BUILD NICHE

“The first 50 episodes had no guests. It was just about them too. And then they even when they went live and started having guests, the first 90 was always just John and Jordy talking. I think this is something I'm noticing in the world of podcasting, the world of content is that it is no longer at all a competitive advantage to book guests on a show. Like, almost any like, not anybody, but so many creators can book guests on a show.”

“sometimes people who are, you know, naturally multi talented, multifaceted, they think that they can make content about 10 things. And I try and say to them, how about three things that are all united by this one common theme?”

“Because everyone can make anything now, like, your software is probably not unique and can be re recreated. Everything about the next era of business is story. It's all narrative and positioning. And so every company needs help with narrative and positioning. Again, back to the anthropic job offerings, like, they're they're hiring a ton of storytellers right now. They need storytellers.”

“the most shocking thing that happened when I left the BBC was how the BBC disappeared. So I I went from just, you know, being totally surrounded by it. Because, obviously, when you're an employee there, you're getting all these newsletters. You'll you'll you'll you'll seeing your mates there. You're hearing about all these things. You're seeing all these things. And then I left, and all of a sudden, I stopped seeing the BBC anywhere.”

“What makes a good presenter? It's pretty boring answer, I think, but it's that some that someone is themselves. I don't think people need to sort of act like someone else or try and do something they've seen on TV. It's about just being them.”

“I think there's another reason, though, that live is taking off. What is it? It? It's that we don't wanna give you our full attention. We don't wanna have to give you our full attention. And live content does not ask for that. You can chime in. It plays in the background. You can still be on your phone if you're watching on your TV or your computer. I don't have to watch everything that happens for me to understand it.”

“There was an article that I came across on Twitter that I think we should talk about, which was about the fact that views are dead and virality is dead. And the alternative to virality is what he calls niche maxing, which is essentially what TPBN did. They went, here is a very small audience that we're gonna own. And they said it on our show. They said, our cap is 200,000 tech employees and people interested in in technology and business. If we ever have 10,000,000 subscribers, we did something wrong.”

“This version of I'm a company that needs better marketing and storytelling. Let me just grab a creator and pull them in house. That is that is, I think, going to be a growing trend. It's happened before. HubSpot bought the newsletter company, The Hustle. HubSpot also bought the podcast starter story. It's like, if you reach my customer, then I want this media product. But I think what hasn't happened yet as much is you have a show. Great. But you're also just a great storyteller, so come in and be my marketing department.”

“We all know too much now. Everybody knows what the upload button can do. You can become a millionaire, even a billionaire. You can become famous and your life can change overnight. The heaviness of that knowledge has changed what people create. When you're aware of the outcome, you optimize it. You don't share your craft. You share your well thought out product. The thing you make becomes strategic, not honest. And that's why so much of what we see online feels the same.”

“journalism is something that you do. It's not really something that you are. And so, happily, lots of people can can do quality journalism. If someone choose to define themselves that way, it probably means that they're making a statement to the world that they are either, you know, holding power to account some description or investigating something or are published or are connected with legacy media.”

“Scott Galloway did this analysis of their media output and showed that, yes, the live is being viewed by seven to 10,000 people in a session over the three hours they're live every day, but the clips have an average viewership of 200,000 views. And these are clips of them talking to Mark Zuckerberg, them talking to Mark Cuban. They talk to Travis Kalanick from from Uber. So these are very notable people in tech that go out, and the clips end up generating the traction in the audience.”

“I am almost allergic to a, like, really well edited video right now. I, like, can't I don't want it. I I just wanna see something real. The first one, I think, is the messiness of live. I actually think the messiness and the real time nature of live is so much more exciting to watch as an audience right now. I actually kind of wanna see you stumble a little bit. I wanna see you think. I wanna see some of the pauses. I want the realness because we're in a world of hyper produced, of really slick AI generated content of great graphics. Like, this is the antithesis.”

“I do loads of projects I don't get paid for at all. You know, I do pro bono stuff and God, I would never I would never be able to do pro bono stuff if I had stayed as a staff journalist. The highly paid thing I get to do here helps me do the less paid thing here.”

“I do generally think that, like, content creators have a ton of opportunities in The US because you're at least five years ahead in The US compared to The UK. I would love someone to explain or even speculate why The UK we are actually like really quite backwards when it comes to video adoption as a market in terms of how we consume content. A lot of markets around the world are way ahead of us in video consumption.”

“if you're relying on the organization you work for to be responsible for your sort of entire video presence on the Internet. I worry about, in reality, what kind of connection and community, if any, you're gonna build with people that is, like, direct between you and them rather than this really tangential link like, oh, you're that person who works at this place. What happens if that newsroom makes you redundant? What happens if that newsroom has to stop operating? you you're what are you gonna have that's yours?”

“Then Sam Altman in an Axios interview said, these guys are genius marketers, and we could use better marketing. That to me is, like, the most simple form of why this deal happened is that Sam Ullman quote.”

“He started out in, like, a pretty minimal cool set just performing by himself. And then in the middle of the set, pulled up a stool to a laptop, went on YouTube, and started pulling up his old YouTube videos and singing along to them. And then after he was singing along to them, he also just started pulling up cool YouTube videos. It was Incredibly intimate and in front of a 150,000 people. And the camera that they had was a super wide camera sitting basically on his laptop. So you are essentially in between him and his screen.”

“They will either think that, oh, well, people who do this kind of thing are just like people trying to sell you stuff. Or they will say, oh, we can't make this because it's not polished enough. And, you know, the stuff that we make has to be really polished. And it's very worrying when I'm being told things like that by by people with with power in newsrooms because they're wrong. And if they'd spent any time on social media, they they wouldn't have they wouldn't have those views.”

“I assume that some people had a sort of great fear of cringe. and, you know, yes, there were survey respondents who said that, but it was by no means near the top. Something else. Oh, yeah. That their that their, bosses wouldn't let them do it. And, you know, you can predict why I thought that would be a problem. But it turns out for most people, their bosses are very encouraging for them amplifying their work on social media.”