How TBPN Built the Luxury Brand of the Creator Economy

- Even the biggest creators in the world don't have a big enough audience to just use that audience to create a standalone business. - We're on track to do like 5,000 host-read ads next year. - 5,000 host-read ads, wow. - 20th episode, 250 episodes a year. - I imagine that trades at a pretty high level to be one of those 20 spots. - Exactly. - Safe to say that trades in the six to seven figures. - Today on The Common and Smear Show, we're joined by Jordi Hayes and John Cougan of TBPN. So if you haven't heard of TBPN yet, that's kind of by design. First of all, they just started the show about a year ago. - You're watching TBPN. - But second of all, it's designed for a very niche curated audience. TBPN is what I call a luxury brand in the creator economy. It's an extremely high quality audience, very tight knit, and very high priced advertising. It's a daily news show that's live for three hours across X, YouTube, and Twitch. It's kind of like Sports Center, but for technology. And because they took this traditional daily news format and brought it to the modern creator economy, they were able to grow really fast and get some pretty hard to get guests on. From Sam Altman to Mark Zuckerberg, everyone that you can imagine in technology has showed up on TBPN. So in this episode, we talk about how they did that, how did they build such a luxury brand in the creator economy. We also talk about their ad strategy. I truly have never seen anyone approach advertising the way that they do, and it's really impressive, and I think you guys really enjoy that. So I hope you guys enjoy this conversation with John and Jordy from TBPN. (upbeat music) - Jordy, John, welcome to the show. - Thanks for having us today. - It's weird to say welcome to the show, 'cause I know we're on your set. - Yes. - Welcome to the show, but-- - Home court. - Yes. - Explain the show to people who haven't seen it before. - Three hour live stream, daily 11 a.m. Pacific weekdays. So 250 shows a year, 750 hours of content. - Over 1,000 guests a year. - We typically go long. So almost 1,000 hours of content, which feels incredibly long if you're doing a podcast that drops once a month or once a week. It also feels like we're maybe not as extreme as some of the live streamers that you've probably interviewed where they're streaming eight hours a day. So we sort of fit into a little bit of the legacy TV mold where a sports center, a Pat McAfee show, a squawk box, something on CNBC, might fit a three hour daily live segment. And we just kind of stumbled into that, but we do a lot of interviews. And we also just talk about the news between us. We go back and forth and the show is very focused on technology and business. And so we talk about those topics and go back and forth. And then hopefully have guests join us to add more context to whatever the news is of the day. - Yeah, so you can think of it as 90 minutes of us just talking, going back and forth on the stories that are most interesting to us. And then 90 minutes of guests. And it's very much, I mean, it's live, obviously. A lot of tech content historically has been recorded and podcast format. And so it's lagging by a week or two weeks or at least a couple of days. And our industry moves really quickly. And so we were one of the first shows to put out a super high volume of content that was like right at the present, basically. And yeah, I would say from. There's a lot of interview shows out there. We do interviews, but we view them much more as conversations around what's happening in various industries, what's happening in the news broadly. And I think that's resonating a lot. - The show is also fairly niche. It's, I say, tech and business. The show TBPN stands for Technology Business Programming Network. - So that one stands for Technology Brothers. - No, we have pre-curted show. That was called Technology Brothers. Let's play on the tech bro meme. - We were trying to reclaim the tech bro. - The tech bro. - Technology Brothers. The issue is that everyone would just abbreviate it when they were introducing us. So the show, we started as a weekly show. It was kind of like commentary reaction show where we would have a printed out stack of posts from the internet and we would just shuffle through them and read them and talk about them. And even though our audience was small early on, we realized that there was a lot of people that were our friends that were listening to every episode. And we decided to take it a lot more seriously. But the issue was people would introduce us as, "Hey, it's John and Jordy, the tech bros." So the whole thing that we were trying to reclaim as like we're not tech bros, we're technology brothers. It ended up backfiring. - It's a smart one. - And then we realized we were doing our life's work like really early on and John and I were just like, we cannot go our whole life being introduced as the tech bros, the thing we were trying to avoid. But I think there's a lot of different ways that you can look at the show. But the best way, I think the category that we'll see emerge is the highly produced live stream. So like the last 10 years of streaming, where like you set up at your desk, you have a camera or you're walking around the world, some of these IRL streamers. And they're fairly low, they're sort of like low production. One camera, one microphone or a couple microphones. And you'll see sitting in the set here, we have a team that's doing like full live production. And so you can think of the show as sitting somewhere in between traditional television, which is like huge teams, big, big budgets, highly, highly produced. And then like traditional live streaming. So it looks like television, but we're still reading chat. We're still like interacting with the audience in real time. And so that hybrid is something that we expect to see a lot more of going further, going forward. Just as people realize like, hey, there's not just one format for live streaming, which is a screen share and a camera on you. Or not just like the IRL strategy that I show speed might do, which is like you're kind of just running around in the world. Some hybrid that I think people appreciate. Because we do three hours, which is like a lot in the world of tech. Not nothing compared to like some streamers that are just going around the clock for days and days and days. And so we keep it like fairly condensed. We have a team here that's managing, helping us manage guest booking and a bunch of other things to make sure that that three hours every weekday stays pretty tight, right? There's no dead air. It's like, you know, really dialed. - What are the economics of a show like this that basically like takes the effort of what feels like TV but is on the internet, especially considering it's pretty new? Like how do you, I read somewhere that you have 10 team members. - Yeah. - The economics of it, is it more similar to what we see on streaming? Or does it actually feel more similar to TV? - I would say, so we started about a year ago. And I was just the two of us in Ben, who's still here. I don't know if he's actually still at the office. But so originally it was like one camera, two microphones, super simple. And then we added a second camera. And so that's making Ben's job a little bit more complicated. And then we added a third camera. And then there's like more lighting. And then we added a chiron, which is the, for those not familiar, is like the overlay over that you can update in real time. So as we started adding like more pieces to the show, we started adding more people. Like as soon as the team would be like, "Whoa, this is a lot to handle." 'Cause you can imagine, we definitely had some sympathy for them, but we're also getting up there and we're like, "Okay, we're performing for three hours live." And like it is very much like you have to be very locked in to be running the show from a production standpoint. But we built up the team from Ben to Michael the Scott, who do all of the live production. And then we have other people on the team that are kind of managing the complexity of like the calendar and things like that. And then we have our like editing distribution team that's doing clipping and all that kind of stuff. - On the economics question, there's been a number of late night shows that have been in the news this year. And a lot of there like sort of financials and numbers tend to hit the headlines when something happens to the show. And I remember benchmarking with, I don't know, was it late night? It was one of the late night shows. And I think we had one tenth the amount of employees. And then like maybe one 50th of the overall budget. - But in the reason it was notable. - We produced like just as many hours. If not more hours, like we took less holidays off. And so overall it's like I think on a like per watch hour basis or a per hour of produced content basis. You know, you talk about this in Hollywood with like, this movie cost $10,000 a second or something like that. I think we're, I think we're between 10 and 100 times more efficient. - Yeah, and the reason these headlines were notable is we would look at them and we're like, okay, they produce two hours of content a day. We produce three hours a day. And they're saying that they make 200 million in top line, but they're losing money. And you're saying they rely on hour they doing this. And I do think if you're not committed to getting the most amount, like as much as you can out of each person on the team, you can very easily be like, oh, let's add a sound guy. Let's add a dedicated like guy. Let's do all these other things. And I feel like for us, it's this balance of wanting to deliver a super polished professional product that's ready for television. But at the same time, we enjoy working with like a small team. Like, you know, we're like a two pizza team, right? We like that we can go, sit it. One, one, we get breakfast in the morning, one table and staying, staying that way as long as we can. From an economic standpoint, it's certainly, you know. I mean, I'm a gear nerd. Like I like dealing with cameras myself. And so I feel like everyone on the team is like excited about wearing multiple hats. It's true. It's also like to understand, to understand like, kind of TVPN, you have to understand what John was doing before this, which is building his own YouTube channel. I was at around, yeah, to somewhere around half a million subscribers. And then I actually started a YouTube ad network in college helping creators like monetize their channel. So it was like, this was post like the MCN boom. And I didn't realize that those businesses like hadn't fully worked out. But I just started helping creators like monetize the ad inventory that they have. And so I had done, prior to TVPN, I had done like thousands of bespoke ad deals between creators and advertisers both on YouTube and podcasts. And so we came at this like, John, very much from a technical production standpoint. Me from a commercial standpoint in that from an economic standpoint, we wanted, we're a daily show. We wanted to bring on not a big, but like a small effective team early on. And so we structured, we structured our like ad product in a way that allowed us to have super predictable revenue throughout the entire year. And so we've never been in a position where we're like, hey, we got to sell an extra ad to make payroll this month. And I think that's allowed us to consistently invest in gear, consistently invest in the team, invest in the space that we're in, and really think super long term about all these things. I want to go deep on that. Because like you've compared yourself to late night a bit, compared yourself to sports, like magnography, and then podcast is in the name of the brand. And I think it's not programming network. Stop it. Got you again. No, you didn't. No, no, no, look on the website. I'm not buying this again. These guys have changed in the brand. Yeah, just for everyone, listen, listen, this is not the revolving door. I thought it was tech, bro's podcast network. Everyone thinks that. Yeah, but on the website, technology, business, programming, network. OK. Well, I've got to check the website. But yes, we've got a great, great, great website. I did a deep dive on that company that helped you with that website. Oh, yeah. That's a very good website. But you guys are exceptional at packaging. Yeah. Meaning you've packaged this show really well. You also packaged your ad products really well. The thing that caught my eye, you know, A, obviously, as the show emerged and took over Twitter in a really interesting way, it was both the fact that it was this thing that I could have on in the same way that when I was in college in my house, sports center was always on. Yeah. But it was a thing I could have on always while I'm working. That was relevant. And relevant people in our industry were showing up on my screen, which was cool. But the thing that really struck me was the presenting sponsor, the presented by Ramp. Yeah. Because I've been, you know, in this world for 15 years and felt like the ad products that we all do, especially on YouTube, was this format that was adopted by the radio of, and very D to C, very like quick break in the episode to tell you about Squarespace and like use my code to get X percentage off for the next 30 days, like very, very radio style advertising and it's just like this isn't the right, you know, it's maybe it's the right ad product for podcasting. Maybe it's effective in podcasting, but it's not like we have to evolve out of this. And I really appreciated the way you guys did the Ramp deal, not only from a presented by on screen always, which I think is really powerful because then it shows up in the clips just as I remember, but you guys made like an actual ad for them that was really dope to announce it. It's like a big partnership announcement, also talking about our stuff and kind of framing around like what is the show, almost just reintroducing the show, you've seen these clips, but what is this? But I think in a world where so here's what it comes down to you. I think a lot of creators are reluctant to do advertising there, even in the airs to do advertising, and it can be depending on the type of content we were talking on our show earlier, how stake is like UBI for a wide variety of content creators, we'll expand on that. Everyone listening and that's really just we had zero embarrassment around advertising early on. And I've always, since I was a kid, I've been obsessed with advertising, how it works, why it works on me. I think advertising is a beautiful business model. I think it's been underappreciated over the last 10 years as people were like experimenting with subscriptions and tipping and things like that. And I've always felt like content just wants to be free, wants to be seen by as many people as possible. It's in your interest as a creator to get as many people to see your content. And so we leaned heavily into advertising and the pitch to brands was like, hey, think about this as us building like a formula one team. So like you're going to sponsor us for a season, 2025. And we're going to like go above and beyond to deliver like you're paying on a sort of monthly or an annualized basis. But we're going to go above and beyond. You're giving us revenue predictability. We're going to go above and beyond to like get you as many relevant impressions as we possibly can. And so that's like innovating on the overlay, which works well for us because it's like television, right, people are kind of used to these kind of things already. And then innovating on the actual ad unit itself, which are host red ads that we insert. And our insight there was like, we're live and we start doing a 90 second ad read like a traditional podcast. Ad read people are just going to like tune out or they'll, you know, it can be very frustrating. And so we told advertisers like, hey, you're spending money on podcasts. It's very likely that your audience is listening to the first 20 seconds, 15 seconds, 10 seconds, maybe before they kind of like hit the skip button and skip through. We're going to just deliver your ad read in that 15 seconds, but we're going to like make it really condensed. So you're hearing like value props, you know, URL test, you know, testimonial or like social proof, right? In terms of the other advertisers. And we're going to deliver like much higher consistency. So instead of doing like one ad every two weeks on our show, we're going to do a daily 15 second ad read. And so, and to basically, and that meant for us as like a news driven show, it's like whether somebody tunes in, you know, once a year on a crazy news day or once a week or multiple times a day, they're going to be like getting, getting, getting the right messaging delivered, but not in a way that's like, I get me out of here like I, I, I, I deal with this on YouTube where I'm like falling asleep and get an ad read for, you know, a host read ad and, and so yeah, there's been like kind of trying to rethink the, the business model in a, in a number of, in a number of different ways, but it comes from a place of being proud that we have companies that, that back us so that our content is free for the entire world. I think that is a massive differentiator. Even the, the, the psyche of being, you know, embarrassed or, or not embarrassed, but like just shying away from the fact that you have an advertiser because we've built a culture where people skip them on YouTube or people don't, you know, want them. It's like the obvious reframe is how do I make it cool? How do I, because it is, and what if it is cool, confident about how I'm going to deliver this messaging instead of just doing whatever one else does? I think it's important to have a POV on advertising because creators assume, okay, this is just the way it's done. It's 60 to 90 seconds, but actually like you should have a POV and you're paving a path that no one has done before. You're building a brand that no one's built before. So you should have a POV on how you think it should be integrated. And a lot of times, I think also brands are looking to you for that. They're like, oh, wow, this is great. Someone actually has confidence in how they think my brand should show up in their world. And it was another point of differentiation we saw it as a feature of the product because many, not all, but many tech podcasts were monetizing in other ways either working, you know, you have a business on the side. So it's just your marketing for that business, something along those lines, and the classic is like having a venture fund. So you get management. You're investors. You just have a podcast on the side. Right. And so the idea of being the exact opposite of that maximal advertising is sort of funny. And we like the level of like, okay, we're standing out. It's we're pro. But when we really thought it through from first principles, all that applied and also just this idea of like being pro, the companies that we work with, like you look at the logos that we work with and they are companies that we are aligned with in terms of like vision for the world and like technology and like we feel like a strong alignment. And so the actual, notably to the actual ad load, like the amount of our content that is advertising is lower than a traditional podcast, which is already way lower than traditional television. Yeah. And so that was like trying to find out, you know, win, win, win with the advertisers in the audience. You guys have innovated in a lot of different ways, but I actually have been a big fan of how you've done your advertising. There's that one photo that on Twitter of you, Jordy, like walking with your bag. And you have the, you guys essentially made these like Jersey shirts away and thinking about it like an F1 team where all your sponsors are listed on the shirt. It's like the game day outfit and it's a game day outfit and that like there's, even notice there's employees around here with the hats. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. As if it's an F1 time roundabout. I mean, Texi did it up saying I wanted a hat and it's amazing that I desire a hat that has your sponsors on it. It's crazy, but it's the same way that someone would wear, you know, their favorite football club or, you know, any other sports jersey with sponsors on it. When you guys first, like the transition from recorded to live is an interesting one for me. I want to talk about that transition as well as the first pitch to, you know, if ramp was the first big sponsor, the first pitch to them, how big the show was at that time, how you got ramped to say yes. So a lot of people ask us, how do you do three hours a day of live content? That sounds insane. You think about us giving a three hour speech every day to an audience, right? It sounds insane, but one, it's really a conversation between John and I, plus whoever we're bringing on the show. And then we also built up from starting with like a 90 minute, once a week podcast and we went to two days a week and then we went to three and four and eventually five. And we were doing a recorded five day week podcast before we ever went live five days a week. And so building up to that was having the, we also did the first 50 episodes, we had no guests, which was a big thing. And was something that gave us confidence to understand that we're not a guest driven show. And there's plenty of guest driven shows and you can build a great media business or become a great creator by being guest driven, but we, we joked early on. We were like, this is pretty amazing, a podcast, like one of the most time intensive things of running a traditional podcast is like booking guests and having a pipeline of great guests. And you know, creators will go through this of like, Oh, this guest that I had that I was going to publish later this week just canceled now I'm scrambling or just came out on another show. Yeah, it happens. And so it's like, so yeah, we, yeah, having the confidence of doing, you know, something like 150 hours just by ourselves and then going into, into live, but going from zero to then starting three, three hours a day live would be really tough. From the pitch to advertisers, it was definitely, I think in our case, we were asking ramp to make a big commitment, right, to sponsor us for all of 2025. We had been self-funding through that point, but we had both known the ramp team for years prior to that. And so that was helpful. Like they were very much making a bet on us to like figure it out. We, when they committed to working with us, we had done maybe, you know, we, we were maybe doing three episodes a week or something like that. It was, but they saw signs of being like, hey, this is a great product and it will scale quickly as they spend more and more time on it, but I would say like a variety of the first sponsors that we had were companies that we had built relationships with for three years prior to that. And that was super helpful. I would say we definitely, we definitely treated those like sales pitches like raising money for and start up coming in with a vision and knowing that there's not everything is going to play out exactly as we intend, but if you, if you give us the opportunity, we're going to go and make plays and be creative and deliver value that is an, that is in excess of what you're investing. Yeah. So we actually put together a deck. We put together a full slide deck. We, I wonder if we have an, we had a hand delivered to the CEO of ramp and he, and in there, there were some things that we definitely got right. Like, we just nailed this, this, this, but then there's some things where we're like, well, we promised to do what and one of the things was that we, we, we were under the assumption that, that if, that they were giving us money and if, if we weren't able to put up numbers, we would be able to buy impressions or buy ads or promote our content. And we were like, look, you're giving us money. If, if, if for some reason we're not getting a lot of views, we will, we will be willing to take those money to pay to promote. We never had to buy a dime of ads. Yeah. Yeah. We have a lot of dime kinds of like performance. Yeah. Just like, we just got clipping working. We got a bunch of attention. We got great guests. Like, things played out. Yeah, the other language will be willing to advertise us, which I would encourage other creators or people that are getting media companies off the ground as we set the monthly pricing for 2025 in December of last year. So we, they kind of could say, like, hey, if this doesn't grow at all, like, this is fine, we're kind of, but we're going to commit to a year of spend. And that meant that when the show went viral, they weren't, we weren't coming to them and saying, like, the price went up. The price went up, right? And so for them, it's like, you know, we got the ability up front to have that predictability of revenue, which I think is super powerful because I've seen so many creators have this like kind of, it's so easy to have, you're going to have ups and downs and big moments and flops and things like that. And so if you're constantly doing your, all your advertising conversations like week over week, then it's so hard to have predict like the predictability. It's hard to be like, I'm hiring a full-time position for this role. And so ramp, not only, you know, they committed early and they took on some risk, but that meant that by end of Q1, they were like, wow, this is like a home run, right? But we weren't going back to them being like, for sure, price is going up, it's like we have a contract for the year. Yeah, I think that's a really important lesson that Samir and I talk a lot about is like, if you can make the year long agreement with the brand, the brand is buying a portfolio of your work. So of course, some videos are not going to hit. That's just the nature of what we do. Not everything's going to hit, but some of them really are, especially with you guys in the way that you clip. It'd be curious how you storytelling around viewership and metrics even today, because like, I tuned into Evan Spiegel and on X, it was like 4,000 people watching Evan. There's a few hundred people on YouTube. There's kind of like different places that you guys are distributing. But of course, the clips have the opportunity to really be seen. Yep. The other thing that's notable is like brands plan advertising on an annualized basis, right? So of course, they're adding budget or sometimes they're taking budget away. But if you're having a conversation with an advertiser, they pretty much know how much they're going to spend for the year. And so you can work out deals that fit within how much they're allocating to content creators or podcasts or newsletters and things like that. Storytelling around viewership. There's an exchange rate between, you know, one clip viewer or, you know, one live viewer who's there chatting, who's like the super fan is probably worth 10 people watching in live, which is worth 10 people that watch the full three hours. But on video on demand recording, which is worth 10 people that, you know, watch a cut down version. And then that's worth 10 people that just watch one clip. And so what I'm interested in is watch time from the core audience that we very narrowly define. We think that there's maybe a hundred or 200,000 people that are interested in this particular corner of technology and business. And then how can we reach them for a, like a good amount of minutes per month? And that might be in a bunch of different touch points. It might be, yeah, they read the newsletter. So they spend a couple minutes a day skimming that. Then they'll see all the viral clips. And so they're watching two minutes of clips a day that's actually an hour of clip watching per month, right? It like it adds up pretty quickly, you have just a couple minutes a day. And then maybe the, if there's like a, their friends on, so they got to watch 30 minutes of that. Or someone that they're going to pitch someone that, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm trying to invest in this company or vice versa. I'm trying to get money from this investor. So I'll listen to their latest hit on TV again. And so there's all these different reasons for people to go and spend a couple minutes with TVPN. And so the absolute number of people that are sitting down and chatting constantly in like the, we basically have just taken the 1000 true fans thing like really, really seriously. And then identified the niche of like, there's maybe 100,000 people in tech and business. How can we reach them in as many places and just be sort of like, like content agnostic? Like, if you're just not the person that has an hour to give every day, that's great. We'll take two minutes here, two minutes there. We'll, you know, it's like the, the jar of marbles that you pour the sand in, you pour the water in. Just continue to fill it up. I think a lot of, we look at a lot of the content we put out as marketing for the main show. And there's two ways to watch the main show. You can watch the live version, which today somewhere around 10 to 12,000 people tuned into the live at some point, right? And then that immediately goes out on RSS and YouTube. And then another batch of people will just watch it there. And already on that core show, we're doing comparable viewership to the major business like shows on cable, right? Really? Yeah, yeah. If you look at, all their ratings are public, so you can look at CNBC's top shows, things like that. So like a squawk box. Wow. In under 55? Yeah. Sorry. In under 55. So yeah. So our segment is like 25 to 55, right? These are people that are. And so the young viewership on a legacy business, yeah, is send ratings, ratings on traditional television are, they'll, they will count like if a TV is in an airport lounge or in the gym. There's some great, yeah, yeah, yeah. Creative accounting there. But for us, it was like, we care about growing ultimately the metric that shows were growing. The show and the brand is the number of people that tune into the first 24 hours, right? So most of the people watch the recording because during the day, you know, there are work. They might have it on in the office or their extra monitor. Most of our audience is like watching the recording. And then a bunch of people watch, watch clips. Some people watch. We have people that just read the newsletter, right? And so it's about taking the content and our point of view on the world. And then like John said, delivering it in as many places. And then we'll have like random breakout moments like we, we got this exclusive interview with this guy. So hungry. Yeah. It's different, six different jobs in Silicon Valley all at the same time. And it was like a moment on the internet and like a lot of people were tuning in right there. I think that stream was like 100,000 people. So you too. Yeah. And so just being there for like those weird moments and that's another benefit of being live is that live daily like, I'm sure there were a lot of other podcasts that could have said, Oh, I'll do the definitive interview. But for someone like that, it's so news driven. He doesn't really have a three hour story to tell. Because he's still early in his career and it's sort of just this controversial moment. Being able to have a, have a, have a show that someone can just hop on. Do that. Everyone can go hear the full story from the person right there. That's been something that we've been coming back to again and again, where there's, there's a conversation that's happening in tech, in, in business. How do we extend that conversation on our show and then clip the show and distribute the show in a way that that conversation can continue in the comments of those clips and quote tweets of those. Yeah. A big, a big thing too is we, we, from the very beginning of the show, we had this number like 200,000, like that is the core. That is the audience that we're building for. Meaning that's like the total addressable. Yeah. Absolutely. We have 10 million subscribers. Like we've pivoted. Something's wrong. Something's gone wrong. It's enough. That's people that are building startups, businesses, working at the companies that we cover, investing in the companies we cover and being okay with Anish and not being, you know, the dopamine that comes from, you know, putting out a video that gets a bunch of views is, is very real, but we are not willing to let that guide the content. If we wanted to do that, we would get into politics. If we wanted to optimize for views, we'd get into sports. And I've sort of done that on my previous channel. I sort of figured out how to get a million views in a video. I was never perfect at it, but like I was following that optimization path. Right. And I sort of feel like, okay, I understand that story and it was time for a new story. And the, and the reason that we need to do that is sort of an imperative is that we hand make the show every single day. So we're not building a company. This is a show that we are the hosts of. And so, imagine if we start, like the things that we are obsessed with, the conversations that we have in group chats and on the weekend and all these things are the same things that we talk about on the show. And as soon as you start getting into, and that's just niche content and that's okay. But as soon as you start expanding out into content that we're not already talking about, like amongst our sports, it becomes like just a job and then at what, and then, and then we love what we do. So we're like, hey, if we can figure out, if we can just stay niche and do this forever, that sounds, that sounds great. And it's been fun to see the different people that have picked up the show that maybe aren't a part of that 200,000. But again, it's like, we care a lot about that, about that person and care about continuing, continuing to deliver the content that they started watching in the first place. It also gives it, so a couple of things, one, like the one thing we haven't talked about is how influential that 200,000 is. And I think that is obviously a very important note that like, if I'm an advertiser and I want to be one of these advertisers on the screen, on the chiron or on the ticker, like, it trades at a high price because this is a very highly influential group of people. Yeah. I think one way to look at is purchasing power. Yes. So like the average YouTube viewer, you could probably do the math and they might actually be responsible for, they might have like $5,000 a year of discretionary spending. Like they're deciding like- So it's like a t-shirt? Yeah. A t-shirt or a chocolate bar or a subscription to this app that helps me save money or something like that. Whereas our audience spends like a million dollars a year on software. Is the right thing? Yeah, their business owners, or they're investing a hundred million dollars a year. Almost all of our sponsors are business-to-business companies. We have a few business consumer companies, but almost entirely business-to-business. And they're also essentially all like variable pricing, price elasticity there. Yeah. So when somebody hears an ad and they make a decision, it could be a $100,000 a year and contract, or if they work with RAMP who we talked about earlier, they might go on to spend tens of millions of dollars on RAMP the platform, right? There's companies where we've like converted a big company to that software and that will be a contract that's huge and lasts a really long time. And so there's a big value to having selling something that doesn't just have a fixed price because when a bigger client shows off course, more money, right? And so the way this is manifested in more consumer-focused shows is through investing products or through gambling products, right? Because if you get a whale, even in a mobile game, if I'm advertising game of war or one of those mobile games and a really wealthy person shows up, they could become a whale and they're going to generate a ton of revenue. The same thing exists in business-to-business software. We don't call them whales. We call them Fortune 500 companies. We call them great companies. And if they show up and they buy a particular piece of software, they're running their database on this one or their cloud on this one or using this API, then they could scale and wind up spending millions and millions of dollars and so capture a fraction of that value. I do think that also aiming for a small niche community is obviously that's been a thing that has happened quite a bit on the internet that unlocked that. I think more and more I'm watching it and noticing that when I have such an abundance of content, I want to go to the place where I understand the inside jokes more than ever, right? And I think your guys' show is a show where there's inside jokes and if you get it, I don't like that. I don't like that. I had a line today that was funny. I was talking about a company that I was having an insane holiday party, like Vegas, Dial, DJs, all that, the CEO was drinking on video and I was riffing on it. I was like, John, I mean, I know what they're trying to say here. This is like, and if you know, you know, I mean, this means that they're doing, they must be doing billions of dollars of revenue and we just don't know about it. So like that was me being like very dry reference, sarcastic call back to a joke we made eight months ago and someone in the chat was like, this is OG, it was like, whoa, okay, yeah, they're paying attention. It was great. Yeah. And one thing that we did early on is not relying on kind of like randomness to like curate inside jokes. So like we actually had a piece of paper that we'd print out and it had like every one of our inside jokes in like different quadrants. And if we had a riff on the show that was fun, we'd just write it down. And even like, who are our allos and it was like our close friends and friends companies, who are our enemies? And it was like, you know, like Xi Jinping or someone, or like stagnation, like the lack of technological progress or podcasts that don't run ads. Rockets that blow up, right? It's like, we built this whole world of little little phrases and, you know, elements that could continue to build some sort of brand in the. Yeah, because as you grow, you just, you, you forget the inside jokes, you forget. I think a lot of this year was like remembering, we got to a point where we were doing like eight guests a show because there was so much demand. And we were, we were, we were, we had to remember, go back to the early days of like what made us so excited to drive to the studio when it was just talking ourselves. Yeah. And so we made changes. We're going to do any guests in the first 90 minutes, like that is a non-negotiable. That's what makes the show great. That's what people tune in for. That's what we have a monopoly on. Anyone else can get Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Sachin Adela on a podcast. No one else can get us on a podcast unless we decide, let's do it. Like we're. We're here. Yeah. And it's not, it's not like we're, we're, we're happy, we're happy to go on other shows. But this is like the one thing that we, yeah, this is the resource. I mean, that's like a long-term strategy, right? Like getting Sam Altman on can be a big hit, but it's not a daily tactic you can use to get people to. And it's so, yeah. It's a long-term strategy to just put YouTube up there for 90 minutes in the beginning of every show and just build inside jokes. That's a late time. Yeah, and we, we even see this in the, the, the viewership because we're live, we'll see like as soon as we have a guest immediately, of course, you know, 25% of the audience. Yeah. To me, that's like, of course. And from guys who run a guest show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, because like we, basically over the past five years, the, what we've noticed and what we were chasing for a long time, what, what we, what was challenging to chase was the variance of viewership and guests. And I noticed this with my own habits, with like, dachshepherds, armchair expert or smart list, it's on, like, smart list is a great example. Those three guys are very funny. Yeah. I would just listen to them three talk about what's going on in the world. But if I don't care about the guests, then I'm not listening. And I, I didn't put those pieces together as a creator of a podcast as quickly as you would imagine. But I also want to take a step back to something you said, Jordy, and, and have you explain the distinction because I think it's really important. You said, we're not building a company, we're building a show. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between a media company and a show? Because I think those two things came together with the rise of the creator economy, where the assumption was creators need to build scalable things, right? And I actually, like, I think a lot of the, even the energy towards advertising is like, oh, advertising is not a scalable product for you. Like, you got to build your own thing. And why are you doing ads for someone else when you can be doing ads for your own thing? This is like the advice that was given to creators over the past five years has been, you know, okay, you got a hot thing. Great. Yeah. Right. So just make the distinction between a company and a show and why you have conviction in building a show, not a company. Yeah. So, I would say, as the creator economy has exploded, you've seen all these incredible personalities emerge that have gone on to become like many empires in themselves, Mr. B. Joe Rogan, things like that. Dave Portnoy, Alex Cooper, right? And the things that have actually been durable out of that are the personality themselves. So a lot of, we started this business having started venture backed companies in the past. We made the decision. We didn't want to start a venture backed startup. We didn't want to sort of venture fund. And part of that is because we're in LA and we have young families and we were just like, we want a business that's aligned to our life and aligned to LA. And these are, this is not the place to really, I would argue to build either a venture backed startup or a venture fund just because the tech industry is really not here, right? And so we came into this being comfortable with there being a relative like ceiling on the business, which is very counter to like the whole Silicon Valley philosophy, everything in Silicon Valley is about scale and getting to a $100 million run rate and then getting to a billion dollar run rate. And we think that's super admirable, like a lot of the companies that come on the show are already doing that or plan to do that or we'll die trying to do that. And so coming into this, this show, like I talked about earlier is about like anti scale, right? It's like be okay with your niche, figure out what your niche is, deliver the best product for them. But it'd be good for our audience if we launched some product that was suddenly taking up 20 hours of our week, would that actually make the show better? And we've run that, John's very good about like running that analysis on every single thing that we do of like, does it make the core show better? And pretty much always it's a no, right? Even going out to dinner, it's like, does that make this short show better? You could argue, you're going to hang out with somebody and maybe they'll come on the show, but in reality, you end up like going to sleep later and you get a bad night's sleep in the show next day is bad. Or, and so there's so many decisions that we make or like, does this make the show better? And we've had to like, learn all of those things over and over and like actually learn what makes the show better, but makes the show better is we get to the gym at 630. We start talking about what we want to talk about on the show that day. We get to the office at nine, we prep the show for two hours and we do it. And like actually like having that rhythmic nature to making the show is what makes the show better. And I think a lot of people investor types have pitched us, have you guys thought about buying a cable network? Right. Right. You guys thought about building out a talent network and we, we've thought about everything, like truly tried to think about everything and haven't come up with something that makes the show better, which is that the show is, the show is our business. So I think if you look at Dave Portnoy and you look at the, the funny thing is there's like a chain of creators learning the same lesson, which is like, even if you do the impossible thing, which is identify exceptional talent. So like Dave Portnoy is like Alex Cooper, yes, you're, you're a star. We're going to build a show around you. What happens, right? Right. As right as she's reaching like the sort of peak of her earning potential, she ends up going independent and gets a, however many, nine figure or Spotify deal, right? And, and then she funny enough to my knowledge has like run effectively the same playbook with other creators, Alex Earl, right. As soon as Alex Earl is a star, you lose it. And so the way the internet, the way that the internet works today and the way that content production works is used to be that like media companies could retain incredible talent because the cost to produce and distribute the content was so expensive that a creator would be like, well, I have to work with these guys because I don't have 20 million dollars a year to spend building my own media business. And now a content creator can be like, if I have my phone or I have a microphone and a computer, I can be, I can launch a competitive product. And so we've just made the conscious decision to focus on ourselves and focus on the show. And we're very like commercial, you can tell, like we care a lot about running a great business, but there's no like ego tied to our decision making. So we're never going to make a decision where we're like, well, we need to get to a hundred million dollars a year in revenue, otherwise we won't feel like we're worthy here. We won't. Sure. It's like we want to run a great business. We want to change the lives of our team through that business, but we're, there's no, we're not trying to prove anything to anyone and scale is again not the thing that we're optimizing for. I tend to visualize it like a barbell, I think value, a cruise in media to the platforms. So YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, these companies have been fantastic businesses, just grown and grown and grown. And then on the other side, the most extreme, you have like the individual creator, the Joe Rogan's, the individuals that we mentioned. And then in the middle, you sort of this messy middle where there's someone who's like trying to roll up a bunch of talent and put them in a bucket and capture some value. But at any moment, those people could leave and do the why I quit X, the viral on YouTube, and then boom, they have a hundred thousand followers in a business the next day. And so the barrier to leaving one of these like talent roll ups is so low that it's just very hard for the actual talent roll up or whatever you media company to capture any meaningful value because you can't keep these people, and you've documented it. Johnny Harris, try guys, CleoA, from like all these folks basically got a paid education at one firm and then went and started their own thing. And for us, and for us, we have the flexibility with the show to be collaborative with so many people and provide it right and all for other businesses, other content creators, other writers, other business owners. You can, like, if we want to have a conversation, they can come on the show and we can talk. We don't need to try to poach them from for sure. We have an amazing relationship with Joe Weisenthal. He's at Bloomberg. He has odd lots. It's a fantastic podcast. He's been there for a decade. He's been on the show eight times this year. We did eight interviews with him on our show. But we're not asking him to come full time, where he's just like when he does something cool come over here. And he's growing. So his audience from coming on to the VPN, like we're having a fantastic conversation. Our audience will enjoy it's, it's like very, that's like what I see. There are certain cases where I can see talent, like management companies still doing well. The one that I've identified is writers, specifically journalists that do like scoop driven writing, which is like I am out in the world trying to find four interesting stories a year. And I want to break a story, do the original fact finding right, break the story. And so we see that in tech, there's been a lot of, there's been a lot of people leave like see media companies start a step stack. And the challenge is for as a consumer, I want to subscribe to one place that's going to get like the maximum amount of interesting new information a year like scoops, right? But if I'm subscribed to an individual creator, maybe I want to support them, but they may only get like two, three super interesting stories a year. And that's amazing if you're at a big media company, but it's hard to build a business around that because it's not a massive amount of value on an ongoing base. So historically it's the Wall Street Journal because if you open up the journal, like you know that they're going to at least cover every single story. It's very hard for an individual creator to guarantee for their audience that they are sort of a one-stop shop on 360 view of it. Yeah. So I think that's like the durable platforms, like talent management style media companies is people that are doing original reporting and fact finding. But if you're just a television personality, you can probably go independent like anytime. Right. I resonate with everything you've just said about building a show. And I think it is very easy in our world and I'll say we are not immune to this at all to get attracted to the entrepreneurship of what comes with building an audience. It's very exciting. You know, and you watch what happens with other creators and like, oh, I think I'm supposed to build a CPG brand. I'm supposed to build a software. I'm supposed to diversify this revenue when actually the biggest outcomes in our world have been people have built great shows like getting a nine-figure outcome is no joke. And the fact that a Joe Rogan deal or an Alex Cooper deal are nine-figure deals on a short-term basis where they retain the ownership show is actually completely insane. And I realized this through I saw a lot of creators back in the kind of 2018 era, like creative products and launch it. And even the biggest creators in the world don't have a big enough audience to just use that audience to create a standalone business. You actually have to be building top of funnel. You have to invest in building top of funnel. And if you have an audience of millions of millions of people, it's equally, you give yourself like a 1% advantage on overall success. I agree with that. And people think that it's like you give yourself like a 50 or 60% much, much greater advantage. And it's just hard because just mathematically, you can just go to a brand that has an existing company and say, hey, I have an audience. If I bring you my audience, can you give me the economically fair amount of share in the profits for the LTV or however you want to calculate? So the idea that you have to start the company to effectively monetize your audience is really just you're sort of telling on yourself you're not actively pricing your advertising product correctly because you could, as long as the product exists, everyone swindlers of product that just doesn't exist. But if the product exists, you should be able to just advertise it and say, hey, I brought 100,000 people, each of them are worth 10 bucks. That's a million dollars. Give me half. Right. You get half. I get half. Like you should be able to do that. Yes, it's hard to attribute sometimes, but I think what I love about just how you also talked about the ad product is we were together at a Google event, maybe a month ago. And I was just observing how people were reacting to you guys and to Ben and David from acquired. And I started writing afterwards about the luxury brands of the creator economy because I think you guys fit into that world. Sure. I think Ben and David from acquired, or that is the Rolex of podcasting, right? Yeah. And we, we, we have an amazing, it's interesting. We have, I feel like we have an amazing relationship with them because we have so much respect for what they do. Same. They respect what we do. But we have like complete. Yeah. You're on the opposite ends of the. Exactly. We talked about this on our show earlier, like we're fast content. Right. They're slow content. Yeah. I will watch an acquired episode today that was released three years ago. Yeah. In same catalog. Crazy catalog. That's a long time. Yeah. But the way that people, like again, I think, I think maybe what we lost sight of in the creator economy was brand building over the past couple of years. To be honest, I think, I think we looked at viewership and metric building as like, the end all be all, it's like, let me show you that I can get 100 million views and that will trade at a high value, forgetting that when you build a brand, and it's hard to explain to someone what a brand is. We were talking about this before that, like what you guys have done here with TBBN is tangibly different than what you did with the John Cougan channel. Although you made video, a video I watched of yours, the meta video, that has like 8.6 million views. You have multiple videos with millions and millions and millions of views. And I knew about you and I watched your stuff and I'd met you. Yeah. But you didn't carry the weight as a brand. It wasn't a thing. No, no, no. This is a thing. Totally. TBBN is a thing. Yeah. And it stands for something. And I can close my eyes and imagine it and there's a color to it and a tone to it. And I think we lost sight of that. And that has created scarcity with those who create brands in our space. And I think that's where I'm noticing that there's, you know, luxury brands. And the three that I was just writing about internally was like TBBN acquired and feed me. I think Emily Sunberg is in that luxury brand space. Whereas like Mr. Beast, and this is not at all like he's a friend, he's not at all a dig, but he's McDonald's, right? He's available to everyone. And he is looking for global expansion and to be available in every country and every continent. And something for everyone, right? And his peace, his content can talk to a 12 year old and talk to an 80 year old. And that is what he wants to build. Whereas the luxury brands in our space are more just focused on like reaching an audience that's hard to reach in a way that's hard to do, right? You guys do a hard thing by being daily and being live and making it, making it a brand and being consistent, acquired as a hard thing by researching and recording for 15 hours and cutting it down to six hours, like I just think the luxury was traded to different. You guys get to do things that are different. Like you get to command with your advertiser for 2026. You get to say, you get to set a very, there's also exclusivity. So for us, we won't work with two companies in the same category. Right. There's a, there's a number of different categories. So there's a scarcity element to it. But I would say the way that we've approached brand building and the way that I think a brand gets built is not by just obviously getting the most reach and getting the most number of people to be aware of you, but it's getting how many, how many people have you made actually feel something multiple times, right? And so it's probably like something, you know, advertising, they say it's like you need to reach somebody seven times in seven different ways to get them to like get to the point where they'll convert. And I think with building a brand, you need to make somebody like feel something, a certain number of times before, before you've actually like imprinted in their mind. And so for us, there's a lot of things that we do that have no, no direct like value to the show, other than there's like a few people in the world that we know are going to laugh. And like they're going to be super entertained by it. And they're going to text us about it and be like, like we do this, we do this kind of thing multiple times a week where there's like, we'll put out something that we know only like 200 people in the world will find funny. And we know we're successful when like six of them text the team and they're like, this is hilarious. Have you ever read the example of that? An example is like, we do, we do great. We do. Yeah. So we do, we do these like, we do like use images to like share various news. Sometimes it's a fundraising announcement or M&A or somebody gets hired. Those are like hilarious. That's very serious. So over the weekend, they're like hiring out somewhere when someone gets traded on a sports team. Exactly. Exactly. But also on the cover of the Wall Street Journal business section today is a story about open AI, changing their investing schedules for how they let hanger and we just took in post his stuff. Like try and come up with something a little bit fun twist on it just to give you the news. But then also we had a friend who Jackson doll who interviewed us and their buddies with him. And he had a new profile picture. And so we put it in the credit card just for that. Yeah. And it's like, it's like, these are nowhere near as and we'll do, we'll do like wedding announcements or like. Yeah. And I say, you know, it's wedding announcements. Right. So fortunate. Have you guys read the book unleashing the idea of Iris by Seth Godin? No. No. Seth Godin's like OG. OG. So so there's a is the book that got me into YouTube. Okay. It's nothing about YouTube. It's about his era of like helping Yahoo and Hotmail, you know, scale and the Hotmail thing was so interesting because obviously that was the first email product that had like sent with Hotmail and you could click to make an account. And so he was like, the product is the marketing. But the thing he said in that book that I think relates here is he talked about being remarkable, which a lot of people talk about, which is literally worth making a remark about. Yes. But he talked about when you're, when you're in an idea is like a virus and it's supposed to spread, you have to get into these small pockets and small communities where he coined the term sneezers where you find the sneezers. The ones who are going to sneeze all over everyone else and can't stop telling them about the thing. But that only works if you're in the confines of like how you guys have approached this of we're going to talk to technology employees. You know, as a subset of our audience, because now you can spread through a slack. You can spread through an office building. And when our first YouTube channel 15 years ago was about the sport of lacrosse. And whenever I would, I would tell Colin, who are we making this for? Making it for the kid in the stretching lines that during practice while they're stretching turns to everyone else and says, do you guys see that one video? And if we can make it for that kid, we will get 60 people on the team to watch our stuff. But I think that's how I view what you guys have done is like you make something really exceptional for that one guy in the office who's will just go around being like, are you guys watching this? I need someone to talk to this about. Yeah. But then from a macro perspective, it's super easy to explain. Right. Just even visually. In a second when I'm on Twitter and I see TPP, okay, I'm like sport center for tech and services. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like sport center for tech and business. I see it. I'm like, yeah. I mean, well-friend that immediately. One, one, I love the sneezers. I love the viral analogies. It is funny. People think going viral and they think, you know, the Mr. Beast video, the algorithm just picks up and just organically sends to a million or 8 million people or 10 million people. But we, when we started the show, we had this strategy where we would take a random persons tweet no matter how small they were as long as we liked what they had to say. We would print it out physically on a piece of paper. We would hold it up, read it, and we would react to it. And we're here in suits. And we're in suits. And we're shot in complete hay on these two same cameras, right. And so, and that, but all of that was like fine. You're watching it. You're kind of like, okay, these guys are doing this weird bit, whatever. This is odd. What we do is we would cut the section where we were reacting to your tweet about whatever. And then we would quote tweet your tweet with our video smart. And so you, you've had post-go viral. You know what it feels like, you know, the first hundred likes are your friends and people you actually know business. And you're like, oh cool, like John, like this one, you know, ho, okay, we're all good. And then eventually the numbers just turns into like 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 likes. And you just kind of tune it out. You maybe mute the notifications, you kind of move on. Maybe you go in the comments and see if somebody said something interesting that, but eventually it just becomes all like pixels on the screen. But when someone quote tweets your tweet with a video of them in suits, printing out your tweet, like it's completely undeniable, you have to watch it. So it's like, it's a crazy super like. Yeah. And you might have to retweet it. You might have to send it to your friend. And so it was, we described it as just like love letters to Silicon Valley. Let's just send love letters to the people in Silicon Valley that we think are interesting. That we think are cool. And there was no presumption of who we are in the social hierarchy, who you are in the social hierarchy. It was purely on the basis of like ideas, humor, interest. If you said something cool that we liked, we would talk about it and laugh about it and maybe debate it, maybe disagree, maybe agree, maybe love it, maybe laugh at it. But you would get a video and it was like this like weird other thing that had never happened before. There was this interesting phenomena, which was that we would talk about even early. So Q4 of last year, we would highlight somebody's posts. And then you'd be able to see like a billionaire immediately, like we'd highlight like a college student's post about starts, something started related. And then you'd see like a billionaire would go and follow that person. And that was like, and we've always tried to maintain even with the content of the show on the same episode that we'll have somebody that has a hundred billion dollar company. We'll have somebody with a five million dollar company, or you know, and start a plan that means like they've raised their friends and family. Right. Sounds like a big number. But it's, I mean, in a couple of weeks ago, we had like a 13 year old on the show who's like starting a YC company. Just because he went viral. I mean, like same episode. Yeah. We probably had like someone, probably a public company CEO, I can't remember, because we was definitely we had like a big person in small. In my opinion, like Twitter actually needed a show, which is funny, it is to think about. And I remember like, you know, we used to have a tagline technology needed a podcast, because it was so obvious that technology didn't need a podcast, because it was so obvious it was our joke. But Twitter actually did need a show. Twitter needed a live show. It's weird that it needed it actually in a, I don't know, like three years ago when Elon bought Twitter. Yeah. He hosted the Zoom call with a few other creators, calling and I were part of the Zoom call. He was asking what we, what we thought he should do. Sure. And, and my pitch to him was he should try and compete with Twitch and make it the best live platform, because I go to Twitter for what's happening right now. Interesting. Right. Right. Like I, because he was talking about YouTube and I was like, that's again, like you guys mentioned, it's slow content. Yeah. Like not going to win. That's not what Twitter is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think Twitter needed a live show. Yeah. Yeah. Because what you're just describing of like a 13 year old at the same time is a billionaires at the same time as a public company CEO, that's, that's Twitter. Yeah. That is like you're getting a take from it. So you guys would appreciate this. John went on Eric Tornberg's show. Yeah. Like three, almost three years ago, maybe two years ago, way before we had even started thinking about a TVPN or even doing our first episodes. And he made like the full pitch for TVPN around, like no one had cracked live streaming tech. I wasn't thinking about it, but he was like, oh, where else do you think there's opportunities? White space. White space and media, like tech media seems really saturated. And I said, well, no one has cracked tech live streaming. And because I had done technology-focused video essays, and I wasn't the first person to do video essay, obviously, there was a long lineage of people doing video essays for film critique or video game reviews or lore or politics. And I was just the first person, at least one of the first to really focus on like startup business tech content in video essay, right, in video essay work. And I was like, everything comes to tech eventually. It just takes time to niche down. And so if I see what speed is doing or how it's not, it's funny because tech created the platform to make it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And part of that is that being a content creator in tech is relatively low status, right? Which sounds insane because like young people out in the world, they're like, I'd rather be an influencer than an astronaut. But in tech, for good reason, right, people can come into this industry and create a hundred billion dollar company, right? It's possible. It doesn't happen. It's rare. But you come into this industry for glory and to have a billion dollars under management or to have a unicorn. You don't come into the industry to like make funny videos. That's a lifestyle. Yeah, lifestyle business, yeah. And that's ultimately created an opportunity for people that do want to come in and take it extremely seriously. So I feel like you guys are to Twitter almost what like subway takes is to Instagram in a way that like every time I open Instagram, the first thing I see in the morning is subway takes. Yeah. Which is so interesting that like each platform needs like a native. Yeah. So yeah, I think about this like on the show, we're trying to cover like, how do we think about the topics, what are the topics that we're covering every day? What is the content on the show? And the content is very driven by what is the conversation that's happening on Twitter? Yeah. Yeah. And often times like, I believe it's funny. We in the New York Times, they call this the sport center for the LinkedIn crowd. And I was like, it's funny because I do think our content in the long term can do well on LinkedIn when we repurpose it properly. I think we'll do well there eventually. But I couldn't tell you what the current thing on LinkedIn is today, but I bet you there is a current thing. You know, I don't know. I think that's actually. I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn. Yeah. But I don't think there's like a pulse. There is a pulse on Twitter. There's a pulse on Instagram. And on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. They're all like story arcs. John's analogy, which has been great is that X is the internet's dive bar. Yeah. Told it. Wait. Are you this for YouTube? I don't know. Mr.Beesification was the conversation that YouTube had and I feel like you were a vocal point. I would say we were. Okay. I think YouTube has grown and expanded into so many different directions, but there was a pocket of time for sure when like there's people who associate the term creator economy with us. I don't say that we came up with it. Yeah. I don't think we came up with it. I don't remember if we did or didn't. I assume we didn't. Yeah. We definitely set it a lot in the certain popularism. Yeah. And we were like, oh, that's what we've been talking about the last one. Well, yeah. So the reason I used to, I used to kind of mock the VCs. I think we're going to say the creator. Yeah. No, no, no, no. No, no, no. Come in. You got this. Yeah. I know I used to mock the VCs that would go on X and talk about the creator economy and how creators were the fastest growing category of small businesses. I used to think it was so funny because I'd been. I'd been in the space myself for a while since I was like how it was like paying for my life in college was like doing ad deals between creators and brands. And I knew that all the creators just used like QuickBooks and they just used like a regular bank account. And so VCs like started talking about this trend like it was happening now. But I was like, look back for the lot. This has been happening for a while and we also were all good on software. We didn't need like exactly. Exactly. We didn't need. That's true. Yeah. Because QuickBooks existed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was a funny moment. Creator economy company. But Sony. So that's a creator economy company. Totally. They made the FX3. Yeah. Everyone has 10. So one thing. I mean, obviously this happened to us at the same time where we became that that show on YouTube very quickly. Sure. If something starts working and you see the ad dollars and it's like everyone starts doing the same show. And that also happened. That's right. It's like a lot of people did the same show or similar shows and competing for guests got hard and that and I would say pretty quickly after you guys made the show, I started seeing this show attempted by other people, you're just from like an artwork perspective. Yeah. You don't have all the nuts and bolts but you're like visually they're trying to do something so. But it's the same thing with your thumbnails. Of course. Our thumbnails are everywhere. Yeah. People sell our thumbnails. Actually, as a template. Yes. So it's everywhere. But people will probably sell TVP and overlays. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure that this overlay is probably somebody probably templatized it. But I think that's, I was curious about how you guys, that's why you go back to brand. Yeah. That's why brand matters. Brand matters. We are always be knocked off. Yeah. We have seven speagles today, how he felt about a copycat. Yeah. Because he's been copying. Right. He's a good person. Talk about that. Yeah. I think Tony. What's his LinkedIn bio? I mean, a product. Full of meta. There's a fake merch store for our merch. Yeah. We don't sell merch yet. Multiple places on the internet. You can buy fake TVPN merch. Oh well. Maybe you shouldn't sell merch. Maybe. I don't think I should. It's just a reality of the board game. Like some are like red one. Like you, if you're a Red Bull athlete, you can't get the red one. Yeah. You've never wanted to like use merch as like a revenue stream. The reason I like making it is just from a quality standpoint. Yeah. Everything we make is something that you would pick off the shelf at like a retailer. But what did Evan say to you guys about people copying the show? Because we've been, I did on shows like this and actually I don't feel compelled to go on a similar show just because I'm like, I want to go on the real, I want to go on the real thing. Totally, totally. Yeah. I mean, I think it comes back to brand, but also what do you have control over monopolizing, and that's yourself. Yeah. And actually the individual creator, like the host, the host being very important. And then there are some tactical things where, you know, if you are out in front and you just don't take your foot off the gas, like I honestly think that we would, the copycats could defeat us if we were like, okay, let's rest on our laurels and then also start a company on the side and also do something else, right? Yeah. And I've seen that a ton of times where you're like, you just stay focused on the show. Yeah. What happened? How did the new person come up? And it's like, oh, well, that person like, they got sick of doing that thing. And so of course, someone came and ate their lunch and so, and sometimes that's like, fine, they're like, yeah, I kind of wanted my lunch eating, I was sick of doing what I was doing. I mean, how do you do the new thing? I've noticed a lot of people, a lot of people that I think every single person that has a niche that they care about should focus on learning from outside that niche, right? So copy, but copy from other parts of the internet. Yeah. So if you're doing gardening, go look at what people do in politics, right? It's like, take from all over the internet. And so for us, everything that we do, we think it's funny that people copy us because we're like, well, like, we just look like television that's existed. Yeah, you look like our format, like a talk show that transitions into having guests has been around forever. And so anybody that's like, like, very clearly copying from one show is not actually taking inspiration from the world and then recombining it for themselves, right? And the things that they're interested in. And so I think ultimately, you know, people copy without knowing really what they're copying. They're just like, this thing works. I should copy and paste that thing into what I'm doing and the best, the best shows are going to be some combination of a bunch of the next big tech and business show won't be a direct clone of us. It'll be something that is so new and different that we're just like, oh, we hadn't even ever thought about that. That's awesome. I guarantee they're going to come on our show immediately. So we had it. We're going to be going back. Yeah. We had a cool, we had a cool moment with Jim Kramer because in some ways, yeah, he's like multi-decade career. He's truly in the game because he just loves talking about markets and stocks and talking with CEOs. And we had this cool moment because he's seen a bunch of different podcasts, but he was like, you know, I just, he just said he's like, I really, something to the effect of like I really respect what you guys are doing and I always thought someone would do this, but I know when ever did it. And it was like, a lot of people have done toward of this, but it was, it was clear that he saw like the whole and the brand and like the unique pieces puzzling together and was like, this is. And also, and also the energy, depending on your energy as a, as a person that's going to be on camera, this show needs to be built around that. Like Kramer has like crazy chaotic energies running around yelling, he's ranting. We aren't that, but we have our own energy and we have our own dynamic. Yeah. And yeah, it was cool moment. He could have said no to the interview, he could have come on and I don't know, like just been low energy. But he brought his, he was excited. So that was really. So yes, I want to, I would love to see more people that call it copying, call it being inspired, but take this concept of a highly produced live stream and then apply it to other things, right? We've talked about a huge opportunity to do this for cooking, right? You can imagine a set like this in a beautiful kitchen and somebody every day says on Monday, I'm going to cook this Tuesday. I'm going to cook this. People can order that. That's cool. And then the host can just hang out and cook this meal and you can still clip it and you can do gas. And it's like door dash. Yeah. So, so you could, there's so many ways you could have the movement of, like, development of like this chef went here, this restaurant opened here. Like, there's also like the slightness of rest, well, then, then, you know, if there's like the, the sports center for cooking, it's probably also like the Kaesanaat for cooking. Yeah. Yeah. And we've seen this also with like, there's some creators that travel all the time and that's a very different lifestyle, but it gives you a different flavor of content. So can you go inside of a company? Can you go tour it? Can you go do a walk and talk like, would that's not us? And so by default, we're not competing with you if you're creating that different type of content. Is there anything that this show doesn't have yet that you think would make it better when you think about the next year or the year after that, a bigger gong, a bigger gong that's what it is. Doing like a proper, like, LED wall, which would be fun, I think this is a little low contrast right now. So there's like gear stuff, I, I'm trying to think definitely like sports wise, like allowing you to get up and draw on something working on labs, actually, okay, that would be cool. Yeah. So, so we've been fantastic that movement walking around, I don't like when you did the meta, you know, like, I like this almost game day sport. Yeah, I want to do more of those and in a way, do we do those and wear and so the big thing is like there are set of conferences where a lot of business leaders come together and those are very, they're just difficult puzzles because you have to get the whole team there, set up the 10 book, everything. It's like the, it's the Super Bowl and, you know, Pat McAfee does this on college game day. Right. So it's like, what is our college game day? Yes, it's met a connect, but it's also some of the conferences that that bring right together, I tell you, yeah, yeah, it's a polishing that and yeah, Figma and Marlana IPO this year, next year is going to be, there's God willing, there will be a lot of IPOs, the IPO windows wide open right now, CC bunch of companies, SpaceX will go out, probably some mid-range to model. Open. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, maybe. And so those moments are amazing because it's just the culmination of usually a decade of incredibly hard work by a big story and so much, so much risk and so much emotion going into those moments. So those are really, I would say, are like Super Bowl moments, but they only, I guess better than the Super Bowl because they come up, hopefully a couple times a year, but realistically there will be like one IPO next year that is like the thing that we will remember. It's so amazing because it's, it actually is an underserved market, like a company that has like their IPO day, like who was, well, I mean, I know they're tangling squawks, but it's like the squawks, that's a different, we went on squawks, that's a very small hit. I think we're on for seven minutes. Yeah, right? It's under and they're just in, it's a small hit, but it's also underserved in that. Your guys show feels like a for us bias, like from the inside out type of, so production. Yeah, I mean, and we, we still, even though we're much more, we're much more constrained than a normal live stream. If you look at what a lot of the live streamers are doing, some of them will just go live like whenever, and they'll just log off whenever, or they'll be like, you know, I'm throwing on a YouTube video, I'm going to react to it, and I got to go to the bathroom and watch the chair, right? Yeah. And that, that sometimes causes consternation, but we're a little bit more structured than that, but we're still less structured than in TV show where if we are having a great conversation, we can go an hour with basically no ad breaks or anything. We can really get on our show today, we went 25 minutes over, something like that. Yeah, and it's like that. We just have a little bit of the affordance, but we, but we still have, so it's like this weird half and half, but you try and play to the strengths of both. So I want to come back to talking a little bit about business, because I think one thing that I thought was amazing, and again, a part of the brand you guys have built this year was your spot with Axios and what they covered afterwards, which was that you guys are almost sold out. We love your inventory in 2026. I looked at that and I was like, that is unbelievable, and I imagine that is a multi-million dollar tweet. Someone quote. That was right. They're running ads for ads now. Yeah. I was like this. This is a multi-million dollar tweet. No, you want to know what was going on there. Like, if you look in the comments of that Axios article, so links have not done well on Twitter. Sure. Maybe they're coming back. Yeah. But that article, there were a number of articles, that one got like hundreds of likes. So that's like the true fans, like, who's liking the fact that we're selling out ads? Yeah, but that's like the inside, again, people being so-- Exactly. Down with this and being like, yes. Hell, yes. And yes ads. Hell yeah. Yeah. In the chat, when an advertiser comes on, because, you know, like, Ramp Rae's money, they come on the show. Normally, the vibe would be like, oh, is he paying a beer? And in the chat, they'll be like, it's TBPN royalty. This guy makes this thing possible. Right. It's amazing. In the response to that post, there were so many people that were like, they deserve it. That somebody, quote, treated it was like, is they deserve it a meme or are people just being wholesome? Right. He's like, well, I'm actually-- He's wholesome. I mean, I think a big part of that is, you know, we see, anytime a startup raises a lot of money, right away the whole industry is like, is this legit? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Is this warranted? Are they worth a billion dollars? And so there's just like this immediate kind of frenzy. A lot of it happens in group chats. Some of it happens on the timeline. I think what's-- you know, the reason you saw the dynamic that John just described is that it's been even if you don't watch the show, I think people can appreciate the work that we put in because we've missed two days this year that we were like traveling to do, like, out of-- we've done hundreds of shows this year and really put in, like, put in the actual work. And so I think when people see that you are being rewarded for, you know, really focused hard work, I think people appreciate that. Yeah. You're underrated. Like, truly, like, for those group of people, like, that feel like they're there with you. Yeah. Like, people don't know how hard they're working and how good this show is. Right. Yeah. That's how they feel, especially in like a year one, you too. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I do-- I always do like to reality check the other side of the equation, right? Like, the business has grown a bunch and should make it a lot of revenue next year. But, you know, it's like, what's the grounding on that? Are we getting the actual impressions? And, I mean, I think we're going to-- we're going to track to do, like, 5,000 host red ads next year. And so when you've 5,000 host red ads, wow. Yeah. Because you do 20 in episode. Wow. 250 episodes a year. So you have 20 more sponsors? Yeah. And for 20, so you have 20 spaces around 20 spaces. Yeah. And is-- I imagine that trades at a pretty high level to be one of those 20 spots. Exactly. And so-- And so-- And so if you work-- And so if you work backwards from-- That's a lot of revenue, guys. 5,000 ad reads. What's an ad-- what's a host red ad read cost? Do you do the math and it all maths out? Yeah. I think association is a very important byproduct of advertising. Totally. Is one that I think-- That's one thing I'm talking about way more. Yeah. Like advertising works on me. To your point, Jordi, I've been a fan of advertising my whole life. It's actually one of the things that connected Colin and I early on was how much we like ads and how cool advertising is. And the association component matters a lot more than like the direct call to action. Totally. But I mean, when I think about you guys, I associate ramp, eight-sleep, wander. Like I can name so many of these sponsors, public, polymarket, like I can name your sponsors. That's crazy. That's crazy. That I can call them out like that. And I think you're a fan of an F1 team. You can name your sponsors. Exactly. Yeah, you can name them too. And I think that's-- you guys have done that in a really cool way. But even just seeing that, like the terminology, I think vernacular matters so much and talking about inventory and being sold out and having your community be-- like I think, what you said early is that a lot of creators are trading-- And clearly, that was one question out of a 20-year talk that we gave, and I just answered it-- Best case scenario, actually. Did they go up? Yeah. Yeah. Best case scenario. Yeah. Again, that's scarcity. It's like luxury brand scarcity. If you want in, you got to act now. Yeah. You know, there's only 20 slots. They're all exclusive category slots. Yeah. It trades at a very high price. We're not negotiating. It's just-- Do you have the money? Yeah. There's another thing that I think we now have the luxury of advertising understanding. There's like predictability to what we do. Right. It's not like we are three days a week doing a lot of content. Then we go dark for a week. Like we are very consistent. You have a very trustworthy process. So give this as like-- Yeah. We like the labor of this. Like we like that. It sounds like silly, and hopefully this doesn't get clipped out of context. But we like the fact that it's like this kind of rhythmic, cyclical, you know, like we show up in the morning. We prep the show. We do the show. We go hang with our family. If we come back and do the next day. Yeah. I think there are-- I heard it's entrepreneurs. It's very easy to not have structure in your life and just say yes to us. Oh, yeah. Like-- You got invited to this amazing week-long retreat. You got to say yes to this. You can't turn down an interview to go hang out. Like we've turned down a lot of stuff, but just because like the show doesn't happen if we don't do it. And so we'll be like, yeah, we'd love to go to this crazy place and with all these cool people for this time. But it's like it just-- Yeah. Then the whole thing breaks. Yeah, to optimize for what your status quo is. Totally. For what the true, reliable, everyday experience. Yeah. Your life is. Yeah. Right. Like the weekend getaway is not-- It's not a thing. It just becomes very much just like rhythmic running. Especially if it's like getting a distance runner. It feels like being a distance runner. Just every day. It's good. Like that. You know, we've been super proud of the progress this year, but at the same time, remembering that we're a year old. We want to do this for-- Yeah. We want to do this for decades. And so going into next year, it's-- I feel very fortunate that we're not trying to do. We're constantly going to be trying to innovate on different formats and distribution methods. And a number of different things, but we're not trying to do anything that is wildly different. We're not trying to add something new that takes another 10 hours of our week or anything like that. And so it's this constant, just like, refinement and making the show. It's really been a thing of like, how can we make what we do 1% better every day? Sometimes it's just Ben or Scott or Michael mounts a camera differently. Sometimes it's changing the lighting. Sometimes it's changing the flow of the show. Sometimes it's-- Just the interview. Like, how you ask a question? I feel like, I mean, I've done interviews before, but doing so many interviews and like being an interviewer this year, I've used this metaphor of like, it's like having a race car on the track. Like, I can sit down with Mark Zuckerberg and not be nervous. And I can keep the car on the track. Right. And I'm not going to embarrass myself. He's not going to come away being like, I never want to talk to that guy every again. But to put on a really great performance and actually find some very interesting moments and very interesting learn about each other and have fun together and create something special, I feel like that's just decades of work. That's what I was worried. And so I'm, so I'm not nervous when I go into a big interview, but I'm also not excited about my performance yet. I feel like I have so many-- Sure. I can shave seconds off. And with the great Walt Mossberg interviewing Steve Jobs, right, is like they had a life together. And so when he was pushing him later about the iPhone and all the different things, like they had rapport. And building rapport is something that I think interviewers don't take seriously in the moment. In the time of like, I got a book, The Big Gas, everyone's like, I got to check the box. I got to get this person and that person instead of like, how can I be, how can I be interviewing them 30 years from now? Well, something that, yes, something we lost with podcast was just an interviewer, you know, somebody interviewing somebody multiple times, multiple times a year. We have the luxury of a lot of our guests have come on the show multiple times or some guests don't like to do as much press. So they'll come on once a year, but we have a lot of people that will come on four times a year. And I think that more shows should look to do that because it's something beautiful when you build up that trust over multiple and we're the, the trust that somebody has to have with us is comparable to television and that where there's like half a second of delay. And so they have to, they're coming into our world and we're having a conversation. They have to trust that we have respect for them and it's about finding this line of like asking the questions that need to be asked while also, you know, not never trying to do. We've had CEO say some things that have gone viral that were like, we didn't even set, you set yourself up. Can I gain them enough rope right? Right. Yeah, I may do it. Sometimes, yeah, sometimes, you know, people, some guests want to want to take it to a crazy place. Yeah. But yeah, Kramer had a wild, we, we hit a wild arc where he interviewed Tim Cook ten years ago. The stock was getting trashed because iPhone sales had finally leveled off and this was before the app store was growing so big and stock went on a massive run again. But he had to ask the hard question of like Wall Street. My viewers don't like your stock right now. But he was bullish and he was saying I say don't trade it own it. And so his true belief was Apple is going to do great over the next decade. He was right about that. But his viewers were down on Apple. So he had to ask the hard questions. He did the interview. I think it went very well. And then like ten years later, he was like doing this onsite interview with Tim Cook again ten years later. And they have this like big open story loop that goes over a decade. And you see this with like Sorkin and a bunch of other of the great interviews. Anyway, sorry. I was going to ask you guys about the polymarket ticker. Sure. Were you the first live show to have a prediction market? Because I like so. CNN and CalChi just made a deal where they're going to be doing the exact same thing. Yeah. You guys have that ticker. Yeah. Like the first time I'd ever seen it was your show. Yeah. And then when I saw the CNN CalChi, it felt like a reaction to the internet and a reaction to any way to kind of capture attention. I have, you know, not a great viewpoint on prediction march. Sure. I don't think they're great. But I wanted to ask about that like even as I was sitting in there, I will say I thought it was really fun to look at and Colin looked at me and he goes look at how many people think because he's been talking about how he thinks Gemini will be the LLM of the year next year. Sure. That came across to me and there's like 95% of people agree with that. Yep. Yeah. So yeah, so prediction markets are an interesting category because you have like a massive amount of speculation happening, people making trades, taking a bet one side or the other. But then the end product is like an interesting data point on a bunch of different parts of the world and the economy and the markets and what's happening in tech and so we've always looked at it in this bucket. We've never, we don't trade on prediction markets. We've never, we don't take sides. We don't say, oh, I like, you know, on the ESPN you'll be like this is my parlay or we're not like we, John and I like two weeks ago, we were in Vegas for F1 and like didn't gamble at all in the whole weekend and you know, we don't, we don't have that. We're more on the creamer side. We like to own companies that we love and so we always thought it was a fascinating data point and it's like very much like a hot button issue within tech and I think outside of tech and we'll probably continue to percolate but it's been a very interesting data point to try to understand, understand the future and provide some context for the news because around elections you have polling, which gives you like some indicator of how an election might go and this is like that same type of data but for kind of everything. So it's been a year for prediction markets because there's sort of two ways that any market can break. One could be it's heavily institutionalized and it's like hedge fund guys and they know the risks that they're taking and no one really feels bad for them if they lose their shirt betting on the election the wrong way but then there's like retail traders betting on sports and if that becomes the predominant consumption vehicle then I think people have a lot more sort of moral qualms with it and I think this year's been the year where people have been grappling with that and we'll see where it lands. A lot of it will be determined by regulation and where things can go but we found it useful to just add a layer of context around tech events like the Gemini thing. I'm with that. I was at deal book and so do you see what Brian Armstrong said about prediction markets? So his POV was that insider trading with prediction markets could be argued that it's a positive because it's a better indicator if someone knows what's about to happen. Since that's the challenge if you are just an observer of these markets you want the insider trading to be happening because it gives you because otherwise it's just data is better if someone says yeah this is going to happen. But the problem I have is like CNN and Kalashu you have this partnership that you can bet on Kalashu almost every night what Anderson Cooper is going to say on the show. You can I don't know that I would be surprised if that stays as they roll out an official partnership. I mean we've had prediction markets also prediction markets pop up for certain interviews that we do and I find it to be a terrible experience clear that example is not that is not a good example of what Brian Armstrong is talking about because he was talking about the situation. He was talking about the situation. I mean maybe there was a crazy. It was a crazy one. It's also bring up. Maybe there is value because you're like oh I want to know. I want to know what Anderson Cooper will say on tonight's show. Let me pull up the prediction market where he is inside or trading it. Yeah. It's like do we really create anything? I guess we did. But why who's trading against that if as Anderson Cooper. But I mean. And to be clear. So we've had markets pop up on some of our shows this year and about your show about our show. Yeah. And then people will come into the comments and they'll be like say this and say this. And we very anytime that's happened we've just told the team like hey well if any one of you trades on this you will be fired immediately like we have zero tolerance for this and I mean the platforms themselves have rules against insider trading. But there are also laws against insider trading even in commodity markets which is how these things are regulated. But how do you enforce it? Oh well you have to find proof like it's like insider trading in a stock like maybe there's a whistleblower maybe there's some you know. Yeah. And then the big dots or like there's some big windfall and somebody's like or shows these are commodities right. So historically if you were a farmer and like you could be like wow this year is really rough like we're not going to have a bountiful harvest I need to hedge. So you could go to a commodities exchange and hedge your like production and that's actually good. And that's that's insider trading and it's good and so there's because you have inside information that your harvest is going to fail and so you go out to the market and say I want insurance against me failing my harvest. And so it is driven by sort of insider trading but we've determined that that but that's okay. Yeah but that is not I don't know why we landed there but that is not from my understanding is that that is not considered insider trading insider trading in that situation would be like you know that some other company that you have not public information that some other company is. Literally insider trading is a different thing but also like the nature of a commodity market is that there shouldn't be a monopoly on it like there shouldn't be anyone who's like oh I control enough power in the market to actually effectively insider trade because if there's just one farmer who's corn futures you know like who needs to trade corn futures like they shouldn't be able to actually move the entire market off of one person's insider information. So they know that they're worried about their corn failing they're not making such a big bet that it's moving the market which is like a weird nuance. There's going to be a whole like regulatory debate about this for sure. I feel like just proof of lack of opportunity to me that might be for young people. Yeah for young people for that people are excited about it. I feel like proof of lack of opportunity but like that there potentially is a lack of opportunity a lack of jobs and here is a new surge of gambling low cost gambling opportunities to really like spend money and spend time on it relatively. But I also find the data interesting it to me is again, of course interesting and potentially certainly better than like the some of the crazy crypto stuff that's gone. But I find it to be more of a indicator that our tolerance for story has gone really high. Story. Again, things are more interesting when the stakes are high. A good story has stakes to be more interesting if I can win or lose money based on what you say. Or just a long time. But again, that's been I don't think the people that we've seen trade prediction markets based on our show are not real fans. They are just out like betting, you know a bunch of things interesting. And so I have like our core fan base has never cared of. In fact, they get annoyed, they're like all these people are in the chat and they're just from here. Oh, interesting. So yeah, I would say we people do that with the stocks too, like we would see, but we also don't do so, so CNBC has like is retail trading their focus on the stock price. They're focused on how it's going to move before yeah, all the guest is on the stock chart and based on what the stocks and it's not inside of trading. And so we that's great content for a certain part of the internet. Our audience is more so they're like building a company that might be worth two million dollars today. They want to make it worth two billion. They're trying to better understand the world. They might be listening to such a such an adela on our show to understand how he's thinking about co-pilot. And so they may make business decisions based on that, but none of our coverage is actually focused on individual stock prices or anything like that. And I think we push the something that we've, we pride ourselves in having a, we have a small team where we care a lot about each individual person and making sure this can be transformative, this role can be transformative for their life and that we can keep like helping them grow year over year as we grow as a show. And we encourage them and I say this to all young people that I talked to you about this is like, you're not, you, it's very, very difficult to change your life by being a better investor, right? By like trading earnings. In fact, it's like oftentimes a total distraction even to own $1,000 of a, of a, of stock in a company because it's like, you're getting a notification and it's like, it's down. It's like, what should I? Should I sell this? Should I not? And it doesn't matter what the price point is. It's wildly distracting and more in it, I, we do think it's bad that you're seeing like sports betting explode on college campuses and you see this in like LaBoubou's people effectively gambling on, on all, all different types of things in the market and we tell people constantly both in our lives and on the show, it's like, you're the best possible thing that you can do is like increase your skill set, increase your capability, like increase your power level as an individual through the things that you can do, the people that you know, the things that you're working on and that's how you, that's how you change your life. You're not going to change yourself like the best hedge funds in the world will put up like 30% a year. So run the numbers on your personal portfolio. If you are more elite than the best hedge funds in the world that trading, but you're starting off of a $10,000 base, like you're not, you're still not going to be able to afford like the house that you want. Yeah. You know, in your city. And so like you need to develop skill sets, you need to create things, you need to be in the right circles, work at the right companies to change your life. And so I think like the more people that can put out that messaging to young people, the internet's just been dominated by. Info product. I get his knee. I see, I see like a lot of, a lot of young people that are interested in entrepreneurship think that they need a personal brand. It's like. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't like, we have like a personal brand now by nature of building TBPN and doing a daily show, but I had a lot of success in my career just building companies, right? Yeah. I built a, yeah. Having a personal brand is just, for me, it's like, are you a rational person who does the thing that you say you're going to do, meaning internally adaptation. Yeah. Yeah, your reputation. Sure. Yeah. Is your personal brand? Yeah, sure, that's another thing, but like, focusing on your reputation is like the most important thing. Yeah. And I just think young people think, oh, to be an entrepreneur, I need a Lamborghini and an Info product because I want to make content that these people, you know, end up like in the cycle of looking up to entrepreneurs that sell courses. And I think that the course bros kind of like change these kind of shapeshifts, but it's still this, they're still getting like more impressions and reach and views than ever. So you still have this generation of people that are growing up on the internet thinking that that's how, that's how, that's the path that I should go on, right? Not realizing that if you become successful or you create anything great, you will just like get the personal brand through that, you don't need to make videos in order to get that, right? It's a much better to be patient. I want to ask one last question for you guys because we've, I don't want to go as long as your show here, so you double up today. But I'd have to imagine that you've gotten the call from a CNBC or maybe a network like that as the world of streaming and the world of traditional media is looking for something like this. And I'd imagine the world of business media is like, here's our guys, like, and they're making something that looks like the thing we make on TV. So have you considered that or would you consider that why or why not if a legacy network says we want to bring you on, I don't even know what that means. So we actually have a, we actually have a sort of tongue-in-cheek word for our genres. So I mean, obviously we've talked about new media. We have, what do we call it, neo-trade media? Neo-trade media. Oh, that was that one. We did this media map. That was our media. Oh, you saw it, but you didn't. Yeah, I didn't know. I didn't know. You should have. But ads on it. Yeah. But the whole joke of neo-traditionalist media was the idea that we are both new and old simultaneously. No one in tech and businesses is like, we literally stream the show on Twitch. No one's doing that. But also we have a Kyron and we look like something out of 80s. Right. And so it's like, are we 80s or are we 20, 25? We're both and that was the neo-traditionalist. And we have a couple of friends that fit in the same bucket where they're new media but they're doing a print magazine. Right. Like, that is an old school format that they're bringing back. And so it does slot in well and I could see it working in the future. I think that we're still early in our journey. And I think we do to back to that track analogy of how you shave off seconds in the interview. I feel like there's a lot more that I want to do personally before we go that direction. But at the same time, I do think that there's-- At the same time, you'll probably be able to see us on cable. No, no. No. No. Is that true? At the same time. Yeah, I mean, really? John, John, John. Content wants to be everywhere. And so just like I definitely want to be on Spotify, on YouTube, on RSS, on you go on Transistor, check every single podcast player. Right. Also, I want to be on LinkedIn. I want to be on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. All of them. Yeah. TV is another outlet. And so we hold 100% want to be there. And you will be there. In 2020. I would expect so. I mean-- It's fun. But again, we're also-- we've talked to the networks that we admire, and there's interest. But at the same time, it's like coming back to being like, we started this effectively in Q1 of this year, in this format. And we want to do this for decades. And so-- The most important thing is that it is not a win condition. Well, people often come to us in this question, as a win condition. Yes. And they try and frame it in the same question as like-- Explain that. Yes, win condition. So for a lot of creators, it's like, you're-- you win the game. Everyone wants to know, what does it take to win the game? And for a long time, it was everyone wanted to be like Doug Jumero, which means you start a company, and you sell a slice of it, and you get the car of your dreams, and then you've won. And I'm sure, you know, everyone who's ever won knows that you never won. And there's always something more, and you just keep going. And so now, the new win condition that has been placed at our-- the gauntlet has been thrown down as like, get on TV for some reason. And that's not the win condition. The win condition is the number of years that you do this. It is the 30-year career. It is closing out that story arc of, what does it look like to interview Mark Zuckerberg in 2055? What does it look like to talk to Sam Altman in 2045 when we can go back and say, oh, we were talking in 2025. And we're still talking. And the condition for doing traditional cable is that it doesn't change the core show. It doesn't change. It already ate three hours a day of content, and some of that is suitable for other platforms, but not being-- we're not going to sacrifice the product that we've built until this point. And our motivation is to keep making that better and better and better, and we know the things that we need to improve, and we want to keep that magic of waking up in the morning at 5.30 and being genuinely excited to drive to work. It would be very easy to break the format and break what's special. How exciting is it to be sitting basically a year or so in and thinking, okay, next year we're going to be on TV? Like, I still think for guys of our age, I still think there's something special about showing up on those screens. I think you guys are-- if I was to just say my perspective on the year, I think you guys showed us of the value of craft and brand. And I think that matters a lot, and that's something that I think we lost a bit of sight of. Everything you guys have said, that's truly what I have recognized. What you just said of, like, go first. The show is first, the product is first, and serving the people who love the show is what matters. And I think our world, our industry has lost a bit of sight of that. Yeah, you guys need to show it with us today, so we just kept kind of podcasting. Literally. Everyone was texting us. You guys need to wrap. We get off the show, and we're not like, oh, pack up, let's go home and do something else. It's just like, what was great about that? What wasn't? What do we change for tomorrow? We're oftentimes making changes to the next day's show immediately after getting off, and so it's just that not enough. Our friend David Senra, who was our first listener to our knowledge, because we made the show and didn't share it anywhere and sent it to him, and he, yeah, yeah, exactly. And he listened and encouraged us to, we were like, how seriously should we take this? Because we made a couple of says, and he was like, you should take it deadly seriously. He saw something in us, and he goes back to this quote, I don't know who the original is. I'll attribute it to him, but someone else may have, I think, came up with it. But they take a simple idea and take it super seriously. And not enough people, a lot of people will take a simple idea seriously for a little bit. And then they'll have some success, and they'll be like, I got to think bigger. I got to do other things. I got to do things. Yeah. Yeah. Just the joy of. Yeah. He gives the example of Todd Graves, chicken fingers, chicken finger, guys, massively successful, and the idea is just a chicken finger restaurant. But when it's executed extremely well, it turns into a multi-billion dollar enterprise with offices and employees, and it turns into this massive, massive thing, and Davidson has a lot of respect for that. And I think just like one show, not, we're not talent management. We're not trying to sell ads on the side or do, I mean, you know, then some this and that and this and that, just the focus on the one simple thing and just just repeat it has been really good. I love that. I love that. Well, thanks, guys. Appreciate the time. I hope you guys get a good night's rest and get back in the saddle tomorrow morning. It's just one more sleep that we go live again. Thanks, Hans. Awesome. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.