Loading summary
Transcript177 lines
- [00:00]
Jackson Hewitt Advertiser
Jackson Hewitt handles your taxes and your stress. Inhale on no surprise price of 149 or less. Exhale. Paying more for complicated taxes you won't inhale New tax law knowledge. Exhale. Missing out on your biggest refund? Certainly not. Don't miss paying 149 or less. Rest easy, Jackson Hewitt's got your taxes. Guaranteed limited time offer for new clients on federal terms. Participating locations only. Turns@jacksonewood.com 149
- [00:32]
John Coogan
for a lot of Americans, credit card debt feels like a fact of life. I think it's just important for people to understand how credit can work for you or against you, why that little piece of plastic has so much power. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Find new episodes Sundays Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:06]
Peter Kafka
From the Vox Media Podcast network. This is Channels with Peter Kafka. That's me. I'm also chief correspondent at Business Insider. And today we've got a story about how to make a splash in a very, very competitive market. You probably didn't think the world needed a new podcast featuring white guys talking about tech, but a year ago John Coogan and Geordie Hayes launched one anyway. Now that show, which they call tbpn, is one of the busiest properties in media, and the two of them have become insta famous, at least in the insular world of tech. As John Coogan and I discuss, the ideas behind TVPN aren't exactly new. He thinks about Johnny Carson as an influence. To me, they are following in the footsteps of TechCrunch, the pioneering blog that for a time owns startup news. And the mechanics are pretty straightforward too. Every day, Coogan and Hayes host a three hour livestream where they talk tech and interview tech people, and then that video gets cut up and sprayed around the Internet. It's kind of what just about everyone does these days. And I also don't want to overstate the scale of tvpn, which has a lot of momentum, not a huge audience. There is a decent chance people who listen to a tech media podcast like this have heard of tppn. It doesn't mean you are watching them. But as Coogan says, he thinks this can be a meaningful business, even if it stays relatively niche. And in any case, the fact that these guys could go this far this fast says something about the state of media in 2025. Okay, that's enough for me. Let's hear me talking to TVPN co founder John Coogan. I'm here with John Coogan. He's the Co Founder, co star, co host, co host of tbpn. Those words will mean something to a bunch of you. A lot of you will be. What, what, what are we doing here, John? Explain what TBPN is in. In like a tweet length description.
- [03:02]
John Coogan
It's the technology business programming network. It's a tongue in cheek reference to espn, of course, but it's not a network, it's a show. It's a live show that happens every single weekday from 11 to 2pm Pacific,
- [03:15]
Peter Kafka
covering tech news, business news, tech and business.
- [03:19]
John Coogan
Specifically if it's on X, the everything app. If it's on the Wall Street Journal's front, be talking about it. We stay focused a little bit more on private markets than what you might see on other business television shows.
- [03:35]
Peter Kafka
It's an advantage to you. We, we'll get in, we'll get into that. I just wanted to give people the, the thumbnail description. You guys have been doing this one way or another for about a year and you kind of relaunched and rebranded it.
- [03:44]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [03:45]
Peter Kafka
In February. You have. We'll get into your history, but you've co founded tech companies.
- [03:50]
John Coogan
Loosely. Yeah. Okay. Startups.
- [03:52]
Peter Kafka
Startups. Soylent, what you've heard of.
- [03:55]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [03:56]
Peter Kafka
Did you want to be a. You did you want to be a video star? Is that, was that the ambition? I'll just, I'll just found tech startups until I get big enough to have my own TV show.
- [04:05]
John Coogan
I can tell the story two different ways. One is pick the accurate way. I don't know the accurate way. And, and this is the nature of storytelling. So one way is I was bored during COVID had some free time for the first time in my career because there's no happy hours on the weekends. There's nothing going on in the business context. I'm not meeting anyone. And so every Sunday I sit down, write a couple words, read it into a teleprompter. I was a video editing nerd, so I put it up as a YouTube video. Do that for about four years. It grows to about half a million subscribers, which is a big deal. Yeah, it was great.
- [04:38]
Peter Kafka
Some people would kill to have a half a million YouTube.
- [04:40]
John Coogan
Yeah, it was a wonderful.
- [04:42]
Peter Kafka
And you were doing this as a.
- [04:43]
John Coogan
It was like a sidewalk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just. I thought of it. I thought of YouTube as the way some people think about their Instagram.
- [04:49]
Peter Kafka
And these are history tech business expenditures.
- [04:51]
John Coogan
Yes, exactly. I could also tell the story that both of my parents went to art school together and I grew up in Hollywood and I was, I think I Was born in Hollywood or born in la, raised in la. But I don't, I would not say that I always wanted to be in media.
- [05:04]
Peter Kafka
But you, it was around. So you picked up some of the book.
- [05:06]
John Coogan
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I, I definitely had access to film cameras as a kid and had exposed film in a dark room and had some experience with technology. One of my first jobs in high school was filming the football team with a. Before I joined the football team, I was filming the football team for game tape review. So I was a cameraman, essentially. And I get paid, I don't know, 50 bucks or something for the day. And, and so, like, I was familiar with, with video editing, video cameras, and kind of carried that through when I was doing the two startups that were in the consumer package, good space, effectively. We would often shoot video and shoot ad creative, and I was always interested in that side of the business.
- [05:48]
Peter Kafka
So, so it was not an accident that you were on camera.
- [05:51]
John Coogan
Yes, yes.
- [05:53]
Peter Kafka
As a rising star.
- [05:54]
John Coogan
Yes, yes. But it was, it, it was very much not what I put in my yearbook.
- [05:58]
Peter Kafka
Got it. I, I, I said at the top that, you know, people who listen to this podcast, a bunch of are either because they're watching it, or like a bunch of them are really nerding out about sort of how you guys are building this business. And we'll talk about that. It's not a huge show, right? I mean, you do a live stream that gets, what, 10, 20,000 people?
- [06:17]
John Coogan
Yesterday we did y com day. I think 22,000 people. Ch.
- [06:20]
Peter Kafka
Again, not nothing. Yeah, but that's not a. You're not taking down CNBC anytime in the very near future.
- [06:27]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [06:29]
Peter Kafka
The way I would describe you guys is a show for people who know who Josh Kushner is.
- [06:34]
John Coogan
Exactly.
- [06:34]
Peter Kafka
And you sent me a clip the other day of you guys making fun of a caption, I don't know where it ran, of Bob Iger and Adam Silver flanking Josh Kushner and the, the caption IDs who both silver and Iger leaves. I think, I think the idea was Kushner's a nobody. And that was then for you guys, Kushner's everybody.
- [06:53]
John Coogan
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that, that, that, that was the, that was the joke. And our, our audience understands that markets are smaller than retail and public markets. And so I think the audience should be smaller, But I think that it's still a fun show and a wonderful business.
- [07:11]
Peter Kafka
And so the idea is you're having tech VCs, founders on the show, you broadcasting three hours a day, you got a Lot of time to talk. A lot of them. And those folks see their peers on, they want to come on your show. You get a good flywheel effect there.
- [07:28]
John Coogan
Yeah, totally.
- [07:28]
Peter Kafka
And so you don't need to be massive to be influential, is what I'm assuming you're thinking.
- [07:33]
John Coogan
Yes. And I noticed this through, I noticed this through YouTube. If I made a video about a rocket landing. That's a universal language. Anyone can see a rocket landing and say, oh, SpaceX, I want to hear the story of SpaceX. But if I tell you about the history of PayPal, which is also very linked to SpaceX, same person. Right. That will get less views because it is less visual. And so there's always a way to think about the market size, the tam of what you're building towards. And I think at least right now, the opportunity certainly seems to be in staying focused on tech and business and focusing less on geopolitics and politics, broadly national politics, and then also focusing on the private markets, which didn't really have a TV show. I mean, there's certainly no good people doing great stuff.
- [08:29]
Peter Kafka
I've thought a lot about this watching CNBC over the years and sometimes working with them. Is that by definition, definition they kind of have to work with publicly traded companies because that's the premise of the
- [08:38]
John Coogan
network is stocks are moving up and down Deidre Bosa and Tech Check and there's, there's, there's great products in there and honestly, like a lot of times we have CEOs on there. Like I'm running to CNBC next.
- [08:48]
Peter Kafka
Right. But, but as the, but as, I mean, so much of the tech has been private, the big companies in tech for a long time.
- [08:57]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [08:58]
Peter Kafka
So if you're not, if you can't talk about them, it's.
- [09:01]
John Coogan
Yeah, it's a problem.
- [09:02]
Peter Kafka
We haven't neglect, we've. I have neglected to mention your co host.
- [09:05]
John Coogan
Sure. Geor.
- [09:06]
Peter Kafka
Anyways, explain where you guys met.
- [09:08]
John Coogan
We met through a mutual friend mostly because we were both young dads living in Los Angeles and were interested in tech. We'd raised money from both Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. So we had the kind of the same experience in Silicon Valley, but we're living and building families in LA and then looking for what was next. We were both kind of had built two businesses with varying levels of success and were thinking about what was coming up.
- [09:37]
Peter Kafka
And again, was there a debate about, well, let's go build a new company that's not media focused or you know what, we both like being on Camera. Let's do that.
- [09:45]
John Coogan
I think that we both understood the power of media from. And mostly just how it was a fit for us. I'd obviously been doing YouTube for about five years. Jordi had been working on the FBI business side of YouTube for more than five years as an ad sales business. And so those two skill sets really match together. And it just seemed like something that was extremely oversaturated. There's so many podcasts.
- [10:17]
Peter Kafka
Not a shortage of podcasts. Not a shortage of tech podcasts.
- [10:19]
John Coogan
Exactly. And yet. And yet we were struck by the line. Technology needed a podcast. And that was our. That was our first.
- [10:27]
Peter Kafka
But so what was. I mean, like, where. Where did you think the space was? Right. Because it used to be the journalists had podcast, but also VCs had their podcast, and then everything in between.
- [10:35]
John Coogan
So. So I'm obsessed with this idea of white space in media. Where is, where. Where is the product that no one else is building? And so, and we kind of iterated towards this. So the first one was, if I come to you and I say, hey, there's. There's two people who have worked in technology and they're going to start a podcast, you're going to roll your ey. Right. But we introduce it to you, we address that immediately by saying, technology needed a podcast, you're welcome. We gave you a podcast. We know you were asking. Right. So just adding a layer of humor like most many podcasts are not that tremendously fun.
- [11:09]
Peter Kafka
Except for the ones that star comedians, which is a whole other thing. Yeah, but.
- [11:12]
John Coogan
But within tech in business, that was
- [11:14]
Peter Kafka
less Freeman not cracking a lot of jokes.
- [11:16]
John Coogan
Yeah, yeah. And so, and so it's like you have the tech in business show, and then we, and then we saw that there was no one at the time. There weren't that many shows that were too consistent. Host, no guests. So for the first something like we had no guests, and it was just
- [11:31]
Peter Kafka
us two talking, just chopping it up the table.
- [11:33]
John Coogan
Just chopping it up. So we would read the. Whatever was being covered in Bloomberg or the Journal or the Financial Times and cover the big story of the day. React to it. And so my original YouTube channel, I was one of the first people to do video essays for tech and business. Video essays had been a fantastically popular format for video game critiques, film critiques, political analysis, analysis. Johnny Harris, former Vox guy. Right. Yeah. So there's. That format was working. And I was the first person to say, hey, that format, I like that format. No one's really doing that about startups. Let me do that over here. And then eventually other people came in. They did it even better. They twisted it, they did their own thing. Right. And so with tech, there was really no show that I was listening to. There were a few, but there weren't that many. There were just two people just chopping it up. And then also, what's another format that's really popular on. In YouTube, in video gaming, in non tech categories, we have the reaction stream. Yep. The try not to laugh challenge. I don't know if you're familiar with this, but the streamer will sit there and watch TikToks and try not to laugh at funny jokes.
- [12:44]
Peter Kafka
And I figured it out even before you told me.
- [12:46]
John Coogan
Exactly. And, and, and, and the, and the heavy lifting of the comedy is done by the TikTok creator. And then they are interacting with their chat. And so one of our first, like one of our first differentiators was most podcasts will come on and say, we're going to tell you the whole story of this, or we're going to tell you the top three stories in the news and have 20 minute discussions about them. We said, what if we printed out 50 tweets and reacted to them one at a time? And so it was a much crazier, twitchier, like
- [13:18]
Peter Kafka
leading with entertainment. Right. Like you guys, the premise is, right, that you guys have been in the world, right, you started companies, you understand how deals work, but you also also understand that you want to entertain an audience.
- [13:31]
John Coogan
Exactly, exactly. So one of the first tweets that we printed out was a, a post by an anonymous account on X that would not be worthy. Normally I love this account, but would, would not be something that starts a news cycle that gets people talking. But it was a good encapsulation of something that was happening in Silicon Valley, which was that there are two types of deals that are happening in Silicon Valley. One is an Excel round where the venture capitalists get out the Excel and they say, okay, you're making $10 million and next year you're going to make 15. Okay, we will value you at. And then there are Vibe rounds, which are, I like the founder, the numbers don't matter, I gotta get in. What are the other VCs paying? And so this account was just saying it's one or the other and you need to know which camp you're in. And so we printed that out, we talked about it and we said, yeah, this is, I've in our, in our careers. This is a real thing. I've done a Vibe round I've done the Excel round, Excel rounds really hard. And so we joke about it, we talk about it, we give our own experience and. But the key insight was that we, we printed out the tweet, which was unique and different format. And then we, then we took the clip of the video of us reacting to that tweet and we quote, tweeted the original tweet. And so imagine if I, if you have a tweet, yep, you're a big account, you're big person, but you don't get that many quote tweets with videos, right. And so you're going to see it even if you don't know who I am. And so we quote, tweeted this account. They saw it and they were like, wow, this is crazy. These two guys in so suits with 4K cameras just printed out my tweet and talked about it for 10 minutes. This is like way beyond just, oh, someone liked my tweet. Or oh, someone retweeted my tweet. Or someone, oh, someone chimed in the comments. It's like the most extreme version of I love this post. Right. And so we, so we did that for a while and that was sort of, sort of a white space. And then we kind of, you know, found more white spaces. Live, three hours daily. There's just a set of differentiators that puzzled together to create something that was like a little bit. It stand out.
- [15:28]
Peter Kafka
So you alluded to it here, right. But the, the show exists in lots of different formats. There's the live stream, which is the main thing. And actually this is just like a lot of like late night TV right now. A lot of shows. Right. Like, like there's the one unit and then you guys chop it up, distribute it other places. Walk me through financially, how it works. Where are you guys? You've got, you've got some sponsors.
- [15:49]
John Coogan
Yep, exactly.
- [15:49]
Peter Kafka
I'm guessing you're above seven figures at this point.
- [15:52]
John Coogan
Yeah, yeah, that's been reported. We. So our office or our studio is in Hollywood and I was driving home one day and I see the Jimmy Fallon show and they are advertising on the billboard that they got 2 billion impressions last year. And that's across everything, including social. And so I think the key insight is that what people are actually optimizing for in media should not be one specific number like views, because even views are measured differently on different platforms. What really matters matters is total watch time across everything. And so if, if you have an RSS feed with a thousand people that listen to 100% of an hour long show a week, they're giving you four hours a month. But there is an exchange rate between that and someone who gets a bunch of random 30 second TikTok views. And it's easy for people in media to say, oh well, yeah, TikTok views aren't as valuable as, as like, you know, sit or does anyone say that? People say that, yeah, for sure. And it's ridiculous. But that, but the exchange rate is important and I think people haven't fully crystallized what the exchange rate is.
- [17:08]
Peter Kafka
There's. People inherently understand that they're spending time looking at something. If you're looking at one thing, you probably can't look at something else. So people inherently get that.
- [17:17]
John Coogan
Yes.
- [17:18]
Peter Kafka
The media business is a different story.
- [17:19]
John Coogan
Right.
- [17:20]
Peter Kafka
Ad money always trails a long time, right?
- [17:23]
John Coogan
Yes.
- [17:24]
Peter Kafka
The TV business is still 70, 80 billion dollars and you know, it's dying off every minute. Money is still going there because people know to buy there. People finally caught on to buying on YouTube.
- [17:34]
John Coogan
Yep.
- [17:35]
Peter Kafka
I don't think it's, I don't think you're generating any money on TikTok. Right.
- [17:38]
John Coogan
I don't think so. We, we have not prioritized TikTok for the most part.
- [17:44]
Peter Kafka
So where, where do you make your money today?
- [17:46]
John Coogan
So we primarily make our money through significant sponsorships with companies that are kind of deeply aligned with the tech and business private markets. We have, we have a partnership with Figma, who's a public company now, but by and large we're looking at mid to late stage growth startups.
- [18:08]
Peter Kafka
And they're buying what from you? They're buying on air mentions.
- [18:11]
John Coogan
Yes. So we do. Every advertiser gets a host red ad during the stream. They also get inclusion in a ticker at the bottom of the stream. We kind of had this like gonzo, overly styled aesthetic that we built into the stream overlay. And it looks sort of like tv but it doesn't look like a twitch stream.
- [18:37]
Peter Kafka
It looks like CNBC and espn.
- [18:38]
John Coogan
There's a little bit of that. Yeah. And, and, and when we were leaning really into this idea of like we are pro business, what is more pro business than supporting companies that want to advertise? So we leaned really heavily into the idea that advertising is the best business model. It is the greatest business model.
- [18:56]
Peter Kafka
But so, but since you guys, you know, you're doing these, these ads and spots.
- [19:02]
John Coogan
Yes.
- [19:02]
Peter Kafka
In the live stream.
- [19:03]
John Coogan
Yes.
- [19:04]
Peter Kafka
And there's a relatively small audience when it, when it, when you, then when
- [19:06]
John Coogan
we flip it, that gets an order of magnitude more or two orders magnitude
- [19:10]
Peter Kafka
more those ads and those travel with.
- [19:12]
John Coogan
Yes, exactly. So there's a host read ad in every clip and then, and then you
- [19:16]
Peter Kafka
need to figure this out going in or was it pretty obvious that this would be how you guys were going to work?
- [19:21]
John Coogan
We, we treated it all of our partners saw us as entrepreneurs and they saw us. I think most of them took bets on us. And this, this team would continue to innovate and test out things and learn and explore and figure out where the opportunity was to actually make good on those, you know, like make good on those partnerships, essentially. Whether that's doing, I mean, we've, we've brought in customers through, we've done merch and the merch gets impressions and the impressions convert people to, to sign with a contract or sometimes somebody will just through the show come on the show and ask us about something and we'll route them to one of our sponsors. And so it's very hard to measure the impact directly on cpm.
- [20:10]
Peter Kafka
But you're also new and hot and so people want to take a flyer on you as well.
- [20:15]
John Coogan
There's a little bit of that. I think that the numbers are penciling out, though, especially from the early deals. We've grown to where those deals look very, very good.
- [20:26]
Peter Kafka
We'll be right back with John Coogan. But first, a word from a sponsor.
- [20:33]
Experian Advertiser
My dad taught me a lot, including how easy it is to forget to cancel things. So I downloaded Experian, my bff. Big financial friend Experian could help me cancel my unused subscriptions and lower my bills, saving me hundreds a year. Get started with the Experian app today. Your big financial friend friends here to help you save smarter. Results will vary. Not all bills or subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed. $631 a year average savings with one plus negotiations and OnePlus cancellations paid membership with connected payment account required. See experian.com for details.
- [21:01]
Podcast Host (Net Worth and Chill)
Experian this week on Net worth and Chill, we're joined by Zarna Garg and her daughter Zoya for a mother daughter conversation about money, ambition and reinvention. Zarna proved it's never too late to chase your dreams. From practicing law to building a matchmaking business business. To becoming one of comedy's most exciting voices. Her unconventional path has led her to Hulu comedy specials, sold out tours with Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, and her memoir, this American Woman. Meanwhile, Zoya's been watching, learning and carving out her own path as a young professional. Get ready for a hilarious and honest conversation about immigration money Late blooming success and what it really means to build a big authentic life on your own terms. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com YourRichBFF
- [21:48]
Podcast Host (Today, Explained)
in the wake of the release of millions of documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, the rich and famous are finally feeling some pain. But even with corporate resignations here and with former Prince Andrew being arrested in the uk, the question remains. How did Jeffrey Epstein remain a thriving member of the elite for decades when everyone seemed to know what he was up to?
- [22:10]
Podcast Host (Net Worth and Chill)
I don't think you could be friends friends with Jeffrey Epstein, whose MO was obviously having sex with young girls, even as Trump said, on the younger side,
- [22:18]
Podcast Host (Today, Explained)
and not know his MO Untangling the Epstein conspiracy. That's this week on Today, explained every weekday and now on Saturdays.
- [22:35]
Peter Kafka
And we're back. I have a sense of like, what predates you guys in terms of this format and this audience? But you tell me who, who are you modeling after? Who's influential for you either in video or covering tech?
- [22:50]
John Coogan
So I'm not huge into sports, but what Pat McAfee has done is very interesting in taking a podcast, turning it into a three hour live show, I think that keeping it conversational, but still getting to a point where he can do the LeBron versation and does bits sit down, does bits has interaction with, with the chat, does live events. I think there's something interesting there. I don't watch as much, as much TV as I should to get, but it's also, I'm live, so it's hard for me to, to kind of, you know, great artists, people who make TV
- [23:26]
Peter Kafka
are watching the Internet all day to figure out what to talk about.
- [23:28]
John Coogan
So, yeah, so I guess, yeah, the, the, the, the real media influence is like what is happening on ax and can I just turn on the camera while that conversation's happening? And, and so whatever. Like, yeah, the Internet is definitely the guide.
- [23:45]
Peter Kafka
Yeah, I was thinking also about like predecessors, like, like the early tech business blogs like TechCrunch. I'm sure you paid attention to those.
- [23:52]
John Coogan
You're probably, I mean, I read those a ton.
- [23:54]
Peter Kafka
I mean those were usually not started by traditional journalists. They were started by kind of odd people or TechCrunch's case. That's a former, you know, IP lawyer who really. Right, yeah. Mike ARR. Lawyer.
- [24:08]
John Coogan
Interesting.
- [24:08]
Peter Kafka
Yeah. And so, and, and I think a lot of those guys, if, if they had been more successful in their earlier career, would have never started a tech blog. But they sort of showed up there. But the other thing was they were, they were writing for inherently a sort of like in the. No audience that had to be relatively small. But then because that was influential, other folks outside that circle are paying attention.
- [24:30]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [24:30]
Peter Kafka
When that seems like what you guys are. Have cracked a little bit.
- [24:32]
John Coogan
Yeah. Yeah. I think big fan of TechCrunch. Definitely read that when I got to Silicon Valley. Also some of the independent stuff, it's odd because everything that starts out as independent, eventually, if it's good, it scales. Right. And so you could think about the first version of TechCrunch's just. Yeah. Mike Harrington. But Paul Graham's blog, there's a lot of different substacks out there that are interesting. Yeah. It's hard because the information diet is so diverse now that I'm not as much of a student as I guess I should be. You know who the real influence is, is Johnny Carson. I'm not, not from that era. I watched a lot of Carson, but I've read biographies and I feel like what Carson got right was that if you pour 100% into the content, into the show.
- [25:31]
Peter Kafka
Show.
- [25:32]
John Coogan
And there's this anecdote about him. He wore suits on the show every night. And his business manager comes to him and says, we should start a suit company. Says, that sounds great. I'll wear the suits on the show. I'll say, hey, go buy Carson's suits. I think that was his name. Turned out he was getting completely roasted on the deal. He had no equity. He was doing 100% of the promotion. And this just happened again and again because he was not very business minded. But he poured so much into making the show great every night for, for decades that eventually he wound up getting ownership of the show and one of the greatest deals in TV and media history. And so there's something about just like be a hundred percent in on the media and focus just on your show.
- [26:15]
Peter Kafka
And this is what you guys want to do. You don't want to raise a fund.
- [26:18]
John Coogan
Exactly. No fund. No spin out businesses.
- [26:21]
Peter Kafka
No.
- [26:22]
John Coogan
No talent management. So there's a lot of folks in the industry that have said, okay, great, I have one thing. Let me get someone else to do the thing that I'm doing.
- [26:32]
Peter Kafka
That was my next question. Right. Or build a network.
- [26:34]
John Coogan
Yes, right.
- [26:35]
Peter Kafka
Which makes a ton of sense.
- [26:36]
John Coogan
And network's literally what the N stands for. But it's a joke. We're building a show. And so if you're comping us to cnbc, I think it's like, well, that's very nice. But the, the, the interesting thing Is that I, I, I truly believe that the value is in the shows and the, and the networks are the social networks. Yeah, there's a ton of value in Spotify, there's a ton of value in YouTube, ton of value in Twitch X and Facebook and Instagram and, and so. And then there's a ton. But it's hard to be in the middle.
- [27:08]
Peter Kafka
Have you guys thought about. And again, you're early, right?
- [27:10]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [27:10]
Peter Kafka
It's a year you've been doing this. Have you thought about if this keeps going and we grow, you know, are we going to be the face of it the whole time? Do you want to bring other talent on? Do you want to, you know, again, I mean, you're not going to age out anytime soon. But do you think about or just literally like, well, if we're doing these three hour shows five days a week, yeah, we can't do other stuff. Can we figure out how to expand the roster so we can do other stuff? We can lessen the load. Yeah.
- [27:36]
John Coogan
I mean, we've. Private markets are interesting. There are folks in. For a long time, the barrier to creating a media product was so low that there was. Everyone wanted a blog. Everyone set up a Twitter, which was great. And then pretty quickly it was like, everyone's setting up a podcast too. There are great people who are regular guests of ours who, they don't really need their own show, but they should be, they should have a voice and they should be a regular. And so when we build out our suite of regular guests, that really helps sort of like fill out the content.
- [28:15]
Peter Kafka
Johnny Carson would have guestos.
- [28:17]
John Coogan
Exactly. But at the same time, it's only three hours a day. Like, it's not like people are like, how do you do it? And I'm like, if I told you, you had to, I would pay you to sit in a chair and talk to people for three hours every day.
- [28:32]
Peter Kafka
And you guys are loose, Right. There's a lot of like, hey, I think this is what's going on. And then Jordy will say, no, that's not what they said in the press release. It's the opposite of that.
- [28:39]
John Coogan
Yeah, totally, totally, totally. We're reacting to the chat and we're reacting to the timeline and we're calling people and sometimes the story will develop. And by the end of the show, we've talked to more people about what's going on.
- [28:53]
Peter Kafka
You're YouTube native.
- [28:54]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [28:55]
Peter Kafka
Beyond you. And that's sort of the core of the, the business is beyond YouTube. What's, what's the most Important platform for, for you?
- [29:02]
John Coogan
Well X is actually the most important platform I'd say then, then YouTube.
- [29:07]
Peter Kafka
So even in the Elon era where it has lost a lot of the people who used to be there, it
- [29:15]
John Coogan
is still, it is still the place where the private markets gather and it's been very sticky in AI research. It's where like a lot of the AI Research labs Foundation model labs like look to for responses how things are going like companies do care about X. Although I agree with you it is, it is smaller in some ways. Although I saw some data point yesterday. The app's doing really well or something. Hired this new guy, Nikita Beer. Seems like it's climbing.
- [29:43]
Peter Kafka
Depends what day you ask Elon or whether he's. I guess he's still suing Apple as.
- [29:48]
John Coogan
Yeah, yeah, very funny story. But yeah, apparently doing well in the, in the App Store rankings. But there has been, there's been a very large community specifically for startups, specifically for private markets investors on X and that continues to be there. That group and the AI group hasn't fully replatformed anywhere else. Now there are other valuable audiences that aren't on X and they're on YouTube and they stayed on YouTube and we want to reach them on YouTube. Same thing with LinkedIn and then on Instagram and some of the other platforms. I think there's, there's just a matter of like everyone is there. They're not having a conversation about tech.
- [30:33]
Peter Kafka
Right. Everyone in tech has an Instagram account. They're not invested in it the way they are LinkedIn or.
- [30:39]
John Coogan
Exactly. And so they might be, they might, their, their personal brand on X might be about their business and then they might be using l may be using Instagram as more of like here's my family and how do you think about
- [30:52]
Peter Kafka
when you're, when you're booking. Right. Because there's some VCs that are, you know, Gary Tan is. Right. A big. To anyone who knows who Gary Tan is, most people don't know who Gary Tan is. Right. On the other hand, if you're scrolling through Instagram you might recognize Mark and Mark Cuban. You might not know who Alex Carp is, but he's a weird looking guy. What's going on? How do you think about sort of like inside, outside in terms of booking and, and, and sort of what your audience, your existing audience wants versus what your future audience might want.
- [31:23]
John Coogan
Yeah. I think almost entirely focused on that insider core community and then let the, let the downstream algorithms send stuff off into other parts of the Internet and other sub Communities. I'll give you an example. So when we interviewed Dr. Karp from Palantir CEO, that is an interview that most people in. In, even though it's a public company, lots of people in tech and business, in the private markets really are interested in what he has to say. They find him entertaining and they find what. His insight is important to the private markets because he's kind of setting the tone for how the AI narrative is perceived in the public markets.
- [32:07]
Peter Kafka
Right.
- [32:08]
John Coogan
And so people on X reacted to that and the, and the play by play of him interacting. The Palantir versus Salesforce battle, that's emerging. Right. And they watched the full thing. Then during the, during the interview, he addressed advice for young people. He addressed how CFOs should be thinking about gross margins in enterprise AI deployments. Can you imagine where one of those clips might do better? Can you imagine? Right. So the advice for young people that might go out on TikTok or YouTube,
- [32:46]
Peter Kafka
will you guys literally sit through and say this clip should get pushed there? Or do you just send them all out and just let the.
- [32:52]
John Coogan
A little, a little bit of both. But we, we do have an in house team full time that is focused on exactly that.
- [32:57]
Peter Kafka
I met one of your guys at a, at a fancy party that you guys did with Emily. Oh, you were there? Yeah.
- [33:03]
John Coogan
Amazing. I didn't.
- [33:05]
Peter Kafka
Well, your guy was the one guy there with a mullet.
- [33:07]
John Coogan
Oh, that's very funny. Yes. He runs our Instagram. Yeah. And so figuring out where things fit. So if you look at the Wall Street Journal, you'll see the front page is usually geopolitics. Then the business and finance section is everything from what's going on in open. Very cool. To our audience to what's going on in the oil and gas markets. Less important, but still interesting. We might talk about it if it's a cool deal. The demerger of craft is interesting at a certain level, but it's maybe not front page news for us, but it may be front page news for the Journal. And then they also have the Mansion section. And so if we're talking about, you know, some massive mega mansion that just sold that might do really well on Instagram and that might be clipped up there. And so there's a variety of content. It can kind of just like flow through the river. Drivers of the Internet and real estate
- [33:59]
Peter Kafka
porn does well everywhere. I think everyone wants to see a rich person's house.
- [34:03]
John Coogan
No, it doesn't do well in X. No, no, it doesn't do well there. People are too Nerdy. They love AI research and benchmarks at least in our community. Yeah, I mean I'm sure there, there might be just like basketball Twitter still exists even though like I don't see it. It probably still exists.
- [34:18]
Peter Kafka
Fair enough.
- [34:19]
John Coogan
And I imagine the death of X is like you know, some communities left but I don't know if basketball Twitter
- [34:24]
Peter Kafka
you got guys took. You took an oversaturated market and said we're going to just wedge our way in and we have particular skill set Y if I said great replicate this but do it for gardening or 100%
- [34:37]
John Coogan
possible and it's happening right now.
- [34:39]
Peter Kafka
Yeah, you do it right. You. Oh no, there's someone else can crack this. What are, what are sort of the basic tools you need to be able to sort of break through what is already a saturated market.
- [34:50]
John Coogan
I'll quote Marquez Brownlee, the fantastic YouTuber. Everyone should go watch his iPhone review which are highly topical right now. He said make sure you love the content. If you're going to be. Because he's been a tech reviewer for is it forever 20 years now or something. It's, it's since the beginning of YouTube basically. And, and it's like you're going to do this forever and you're going to do this if you're, if you like you cannot have a passing interest in the topic you're talking about. So you know, live streaming clearly huge in video gaming clearly huge in in politics starting to grow in business and tech and private markets. You could think about TV as an instantiation of that in the public markets but sports has done well here. So yes, I think it can be incredibly niche. I think you mentioned gardening. That sounds actually like a pretty big niche to me. But I think people would watch that just like HGTV exists. I would imagine that there's someone out there but the key thing is that that they pro to be really successful they probably have to make it their full full time thing and they can't be like well really I'm a fertilizer sales business and I'm also have a fund that does real estate investing and I'm in my free time I'm going to do five hours of live streaming a day.
- [36:06]
Peter Kafka
Like you guys are going. The reason you're here in studio is the Klarna IPO we are there starts today and you're going to go there and you couldn't really fake talking to Klarna's VCs and and CEO CEO about their business and why it' interesting if you weren't Interested in it.
- [36:22]
John Coogan
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It would be. It's not, it's not even just that. It's just the time. Like, if you. I don't know how you could be successful if you were.
- [36:34]
Peter Kafka
Yeah.
- [36:35]
John Coogan
I mean, it's just so many hours.
- [36:36]
Peter Kafka
Like, what's, what's, what's on next year's list. You've been. Been at this a year. You want to get bigger, better, bolder. What do you want to do?
- [36:43]
John Coogan
That's a good question. Next year. You know, we've been focused so much on this year's goals. Doing, getting those. Getting those bigger name CEO' that still draw attention in the private markets but are a little bit harder to get. I think next year will really be about solidifying. We've run a ton of tests. We've done shows with no guests. We've done shows in person. We've done shows live from New York, from the stock exchange, and the cadence and the flow and when to expect us to do things. A lot of opportunities come our way. We tried to say yes to as many things as possible if they're, you know, made sense. But actually understanding what is our cadence, how do we cover, what are we covering and how, at what level do, like Marquez Brownlee needs to go to Cupertino to review the iPhone. Right. Like his audience expects that. I don't know that our audience expects us to be at.
- [37:37]
Peter Kafka
I mean, you're making this thing in L. A. Right? Like, if you, like, there's a. There's an argument. No, no. Obviously this needs to be in San Francisco or the Bay Area. Right. Because that's where your core audience is.
- [37:46]
John Coogan
Yep. But I think the. I think it makes sense if you're heavily in person, guest driven. We are heavily in person, but not in person guest driven.
- [37:59]
Peter Kafka
The two of you have to be in the same place.
- [38:01]
John Coogan
Exactly. The two of us need to be very consistent in the same place. Building out the studio, having fun in the studio, making our own show with its own look and feel. But part of the show is supposed to be hypertopical. So I was writing this, I was like, what if we had a studio on Market street in San Francisco and News breaks at 9am we're going live at 11. Can we actually get a big CEO to come up from Menlo Park? No. Like, probably not.
- [38:33]
Peter Kafka
They're going to zoom in with you anyway.
- [38:35]
John Coogan
They're going to zoom in with us anyway. And so I think that, like having the opportunistic call ins, having really strong relationships there so that we can get interesting people to comment on interesting things at the right time. Some of these things are predictable. And that's what I've like to do for next year, is, is. Is be thinking like three quarters out. Okay, well, this earnings call is going to happen. This announcement's gonna happen. Okay, who are we inviting? When are we coming out? Like, all that stuff is.
- [39:00]
Peter Kafka
P.S. your advertisers want that schedule for me too.
- [39:02]
John Coogan
Of course, of course. And. And we have, we have like 90% of that lined up, but it can be a lot more solid. And so I think that will be the. The theme of next year.
- [39:13]
Peter Kafka
John Coogan. This is a fun story, A fun story to watch. Thanks for coming in.
- [39:16]
John Coogan
Thanks so much for having me.
- [39:18]
Peter Kafka
Thanks again to John Coogan for coming into the studio. Thanks to Charlotte Silver for producing editing the show. Thanks to our sponsors who bring this show to you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. If all goes well, we'll have a second episode of this show this week. Stay tuned. See you soon.