The other thing that's real is like we [1:51:50] never run out of things to talk about. So like if we're, uh, if it's like a Friday and, and John, uh, is like driving to Santa Barbara, uh, [1:51:59] Uh, and, and like, I'm going to Malibu and like, instead of taking my, I, uh, have a driver because it's like an hour both ways every day. It's a lot. And I'll just be like the drive. I'll just send the driver home like separately. And I'll be like, I'm riding with John. John goes out of the way. Cause we're like, ah, like I didn't get quite enough time. 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. Yeah. [1:52:25] Yeah, there's every single day there's moments off air that I wish were on air. [1:52:30] because it's pretty impossible to recreate that [1:52:33] how we got to a conclusion or like a specific bit, a line that you can't. [1:52:37] Really recreate. Yeah, also, it's like if we had a line that we were dying laughing at in the gym, and you deliver it on the show again, it's hard to fake my reaction the first time. I've had to do this a couple times where I had an interview where like...

[1:52:51] we lost an hour and we redid it and it's, it's a different thing. Yeah. Hmm. Is, is, [1:53:00] Maybe the dumbest way to ask the question is how important was Will Manitis? Was he as important as he claims to the formation of this partnership? He introduced us. He introduced us. And he's made a number of like... [1:53:13] in [1:53:13] Truly incredible introductions to people that never... [1:53:17] We never would have reached. I think also just Will has a particular... [1:53:22] way in expressing his belief and, uh, [1:53:27] and just positivity and like cheering for you in a very quantitative, like hyperbolic way. And so probably for the first like six months, every time we would – [1:53:41] 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 one fund. He's just like, I just told them that we're oversubscribed at 400 post. And it's like, we weren't fundraising. We weren't doing anything like that. But he's like, oh, yeah. And like so-and-so bought it hook, line, and sinker. No, he would say, we were just like, we have a group chat with a few other buddies, and we'd say something or something would happen. [1:54:11] assets in the chat and he'd be like, [1:54:13] I'm updating our, like, 2026 guide. The guide. Yeah, he would refer to the guide. You're like, we're a public company. Yeah. He would also do these funny things just being like, yes, I've updated my thinking. He would use the language of, like, a philosophical venture capitalist. Yes, I've updated my thinking on TVP and I no longer 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?

[1:54:43] with posters, obviously. And so, [1:54:47] 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... [1:54:53] kind of putting his own spin on what's happening in the world. Right. [1:54:58] And there's like a there's a number of people like that that I can think of, you know, the ruins 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 they are amazing. [1:55:16] fundamentally like a key part of the show. And interestingly, the sports world has done a great job of embracing posters. Like Stephen Smith reacts to random people with hot takes about basketball or sports, and Pat McAfee will elevate a post about something. But for some reason, maybe it's just the private markets thing, but like business television has not, I don't, I feel like I would have seen if Rune had ever been on Bloomberg, for example. That would be an amazing moment. [1:55:46] A lot of our guests, I don't want to call them out too much because maybe they'll start getting calls, but a lot of our guests, I'm like, how are they not getting called every single day? It's like their influence outpunches their credibility. Yeah, and it's also just like it's so many extra steps to introduce someone like Arun to a Bloomberg audience on TV, right? Whereas us, it's like it's supernatural. 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 easier, but.

[1:56:15] Were there any other ideas? [1:56:18] you guys considered doing together, podcast or media-wise or otherwise? [1:56:23] 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, and I sent to John, was – [1:56:38] an energy drink for like white collar workers. Sort of like displacing Diet Coke or Red Bull or Celsius. Because all of those speaks different. Because they're obviously loved, like 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, [1:57:01] Yeah, they've made Celsius their own. And so we kicked around the idea for a beverage company. I thought you could do a lot of this 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. [1:57:23] consumer packaged goods business like john i've invested grind once you break through zero to one it's such a grind you're just at a trade show [1:57:32] You know, 20 minutes from O'Hare in Chicago every week forever. [1:57:38] 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've got to be a killer operator. And I think both of us recognized that neither of us wanted to be a CPG operator. Right, right, right. Because we both kind of...

[1:57:55] I'd been in that space and both tasted it and been around it. And so, yeah, we put out like an entire campaign around it. And we put out like at least a five minute video of us riffing basically in the characters that became the original Technology Brothers show. So we filmed a full hour. We sat down and Ben was filming it over there. Yeah. Ben was like, did you guys script that? He was like, what was that? And we were playing this hilarious character. We just kind of completely... [1:58:20] melted into it and we were like this is great and and then we also did an overlay and we made it retro and we had a lot of like graphics and just like funny things and we even worked with day job on the packaging and the uh there was like a pr box that we sent out to people that had this like [1:58:36] comically large tin of Lucy's. It was like this big. It was massive. This huge, massive puck. And a Rolex that like had the branding on it. It was just like, [1:58:47] I think we executed on it really well, sent it to a bunch of people, but that was the first time we actually made... [1:58:53] content, uh, together. Cool. Yeah. And we kind of realized, and then we did two, I believe we did two test episodes on Riverside. [1:59:01] and then we started recording in person, and we shipped the first episode that we recorded. But in terms of formats, [1:59:08] I was... [1:59:11] pretty convicted on the two person, in person, [1:59:15] 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 two test episodes with Lulu Miservi, and we kind of clipped that up, and I saw that that was kind of interesting, but she was very focused on comms, and we weren't able to, like, go all over the place. So if there wasn't a comms story that week, we were just like, what were we talking about?

[1:59:45] And then I did a... [1:59:47] a test video with Jason Carmen 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. He didn't want to like become a like a hot takes like newsman. Newsmaxer. Yeah. And so me and Jordy were just like, oh, we when we put together the first the first test episode on Riverside, it was just like super easy to talk about everything because we're just super comfortable. Yeah. The thing that the thing that ended up [2:00:15] like realizing [2:00:17] you know, in hindsight... [2:00:20] We both wanted to [2:00:23] continue to be a part of [2:00:26] the private market ecosystem, venture, startups, etc. This is where we've spent our entire adult lives. This is the thing that we spend the most amount of mental energy thinking about, but we didn't want to go and [2:00:42] do a traditional venture-backed business. We didn't want to become a venture capitalist. [2:00:49] not [2:00:50] 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. [2:00:58] to actually stay. [2:01:00] Like... [2:01:00] heavily involved without [2:01:03] doing those two paths, right? And being in L.A., too, it's not a tech hub, right? Where L.A. Tech Week is this week. I haven't seen any technology out there. I didn't even know. It's like a terrible tech hub, right? Because it's like...

[2:01:18] basically a string of neighborhoods that are like loosely connected by freeways. And there's a couple companies that are somewhat important, but it's certainly not. [2:01:28] You know, we have El Segundo now, which is its own amazing thing. [2:01:33] But. [2:01:34] the idea of like building a tech company in LA is like, [2:01:40] uh... [2:01:41] joke to me. It's just not something that [2:01:44] you really, I'm sure you can do it, but again, ignoring El Segundo, because that's its own thing. And so we were in a position where we both have [2:01:53] We both have kids. [2:01:56] We have John has three. I have two, all under five. [2:01:59] like their setup in their communities, like we had no... [2:02:02] desire to, I really felt like if I wanted to build another company, I had to move to San Francisco and [2:02:08] or New York. [2:02:12] And I didn't necessarily want to do that. I like... [2:02:14] L.A. 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. [2:02:24] and get to... [2:02:26] talk all day long with our friends like you that are in and around the industry. We're [2:02:32] while building a business that is extremely well-suited to build in Hollywood and build in LA. And to you guys. Because we are not looking to hire... [2:02:42] 50 engineers in the next two years, right? Like we're looking to hire engineers [2:02:47] And we're actually not even really, we're hiring for a couple roles now, but it's like,

[2:02:51] Where can you build, where's the best place in the world to build a media and entertainment company? It's like L.A., right? Yeah. [2:02:57] I mentioned before I interviewed Gabe Whaley for Mischief recently, and he brought up Soylent. There's an excerpt in the Mischief employee guideline handbook where it says, Soylent could have been a speculative artwork. Instead, it's real. And then Gabe went on to say, you could have done it as a small batch, or an artist could have lived off it as a performance for 20 years, documented everything, had a video, and then done a gallery show about it, living off the powder. Instead, it was a business. It was a company. They put it out into the real world, and that's rad. That's cool. That's awesome. [2:03:27] it captures this [2:03:30] Like, earnest, just try stuff. I mean, even what you were describing of getting to this. [2:03:35] like a whole lot of iteration cycles that people didn't see that were real things. Like, I'm curious what goes into your guys' inclinations to just, like – [2:03:44] That's an interesting idea. Let's see if it... [2:03:46] Let's put it into reality and see if it works. I think there's seeds in humor. Like things that – because humor gives you the – [2:03:52] it gives you the permission to do something low status or do, I mean, even, even the Soylent thing, it was definitely like a social experiment. We, 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. But like as a YC company, starting like a consumer packaged goods company was extremely low status. Like you want the literal name. Yeah. Crazy. Right. So everything was like trollish insane. And so like, um, [2:04:21] There were a variety of like, just when you start with the lens of like,

[2:04:28] humor or performance art. It gives you the ability to [2:04:32] to broaden the aperture to like get really weird. And then, 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 like media product. But, but it, it, it allows you to kind of start from scratch, a really blank canvas, as opposed to being like, this is what a podcast is, or this is what a show is. And then I have to like, find, I have to take what is already a thing and then like try and find a little [2:05:02] of differentiation. Instead you just start from like... The other thing that is very real is I think we both like creating things, right? John created Soylent and then Lucy. I, going back to like my very first company, I created a skateboard company when I was 12 and that was like, [2:05:19] 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 [2:05:28] As a 12-year-old... [2:05:29] Yes. [2:05:30] Called up my aunt. I was like, I need $500. That's like the boards were like $17.50 to make. And I was like, I'm going to buy these and I'm going to sell them locally in stores and at the skate park and to... [2:05:43] 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. [2:05:51] The thing about making things like... [2:05:53] in the physical world and even software. [2:05:55] and companies is like the feedback loop is just so it takes so much time. Right. So like an example, I

[2:06:02] started a company with my partners Brian and Charlie years ago at this point, which was [2:06:08] 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 create [2:06:18] 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. Right. And so if you enjoy making things, there's nothing better than content to me because like we can have an idea. [2:06:38] at breakfast and ship it like two hours later. So that iteration is just like super addictive where if you [2:06:44] If you like generating ideas and you think you have decent ideas, [2:06:48] and you want to see, like, the challenge with startups is, like, I've seen this. It's like, you know, I'll meet an entrepreneur, and I'm like, okay, you have a good idea. You don't know if it's actually, like, truly a good idea. See you in 12 to 18 months. Yeah, even more. Like, I've had companies that I thought were... [2:07:04] literally dead because they weren't sending updates. And then you they send an update and it's like, yeah, we just crossed a million dollars a month in revenue and like it's working finally. And so the thing that's so addictive about media is just, again, that like we love generating ideas. [2:07:19] And you can sometimes it takes like three hours to make. Sometimes it takes... [2:07:24] 20 minutes to make, et cetera. I'm laughing because you're talking about how addictive media is, and I think we're on the fifth hour of podcasting for the day. We sat down, and I'm like, are you guys sure you're ready to do this? And they're like, we can podcast literally.

[2:07:35] We are almost out of time. I would love to just do a quick speed run of a few miscellaneous things if you guys are up for it. [2:07:42] How do you do a great 15 minute interview? [2:07:45] You've got to ring a gong, a big one, ideally. Yeah, fair. 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. [2:07:58] Most VCs wish that every meeting that they had with entrepreneurs was 15 minutes, right? And we just have the affordance to be like – [2:08:05] It's 15 minutes. I think it's like intro, what do you do, and then the news. It's got to be news-driven, so we ring the gong or talk about the product announcement. And then pretty quickly it's like, get us just one layer deeper. Not a sound bite. I didn'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. [2:08:35] I don't really know anything about the personal injury market. I'll just ask one question to get me like a little bit more information on how that market works. So then maybe I come out of that interview just understanding like, [2:08:46] How many personal injury attorney firms are there? [2:08:48] What's the average size? Yeah, and I would 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 – [2:08:58] a [redacted address] too much time for that person at that point in their career, that moment. Right. And so we just recognize it's it's much more interesting to hear for.

[2:09:12] 10 minutes from somebody like in a specific moment in time, [2:09:16] uh than uh than than 90 minutes right like a lot of we talked to a lot of like [2:09:22] 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 a Marc Andreessen and that they can just talk and talk and talk and talk. And it's entertaining, but they're not at that point yet. And so like, let's give them the format where they can come in and introduce themselves to the world [2:09:41] And we get to hear how they're thinking in that moment. The other thing when we do like, [2:09:46] at Meta Connect and at YCDemoDay, like we think it's a very interesting media product to interview like an entire management team. [2:09:54] in three hours because you're getting to hear how all those people are thinking, not generally, not over. Like you could piece together interviews from an executive team. [2:10:04] 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, [2:10:13] you get a really good sense of the batch from listening to a bunch of three-minute interviews, right? You get a good read much more than just kind of like... [2:10:20] reading during Gary talk for 45 minutes about all of them even. Yeah. Yeah. You're getting like real. Yes. That's cool. Yeah. You're getting like a, a flash pulse check with a bunch of different flavors. Yep. Um, [2:10:31] What's the difference between... [2:10:33] What is the conscious difference between what you guys do in journalism? [2:10:37] We don't break news. [2:10:40] Yeah, we rarely break news. We're very happy for the news to break at 9 a.m. on Thursday.

[2:10:46] tech Twitter acts like it normally does. You can talk about it. Come on and give us more context. Let's react to the reaction. How are people perceiving it? [2:10:55] Your launch video got 10,000 likes, got a lot of hate. Let's talk about why. What are you going to change based on that? 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. [2:11:13] 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, [2:11:23] This news is going out in an hour. [2:11:26] Let me know if you have a comment. And I think that there's general, there's like, [2:11:30] There's a lot of value to fact-finding and, like, original reporting, and there's stories that do need to be told. And there's certainly stories that don't want to be told that still need to be told. But we think that it's important for our position kind of in the ecosystem to not be – [2:11:45] We have no interest in scooping. I have no interest in telling a story and being the one to deliver. [2:11:52] A story that doesn't want to be delivered. There's commentary. There's Shams and there's Steven. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And 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 sections of the ecosystem. But you just got to like know your lane and thrive in it. Yeah. Yeah. And an example being CNBC is not in the scoop business. Right. They're not like.

[2:12:18] Wall Street Journal is. [2:12:20] Yeah. You teach your audience, by the way, what to expect from you. Exactly. Um, [2:12:25] What you had a bunch of interns here. [2:12:28] I'll pick on Tyler as a general example, but maybe him specifically. Tyler's also the only... [2:12:35] Only remaining. And he's not really an intern. Right. He's an employee. Somebody like that who is... [2:12:42] generally smart and capable and could probably do a lot of things in tech that are not media. [2:12:48] Why does someone like that... [2:12:50] stick around here for [2:12:52] another year or five. [2:12:54] Just going to ask him, bring him over. [2:12:56] Tyler... [2:12:59] We'll have I can imagine a bunch of different paths for Tyler post-DBPN. I can imagine a world where he stays with us for 30 years and it's just 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. Different set of interests. Yeah, different different set of interests. So he's bringing something novel to the show. [2:13:19] But... [2:13:20] Yeah, I mean, Tyler is unique in that he's the, you know, reoccurring like personality on the show. But if you think about what his optionality will be after, you know, if he decides at some point in the future, one, he's still in college, hasn't officially dropped out. [2:13:35] He's on a gap semester, but... [2:13:37] if he decides to go back to school and still be a part of what we're doing or just like go back to school and just be a student. [2:13:44] or stay with us, and then a year from now... [2:13:46] you know, decide, I want to start a company, I want to start a...

[2:13:50] I want to go work at a venture firm. He's going to have truly infinite optionality. [2:13:57] thousand companies we interviewed this year that we can easily make an intro to. [2:14:02] Yeah. [2:14:02] One more thing that I would add. [2:14:04] Like... [2:14:05] retention like [2:14:07] talent retention, to put it in like corporate speak. [2:14:11] Like, we want... [2:14:13] we want to create an environment where... [2:14:17] uh, [2:14:19] 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, [2:14:28] you know, to date, we haven't had somebody like [2:14:30] decide to leave themselves. [2:14:33] and [2:14:35] Thank you. [2:14:35] we're like hyper-conscious of like creating... [2:14:38] ways so that people can grow in the industry because [2:14:41] There's not like if you if you're if you're deciding to work in. [2:14:45] tech media. [2:14:46] Like... [2:14:47] I don't know that many other places that you can go that are going to be fulfilling after you work in, like, this type of environment, right? You might decide. I see it much more like a... [2:14:57] like a law firm's partnership, then [2:15:00] a C Corp that is growing and changing and cycling people through. It's like, [2:15:06] The people who get in develop a unique set of skills that work very tightly together. It's a small group. [2:15:11] for a very long time and everyone participates in the upside for a long time. [2:15:17] That's definitely rare in media. Yeah, as opposed to like, you know, the, hey, we're all going to be on a four year vest and then we're going to get out and sell this thing. But also like content creators, like people don't.

[2:15:26] it's pretty rare for like, [2:15:28] there to be real durability around something like that. 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... [2:15:37] 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. [2:15:50] 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? [2:16:03] I think you guys have talked about the sort of like... [2:16:05] Maybe it was you, John, like the sort of speculation culture, the feeling that it's stupid to not use leverage. You have two years to escape the permanent underclass. The carpet zagers. Yeah, what would you say to young people who are feeling that? [2:16:17] I think it's a very toxic mindset. Or if you guys were 21. Yeah, I mean, it just game theoretically. It's clearly there's immense alpha in not participating in that culture. Right. Because if everyone else in your college class is. [2:16:32] 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 going to build. It's also like the advice that we give, the financial advice that we give to the team, and I'm saying that in sort of a joking way, but it is financial advice, is to... [2:16:54] like, [2:16:55] if you were in your 20s trying and you have like relatively modest cash flow,

[2:17:01] trying to YOLO into investments in order to escape the permanent underclass is like such a ridiculous concept because one, you're not deploying size. Like two is going to distract you from the main thing that's important, which is what else could be like. Are there even any main things left? [2:17:19] There's tons of main things left. [2:17:21] Obviously. [2:17:23] Like like the power laws gets deeper all over the place. [2:17:27] Just be at the top end of the power line. [2:17:29] And maybe to go back to what we were talking about earlier, look at... [2:17:32] more a more diverse set of inputs of like what creativity is going to come from 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 seven figures if they're if they're a you know yeah i mean it's best ceramicist right i think about high demand i think about this so much because when i was in college i like was obsessed with startups i would be refreshing tech crunch right i'd be on tech twitter at the [2:18:01] so like obsessed with venture capital and, [2:18:05] And yet my first real business was a company that didn't raise money. [2:18:09] that just, [2:18:10] 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 [2:18:18] We were able to be like, okay, we can just... [2:18:20] John was an EIR at Founders Fund. I didn't have anything else that I needed to do with my time. And I had, I had, and so it's like, you want to, [2:18:28] not like and it was [2:18:30] Being really into startups and having a lifestyle business was...

[2:18:34] at times, like kind of miserable because I'd be sitting there being like, [2:18:38] Like I'm making like real cash flow here. [2:18:42] And nobody is going to look at my LinkedIn and offer me. It doesn't feel like I'm in the big leagues. Yeah, you didn't feel like I was in the league at all, right? [2:18:50] If you have a lifestyle business, like... [2:18:53] get ready to make a lot of money, but no one is going to care about you at all, right? Because you're not providing a way for other people to... You're not... [2:19:02] 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, yeah, it's, it's really sad, right? Like, [2:19:16] If you're just chugging away building a business, no one cares. David Sender will care in 50 years if you build a lifestyle. By the way, it takes a long time for you to get recognition. How have the wives of TBPN... [2:19:30] influenced or made this thing better. [2:19:33] Thank you. [2:19:34] Honestly, focus on like building something like in person was like a no brainer for sure. We want to be home with the families and whatnot. And so this idea of like, oh, we're on the road all the time. It just raises the quality bar for like, yeah, we'll travel for Mark Zuckerberg. [2:19:49] but are we going to travel for some random thing just because it's like fun or trendy or like there's a 1% chance that it's good. It's like really, really focused and just continue to raise the bar. [2:20:00] I think they're... [2:20:01] both incredible mothers, which means that we get to

[2:20:05] spend [2:20:06] You know, we both wake up. [2:20:08] Before the kids. [2:20:09] We're at the office before the kid or we're like meeting up, like starting the work day before the kids are even up. And then. [2:20:16] They are... [2:20:18] like such incredible moms that like we get to go home and, [2:20:22] after the show and like, [2:20:25] The kids are happy. They're thriving. We just get to hang out. And... [2:20:29] they're carrying the burden of like the household and like running that. And, [2:20:33] having the ability to be like live [2:20:36] on the air for three hours and not be thinking like, are the kids like eating lunch or like is, you know, we're not thinking about we've had to like pull the stream because of family stuff was literally during the L.A. fires. [2:20:49] And that was like completely reasonable to be like, get home. But other than that, I mean, yeah, it's been fantastic. My final question. I'm not sure who this quote actually should be attributed to. I think it's either you or... [2:21:02] or will, but podcasting has little to do with profit. Podcasting is about domination of the spirit. We heard that. So, so, so that is a, I might be Senra. So, so, so someone else said that in business. Okay. And I think it was. [2:21:17] Business has little to do with profit. Business is about domination of the spirit. And then I was, I think I said it at one point. You just used it in a job post. I think I used it in a group chat and then Will posted it publicly. [2:21:34] And then that reminded me. And so I posted it in the job post. But yes, I mean, one of the things was that, you know, we take podcasting really seriously. We don't see it. We don't care about the status. Maybe it's low status means high status, whatever. Like we're doing it. We're all in. We're going very hard on it. But just to take the edge off a little bit, we throw in a little bit of humor.

[2:21:55] but [2:21:56] We do kind of feel that. Yeah, my question was going to be, how are you going to spirit your helmet? A better line is David Senra... [2:22:02] We were hanging out and he goes like, I wish media was a zero sum game. He's like, I'm mad that it's, you know, I'm mad that like... [2:22:10] I can win and someone else can win. He knew it was so brutally competitive and he's like, I wish it was more competitive. I love it. It's amazing. Gentlemen, thank you very much. Thanks, man. Super fun. This was great. Cool. [2:22:21] Good times. [2:22:21] Thank you.