Hi everybody. We are back and we are joined by the brains behind TBPN. It has been described many, many ways. The Free Press referred to it as the most influential talk show you've never heard of. I've heard the CNBC of tech. I've heard the Meet the Press of Silicon Valley. Like, what do you make of those comparisons?
We try not to compare ourselves to anyone. Yeah, I think one comparison that we've found somewhat more relevant has been the Pat McAfee show for tech, because ESPN very much exists, but the Pat McAfee show started as a podcast, eventually became three hours of live stream, sort of in our slot too, more casual. He's commenting on sports, sports or commenting, and he has a lot of journalists join to give the scoop on what trade is happening in the NBA or the analyst joins from ESPN, but he's more of a commentator and he's grown a community on his show of commentators. So, that feels a little bit more accurate, but they're all reasonable.
And I guess another question for you is like, what made you think there was an opening for something like this given the evolving media landscape? Like where did you see the white space?
There were a lot of tech podcasts on the charts. You can see that when you pull them up, there weren't that many that were run by full-time people, like full-time creators. There were a lot of folks who... Yes. Lots of people that had fun.
Thousands of VC podcasts. So you guys, right?
Yeah. Well, so I think what allowed TBPN to break out early and allow us to be here, I guess like 12 months into starting, was that in tech specifically, at least the world of tech insiders, there was, if you were starting a podcast, it was one format. It was a weekly interview show where you'd have one guest on. And so everybody that started a podcast would just start that exact show, that format. I think we realized that like in media the product is the format, and so by introducing a new format you're introducing a new product. And people were listening to more podcasts than ever, but everyone just kept launching the same exact format. And so by launching a new format, which was originally just John and I talking about a printed-out stack of posts, we were able to quickly kind of break through the noise.
And now the format is live Monday through Friday, three hours, 15-minute interviews. Very smart brevity style, if you will. 15-minute interviews. But what really breaks through from what I've seen is the clips. The way you're able to clip these conversations.
We actually do flex on the length of interview a ton. We'll have people on for an hour. We'll have people on for five minutes.
Is that based on the conversation and the flow? Is it worked out ahead of time?
Yeah, a lot of it we do have a lot of flexibility because we don't have traditional commercial breaks. All the ads are host-read as necessary. Sometimes they'll be read in the middle of a conversation with someone if the time calls for it, but a lot of times if something's going really well and we're having a great conversation, we can just continue. And people fortunately come on the show, they know, they hang out in our waiting room and they know that they might be on in five minutes, ten minutes. They might, they're okay getting pushed back a little bit.
Well, and you have fun with it. I've seen you glue somebody in from a waiting room before another guest leaves. They get to banter together.
So, you're creating, it's almost like you're creating this insidery feel. Do you ever get concerned that it's too inside baseball? Is that the goal?
I think we've been okay from the very beginning of like defining a niche and not going for scale. I think people, everybody that comes on our show for the most part wants to create or invest in the next billion-dollar company and there's somebody that they're trying to disrupt. They're trying to revolutionize an industry and we actually are very much the opposite of that. Like we just enjoy talking about tech and business. Like we're like pure enthusiasts for the stuff that we talk about. And so being insider just means that it's the conversations that we enjoy having. And because we have to show up every day and make the show, we are the entrepreneur but also the talent. We don't, if we started having conversations that weren't interesting to us, we'd just burn out. Yeah.
Because it's three hours every single day.
It's actually more like four hours. Oftentimes we get kind of carried away.
Well, so you were telling me a story earlier because I was thinking through like, oh, you're commenting live in real time. I asked you how many corrections do you have to issue? And you said actually sometimes the corrections come to you in real time. Can you tell that story?
Oh yeah, this was a great one. So I had interned at a startup back when I was a child basically, around the dot-com era. Sure. And I was telling a story of this particular company. They burned a lot of money. I got the story sort of wrong. And the founder of the company was in the chat, now 20 years older, and said, 'You got the story wrong. And that's not what happened. I demand a rebuttal.' We send him the Zoom link. He jumps on the show and actually corrects the whole record for us. We have like a 40, we have a 45-minute conversation with him. It's fantastic.
I wonder what his comms person was thinking.
I don't think he has one. But he's very much past all of that.
Well, so I guess that's my other question for you is like given how free-flowing it is, given how casual it is, we have seen some executives come on your show and say some like pretty crazy stuff. Karp, I think, takes the prize for that one. I was going to say Palmer Luckey, but... Anyways, I was thinking Alex Karp. There's a lot of... We're listing a lot of them, right? So for the communicators in the room who are thinking about risk and opportunity, like what is the benefit to opening their CEO up to a conversation that maybe might veer off?
I think it's very founder-driven. We've never tried to set up one of those moments. And we actually feel very uncomfortable oftentimes. And I think you'd be surprised at how many founders that have sort of adopted like a going-direct approach that are actually like seeking controversy because they thrive on attention and so they're purposely creating those moments.
And you, I mean, have you gotten backlash for that? For not pushing back, for not saying that's outlandish? Like I feel like I have seen some critiques of the fact that you don't ask quote-unquote hard questions. Like how do you respond to that?
I think the people that are actually a part of our recurring audience would not share that critique. I think where we typically get that is like if we have Vlad on from Robinhood and we don't ask him about GameStop, and from our point of view like that's a four-ish-year-old story. He's like rehashed that a million times. And so to us, that's not a hard question. I think other people might say we don't try to do gotchas around politics and we've like very much avoided political content and continue to. And so there's a lot of people that want us to ask political questions and we just don't. And so yeah, I would say that it's just, what is a hard question? Like we will push people on their margins. Like that's a more interesting thing to push somebody on than like, are you spending more on AWS? If he's going to buy Google's TPU chip, that's a hard question, but it doesn't read like a hard question.
Well, it doesn't break through as a headline.
Exactly. Exactly. But I do think in a year or two that moment will be very important and very relevant. Exactly. Exactly. And this has already played out like many, many times where we've talked to CEOs about some niche in their technology stack, a relationship. Oh, are you going to be doing a deal with Intel or are you going to be doing a deal with Apple? And they kind of brush it off and they don't really, they get squirrely and they're like, I don't want to talk about that. And then it comes back, oh, they did do it. We got it right.
So you've got that clip. And that's fun. I want to zoom in on your audience because it does seem like a lot of the conversation is focused on what the audience wants, what the audience expects. What can you share about the audience that you reach and how many people do you...
Well, so the audience is like very reflective of the guests that we have on. And I would say like we're constantly getting during the show getting texts from people that have been on the show adding to the show, adding commentary. So like I would say it's very circular in that regard. We've always looked at it since the very beginning, which is that there's like, there's 200,000 people in the world that we are focused on making content for. Now, many millions more people will see the content every year, and that's great, but it's really that 200,000 people that are technology operators, founders, investors. We're specifically interested in technology, business, and also we lean heavy on the private markets, and it's just harder to draw a broad audience for a private market company because the viewer can't participate by buying the stock. And so if you talk about public market tickers, then people can say, okay, I'm going to buy the stock, I'm going to participate.
Well, yes, but you guys had a partnership that you announced today with the New York Stock Exchange.
Yes, we're definitely excited about covering more public companies, but right now we've been very private market.
But that's where it's headed, more public.
