All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson
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本篇目录16 章节
§01Friedberg and Jason are live from Austin!§02How building an audience has impacted the Besties§03Colin & Samir join the Besties!§04Evolution of short-form and long-form content§05Business models for creatives§06Advice to up and coming creators§07Chris Williamson joins the Besties!§08Making it seem effortless§09Monetizing content§10Scaling a one-man show§11Bryan Johnson joins the Besties!§12Spotify's move to video§13Bryan's Ketamine experience§14Creators and value props§15Issues with the US food industry§16Top tips for healthy living Thanks to our partners for making this happen: Gemini: Go to§01Friedberg and Jason are live from Austin!
That was perfect. We rocked it, bro. That's right.
Everybody. Welcome to Austin. Welcome everybody. That's my friend Dave Friedberg.
Thanks for having me.
How you doing brother, welcome to Texas.
It's a little light, we're missing a couple friends here tonight.
We have some new friends, we got some awesome friends and we wanted to do something around this sort of new media creator economy. It's something you know we're experiencing with the podcast. And that's obviously having a big impact on society. Right?
A lot of people say this was the podcast election. The big media companies from journalism, Fox News, CNN, to the big platforms, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, to Disney and others are kind of rearranging their pawns on the chess board Yeah. Based on and responding to what's going on. And so we thought it'd be really interesting to hear about some of the people who we think are probably the smartest in the creator economy in terms of building a business and how you maneuver and how you play and how you grow as part of that conversation today. You didn't
you had a Twitter account when we started all in. Twitter account. But you literally had never tweeted, and now you've become the Sultan of Science. You're very famous. Any Sultan of Science fans out there?
Awesome. Awesome. Did anybody see him win celebrity jeopardy? You want to I mean, we're so proud of our bestie. Yeah.
That's no idea how anxious, ashamed, hand wringing he was for six weeks. He knew he won. He wouldn't tell us the outcome because he knew that Shamath would gamble it and it would be like a whole controversy. He'd figure out a way to make, a bet on it.
Actually, someone doesn't know how to keep their mouth shut. But
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. I keep talking to your mouth about that.
Yeah. And then he wins and he wins. But he's so upset at himself because he didn't win enough. Gonna thank our sponsors. I mean, this is what happens on an average show.
I say about 17 inappropriate things. He goes, strike, cut, strike, cut. And then we have to have a grand negotiation after the episode where we horse trade the inappropriate things Chamath and I say and what he's gonna elaborate on. I don't
mind when Chamath says inappropriate things. It's just like because it usually doesn't involve other people. It's you where you kinda cross the line a little bit, but, you know.
That's why they tune in.
I have to save you from you, J. Cal.
But what has it been like in terms of because we're gonna talk about this here. A lot of people now are taking the playbook of creating audience and then building companies. And you were doing the production you're building a bunch of different companies. Ohalo became very successful and you said, hey wait, gotta go all in on this so to speak. But you're going into it with a certain amount of audience, a certain amount of notoriety and the ability, let's face it, a lot of people in business know you from the podcast now.
§02How building an audience has impacted the Besties
So what's it like being a CEO now and having the pod as like a platform?
That's actually a great question. Because for me, I'm like not doing this podcast build a media thing. I just thought it'd be interesting. We started doing it during COVID, and I just kept doing it. I don't know why I kept doing it, to be honest.
Tried to quit a
couple I tried to quit every week I wanted to quit. Oh my god. We had
so much tension the first two years,
and now Until we got to sign an LLC agreement, now it's all smooth sailing. The votes are what mattered. It was a big Well,
actually, I think it's like a real important evolution. You know, we had this thing going ad hoc, and I was trying to keep it together. And you know, the one thing I learned in media from Engadget, I asked Peter Rojas who I had stolen from Gizmodo, Nick Denton's company to come to Engadget. Said tell me the secret of why Gizmodo, Gawker, and now Engadget are doing so well. And he said, oh the secret to blogging is very simple, show up every day.
It's actually a great point. And then, yeah, mean Jason did keep us showing up and then it became a thing. And then it's like, okay, should probably do something legit to make this into a business or make it into something structural that stays alive. So we did. But to answer your question, I go to meet with farmers a lot and business executives in the agriculture industry.
And I can't tell you how often I run into someone who's like, I watch your podcast. I'm a fan. That is
Like farmer Joe.
Farmer like, the other day I was in a meeting. I won't reveal too much, but like, you know, I mean, you guys won't have any idea, but like some big farmer company, big company that does farming, who you would have never heard of. No one in this room has ever heard of. And then I'm in the hallway after we do this big pitch, and the guy pulls me aside. He's like, give me a fist bump.
He's like, love the pod. And I'm like It is weird. It is it is weird. And then I'm like in in like another state at a meeting, and the COO comes out. He's like, I'm a big fan of the pod.
And so it helps with getting building trust. It you've earned a reputation. And so then when I go into meetings, people know me because of this pod. Right. And that reduces friction.
I don't have to go sell myself in a meeting. Right. I'm already sold, and it makes business easier. And so for me, the pod isn't about making money on the pod as much as it is like helping me in my everyday work, which is where I spend pretty much all my time except for a couple hours a week here. To contextualize that in the conversation we're going to have today, you create an audience with your content.
What do you do with that audience? What are you doing this for? You can sell ads and make money against that audience. You can get sponsors that you speak to quality products that you endorse and you can make more money and you can either get paid cash or get some equity. You can build your own product and actually own it and own all the equity and participate meaningfully in the upside as you sell your audience your product.
Or in other cases, you're building credibility. You're building which is what a lot of venture capitalists did after our show, I think, kind of became big. They realized that they have this opportunity to build credibility with entrepreneurs. So when an entrepreneur shows up, they're like, oh, I want to work with you because I've seen you on your podcast. Or investors show up, I want to invest with you because I've seen your comments on your podcast.
So I think there's a lot of ways to think about the value of this. But building an audience, building credibility is really beneficial and it can work out in a lot of ways.
Yeah and you take it seriously. You know it's an investment in time for you. Today we've recorded a great episode. We had our comedian on, Andrew Schultz, and that'll come out tomorrow. He was hilarious.
But you had an emotional moment today on the show. We're talking about entrepreneurship and your journey. Mhmm. And you know, gotta give you a lot of credit. You know, you're not like a professional broadcaster or whatever, but you prepare.
Mhmm. And you put it all out there. And I'm very proud of the work you've done and how you've evolved as a broadcaster and as, you know, somebody on the pod. I'm very very proud of, you know, how much you've started to put out there of yourself. And it's not easy to do because you're an introverted personal person.
I mean Pretty extroverted. I'm like
I mean, yeah, mean on the MDMA.
I'm ready to go party. I don't know what you're talking about. You don't wanna lock yourself up in the room afterwards.
In the nineties when you were going to raves and you had a little of the Molly, the MDMA, you were different. But I'm saying like now you're a little bit, you know Back in the day. Back in the day, it's hilarious because he's such a perfectionist. And every time the pot comes out, Shammoth and I just wait sixty minutes after the pod. That sucked, right?
Producer Nick, it sucked, right? We should delete it. Cancel it. There's the worst episode ever. And then the stats come out, oh, we broke another record.
Oh, it's number eight in the world. Oh, okay.
Look, the the the reality is we can always do
I mean, am such an optimist as some of my friends who are here know. Like I just like, oh, that was fucking great. It was a train wreck. But for me, it was a great train wreck. And you know, just so you all know, we couldn't do it without the audience.
And the love that you give us is such an amazing motivation. Especially for me, like I feed off the energy. And when you all tell me your favorite episode or a great moment or you email us something where, you know, the thing I'm probably most proud of now is people are telling me they're having more difficult conversations with their friends while remaining friends. And I think that's like one of the most beautiful things for me and my motivation on the pod is really to help give an example of how you can really have a hardcore discussion, learn from each other, appreciate each other. And I hope that you all take that back to your poker games, dinners, families.
Know, it's a very divided country right now. There's a lot of important issues. But friendship is worth investing in. I just wanna give you all that as like a note. Invest in your friends.
Invest in those hard conversations, your life will become so rich because But have a couple of laughs, don't take it all so seriously, David.
Yeah. Well, before we bring our friends out, Colin and Samir, I'm gonna just quickly We don't do sponsors on a show or ads on the show, but when we do
live events This is incredibly infuriating me. I wanna read
out something You'll be fine. She'll be fine. But Oh god.
We'd have a jet by
now. We wanna pay for these We don't wanna pay for live events out of pocket, so we do have million dollars left
on the table.
You'll be fine. Find another Uber.
I did, it's called Robinhood. It's doing great.
Yeah. So I wanna say thanks to Gemini. Gemini stepped I think we just got them involved this week in helping us put this event on in the after party on. Global cryptocurrency exchange, everyone knows Gemini. Available in all 50 states, with a focus on security, and you can buy sell bitcoin plus 70 other cryptocurrencies.
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Let's give it up to the sponsors one time. Come on now.
Very good. Very good. You wanna get Colin and Samir out?
Yeah. Hey, let's bring out our first guest. Colin and Samir run the Colin and Samir show, and they are experts on building content business. Come on out, Colin. Come on out, Samir.
§03Colin & Samir join the Besties!
Welcome. Welcome.
You get you get the couch. Come sit on the couch here. You good see it, brother? Alright. Yeah, sit on the couch.
You guys are like real creators.
Brand deals. At that brand deal.
Thanks for being here. I think we wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about the evolution in media. I wanna talk a little bit about the origination and the creator economy where folks were putting out and tell me if I'm off on this, but what felt like more kind of short form content. It was almost like a new type of media that was different than traditional long form media, TikTok type content. But then what happened, it's like folks started doing podcasts and the content started to eat into other forms of media, started to eat up journalism now.
§04Evolution of short-form and long-form content
And eat up news media, and now the platforms are doing deals with the independent creators to put out long form content. Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of like short form, long form? Sure. I don't think
you can underscore the importance of the YouTube app on TVs. Just the fact that there was now a free option and you have people who are in a setting where they want to actually sit and consume something for a longer period of time. So as creators started putting out longer videos, they started serving more ads, making more money, investing back in their channels and their shows, and now they can actually produce things consistently. They can make things better, they can elevate it, they can make them longer, and that's what you're seeing now. Mean, like 50% of our watch time is on connected TVs.
So the reach has grown because of YouTube on TV. Yes. Specifically,
you tube now, like when you buy a new TV, I just when I moved to the ranch, I got a new TV and it's got YouTube on the remote. Mhmm. And you just think about that as a concept. And then I watch my daughter's behaviors and they are watching YouTube on the giant television, not on their iPads. It's really a major difference.
There's something about, I'd like you to get into is the algorithm Yeah. Versus subscribers. Sure. Because I grew up in a subscriber world Mhmm. Where I thought about, okay, I'm gonna get one more subscriber and then I'll have them or a certain number of them.
Out of 10, I may keep five, but they're gonna watch every But then there's something that's gone on where people are creating content not with the intent of subscribers, but with the intent of getting picked up by an algorithm and getting non subscriber viewers. This seems like there's some tension here maybe.
Yeah. Would say probably the biggest creators, most successful creators largely have like a 70% viewership base that's not subscribed to them. Really? Yeah, I would say that's pretty common amongst our friend group and amongst the people that we work with. And I think a lot of that has to do with the algorithm shift towards viewer satisfaction.
And YouTube is a recommendations algorithm. So first, when we first started making YouTube videos, if you could make a great thumbnail, people would click. That then inevitably got into clickbait, you would click into a video, it was really short, it wasn't representative of what was in the thumbnail. So YouTube shifted their algorithm into what is called viewer satisfaction, which is essentially gauged off of click through rate, did they click on the video? And then average view duration, how long did they watch?
What percentage of this video did they watch? Then there's other engagement metrics, they like the video, they comment on the video, there's a lot of different ways to understand satisfaction. But essentially as creators, every YouTube creator, what they're trying to do is go what video are you watching before you watch my video? Because I want you to click on my video after you're done with that video or maybe in the middle of that video. So most traffic on YouTube comes from suggested.
Does that
make sense?
Yes. You have the suggested one here. So you're telling me people are creating videos with the intention of hijacking a popular video and trying to get that suggested. So everybody's talking about, I don't know, pick the latest thing Trump did today. So or who's on Joe Rogan or what Mr.
Beast did. So now I try to get one of those slots that would be related to the latest Mr. Beast video.
Video. I wouldn't say that timely because I think YouTube operates as a catalog. Right? Like some of our videos that are still picking up viewership today were made four years ago. So the best way to do it is to build a catalog that accrues viewership over time.
So you're you're mainly looking at like subject matters with high total addressable markets on YouTube. Right? Like specific on YouTube. So that is why when, you know, the world of MrBeast really exploded on YouTube, you have a lot of people talking about MrBeast or reacting to Mr. Beast or going there's 200,000,000 people to tap into here who are probably watching a Mr.
Beast video. This is fascinating because right now there are people doing after all in videos where they talk and kind of drag us a bit
and they're doing phenomenally well too.
Oh they are? Maybe we'll get into that too.
Yeah, should drag us as well. There's plenty to drag us.
I wouldn't call it phenomenally well. There's like a couple hundred views. Whatever. Could be
the best in that category. Could own that What
do for Colin Art and the artist that this is in their brands? Because you know Freeberg and I, after a show happens I talk about the moments. And Freeberg has got that other brain where he's talking about the metrics and he's wondering about the wait time and the thumbs up and the thumbs down. Who liked it? I'm like, don't give a fuck about that.
It was a funny moment. There was this moment people laughed. There was this moment that had emotional resonance. So maybe you could talk a little bit about art versus commerce, art versus algorithm. Art versus algorithm.
Yeah. I mean, it's difficult to create right now within a vacuum. Right? I would say even opening up TikTok, the first couple of TikToks you see are gonna show you what works. Totally.
Right? So it's hard to create something now that I know what works. Now that I
know what people will see. If that's the objective, audience growth.
But it's it's a true artist does not necessarily care if someone
watches If one person loves my work, that's all that matters.
Like, people. But a true artist doesn't always know actually what they could do to get people to watch their work. Mhmm. And so we immediately know what would work. And so you find for a lot of creators, they're on two ends of the spectrum.
They're either an artist or they're a distributor. Mhmm. But to be an impactful creator, you kinda actually need to lean more towards distributor.
Mhmm.
You need to be like that programming executive that's like, okay, well, Spider Man worked, let's do it again. Correct. Let's do it again. Let's do it again.
Correct. We see that a lot if we change the title of the show or the order of the topics. We debate this a lot. Where it's now, this might be the thing that I wanna talk about, but no one wants Science Corner upfront because then the audience won't click.
No. I mean, literally
But I think that's thing that Do
you guys
think if we had Science Corner upfront, more audience would click? Thank you.
But that's the media business, right?
More Trump. It's like, well, we've got enough Trump.
Mean this is the tension we've had. We're a band, not a solo performer, right? So you have four people with distinct perspectives and you know, Sax was always of the mind. What's the top story in the world? I'm trying to think about well like what's the most interesting you know discussion?
Freiberg's like well what's the biggest breakthrough and what did we do last week. You kinda, and then Shamaat's like well what am I wearing and how does it look.
What am I wearing?
What am
I wearing? What am I wearing? What did I consume this week? Everybody's got different things there. It's kind of disheartening to me to even know about all this.
I feel like it's ruining it to a certain extent for me.
Think it look, there's tension between creativity and strategy on these platforms, right? Because these are businesses. If you zoom out and go like, how do media businesses work? This is how media businesses work. Sure.
But I think what you have to think about is also choosing your platforms. I think struggle because we entered into the world of YouTube fifteen years ago as creatives, as guys who were exploring, wanting to get into Hollywood and saw this as a different route. And where we've come to as now entrepreneurs is we're in the media business. And there's still tension where we want to express our creativity, want to do cool things that we think are cool, but they're very anti media. But what I think what you're talking about, what's really interesting is you just need to pick the right environment.
So we think about platforms in the context of like permission and interruption. So YouTube is an interruptive platform. You have to stop someone in their tracks with a thumbnail to get them to click in. Right? But Spotify, for example, is a permission based platform.
Like RSS feeds are permission based. Email, which we have an email newsletter. That's where we can have permission. People have given us permission to be in there. That's where you're seeing the rise of memberships too, whether it's like Patreon, right?
People have said, hey, you know what, I'll pay whatever you guys make, I'm down. And so I actually think you just think about those environments of you know, top of funnel, bottom of funnel or you go permission interruption. It's an interesting way to think about in this environment I can play around and my audience has given us permission. Everyone who's in here, we have the permission to kind of talk about what everyone wants to talk about.
Yes, you're not worried about the title.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. And that's sort of where I'm getting to. And the other trend that Freiberg and I have been talking about, you know, have this natural tension.
We don't have ads on the pod. On my other pod, makes millions of dollars in ads this week in startups. And that helps me have a team of nine people.
We like to throw good parties.
And we like to, yeah, we spent We spent like a million a
party in LA.
Spent 900,000 on the Barbie party on Oh,
we spent more this year. This year, We did? Oh, my God. Fuck. See that's a funny Let
me just
put a little plug in. This year at the All In Summit in LA, the first night is gonna be insane. Insane. It's Like, everything last year combined. Yeah.
It's gonna be awesome. Anyway. My job is to burn all the money. Like Jimmy at Mr. Peace.
Let's flip a coin and double it. Let's double it. You know.
Kinda feel that that's like what's interesting when you have success as an artist is being able to deploy resources to make something that gives joy or that experience. Right? And one of the great things about the event is when people show up and they dress, when a party has a theme, great music, great people, and it's in a really great location, something happens. Has anybody been to one of the All In Summit parties? Raise your hand.
Open Open bar. J. Cal fought me on the open bar.
I'm like, you gotta have No. My thing was wine and beer and like a couple of cocktails, but this guy is like, he's a bit of a lush, he's like, we gotta have like all the high end stuff. And then what happens is the last hour
Jason thinks everyone's like sipping champagne looking in the sunset. No, people
are pounding double Macallan eighteen's because they're like, I gotta get my money's worth. Then all of a sudden I'm in a headlock getting, somebody's taking a cell phone to me. I'm like, we're friends, Jacob. I love you. What do you think of the the phenomenon now of building audience to distribute a product?
§05Business models for creatives
Because this is infected
This is a great by the way, let's just ask the broader question. What's the business model? You have a new creator, they're starting to build an audience. Advise them on what are the paths they can walk and where that can go. Because this is one of the paths, the great one that we're talking about, but like, what are the options and when does one become an option?
Sure. I mean, no matter what, everyone is making videos, attracting an audience and selling a product. That product is either theirs or it's someone else's. Like, we go back in the history of media, why are they called soap operas? They were literally created to sell soap.
Right? And so I think
Is that right?
That is right. Interesting.
That was car companies
I'm a write
that down, Jeff. Were the big sponsors.
No, but it was programming that was created to attract a specific audience that was interested in buying soap.
Totally.
Right? And so that's why the programming happened in the middle of the day. And so the reality is like You can say housewives at that Nobody's gonna
think you're a misogynist.
You said it, not me, but you know. I mean at the
time, that was the nuclear family.
Yeah, was nuclear family. That's why they were called soap operas. So, you know, the reality is for a young creator, would say that the number one piece of advice is actually keep your operation lean and your costs very low. Most great creators can create If you're a good storyteller, you can make videos right now on the internet with your iPhone. The number one thing you have to think about is the audience that you are engaging.
Because at the core of it, your product is your relationship with the audience. It's the trust that you have with the
audience. And
so that takes a long time to build. Some creators make the mistake of raising money to start making their content or some creators make the mistake of hiring a big staff. That creates too much overhead. You're going to start doing deals that maybe you don't want to do. You need cash to finance your content.
First and foremost, it's like, keep it lean, make good stuff, find the audience. Your first hundred videos are going to suck. Just build until you find the audience that you want. And then the business models will start to emerge, whether that's, hey, you know what? I built a great brand and part of my content, I'm Emma Chamberlain, and part of my content is I drink coffee every day.
So maybe I should launch a coffee brand. I take the coffee that I'm drinking every day.
Meaning make your own brand.
Yeah. Right. But that's hard. That means you have like critical mass, big scale, you're reaching millions and millions.
So cost, challenge, but payoff is higher. Yeah. And that's the big It can be,
It can be. I think CPG is
really hard. It's all
predicated on connecting with an audience first. So the advice, I think what I'm hearing is, hey connect with the audience and put on the back half of your career monetization. But just connect. And Marquez, I don't know if you've ever seen his early reviews.
Of course.
I mean it's hilarious. He's like, how old is he? 15, 16, 17 years old? And he's like, I'm using this phone. It's the iPhone four.
Jimmy's first videos are still up on YouTube. Yeah. Mister Beast's first videos, he's still up there. You gotta go watch him.
I I watched one of them. It's him counting to 10,000, I think.
Hundred thousand. That was by the way, that was a later video. His very first videos, you gotta go watch like the first ten videos.
I mean, he's playing video games. You can't even see his face.
You're like, what?
Yeah. And he's speaking speaking literally,
he's got become the most famous person in the world from from that. You can see the evolution.
Yeah. He watches paint dry in a video. Yeah. He watches like a twenty hour long video.
Yeah. But
Just to go back to the question, isn't one of the other paths selling your content? So now we're seeing a bunch of deals. Jimmy's getting a deal from Amazon. Amazon paid him for the Beast Games. We're seeing more comedians that do live shows getting deals with Netflix.
We're seeing a bunch more of those happen. We're seeing Hulu and other platforms start to bid, even X might be doing some more content deals with folks that look more like journalists. So ultimately, how do you decide whether I want to monetize by ads and making a product, or is there becoming a more liquid market for selling my content onto bigger platforms that are losing their audience to be independent, so they need to basically go rebuild an audience? Is that a realistic path or is that just like the cream of the cream get to have access to kind of I
think that's a realistic path for the top. And maybe you could talk about the Spotify thing.
Especially if we're
talking about streaming, I think it's a realistic path for the top. And I don't look at it as like selling content, look at it as selling distribution. Like bringing distribution and audience because the ads get layered on. To these platforms. Right.
Yeah. I mean
What about Amazing Digital Circus?
Yeah. I think where it's
interesting.
Where it's probably going, there's interesting case study. There's a YouTube channel called Amazing Digital Circus, which is an animated channel. And they did a deal that is super unique. I think the first of its kind where they will be distributing on Netflix at the same exact time as they distribute on YouTube. So Netflix licensed the content, and it's coming out at the same time.
It's not
their content. It's not proprietary to Netflix. No. Right.
It's licensed. So in that regard, he's making money on advertising.
But he wouldn't be getting he's not getting paid as much, or they're not getting paid as much as if they sold the content and the rights to Netflix. Is that right?
Yeah. They If it was like an original, yeah. Guess, if it was exclusive.
But this is a watershed moment in many ways because Netflix was really about them being the taste maker. Them underwriting it.
That's right.
You know, at least in this like Netflix post licensing DVDs, then they became the creators, the arbiters, and now they're going back in some ways to say we're gonna cherry pick people off of YouTube, give them money for their quarter billion subscribers. It's really fascinating moment. I
probably that if you've seen the Nielsen ratings of connected TV usage, YouTube's at the top at 11%. Right. It's the most used streaming app on connected TVs. Netflix is at 8.5% and in December after Beast Games, Thursday Night Football, that movie that they did with The Rock, Amazon
They've made a move.
Moved up to 4%, right?
Netflix moved up, mean?
No, Amazon Prime Video moved
up to 4%.
Photo set 8.5% and YouTube, but YouTube's at 11%, right? Right. The reality is, there's a really interesting quote from Ted Sarandos when Netflix won their first Emmy for House of Cards. Because Netflix was an aggregator beforehand, right? So Netflix goes from aggregator, starts producing original programming and it was a massive moment when they won an Emmy because that was pretty new that some internet tech company can win an And Ted Sarandos said television is television, it doesn't matter which pipe brings it forward.
And I think it's a really important thing that the major difference when it comes to YouTube is Netflix is going to spend 18,000,000,000 on content this year. YouTube doesn't spend on content, YouTube does a revenue share. They actually technically don't know what's going to get uploaded today and it could be the biggest video of the day. It could be something like Amazing Digital Circus that did 500,000,000 views across three episodes. Wow.
It's also interesting Netflix, I'm sorry, YouTube Premium taking the ads out is at a hundred and ten one
hundred and twenty five million subscribers.
That 125 now. YouTube, many people here pay for Netflix red or the premium version that takes out the ads?
YouTube Red? Oh, YouTube YouTube How
many people are YouTube premium? Wow, that's pretty significant. It's like a third of the audience. And what
is that? $12? It's like $20.
Yeah. It's $20 now?
I think it's the best
$20 I spend on it.
I agree.
How do the guys that are losing audience, which are the traditional broadcasters, how are they gonna respond as their audience gets attrited away? Like, we're seeing as long form is taking up more time and attention from the independents, Fox News is losing an audience. CNN is losing an audience. MSNBC is losing an audience. I mean, their their audiences are gone.
Like, they're just vaporizing right now. What are they gonna do? They've got a lot of cash. They got a lot of advertising dollars still flowing in for now.
Now.
Yeah. They're well capitalized. They've got very motivated shareholders. What's their response? If you guys are an executive running Fox, what would you do?
And we spoke about this recently. Yeah. There already are some shows on cable that are starting to act more like digital channels, more like YouTube channels. You look at, like, Saturday Night Live Yes. Or you look at Late Night, those are actually just a bunch of segments that can work really well when uploaded to YouTube or to the Internet.
And I think when you bring up Fox News, news is actually one of the last genres of cable to try and figure out or be able to figure out how to put themselves into segments that work at the twenty plus minute range, which is what's working on YouTube right now.
But the long form crushing too. Right? Like the hour long I mean, our show is ninety minutes. Lex does three and a half hours. I would say twenty plus like Rogan's like hours long and he's number one.
When I say twenty plus, I mean like that's like the minimum. I see what mean. It's like twenty and continuing to go.
Yeah. I think that's all.
Does that mean
that they're gonna try and license Rogan, they're gonna try and license Lex, they're gonna try and license one of these independents in? Is that the move that they're gonna have to make ultimately?
That's gonna be like a big changing of the guards because that's like some risk mitigation that I don't know if they would be comfortable with.
I mean it was like Pat McAfee.
Yeah, guess Pat McAfee is a good example on ESPN.
He's a sports guy, yeah.
Yeah, sports.
ESPN just picked him up. Yeah, that's right.
And he does independent.
Well, he came onto ESPN but that also created some, you know, ESPN tried something similar with Barstool a while ago, right? And Barstool got taken off the air within an episode or two, because again, there's a risk factor. They said some stuff on air and they were like, we can't do this, get them off the air. But McAfee is the more mature iteration of that as both spaces have kind of matured. That's like a YouTube show that was brought to television.
McAfee is really good where he's doing, I don't know if you guys saw the college game day stuff where he's doing the big field goal kicks for a hundred thousand dollars. It's essentially a YouTube title, but built for TV that then gets clipped and put onto YouTube. So I think that's what Colin's saying.
Turn on ESPN at any moment and it looks like you're watching a podcast. When you see his show, the production level is pretty low.
So is the media exec gonna go out and find the next or the up and coming and say, wanna bring you on. I'm gonna pay you to come and do this on my platform now. You're gonna become a Fox News show. You're gonna become an ESPN show.
They have to that's like they have to give irrational deals to creators.
Versus like Right? Versus the talent agent showing up and saying here's a good
The other problem is distribution. So like Jimmy for example, Jimmy is, yes he's in the media business but he's in the chocolate business, right? And so being able to get to 200, three hundred million people in a video is really significant. And YouTube being at the top of the connected TV streaming apps, like you'd probably choose YouTube if you're just going pure distribution. If you're selling a chocolate brand or some other type of CPG product, you'd choose distribution over not.
Totally.
And so
I think when you're getting offered a deal to go onto Fox News, do stuff on linear TV, it has to be such an irrational deal because it limits my distribution, right? Even if I go onto a Netflix, technically I'm actually limited in distribution if I'm Mr.
Beast,
Yep. Not if I'm another
Also on the money and control issues are also very acute. This week when Star Wars was doing good, right before All In started, I met with the SiriusXM team. Yeah. And they were like, hey, you know, we think you might have some like Howard Stern potential. And what if you got Travis from Uber?
He was very hot at the time. And a couple of guys to come on and and do like a, you know, round table thing and and make it fun. And then when I like we started talking money, was like that's less money than this week in startups makes already and I own a % of it. Would I own the IP here? And they're like, well no no, we own the IP.
And I'm like, I mean this is we're talking six years ago, seven years ago. And then even now, know, once in a while I'll talk to CNBC or somebody and we'll come and say, hey you know, you have any ideas? And I'm like, it doesn't economically make sense for a creator who has escape velocity to go backwards. And I wonder Freiberg, if the answer to this question is anybody who is actually talented enough, like a Megyn Kelly, or you know, somebody who like mister beast or even Tucker Carlson, like how could they ever go back to Fox now?
That's a point. I don't think they will. I think have to Entropy, it's only going in one direction. I think their audience erodes, their advertising dollars erode, and then they're getting whatever broadcasting distribution deals they have on cable are gonna slowly be worth less. I don't know what it's gonna be worth.
I think Colin isn't this Colin, like, because Fox and Sirius XM and CNBC have a cost infrastructure. So when they meet talent, they're like, talent gets 20% and then we need to get our 20% and then the other 60% has to go to
The shareholders.
Yeah, and the building. And the 50 fucking camera operators and No, you're
100% right. The model's broken.
Greatest thing about your guys' shows, it started on Zoom. We talk about this in the context of creators like, that's the advice to up and coming creators. It's the same advice. Keep your overhead costs extremely low. Creators are the startups of Hollywood.
§06Advice to up and coming creators
We always say, like, think out on a fifty two week schedule.
Yeah.
Could you do this every week for fifty two weeks? If you're someone who loves to set up cameras and lights, sure, you might be able to do that. If you're
You're a % right.
Busy people, you're like, yeah, we can hop on Zoom every week for fifty two weeks.
And if this if it were like what you're describing, there's no frigging way I'd do it. Like zero chance. The only reason I do it is because I can get on Zoom for ninety minutes and be done, and then I go on the rest of my day for work.
The turning point of the pod really was when, you know, I used to run out of my operation and I said, you guys have to commit to Thursdays the same time. We cannot if this is gonna work, everybody has to agree that Thursdays at 11AM Pacific are sacrosanct. And everybody agreed.
We all blocked it out. We all blocked it
out and we said, if anybody has to move, then we go to our list of fifth besties, sixth besties, and we rotate them in. We're not gonna like move around Chamath's schedule, my schedule, free And that's when the show really like actually Okay.
Me let me take the conversation in the opposite direction now. Which is we're going from like points of high low leverage, Fox News, lots of cameras, lots of buildings, expenses, to low leverage being on Zoom and a laptop. To let me talk about the lower leverage. Are you guys seeing any success in gen AI only content channels out there? And maybe you could talk about as gen AI gets better and better and better, do we have agents that ingest the news, ingest content, ingest data, repackage it, and then create new versions of through an iterative process to kind of hack the algorithm to figure out how do I get stuff that people stay on?
What's the right cut rate, what's the right color balance, what's the right sound, what's the right audio, what's the right music. And ultimately the GenAI does what great content creators like Jimmy took ten years to do in a couple weeks, and ultimately creates like a whole new category. And I'm just thinking ahead here now, but like, maybe tell us today on the ground if you're seeing any Gen AI that's like got realistic traction
out there. For me personally, there's no Gen AI channels that are a % Gen AI that I am watching, or at least that I know of, that I'm consuming and that I'm enjoying. But I mean, even within our organization and with a lot of other creators, the amount of AI tools that we're using from like scripting to even cutting the angles on our show, like we're continually adopting more and more AI tools, and I think, which is the way it should be, the audience I don't think even really can tell. Yeah. It's like slowly seeping in.
Into production.
Yeah. But not taking it over.
Have you played with Notebook LM?
Yes. It's pretty My
vantage point with the first time I fed a PDF into Notebook LM was the Spotify earnings report. And I was like, have a twenty minute drive, I want to hear this. And it was nine minutes and it was perfect. And you can, if you don't know what Notebook LM is, it's a project by Google, you can feed in a bunch of text, it'll turn into audio, it'll have two hosts, they host it like a podcast. So then I started to think, okay, well actually you can just custom make yourself a podcast for your drive, right, and go, hey I'm driving thirty minutes, I want to know about the NFL scores, I want to know about the Netflix earnings call, and I'm also interested in what's going on in the world of the creator economy.
And all of a sudden you have a aggregate of news and articles and it gets turned into audio and it's compelling and
Does that replace the time that you would otherwise spend listening to podcasts and watching videos?
It's a more so what's interesting about Gen AI content I found, especially with Notebook LM, is it's a more efficient way to consume content. But I don't think we prioritize efficiency always.
Of course. That would be like, soylent.
Easy, Jacob.
No offense, Brian, but I'm just saying this nutty pudding concept. My wife makes me the nutty pudding.
Like, you know what, I kinda want
the regular pudding. Right. Anyway, no it's healthier. But this is, it kinda takes out the spontaneity of what, you know, if you want that NBA content, I watch this Knicks thing, Knicks fan TV. Yeah.
And this guy takes all the clips, and last night the Knicks won in overtime, the Kell Bridges, amazing buzzer beater, and I was as excited to open up Knicks fan TV.
Right.
You know, when he comes on fifteen minutes after the game, and watch the community's reaction to it. And every time the Knicks win, I will give a hundred dollar tip in a super chat. I probably give 2 or $3,000 a year just to support this creator because it reminds me of WFAN in New York, and he has all these regular callers. It is such a spectacular product. And then I noticed that I'm like into Corvettes, and I'm in the YouTube thing, and I got the Corvettes in my sidebar, right.
And this motherfuckers are like creating fake AI Corvette announcements that aren't real. And they're using generative AI and they're saying, the new ZR17 is here. I'm like, what? I'm gonna get the ZR1. And then it's just there's a 17.
I click on this thing and it's this AI voice. Chevy Corvettes are known for having the greatest danger. But that's the thing. But that's And I blocked that motherfucker. No.
But that's the I blocked
that channel. So look, you're right.
I And I the triple dot. Bam.
Look. I would be less dismissive. As we all know, every month, we're a little more surprised by what Gen AI can do and the power of it. There's a really important human directorial role in the early days of this Gen revolution, and I think that it enables an incredible fragmentation of media, even more than we're seeing today in their creator economy. Maybe you end up getting your personal news feed with the newscaster or the podcaster or the Knicks super fans reading to you what happened at the game last night, that's Gen AI completely.
And it's indistinguishable from reality. That's where I think things may get a little more funky in the next couple years. Don't think
suggests also like this kind of far move away from monoculture into like %. Extreme micro cultures, which kind of already exist. Each of us opens our phone.
Well, I got a point of view on this one, is like Yeah, go ahead. I do think that there's shared cultural facts, but different cultural experience of the facts. Meaning, like, the game is the game, but the commentator that tells me about the game is different.
Yes.
Yeah. And that's where I think this all plays out. Where I'm gonna have, like, my own tuned broadcaster. She could be really beautiful. I don't know.
And she could be really cool. Oh, easy. Hey, woah. She could be talking to me one on one. I don't know.
It could be really weird. It's really funny. Actually get on chat GPT Advanced Voice, and I have this female voice, and when my wife's in the car, I
start recording.
I'm like, hey baby, what's going on? And my wife gets so upset. Yeah, I was about to say She's like, Fraenberg,
as your counsel, I'm gonna go ahead
and advise you to not share this fucking
I know what you're saying.
And I think that's where it might start.
Yeah.
By the way, we're gonna come back and talk again in a few minutes. Colin and Samir, thank you guys. Thank you guys. You guys
are awesome. Thanks so much. Austin's unique. Okay. There's a lot of podcasters here.
§07Chris Williamson joins the Besties!
So you know, I came to town, I got a lot of podcasting friends. As you know, I'm podcast famous, which is the fame that goes right below reality television. And we're incredibly lucky because our next guest is both podcast famous and reality television famous. And he's in Austin. And when I came here, was like, you know, I'm gonna come here and I'm gonna hang with all my podcasting bros.
So I texted Tim Ferriss. I was like, Tim, let's get dinner. Tim's like, yeah, I'm trying to find a girlfriend, wife, know, I'm gonna try to grow up, make a baby, all this kind of stuff. And so I'm out and about, I'm not in town. Then I text, okay, I'm all for one, but I'll text Lex Freeman.
Text Lex Freeman. He's like, I'm having panic attacks. I don't know, my life, existential. I had Kanye on, you told me not to do it. He was, you were right.
And then I had Zelensky. I had Zelensky on, then I had Putin on, everybody hates me, but everybody loves the pie. He's a hot mess and he's like, I can't find a girlfriend either. So then I text Chris Williamson and I'm like, hey, you know, let's have dinner. He's like, J Cal, let's eat a steak.
I need your help. I'm trying to find a girlfriend. And so ladies and gentlemen, Chris Williamson. We're gonna find out.
Such a good wingman.
Good to see
you, brother. Such a good wingman. Get
over here. Oh man, you know, Chamath is off the program, and now we've got a real man on the pod. Chris Williamson will be taking Chamath's seat going forward. He's so handsome. What's going on?
You and I had a little steak, And I think you double booked, but I appreciate being the first seating on your Friday night. Went out
I think I'm sloppy thirds for this choice.
No, no. We saved the best for last. There it is.
It's safe. Yeah. That's why you're such a good wingman.
I'm a solid wingman. I helped Lex out a bit, but what's going on on the dating front? Let's be honest here. Did you Where are you at? Because a lot of ladies want to know, is Chris Williamson still on the market or not?
Off the market currently, but I did shave the handlebar mustache, which I think sort of straightened me up as well. People were worried about that.
He shows up for our state dinner with the porn stash of old porn stashes. It's unbelievable, this handlebar thing, and I was like, know, Chris, don't know each other, whatever. Are you straight? It's like, has an arrow.
Spent 50% of the meal asking me whether I'm straight. That kind of sounded a little bit like wishful thinking after the lady doffing quite
too I thought there was a I there was a window, but you started in reality TV,
yeah? Technically, I suppose so, yeah.
I mean, that's how you got your first taste of media and fame, yeah? You were on Love Island?
That would be fair, yes. I actually did a reality TV show before that. I have an illustrious history of reality TV. Oh, okay. Was a nightclub promoter, commercial model, DJ, reality TV.
That's my career too, by the way. Was about to say, Actually, I did a little summer stock,
very similar to your reality
television. We're kind
of the same.
Roast comedian told me the other day, commercial male model, club promoter, DJ, reality TV is otherwise known as cunt bingo.
Ah, yes. Absolutely.
So I had a full house. Look, did some reality TV stuff that was kind of like an existential crisis that was captured on television twenty four hours a day, being trapped in a house for a little while, and then got toward the end of my 20s, and Rogan, Sam Harris, Alain de Botton from the School of Life, Jordan Peterson are all coming to the front, and I thought, wow, I'm learning a lot from these people. I'm less of an adult infant as I was when I first started listening to them. Maybe if I started my own show, I would be able to have these sorts of conversations. They felt really nourishing to me.
And 900 episodes and a billion and a bit downloads.
Did you think about it think about it as an interview show? Were you like, I wanna interview people, or were you like, I wanna explore the world, or I wanna teach people?
Had nothing to teach people. So it was very much, yeah, I'm gonna find these interesting people who understand how the world works. I wanna understand myself and the world around me, but you start off with who you've got around you, your friends. Kai Wei, the guy that invented the light phone. He was episode 10 because I was super obsessed with digital minimalism and what social media was doing to our brains, and then there was a season of relationships and a season of health and fitness and there was a season of evolutionary psychology.
So it's a thinly veiled autobiography which I actually think a lot of people's true bodies of work are. If you're following your instinct, it's a little trail of bread crumbs of where your mind was at at that time.
Yeah, you figured out the great hack of podcasting which is if you wanna learn really quick, if you hang out with smart people and you ask them very simple questions and you're present and you listen to the answers, maybe you're really good at the follow-up question by the way, which is always how I judge an interviewer. How good they are at being present and not being like, okay, question number one done, check. Now let's go to number two. You're really good at listening and finding that next question. But it is such an amazing hack to learn, right?
And to build a network and to even build a group of friends.
Look, I always felt reticent that I did business at university. I did two business degrees including a master's and I can't remember anything from either of them. I spent a lot of time partying, again club promoter, kind of bingo. And I always thought I wish I'd gone and done psychology. Wish I'd sort of followed something more approximating a passion, or philosophy, or sociology, or something.
And then I realized a couple years ago, I was like, well, you have done that. You've got to design your own degree, only speaking to the best in their field about the very specific niche part of their topic that you want to learn on your terms with no coursework or homework beyond what you want to do, and you get to call it a job. So whatever version of the simulation that we're in at the moment, I need to sort of thank the designer because it's wild that I get to call this a career.
I think we all feel that way in many respects. Tell me about, know Sam's a good friend of mine. We had the same book agent for a long time and I remember I had him on my podcast and he said, what's podcasting? And I explained it to him and he said, how do I do it? And I said, well you get two microphones and a guest.
And he's like, then what? I'm like, well then we hit the record button and I helped him start the pod. What are your thoughts on what he's done and his influence? Because I know you've really had him You've had him on a couple of times, yeah?
No, he's been on once.
Only once?
Yeah, his wife's been on as well.
Oh, Anika's been on as well, yeah she's fantastic. So tell me about favorite guest, Sam Jordan Peterson. Know there's a bunch of
He's pretty great.
It's kind of like having a choose from 900 children, suppose. One of the most reliable guests actually, a guy called Rory Sutherland. Love
Rory. Amazing. I've had people who don't
know, imagine a gruff, upper class British sweary uncle who also happens to be one of the best behavioral economists on the planet. So this guy understands consumer behavior like nobody else. In fact, if you go onto Ogilvy's website and you look at the job description, on the board members it says Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising. Rory got to design his own job title specifically so no one knows what he does. He's fantastic.
Just speaking to Jordan was great. Alain from the School of Life, he sees the human condition very accurately. So it's fun. I get to indulge my own curiosities and follow my instincts.
Do you think other people can do it, should do it? This is a big thing I see is like folks that wanna kinda create a business through this kind of new creator economy. There's all these paths to monetization, build the audience, they're like, what I'll do is I'll go find people to interview and interview them. What's the barrier for folks? What makes folks really great at this?
§08Making it seem effortless
What's the challenge in the business? And how do you kind of do it better than others?
Yeah, I think Christopher Hitchens says everyone has a buck in them, and for most that's where it should stay. And I wonder whether podcasting may be something similar. But it's certainly a skill set that you can develop. Look, I think the best thing is a project so personal to you that you would do it if nobody listened. And for me, if everybody switched off tomorrow, I did this when no one listened.
Your conversations with people that you were truly interested in learning from.
Right. It's a private It's an autobiography for me. It's a repository of my own
I think that's really interesting because kind of like our podcast was us literally talking with each other about the things that were going on in the world and how we were maneuvering in COVID and talking about markets, stuff that we would literally do at the poker table. And then we just did it on Zoom and put it on the internet.
All of the people that are here, I listen every week, I think the pod's fantastic, I get to tune in and just listen to between three and five guys, depending on who's available that week. Just have a hang, and it feels like you're dropping in on precisely the poker table or the private room at the steak dinner, and that's why I think people are massive fans of the show, because it feels like, I know, you're
Genuine, authentic conversations that you want to have as an individual that you're interested in having.
It's like if your friend list was just a little bit better educated than you. And you're like, okay, I get to find out it's a little bit more elevated as a conversation.
By the way, this is a little different than what we talked about, which is the other side of this, a creator economy, which is hacking an audience, making stuff for an audience, growing the audience where your focus is on algorithmically, technically, tactically identifying things that the audience likes and then focusing on those things and building from there. This is a very different kind of tack. Both work.
This is the right tack by the way, is to pursue your muse and to do something that's authentically interesting to you.
You and I both agree on like film and the importance of great film and great directors are the ones that were left the fuck alone. The great directors are the ones who got the deals with the studios where they were told they had complete creative control.
Final Cut.
Look, you can still play that game. I have two full time front catalog strategists and two back catalog strategists as well for YouTube. So, we have a big team that's playing the algo game. They're chopping down clips. So, look, I think that what is it that Ferris say is about in the short term, your results are determined by your intensity.
In the long term, your results are determined by your but don't trade the latter for the former. And if you try and go too hard, if you try and do things where you're being ventriloquized by the audience, I'm going to try and reverse engineer what I think the audience wants from me, which means that if they stop loving you, not only do you not have the one thing you used to have, but you didn't even make a body of work that you cared about either. So you end up resenting the audience. For me, it's kind of like a bulletproof strategy. You're going to keep going for longer because you like what you do.
Can we talk about monetization? How you think about making Before
we get to that, I really wanna bang on this just a little bit more. You also made a decision, we were talking before about we did something low fi to just get ourselves in the same space virtually with Zoom for a couple of hours. Your production quality is absolutely stunning. You care about aesthetics. You care about the lighting and the location.
Just for the audience here, take us through that decision. And I don't I I don't know the earliest part of the catalog and if you did it to that level. Mhmm. You have done some Zooms, believe, because Rory's only available on Zoom. Take me through the aesthetic choices you made and why.
Yeah, so I realized about three years ago that most podcasters are something with a podcast. They're a UFC fighter with a podcast, they're a comedian with a podcast, they're a whatever, invest with a podcast, right? It's not their profession. So, I asked myself, what would it look like if we turned pro at being a podcaster? And part of that is the lift needs to be very low for most people that are busy doing other things, because they're busy doing other things.
So they can't spend ages going towards this one big production. So I started working with cinematographers. I got one of the best directors of photography in America. He's out of Nashville. I got a producer.
We got grips, gaffers. We started using location scouts. And we started to dial in a very specific look. We started to use handheld cameras on tripods, monopods, dollies, doorways, dollies. We did the first ever five camera podcast on LED video wall, the same technology that was used for The Mandalorian.
And as we were talking live, the video controller changed the scenes based on what we talked about. So if we moved from a war story to a scary story in a spooky house, we went from Afghan base with trucks driving around and helicopters coming in to a spooky house that had
This is like literally the opposite of what Khalid and Tamir were saying, with keep the budget low. No, but it
did say I mean, just Knowing what I know about production costs, that sounds like you're spending $30.40 dimes an episode. It's not
far off that. We can get it down by squeezing here and there. Thankfully my line producer is a sort of bully when it comes to trying to get that stuff down. But look, I like pretty things. And I think that one way that you can excel is to stand out visually.
Same thing. Look who I'm on stage with. I like things to look nice. And I didn't see anyone that was really elevating the way that stuff looked.
Does it change the subject's mindset and the interview itself when they see how beautiful it is? When they see the investment in it, does it change something in the subject?
So, I have this belief that at least in the world of podcasting, we're sort of splitting into two directions at the moment. One of them is perhaps a little bit more elevated. It's the modern wisdoms. It's the Stephen Bartlett's of the world. And then the other side is the more sort of low tech.
It would be all in. Would be Matt and Shane's secret podcast. And then you've got sort of a Rogan or a flagrant that sort of sits somewhere in the middle, which is good quality, not insane. It's just facilitating the hang. And I think that barbell ing both of those is a good way to go.
You can lean into the real sort of high end production stuff. And when the guest turns up and they're like, wow, we're in a 25,000 square foot warehouse in the middle of LA, and there's a team of 15 people here, and there's huge lights, and there's guys holding dollies, like they lock in. They're really there to, oh, this is an occasion. This isn't me just turning up for a chat. But that wouldn't work for every type of show.
In fact, what you want to do is facilitate a little bit more ease. So, that's why I still like doing stuff over Zoom, or I guess Riverside or whatever we use, because I want to have that casual sort of conversation. Everyone wants to turn up and feel like it's the World Cup final of podcasting.
Should we go to the monetization? How did you start thinking about building the business, high quality content, authentic content? Was it a conversation about, hey, let me just put this out there, make ads and I'll figure it out later? Or was it very deliberate? And how's the model evolving for you?
§09Monetizing content
Yes, so it was emergent over time. You start off just taking whoever you can get. A lot of supplement companies and teeth whitening companies, whatever's available.
You read ads? Yep. And they come in or you call out?
I did outreach for the first five or 600 episodes of the show. So, was managing my own ads, I was sending the invoices, I was slowly scaling up the CPMs. And you can get between a 15 and $25 CPM, something like that, audio only. I made the commitment not to do ads on YouTube because if it was a virtual episode, it felt like it was such a low lift that that kind of didn't justify making people sit through baked in ads, at least on YouTube, but we got away with
You mean where you have the option to turn them off?
No, these are hard coded into the file itself.
Hard coded in, yeah.
That's what's referred to as baked in. And then look, we've got ourselves to the stage now where we have some pretty interesting setups. I think I'm one of the only podcasters that does this where we sell an entire ecosystem. So if you come on board as one of what we call our flagship partners, you get a set of impressions across the entire year, let's say 40,000,000, 60 million impressions, then you get a number of Instagram story sequences on my Instagram, you'll get newsletter drops on my newsletter which has got 300,000 subs and a 50% open rate, lots of click through on that, And then maybe I'll come speak at your AGM or I'll do something else and we build out this big package.
That will elevate the level of the partner too because they're being thoughtful. So you're going to remove the nickeling, diming people who should just be buying cost per click ads on a meta, and now you've got people who are actually thinking about their brand and what they want their brand associated with. I mean Function Health who I think
on here somewhere, we did a two year deal with them, and I love what they do. I use them to track my blood work, and I thought why would I not want to be in bed with a company that I use all the time?
Absolutely, yeah. Our case
And you deepen the relationship as well. So Element, James from Element, if there's something he wants to talk about to do with brand, have a good insight when it comes to brand, especially from a creator side or ad reads, and I'll happily just do a couple of hours of, this is what we've seen that's been working for
It's interesting when we were talking about the old media model. I'm new to all this stuff, so I'm not big in this podcasting space, but I just observe. So maybe what I say is super reductive and obvious, but it's like you got these pharmaceutical ads on Fox News and it's in between the segments and none of the anchors give a shit about the pharmaceutical ad nor do they talk about or promote it and they have no connection to it. There's no authenticity to it. But here there's an opportunity to be selective and to have it be part of the content, part of the experience and it actually probably does better as a result with the audience than you would get with that, you know, have you talked to your doctor about your diarrhea or whatever.
In the same way, you know what it is, in the same way as following your instincts on the show when it comes to what you talk about, if you can get yourself to the luxurious position where you get to choose your partners as well. Single product that I partner with, I use.
So let's talk about So you got leverage in the That's like
white listed advertising was something we started on This Week in Startups from the beginning which was if I don't use the product or don't like it we turn it down. We turn down all kinds of crazy offers from you know services that you'll hear like I was on Meg and Kelly and I heard her read one or two of these ads And I was like, God, I would never read that ad because I know that if you type in that product and scam or complaints, it'll be like a long list of people complaining about it. And then we were talking about her business and she's using a third party agency to sell her partnerships. Said, Megan, you're Megan Kelly. Just get to ad reps to and partnership people and you have to build that leg of the stool.
You've got the content, you've got the distribution, you've got the advertising, the partners. You have to have all three of the stool or else Let me ask both
you guys two questions.
Who would you turn down? Like advertising wise. Category.
Something to do with investing, we've said no to. Buy gold. Jonathan, ads guy stood there and he hates it because these guys are prepared to spend big money.
You don't want your customers losing money, being upset at you.
I don't have the chops to be able to assess whether or not this bank or this new investment opportunity can you turn your Roth IRA into a five zero one ks backed by I don't know. I have no idea. I hear these things and I go, Ben Shapiro, you don't know either.
Right. That's interesting. Yeah. Well, me ask you guys both a question. In the old internet world, there were these companies that emerged within DoubleClick or Quantiv that were the site rep firms.
So there were a lot of independent websites out there. Have the most sophisticated sales force. They couldn't go hire the two great sales reps to go do the work and dial in. There wasn't a very liquid market. So the site rep firms would rep your site, they would go out and get ads.
Do you see more of those emerging today? Are they getting more sophisticated? Are they getting better to enable smaller creators to be able to be successful in this space right now?
Maybe. I think it's a difficult
And you've never done it.
Finish your thought and then I'll add mine.
It's a difficult game to play because people can go to creators of sort of roundabout my size and it's very reliable. You know what you're going to get in terms of plays, know what you're going to get in terms of demographic, But the shows that are smaller are growing, so you don't actually know what it is that you're going to get. So maybe you can bundle all of these guys together into some weird sort of dispersed multichannel network type thing, and they will bulk be sold by some company that sits above them. But it's so effortful. When you think some podcast is going do 25,000 plays, you've got to go through all the rigmarole and the red tape and the ad read to hit 25,000 people.
Or you could go to Rogan and hit 100, one thousand times that.
Have you ever used psych reps?
No. I always hated the concept.
Even when
we were doing blogs because, yeah, you wind up If you're gonna take it seriously and you wanna make it into a great effort, I think you have to have that relationship and not somebody mitigating it.
Right.
I think it's better to just focus on the content until you hit, to Chris' point, the reach that is necessary to have people calling you on the phone. And then being able to choose it. And there's other monetization that's available now. Merchandising, creating premium content that people can do. So those are better avenues than using these rep firms.
And the rep firms it's a terrible business because if you do your job and you actually do make money and the creator does break out then they will leave you like Meg and Kelly will leave hers or Tucker. I don't know what the one that does all the Tucker Carlson and all those folks. I'm just shocked like Tucker and Megan were getting paid $10.20, $30,000,000 a year. They can afford to have one or two ad people doing this for them and not giving 40% to somebody. It just corrupts the whole relationship.
Let me ask you guys both another question. So you've now got a great content creation engine which is you. You have a great content creation at This Week in Startups which is you. And then you got this advertiser set up, so you got ad dollars coming in. How do you get leverage so that it's non linear?
§10Scaling a one-man show
Any great business has a non linear scaling function. And in your business you guys are limited and you know this is something we've talked with Jimmy and MrBeast about, like if it's just you making the content, you can only make x number of units of content per month per year. So that limits the scalability of the revenue for your organization in terms of how big this can get. Do you ever think about creating leverage in the system where you do almost like what a Spielberg does with an Amblin Entertainment, or any great director or producer does, where they scale up, they become the producer.
They a network.
They create a studio model. And then you have several content shows that are under your brand. Have you ever thought about that? Is that the model where this is eventually gonna go, where some of the great breakouts are gonna end up realizing they can scale up and build the next studio model?
If you want to do that, then fine. But I have no desire to start managing a ton of other content creators. Managing myself is
my What if still did your show, but you have others that you bet on?
Perhaps, I guess. It just doesn't speak to me all that much. I think the question is what do you need this additional money for? Is it that you just need to continue to build more and more profit? Because I quite like where I'm at.
I quite like
the level of revenue that I make, the workload that I have, the fact that I get to spend a morning reading, and I don't feel like I should have been on more Zoom calls. So my ability to put my foot on the gas or take it off is exclusively on me as opposed to having other obligations. So it's very much a lifestyle business, and I understand that that's going to cap the upside. Now there's some things, I can start CPG, I can start to do some clever stuff with ads where that will begin to ramp and ramp and ramp,
But yeah, I'm You've got unlimited upside with how you spend your time now that you don't have to do work 20 fourseven.
Absolutely. There may be a day when I decide to press that button again, but it's not right now. But just before Jason jumps in, you've got YouTube AdSense partners, Spotify partner program, which is brand new, and that's actually cranking quite a lot. And then the one area that I think way more podcasters need to look at, is monetizing clips. So you do mid roll ads on a long podcast episode, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, fifty minutes, one hundred and twenty minutes into an episode, but you can also be seven minutes into an eight minute long clip.
Totally. And you can crank clips out all the time. So you can be putting out one a day.
There's other points of leverage.
Exactly. So you can look at, okay, how can we be a little bit more innovative? We can put Instagram stories up, can use newsletters, these sort of three sixty deals and fill out all of the ecosystem where you can without obliterating the viewing experience and making the audience hate you.
You know, think that's well said. There's going to be international as well with AI. I don't know if you've experimented. We have a company podcast Dubbing
stuff.
Dubbing stuff. And then that'll be built into YouTube. So all of a sudden you'll be in Spanish, Japanese and French and the whole cycle will start all over again. But you know, I did actually try that with This Week In Startups. I got the domain name thisweekin.com and we did This Week In Poker with Annie Duke.
And this week in blank, this week in blank, this week in comedy. We did we tried a bunch of those. The problem was Oh,
you did? You did different shows?
I did some different shows in the beginning. I did it for about a year and what I realized was you could get, you know, average host, broadcast host, but you couldn't get someone like Chris or Annie Duke for the long term. We had a guy Dave Ponsato who's a music producer. And I wanted to do this week in music. He wanted to do the Dave Ponsato show.
He had his own view. And the really great creators, what they realize is I want control of my art. I want control of my brand. I want to own my IP. I want to pick my team.
I don't want to be part of a machine. And so what we're seeing is people like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson now are free. Ben Shapiro started with he was on AM radio in Los Angeles and then he worked for Breitbart. And now he's got his own company. He makes his own decision.
So I think a lot of the most talented people will want to be independent practitioners.
There's sort of a weird level that people get to. Anybody who is sufficiently talented for you to think they're an A grade player is probably not going to want to sit underneath anybody else, and if someone isn't that good, you're kind of just filling the air with something that maybe isn't going to catch.
In the new media world, is it all just lots of independent producers and there is no studio model?
Absolutely. Because a lot of people want that lifestyle.
What happens when you get rid of distribution? It's not like we have to ask somebody for permission anymore. It's not like the record labels where you had to have distribution. You had to go to Columbia Records if you were a Bob Dylan to be in a record store. You can just do it.
Yeah. Well, think the question is the economic moat being can you reinvest capital in creating high quality content because if that capital is invested well, it creates an audience. Definitely. You give certain people money, people will show up.
More money comes out.
Yeah, more money comes out.
Some high points of leverage would be getting a strategist who understands the YouTube algorithm and can ensure that no matter what it is you're recording and how honest and truthful that is to your instinct, it's being presented in the best way for the algorithm. We can repurpose clip. What are the sections that we're choosing? So one thing that hasn't been spoken about today which is interesting on YouTube is timeliness. So YouTube is increasingly becoming where people go to find out their news.
So, maybe you see something that trends on Twitter and you'll catch some clip of
some kind.
But then you quickly over to YouTube, okay, where's the breakdown? And you'll have seen, to use Shapiro as a good example, Daily Wine, I think it's called Ben After Dark or something like that. It's not Ben After Dark. It's Ben in his living room. Because something's happened today, and before he can get back into the studio tomorrow, they need to get a video.
Trump gets shot today, you need to do your video today. Because people are going to be going. And that's the hack to get to the top.
We've had this issue where we put out a show because we record Thursday mornings and it doesn't publish usually until Friday afternoon. Something happens Thursday after we record, and the show sucks. Literally no one watches it. No one watches the show.
That's not true.
Everybody watches it, but everybody can 40% down.
What are we going to do?
It's about twenty four hour turnaround. Sorry, that's stale, that's
old now.
I think this is the next great opportunity will be somebody who just is sitting there and has the ability to go live at any time. This is
what a lot of streaming is doing. You look at Hasanabe, Destiny, look at Asmongold, Charlie, Penguin Zero, all of these guys are doing it. Now, yeah, they're also playing video games too, but they're commenting on a lot of culture and they crush on this, not because they're insane cultural commentators that are really deep in the research, but because they're timely and they've usually got some take.
But it'd be really fascinating if somebody with depth, you know, imagine if Sam Harris when some breaking news story happened turned on his livestream. And you're like, oh my god, we're now we've got Sam Harris commenting on this assassination attempt or etcetera. And you see it in sports. Noticed Bill Simmons has started whenever there is a major trade, when the Kyrie trade happened, when the Luka Doncic trade happened, he just goes emergency pod. And I think they're really starting to embrace it.
That is like a hack and I think that will become a thing. I often go to the live tab on YouTube now to see what they're talking about, right? It's typically low quality, but once in a while somebody will do something and We
were talking about the relatability authenticity thing before. If somebody is talking about a developing situation which happened three hours ago, it has to be really You haven't had time to become contrived. Totally. You know what I mean?
Totally. Yeah. Think that's a big point. What other content do you think is going to win, going to continue to accelerate time and attention away from other forms of content? So the long form podcast conversation, learn about the world with me, are there other forms are out there that are interesting to you, that formats that you think are new or emerging or that are real winners?
I continue to bet on Substack, I think, and that style of blogging, very frictionless, enabling writers to work out loud. I think Jonathan Haidt wrote his entire new book chapter by chapter, published it on his substack, allowed feedback.
The anxious generation?
There's another one about the Tower Of Babel thing which he's working on next. But, yeah, it's this seamless transparent door. Writing, I think, has got just huge, huge upside there. I'm not too sure what we're going to see from short form. I'm aware that algorithmically it's able to get the bottom of your brain stem really well.
But you were talking about this before. It doesn't seem like TikTok creators are able to convert one TikTok sub is worth, you know, a hundred TikTok subs is maybe worth one YouTube sub. Correct.
And a hundred YouTubes are worth one email.
By the way, it's a lot like having a cigarette. Like, you need it, but you don't want it. You You end up being like, I'm not really looking forward to that TikTok tonight. You're not really sitting there at work being like, I can't wait to watch that TikTok.
Yes. But also, you get home
and you're like, I need my TikTok, but you do look forward to seeing this great new movie that's coming out this weekend.
Or the latest episode.
Or the latest episode. You're like, I want that. I don't need it, but I want it. And I think there's a big difference between that, and I think that's where the short form really hits the limbic system. It doesn't actually activate the rest.
I think this is a form of addiction that's going to wind up like MTV going away. MTV and music videos, we all as Gen Xers, I think you're on the tail end of Gen X or millennial? Millennial. Millennial, like we kind of got addicted to it. And then it kind of went away as a format of just sitting there and watching three minute videos.
And everybody thought our brains were getting scrambled because we were watching the video and then this video.
TikTok said hold my beer.
Yeah. And TikTok's like, yeah, wait one second. Seven seconds. I think it's fucking with people's dopamine to a level that they don't understand. You do because you dip into this stuff and you have interest in it.
But you can't fire your serotonin and see the moment, the most exciting, terrifying, funny moment in every piece of media back to back to back.
Oh, dopamine addiction. It
just breaks. The next day people are feeling hungover. It's because they're fucking with that dopamine receptors in their brain and then they can't have a conversation. They can't go to a normal dinner or have a conversation like this.
Or feel happy having a walk and a long time.
I think this is one of the reasons why I wouldn't bet against the reading thing. I'm aware it's limbically less hijacking, but it feels like going to rehab for your dopamine system.
One of the few things that
you can only do it. Right? You can watch a movie in double screen. You can be listening to a podcast while scrolling Instagram. You cannot read and do anything else.
I'll tell you what I think might win. My personal point of view on this is I think that that content will get turned into an AI chat experience. Jason makes fun of me about this, but I do sit in my car when I get I do a lot of long drives now. I was at my office, like Santa Cruz and the cities. I drive a lot.
And I talk to chat GPT Advanced Voice. But I'll talk about a topic, and I'll like learn about it and I'll engage with it, I'll kinda go back and forth. But if I find if I flip on like a book on tape or something, my brain wanders off and I got questions and ideas, and I'm like, oh, then I start thinking about it and I realize, oh man, three minutes have gone by. And so for me personally, and maybe this is just the way I'm wired, like I kinda like the interactive model. But I do think this great content, like Jonathan Haidt's new book, gets put out as kind of an interactive mode, where I get to go engage.
It starts telling me about it, I can ask questions, it's almost like I'm having a conversation with the author. That's where going back to the earlier point, like the cultural experiences of the book written by the author, but the way I experience it is going be different than the way you experience it in an AI world.
I would love to look at how people pay attention to a conversation between multiple people, like a podcast, compared with an audio book. The author is trying their best to come across with bounce and energy and engagement and stuff like that. But really, it's not. It's one person. Totally.
It's one tone going through, recorded very carefully. Whereas when you've got stuff bouncing around, even that author talking about that book on a podcast, why am I so much more engaged? There's something about that which
is more It's the way humans are. Humans aren't designed to sit on the floor and be lectured to by another human. Humans are designed to be social creatures, to have engagement, to have that process. And I think that that's how it plays out in our brain. There's more of a responsive chemistry
to I'm excited for this pendulum to swing back and for people to like read a book again or to watch a Kurosawa film.
Well you know that's 100 percent You can't watch a Kurosawa film and not feel
I'll tell you what, you know, I think for a lot of young people they're missing out on some of like the great beauty in life is to be able to give yourself over for two hours to a Kurosawa film. Or to give yourself over to a book for an hour. Just but an hour. And that's what we're gonna see I think in the coming years is people are gonna look at this like they looked at junk food, like they looked at cigarettes, and say this is not healthy for me.
You've seen that list of five regrets of the dying. It's things like I wish I'd allowed myself to be the person I wanted to be, the person others expected of me, I wish I'd worked less, I wish I'd kept in touch with my friends, I would bet an awfully large amount of money that one of them in starting about thirty years' time is going to be I wish I spent less time on my phone.
Great. I
wish I'd gone to TikTok.
Great point. The way, we're gonna continue the conversation. So guys, join us thanking Chris and we're gonna invite the rest of the crew back out.
Oh yeah. Come on out everybody. Brian, come on up. This is my friend Brian Johnson. Come on up.
We'll talk to
you too. Can we get him a microphone? Introduce Brian? Yeah. Brian Johnson created a payments company.
§11Bryan Johnson joins the Besties!
He was on This Week in Startups years ago. And then I looked up and he was sharing his nighttime erections on social media.
It's three hours and twelve minutes.
Yes. Three hours and twelve minutes.
Just Ryan, you're you're Kardashian famous now. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, really? You were on the Kardashians?
Yeah. Last week's episode.
You were on last week's episode. And who was you were hanging out with Kim or which Chloe?
Andrew Huberman, who was the star of the show.
Who was?
Andrew Huberman and Brian. That was my Trump Zelensky moment. You two in a room, I'm aware.
Oh, is this like East Coast West Coast? It's like Crips and Bloods? You guys get along
or is he?
We do it all. Yeah, we're friends.
You're friends?
Yeah. Okay. What do you do together? Like the two of you.
A secret.
I mean, do you guys exchange blood? What's the A secret,
Suss all in.
They do lab tests. They do lab tests on a Saturday morning.
§12Spotify's move to video
Spotify moved to video. I think that's an interesting one to talk about. That's something people aren't really factoring in because you turn what was an audio platform into, is this audio? Is this video? Now there's trailers that you can see as well, and they are paying creators a pretty penny.
So we were a part of the partner program for January and February, and we made more money from them with only 10% of our catalog uploaded than the entirety of our YouTube AdSense. So they are throwing everything at it to take.
Well, you
do. We don't. But we're working on it. Yeah, but we're working on it. But I think also like there's I think in all these platforms, when they announce a new monetization model, they need model citizens.
And I think Chris, like your show is a model citizen for Spotify. Like they've put you on billboards, definitely going like, hey.
The golden child.
Yeah, Modern Wisdom is the show you want to be on Spotify. It's video, it looks beautiful, it uploads quite a bit, it has a big back catalog. So I think it's a really interesting model. To me it feels experimental. I think if it works, it's great.
Share of premium subscription revenue is awesome.
§13Bryan's Ketamine experience
Ryan, are you going be able to be within the vicinity of that passive smoke? I imagine you're gonna be counting down how many minutes it's gonna knock off your life.
Jason, what is this?
That's a Fuente. It's a nice scarf.
You can
just chew on it.
What's gonna happen if I chew on it?
You can get a little nicotine hit, and you're gonna enjoy life for the first time in three years. Go ahead.
I don't know. I don't know if this fits in the protocol. I mean
Just chew it. Come on.
Like this. See what I'm doing here?
Alright. Should I don't wait. Hold on. Before you before you say something, don't die is in your hands. Should I chew
on it?
No. Yes. Yes. Drew.
No. Give it a shot. David. Give it a shot.
That was
a clear response.
It's in Nevada you've got to do Chris' ketamine. It's one or the other. One do you want?
Which do We'll
do it backstage. I'm an expert promoter. Do everything.
Do you want the cigar?
I'm okay. Thank you.
You did ketamine recently, didn't you, Brian?
I did, yeah. We built a brain interface at my company, Kernel. We were trying to build a wearable fMRI and we had this question, what happens when? You there's like when you take an SSRI or when you take ketamine. And so, yeah, I did dose, intramuscular dose, and we measured my brain thirty days before the ketamine, during ketamine, and then fourteen days injection?
You snorted it or you did the spread? Injection. We did the max FDA loud amount. And what was cool is we saw
You just did it on your you're like, I'm just gonna max out. Right? No.
We had an IRB. We had it approved ethically. What we saw
Sorry. Just real quick. Have you done ketamine before this?
No. First time.
So you're just chilling. You're like, I'm gonna max out on ketamine? I just wanna make sure I really get this. I wanna get your mindset.
We wanted to see the effect. When you
say we, you know that it's just you, right?
We spent six years building this brain interface. We built a custom ASIC. We pushed it through COVID. It was an all in effort.
And you don't have an intern or a 23 year old analyst or something to be maxed out on ketamine.
I was also doing blueprints. I was like, this is interesting. What actually happens to the brain when? And so, like, you think about So you put this helmet on your head and think of your brain like a globe. It has airports all around.
You see traffic, like New York to Tokyo. And so my patterns were very fixed in that thirty days running up to ketamine. And then I did ketamine and it just scrambles your brain. Like all the traffic patterns are just remixed. And then two or three days afterwards, it drops.
So now you're like open minded to new patterns. And then days three, four, five, you come up to your old patterns again. So that's why it makes sense there's this therapeutic window where if you do a psychedelic, you're open to new ideas and doing things. Yeah. But so like there was on the second day, I was in the office.
We were walking in between meetings. We had these big walls. I thought, why don't I just jump over that wall? Like, why am I going to take this long route? I just jumped over the wall not thinking about it.
Like, Brian, what are you doing jumping over a wall? But it just I did really behave differently. And I had the way I thought, the way I behaved. I couldn't really see my patterns very well because we were all watching it so closely. It was cool.
Now we have the ability to say what happens when to But
you could have gotten that information without doing that.
Well, no, no. Think what you're referring to is, you know, this phenomenon where it kind of refrags your hard drive a disconnect from reality. You disassociate a bit? Did you see yourself outside of your own body? Did you see
like Yeah, I did.
You were here and Brian Johnson's here and then there's a universe and then you go past the universe and you're in that space that's outside the universe? I want you
tell me
what you've done.
Same place, same trip.
Same place? Yeah. Yeah, I've been there.
It's pretty great. Sorry, Brian. Let me let me just so there have been a lot of studies on this kind of neural plasticity that arises when you take these. You get, like, maximum neural plasticity. Like, basically, the neurons are out searching for new connections.
It really kind of activates those cells to go hunting and people get rewired. That's why trauma can get rewired out of your brain and you can learn new stuff and develop new experiences. But it can also have profound changes on people's psychology, motivations, other sort of factors. Have you noticed any of that kind of residual effect? Motivation's changed, point of view has changed, emotional Personalities are different, relationships are people like you're different, you're X, Y or Z, you're not Brian, where that's kind of affected you in a It
was only one time so I didn't notice anything in particular. It was really that acute two or three day window. I think if I would have paired some therapy in there, I probably could have done something meaningful, but I didn't. We were looking at the quantitative measurements. But yeah, you're right.
It scrambles the brain. It was cool to see it because before this, nobody had ever seen ketamine on the brain. You don't see the patterns that are in place. You don't see what's scrambled. You don't see when they reform.
And like you can take these patterns, think of like a 96 by 96 grid. You can use these patterns to assess intelligence, emotions, character traits. Like it's very informative. And so these things when you assess and reassemble, you really can deduce a lot of you infer a lot of things about the person.
Yeah. I mean we're joking about it here, but you know, I have some friends who have spent a great deal of time, money and effort on the MAPS project, Tim Ferriss. A number of my friends have really worked on this in a clinical session and setting. And it can have a profound impact on PTSD, on relationships, on trauma. But I just wanna give people like a caveat here that these are extremely powerful modalities.
And you need to do them in the proper setting. The set, the setting, the dose are all extremely important. But people with PTSD you know are coming out of you know 09:11, my brother's a firefighter. A lot of firefighters in New York and first responders, you know they haven't gotten over it. They've gone to some of these sessions and they've come out of it.
And they found peace. And it can process you know, what can't be done in a hundred sessions of psychotherapy can get processed in two or three of sessions. Think it's very important that we take it seriously even though some people are doing it at Burning Man and having fun with it. I get it. People wanna do that.
Is it dependency risk
with ketamine that there isn't with a lot of the other substances that you can use too?
This is the problem. It's interesting, my friend Tony Shea passed and he got addicted to ketamine specifically and it disassociated him. And that's the problem with the recreational use or the use alone Chris. There's a lot of very notable CEOs I know, friends who have gotten into it and they've had good intention and then maybe they're at home watching Netflix or YouTube and they are doing it out of boredom. And that's where it gets very pernicious.
Just be careful.
Can we go back just to the content creator piece? Brian, basically started talking about don't die, and you've created quite a bit of content around this. What's the model for building a business? Did you actively think, hey, I've to build an audience to get this effort to be successful?
§14Creators and value props
Yeah. No, we actually didn't. Kate, my co founder, is here with me. We were posing the question We thought it was a cool question to ask, are we the first generation who won't die? You know, it's kind of like in 1870, you're back in there and you hear in town, people are like, hey, there's this new weird idea.
There's this guy saying that there's these microscopic objects. They're called bacteria or something like that. They cause infection. They lead to death. And then others are like, That's stupid as fuck because really it's just, you know, it's bad spirits.
We know that's causing the situation. And so if you're getting into surgery, you really care to know, this a correct idea or incorrect idea? And it turns out bacteria are real. They actually cause infection. They can lead to death.
And I think the parallel here for us right now is like, we legit the first generation who won't die? And so that was our effort, just actually scientifically go do that. And then someone did a Twitter thread on this and it just went viral. It got like 50,000,000 views and we're like, what the hell? What's going on?
The tsunami of hate came our way. And it was just like there's so much raw energy under this topic. We didn't know that was the case. And so yeah, we've just been trying to basically take people along the journey of like, this is what we're doing. So content's really been like an afterthought to a primary mission and now it's a primary modality for us to go after this.
And you productized it. Came home. My wife was joking about the nutty pudding. Mean, it's not my favorite but it's healthy and I've had it a couple of times. I eat it and my got the whole cupboard filled with blueprint stuff.
I was told the whisper number is over $100,000,000 in sales.
Yeah. We'll up we'll beat $100,000,000 in less than twelve months. And so but the goal was not to make money. It was like so it went viral and people were like, I love this. I wanna do it.
But it's so damn hard, right? You have to source all this stuff. And we had learned ourselves that when we source things that most labels are incorrect, most things are toxic. It was like a disaster out there. So we started sourcing our own stuff.
So like, why don't we just package this up? CPG sucks. It's the worst business in the world. So we were legit like, do the world a solid, make this available. We've worked so hard to make this available and it's impossible to do unless you're all alone.
You're losing money or you're making just a very modest profit margin?
Very yeah. So we're almost basically breakeven.
Got it. Yeah. So it's a four breakeven, not a four not a nonprofit. And, Chris, you're you're drinking this new category of beverage you created. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your intent with your product.
Yeah, I think one of the easiest
hacks Can we get a couple of these out here? I want a drink. I'm losing my energy.
Thank you. Let's go, Jonathan. One of the easiest hacks that you can do if you want to be successful in CPG is take something that people are already consuming, source it better, improve the formulation and then put it back out. Right? A better for you A better for you pair of underwear, a better for you chocolate bar, a better for you hydration drink.
So, made a better for you energy drink. So, evidence based, research backed, nootropic ingredients, efficacious doses, blah, blah, blah. And we bootstrapped it, and I got to build it from the ground floor up and create the brand, come up with the copy, the shoots, and everything else, and I love it. Now we've got to the stage where some really big players are sniffing around, and we've only been in the market for eighteen months.
Are you guys going to do a CPG business? Kind of the trend as you're No. What would you do? What you gonna do?
I mean, we're a little bit different in that our value prop is creator education. So we try and think of what is an extension of our value prop. And for us, digital goods courses, that's like a direct extension, so that's what we have.
As much as Brian is a content creator, I will say like, I came across Brian's content. I was marginally interested, kind of like, you know, confused by it. Then got invited to one of his dinners. And I really commend you for doing the dinners. Cause I think the dinners, like, it's very unscalable, but it actually creates a lot of scale.
And people come to those dinners like me, I've been talking about that dinner for, I don't know when that was, six, seven months ago, and telling a lot of people about it. And it was a very impactful event. And I think actually like the creators today who are doing things like this, getting people together physically, Last week when we were here, there's a creator named Jake Shane sold out the Moody Center. It was about 3,000 people. He started as a TikTok creator up there for an hour and a half by himself doing comedy.
Amazing. And it's amazing. And I think like getting people together and actually having like face to face impact, that's where I think you can build a product.
You know how we were saying it's going to be lovely if there's a counter movement against the TikTokification, very short form video? I do get the sense that Coffee and Chill, you know what that is, Coffee and Chill, or Mushroom Cowboy, these are daytime sober racks. I saw this
on TikTok.
Paradoxically. A couple of hours on a Saturday or Sunday from 10AM or midday or something like that. And I think what we're seeing is the equivalent here of the work from anywhere, digital nomads, degenerate, wake up whenever you want, fuel yourself with caffeine and get back to work. And this is the backlash against that, which is people desperate for in person events. They're desperate for stuff like this.
And it's not just this. Think about any conference you've ever been to. The speakers, cool, whatever, they're the headliners you go to see. But what you're really there for are the conversations in the foyer in between the different events.
I've to say the higher the barrier sometimes, the bigger the fan. Your episodes are three hours long, that's a pretty big barrier. You get to the end, you're invested. You're a fan of you guys. It's the same thing with events.
Right? There are brands and creators now that are starting
with events. It makes so much sense. Think about it, you give up your form of social engagement in a kind of free way, not a structured way, as soon as you're done with college. Then you're at the workplace. At the workplace, if you're working in an office, it's like you got the thing to do and you're done.
Where else do you have this social engagement at scale? We're
also pre selecting, as you say, if it's a three hour long podcast or it's a really niche topic, it's a particular series of Warhammer 40 ks that not many people know about or it's some weird Japanese anime, you are preselecting for people like you, assuming that you're interested in it. This is why Reddit is so good. Reddit is a website filled with people who couldn't find others to have that discussion with in their hometown. Right.
That's true. That's very true.
It's very true. I just want to point out with these CPG products, The creators who are making them, like when you two gentlemen make something or Saks is making this all in tequila
Or where's my super gut bars?
He has super gut which is fantastic. The peanut butter one is pretty good. You know that Freiberg's not making super gut or you're not making blueprint or you're not making Nutonic. New tonic. You're not doing it because you want to maximize profitability.
You want to be proud of it. You want to know that the person buying it had a great experience and it was good for them. Right?
There was a hole that didn't exist. And the other thing, which I'm sure you guys have sensed as well, the online course is the best way. The margins are amazing, the scale is just fantastic, but you never get to see someone holding your course.
If you do
it as cohorts, which we have done, you do get to see them digitally, and now our idea is to actually go, hey, can we take that and have that be also entry into a live workshop or live session.
That's going to crush.
Perilously close to the creator Tony Robbins. I can see you on stage.
I'll make a bet right now that will make you guys more money than anything else combined.
By far. Your question that you asked before was like how does that compare? Like right now the reality is like in a single check, a brand deal makes more money when it's one client. But as what we're watching right now in the course business is like, you know, a hundred people on an $800 product is significant. A thousand people, it gets even more significant.
Because you guys will sell tickets to the live event but the sponsors to get that targeted audience in a captive way will pay you more than they'll pay for the online. That's where you guys make.
That's what I also
think about the value prop for, you know, people go to school, they go 50,000, 2 hundred 50 thousand dollars in debt and then what I hear from young people all the time is they go take a course afterwards. That course for $800 does more from them in the marketplace and getting jobs than the degree did. And I think this roll your own education is very similar to function health in in a way which is like, I'm gonna take control of it. I'm not gonna have an MD direct my healthcare. I'm gonna get my blood work myself.
I'm gonna do my research. I'm gonna go and chat GPT or grok or whatever. I'm gonna ask about peptides. I'm gonna ask about this. I'm gonna cross reference it.
I'm gonna listen to your podcast or Huberman, you know whatever. And I think that this self reliancy and this new category of products and services that are available, it kind of resets this industrialization that occurred. Mhmm. I'm sure Procter and Gamble and some of these things didn't start out with the evil intent that is now in their products.
§15Issues with the US food industry
You gotta cut that out. Well, don't give a fuck. I'm not Honestly, like Procter and
Gamble give a shit.
They're putting die in fucking kids cereal. Why? I have Procter and Gamble.
Yeah. Like And they're cereals.
General Mills can go They're the enemy. They're the bad guys.
I don't give a shit about their sponsorship. Seriously.
I guarantee you're using Procter and Gamble toothpaste in about three hours. No. No.
No. I get that Tom's amazing. Procter and Gamble.
Puts me on all this shit.
I'm telling you, they're they literally are putting dye in children's cereal. They're putting corn syrup in children's cereal. They're poisoning the fucking country to make an extra 2 or $3.04, 5¢. What the word you used? We were talking about the word England you used, the c word.
Yes. So I agree, Jason.
These guys. Right? So Yeah.
We can cut it, but I agree. So we just launched a new endeavor called Don't Die Certified, and we're testing foods. Oh, yeah. Let's Baby foods, pet foods, all packaged foods. And we got the early results back.
You got the receipts.
We do. And so yeah.
How bad is it?
Worse worse than you think.
Yeah. Sorry. What if you guys Brian, what did you test guys?
Yeah. We're so we're doing heavy metals.
Heavy metals?
We have metals. Yep. Then we're doing glyphosate, some other agrochemicals, and then maybe a few phthalates bisphenols. What's the worst product you got so far? So we okay.
We got results back from Have you
done any daylights? Have you done plastics? Or is that something
Yes.
We're doing that too. So we'll probably have it later. There's less evidence around that. Yeah. But yes, like, the cool model we're doing is if you can you find your food, go to the website.
We'll launch this next week. Yep. Find your find your food and say, I want this tested. So you can put up the money. If you get enough money so it
What does that cost? $34?
No. Like, $500.
What? Wow.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's a Oh, I'm doing 10. Yeah. You're crowdfunding. Exactly. Other people that also eat that thing from Sweetgreen can be like, I wanna know if it's got lots of plastics in it.
Exactly. So then the test gets triggered, results come back, and then we go to the brand and we say, Hey, come claim your product. So they then come back and say, All right, now you pay back the people who funded your test. You should have been testing in the first place. So they're doing the work for you.
So we want to do the food home in The US. We want to test 20% of the foods that make up 80% of The US diet so then we can say, on average, the average American consumed, blank, you know, mercury per day or academy or whatever. So we tested a few of the things. We looked at diapers. There was a dangerously high level of glyphosate in diapers.
For the cotton?
Cotton, exactly. Roundup ready cotton. Exactly. And then we also tested tampons. Which brands?
High heavy metals.
Which brands? Heavy metals.
Call them out right now.
We can't yet. So we Okay.
We got the test soon.
Exactly. So we gotta work reveal the first few ones, dog food was really bad, which makes sense. Dogs have been living their shorter lives now. But, yeah, once you start seeing this, it's really pretty
Have you guys checked out plasticlist.org? Do you see that? Not the
last Oh, that's another rich dude spending his money in I love it.
I'm totally not. I look.
This hold on a second.
This know it's super hyperbolic, but just the plastic thing, it's really important to note. They rank things, but you also have to look at the absolute numbers. This is where this can get a little too carried away. I think that there's a lot of shocking shit in there that's super bad. But you've also got to recognize that a tiny amount that's like one one trillionth of something that could ever affect your body, it'll flesh out, may not be that bad.
So we've gotta be really cognizant on how we interpret this stuff.
These motherfuckers knew the whole time they were doing it. They knew.
Who's they? These industrial Brian's like, could be one third of a new tonic and you
got fired up. This is
great. This is great. No. I'm telling you, I'm so I am so furious about this because these people, you know it's true, you know it's true. They knew they were doing this.
And it takes some rich guy who's bored and principled, no offense, I love you, you know I love you. Who's the guy who's doing the plastic.org?
Zach.
Not Friedman.
Not Friedman. Sorry.
Friedman. He's another rich Internet guy. He's like, you know what? I'm bored. These guys are screwing people over.
I'm gonna test plastics.
Annie Hari turns up with 400,000 signatures outside of Kellogg's HQ and says you make in the same factory the Canadian version, which uses beetroot coloring and carrot coloring to make it. And the exact same factory is throwing Red Forty and
Yes, again, to back you, Jason, this. So Gerber, so there's a law passed by California that said baby food providers have to disclose heavy metals in their So it went into effect January 1. And so we go to Gerber's website where
All heavy metals?
Yeah. I think the four. Four big. And so it's like, okay. So go to Gerber's website.
I can't find heavy metals results anywhere. And then I realized my VPN's on, and I'm coming from a server outside of California. They've IP blocked
No way.
To get California only IP origination. Wow. And they hide it. And so this is what I'm saying. These companies
These are nefarious.
It's really not not good. I mean
What do you think of Bobby Kennedy, friend of the pod? And, you know, him taking this on from MAHA. I don't wanna make it political, but
how did we get to this? This is interesting. Happen.
Freiburg, this is the good shit, man. This is the good shit.
Do you guys like
this? Yeah. They love it, man.
This is a this is the
this is
how all in work.
YouTube channel. I little detours.
I hate Proctor.
We take detours. This is a side quest worth taking. Do mean Give me one of your nicotine drinks.
Hey, B. There's others there's others in the other green room. There's some in the other green I'm
I did
but I
did a
lot of drugs earlier. Yeah. What do you think of Bobby Kennedy?
I I think he is going to challenge status quo power. And I think that's gonna create a lot of conflict and a lot of reconfiguration. So I think we'll refrag.
I like the refrag.
There's a lot look. The thing that there's a lot of really important questions being asked that are not asked in the way that they that they're being asked now. That's the most important thing, is the system need to be challenged, and whatever's left will get hardened, and whatever shouldn't be there will get blasted away. And that's it.
But you gotta name and shame.
§16Top tips for healthy living Thanks to our partners for making this happen: Gemini: Go to
You gotta ask the hard
that really pisses me off. You gotta name and shame in order for them to do what's right. That's what's so fucked up. Wanna do any they wanna do
Do you wanna do any of the AMAs? Or
I mean, I don't know. I felt like this was going in a nice direction. I enjoyed the I got I got to do the conversation I find enjoyable. Just see
if there's any cool AMAs. If people ask
these questions,
come on. I've got a question for Brian in the meantime. Here we go.
I'll look for a quick question.
Brian, if you were to, without someone having to completely decimate their entire diet and never look at meat again, what would you say are sort of top triaged lifestyle changes most people should look at making based on what it is that you guys have looked at?
Yeah, mean the power laws are so clear. Sleep is like by far and away the biggest power law. Then exercise, number two diet, number three. And so it's just being consistent on those three things. And once you get those three layers, you can go down other layers.
Like what we've tried to do is we've tried to say anything which increases my speed of aging is a form of dye. So how do you eliminate that? And then we just started with the power laws. I start with zero all the way down and just yep.
Top three things for sleep?
So the thing you want to do is you want to lower so the key marker is lowering your resting heart rate before bed. That is the numb I'd say if you could optimize one marker in your entire life, it's that. So before you go to bed tonight, look at a wearable or take your pulse. It's your resting heart rate. So tonight, let's just say you're at 55.
So your goal over the next week or two is to try to get down to 50. The next month, forty five. As you do that so the way you drive it down is you have your final meal of the day at least two hours before bedtime. So if you go to bed at ten, be done at eight, and then push it back an hour, you're okay, thirty minutes each day. And as you push it back every day, your heart rate is gonna go down incrementally because your body has more time to digest.
So then you also find that food you eat, like if you eat a big pasta pizza or something, it will jack up the heart rate. So mine right now is 44 beats per minute. So if I eat late in the day if my last meal today is at noon, and I did that after like a few hundred experiments of like what optimizes my resting heart rate, If I have a big meal like five or six, I'll be up like low fifties. And that will take away about 30 to 40% of my sleep.
So you go to sleep super hungry?
Actually, I'm okay. Yeah. My body is really adapted. So food is really a big one. And then two is wind down routine.
You need to calm yourself down. You can't have your phone up. You need to turn it off. Give yourself like thirty to sixty minutes. Decompress in the day because it So leave
leave leave your kids in the house and go sleep in the garage.
Yeah. No. No. One shower, that could help.
Actually, a book in hand has probably the best evidence. So, what Chris was saying, right, is that you can't do anything. So, screen off, book in hand, spend even ten minutes and you'll be amazed at how much it'll calm you down.
There's some cool stuff around. People thought it was the blue light from screens that were impacting melatonin release and cortisol and stuff as you went to sleep. It seems like it's much more what you're interacting with on the phone, that you're so engaged that dopamine's firing, you're probably getting riled up about you sending stuff to friends. It's triggering all of these ideas in you, as opposed to if you just sit down and read Red Rising or something by Pearce Brown and you go off to sleep dreaming about being
in Exactly. And you measure it by how much your heart rate goes up or down. So you now have a quantitative benchmark every single day if you could peg those habits.
Regularity versus duration, what's more important?
Consistency is so important because your body tells time like a clock. Like when I was I did eight months of perfect sleep. A % sleep every night to show I could do high quality sleep.
You're tracking on WHOOP or you're tracking on ASAP WHOOP. Yeah. And they they tend to are pretty close?
No. Oh. Yeah. I mean, like, they're all they're all relative comparisons. They're not absolute.
So just stick find one. They're all fine.
Yeah. And then This is the been the big unlock for me. I am now sleeping. I got a 94 last night. I got a 99 two nights ago.
Was my highest score ever. Really dialing in the sleep. Yeah. And it's changed everything for me.
It's the biggest life It's big unlock. Improvement you can do, period. It's the best performance enhancing drug. It is just better than anything on market. But be consistent because your deep sleep window happens in the first two hours of night, and so that's when the garbage trash collector comes through to pick up all the trash in your body.
If you miss that window, you miss it. You miss the garbage trash collection. That's why pick your bedtime and be consistent. Otherwise, you get junk accumulation.
On the inverse of that, I have a six week old baby, so I have the least consistent sleep right now. How long can I endure that?
I'll tell you two things that also worked for me because I sometimes sleep with my bulldog, and that was killing it. But I got these nice headphones and I'll listen to some really high fidelity sleep music and use an eye mask and both of those added a couple of points. And that was really a good unlock. How are sleeping, Chris?
Yeah, pretty good. Thank you. Audio boxes, go to sleep. Turn that off. You've probably got a problem with the ionizing radiation, non ionizing radiation.
You bothered about Bluetooth headphones, Brian? No. Oh, that's good.
That's the
first thing I've proposed to you that I'm still allowed to do in my life. Everything else is like the fun police that comes in and tells me everything's Oh, the die police, I guess.
I'm actually the happy police. The shit I say, it makes you happy. They have this misconception that staying at a plate and missing bedtime and drinking is happy. It's not. It is sad.
It makes you depressed. And we have to be honest, we think it's happy, it's not.
Well, listen, thank you to all of our guests. And you know, you're very busy. I really appreciate you coming here. I know that you've been busy and congratulations on the big win for Nosferatu. That was great.
That's an Oscars reference. Thank you to the people who got it. But seriously, are you worried because, I mean, yeah. Are you sure what you're doing like this extreme is a good idea?
I'm a
little concerned. Same time for that. You might be turning into a vampire. You you are doing the blood transfusion? Yeah.
You know,
I did it because my dad was experiencing cognitive decline, and he called and he called me in a panic. And he said, I will do anything to save my consciousness. And so I did it for him. So the headlines was all about my son and my and my me, but
Well, you did a transfusion with your dad?
Yeah. That was the whole
After doing it with your son?
Yeah. So I You're three generational Yes. My dad called me. He's like, okay. I'm experienced So he was writing something for work.
He walked away, and he came back, and it was a jumbled mess. And he's like, I'm experiencing cognitive decline, and I can't see it. He said, when I thought I would start, like, forgetting names or, like, missing keys, but, like, right there in front of me, I didn't see the jumbled mess. So he called me. He's like, I'm panicking.
And so I was like, dad, we're actually looking at this new evidence on these plasma infusions. I'm happy to give you a plasma if you if you wanna try it. Like, we don't know if it's gonna work or not. So then my son heard, and he's like, I'm in. Like, we'll do a trigenerational thing.
I'm like, great. It's a family activity.
Is there any empirical evidence of this?
Yeah. Is we we should talk about this another time. But this is there's a lot of good work on this. This you think that this is a path we're pursuing? This is I mean, it's longer conversation.
Chris, what are you doing after? You wanna do some blood transfusions?
I'm doing
ketamine with Brian
by the way. Okay. Can we transfuse as well?