Reed Duchscher: Inside Feastables, Night Media and Niche Creator Businesses

Episode 475: Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) and Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) talk to CEO of Night Media & Mr. Beast’s Manager — Reed Duchscher (https://twitter.com/Reedjd) — about his agency, his favorite creator businesses, why he chose to go up against Hershey’s with Feastables, and more. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. Check Out Shaan's Stuff: * Try Shepherd * Shaan's Personal Assistant System * Power Writing Course * Daily Newsletter Check Out Sam's Stuff: * Hampton * Ideation Bootcamp * Copy That ----- Show Notes: (03:45) - Are Talent Management Agencies Good or Bad Businesses? (12:00) - Night Media’s Org Structure (23:35) - How Kick is Overtaking Twitch (26:00) - How Reed Finds CEOs for Creator Businesses (like Feastables) (28:50) - Why Creator Businesses are Challenging (29:50) - How Logan Paul & KSI started Prime (35:00) - Why Reed & Mr. Beast Believe Feastables is a Massive Opportunity (41:00) - How Does Feastables Play Out? (48:30) - Reed’s Favorite Creator Businesses (Mainstream + Niche) (1:02:50) - Reed's Thoughts on Twitter vs. Threads (1:08:30) - Would Reed Sell Night Media? ------ Links: * Producer Ben Twitter - https://twitter.com/BenWilsonTweets * How to Take Over the World - https://open.spotify.com/show/1gqvQ7h7BxNSVoQVTnwihr * Ithaca Holdings - https://hybecorp.com/eng/news/news/189?companyCode=ALL&page=0 * Night Media - https://www.night.co/ * Kick - https://kick.com/ * Prime - https://drinkprime.com/ * Rare Candy - https://rarecandy.com/ * Chamberlain Coffee - https://chamberlaincoffee.com * Dhar Mann - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_hK9fOxyy_TM8FJGXIyG8Q * Ryan Hall Y’all - https://www.youtube.com/@RyanHallYall * Millennial Farmer - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp0rRUsMDlJ1meYAQ6_37Dw * Cole The Cornstar - https://www.youtube.com/c/ColeTheCornstar * Blake Robbins - https://twitter.com/blakeir * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  We'll bleep out every mention because this is the zero clout podcast. Zero clout chasing podcast and we have a no clout policy. We did not, we did not want to do that.

• 0:12Ben?

  Wait, but do we have to use his face on a thumbnail?

• 0:14Shaan Puri?

  No, we're gonna blur it out.

• 0:16Ben?

  I think we have to put like his face and then Reed's face next to it and blur out Reed's face and the thumbnail is like the man behind the scenes or something ridiculous.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel.

• 0:34Shaan Puri?

  All right, what's up? We got Reed from Night Media. He's famous for managing a bunch of awesome YouTubers, including one huge YouTuber, probably the biggest YouTuber in the world, but you know what? Every interview is just people asking him about this other guy. I find that to be a little distasteful, a little, a little disrespectful and, and very much clout chasy. And I just, you know, me and Sam, we were texting this morning and we just said, you know what? He's coming on today. We're not saying, you can bleep that out. We're not saying that name. You know, let's just have a good conversation with this guy and not chase the clout, which is very hard. It's very hard to do because you know, you get those clicks when you do it, but we're not going to do it.

• 1:17Shaan Puri?

  So that's this episode. We're gonna talk to him about his agency. Different creator businesses. So how creators are building these like often multi hundred million dollar businesses, like Logan Paul's Prime and other businesses like that. So good, good conversation there. But we also have a second announcement. And the second announcement is that it is Producer Ben's last day. Last day producing an episode. This is it. This is your, your Michael Jordan shot against the Jazz. Will there be a Wizards comeback? I don't know. But this might be your walk off. All right, here's the rules. You can't say anything about next chapter or adventure. I don't want to hear that. And you can't generically say you learned so much.

• 2:02Shaan Puri?

  If you say you learned so much, you better tell us exactly what you learned. All right, those are the rules for this speech.

• 2:07Ben?

  Okay, great. So the next, the next thing for me is basically focusing on how to take over the world. Getting the podcast as, as big as possible. Speaking of like things I learned when I was here, I think.

• 2:20Ben?

  People talk a lot about focus, right? And focus is maybe easier when things are not going well, because if focus is about saying no, the world is like saying no to you. But when things start going well, all of a sudden, the world is like saying yes to you. You have all these opportunities, right? And so that was, I think, one of the things that happened to me early on. When I came on my first million, all these people were like, oh, Ben Wilson, the new hot thing. Do you want to try this? Do you want to do this? What about YouTube? We should make some shorts. You want to do TikToks? And I was like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I want to do like all these things, right? And so I had all these kind of half finished projects that ended up not going anywhere because those maybe a little too dispersed in my attention. So now it's like, no, no, no, just let's get the podcast to be one of the best podcasts in the world. That's all I'm focusing on for the next year.

• 3:05Ben?

  And then we'll see what happens after that.

• 3:08Shaan Puri?

  There's nothing better quitting your job when you have twins, let alone even one baby. What kind of responsible Mormon are you? What kind of decision was this reckless at best?

• 3:21Ben?

  Well, I mean, it's, it's not like I'm starting from zero, right? It's not like I have an idea for a podcast. Luckily, you guys have put me in a position where the podcast is doing pretty well right now. So even if I have a bad year and it doesn't grow that much, I'll be fine. And if it goes really well, then things will be great. So it's a little bit of a risk, but not an existential risk.

• 3:43Shaan Puri?

  And do you have, I don't know, a message to the fans? What do you, how do you want to leave us here? Where do you want to go with this?

• 3:49Ben?

  So obviously, the first message is go follow How to Take Over the World wherever you get your podcasts. You'll love it. I guess the most important thing is thank you guys. My life changed a year and a half ago when, when you guys brought me on the show. And I called it the ride of a lifetime, but really like, I didn't know if I would be able to make a living as a creator before. You guys brought me on here. Now, now I know that I can do that, at least in some capacity. And so my life has completely changed. So, so thank you. This has been amazing and I've loved doing it. And to everyone who has like, supported me, been such a fan, cheered for me on the podcast, like, thank you to you guys, to you listeners as well. It's meant a ton and I've loved it. So I guess that's the last thing. I'm just very, very grateful for this opportunity I've had.

• 4:35Sam Parr?

  The reason I didn't like, celebrate you leaving, because I'm like, you're not really going anywhere. You'll be around. You're just gonna be unemployed for a little while and hopefully it works out. But I'm sure it will be and I'm happy you kind of came in our lives. It's fun having you around. We're hiring for a producer, by the way.

• 4:54Shaan Puri?

  We, we sort of need a producer now.

• 4:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So we're, we're using one of Sean's Filipino assistants for a little while, but I don't know if that's gonna work out.

• 5:07Shaan Puri?

  My mom is trying to download Audacity this morning, so we'll see what we can do.

• 5:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So, we need a producer. But yeah, Ben, we love you and thank you for everything you did. You, you were mostly decent at a handful of things.

• 5:26Shaan Puri?

  It's like, this was the ride of a year and a half, I gotta tell you.

• 5:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 5:32Sam Parr?

  It was a leisure walk, but it was fine enough. No, Ben, you're amazing. I, I still listen to all the pods. So that's how I know that it's a good podcast.

• 5:41Shaan Puri?

  I'm glad you're doing this because we need more episodes. Like, if you go, I've listened to all the episodes. I just need more episodes. So this is good. I'm glad you're doing this. Thank you so much for everything that you've done. You've brought a lot of, I don't know, good support and good energy to, to what we do. We make it very easy for me and Sam because we just get to show up, perform, and then not think about it after. Like, as soon as we hit done, me and Sam don't really have to think about anything. And that's because of you and a bunch of other people behind the scenes. And so, thanks for everything you've done, man. And we will all go in solidarity, the gentleman's agreement today. You don't subscribe to us. You go subscribe to How to Take Over the World. Fantastic podcast. Basically talks about, I don't know, great conquerors and people who achieved greatness and great things.

• 6:26Shaan Puri?

  Ben goes and reads like, 50 books and then just summarizes it into one awesome podcast story, one hour. So you don't have to go read all those books and you get the story from him. So it's amazing, amazing pod. Go, go subscribe.

• 6:38Sam Parr?

  Thanks, Ben. Talk soon.

• 6:41Sam Parr?

  We're live now. I would read, I went and listened to a bunch of your interviews. I did the, I forget the guy's name. I like him a lot. The financial YouTuber in Vegas. And then I

• 6:50Speaker 04

  watched Graham Stephan.

• 6:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah, Graham Stephan. And then I watched Samir and Colin and then a few others that you did, including your channel. And I was like, Sean, what if we just don't say the word

• 7:02Sam Parr?

  the whole time? Because he's great. But I know I I've learned, I've learned a bit about it. Which is let's just not mention it once.

• 7:10Shaan Puri?

  It's a bad business decision. Not going to get the views, not going to get the clicks, you're not going to get all that stuff. But I don't really care. In fact, actually, it's a great business decision to not be chasing the algorithm. So I say, we just talk about whatever was actually, whatever's actually interesting. I think it might be no bleep. So yeah, I think we might be able to go the whole episode without it. Let's try.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  It's only up to you guys. The Colin, the Colin and Samir videos like took off. I think we we'd expected it to do well. I don't think I expected it to get whatever it's on 4.7 million views. But yeah.

• 7:47Shaan Puri?

  You're like, who's counting? As accurate as of today, but who's counting?

• 7:51Speaker 04

  Is it accurate?

• 7:53Shaan Puri?

  That's pretty much the exact number.

• 7:56Sam Parr?

  How do you, how do you describe yourself? You're the founder of Knight Media, but Knight Media has a studio division. You have Knight Capital, I believe. You have, I mean, Knight Media in itself, it's fairly simple. It's just like an endeavor or one of these other agencies, but it's a different genre. But how do you, how do you kind of like describe what you do?

• 8:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, we've, we've started to call ourselves a creator holding company. So we, at the center of the business, we represent talent, and that's been consistent since I started the business in 2015. But we built out these other verticals now, which you mentioned. We have a venture studio, which has created things like Feastables. We have a studio, which is like making shows on streaming services. We have a venture capital fund, which is called Knight Ventures, it's $20 million fund. And then we announce Knight Capital, which is $100 million growth vehicle. So for us, it's like a platformized creator holding company. And yeah, it's, I think early on, it was much It's easier to just say I'm a talent manager. Now it's it's a little more confusing when I'm like, you know, I can be entrepreneurial. I can be an investor. I'm also talent manager. So I kind of play in a lot of different spaces.

• 9:00Shaan Puri?

  I think it's great because talent manager seems to be a horrible business from what I could tell. I I've met a few talent managers and basically you're you're either talent poor, in which case your business sucks, or you get talent rich, but then your business is always hanging on a thread of this one whale or two whale relationship. And even then, the value you might create a lot of value, but the value captures is fairly small compared to what you're doing now, where you got this investing vehicle and you got you got all these other components. You said studio making shows for streaming. What have you guys made? Have you guys made anything that's come out?

• 9:39Speaker 04

  We did a lot of stuff early on with YouTube originals, and that was kind of the emphasis of like why we wanted to get into it because Netflix and HBO and Hulu and all these places starting ask started to ask us to make shows with them. And so, you know, Creator Games and some of the other things that we did with YouTube originals led us into what we're developing now, which I don't know if I can technically say anything about what's coming out. I'll just say there's like, there's cameras around constantly as well. But yeah, we we have a few things like within scripted, one within non scripted, and then working on a few like different docu memory type things right now. So we'll we'll have like a, I think, a pretty decent slate by next year. We'll see how the

• 10:20Speaker 04

  the writer's strike and everything plays itself out. I think that one's been a little interesting for us to get used to. But yeah, we'll we'll have a bunch of different things like coming out in, what is it, summer of 2023? So sometime in early 2024.

• 10:32Sam Parr?

  Is the agency business, Sean was, he was joking, but he's being serious in that it's a bad business. Is that actually a bad business? Because when I would like, I mean, I don't, I'm totally outside of Hollywood. When I see like Ari Emanuel, I'm like, it looks like your cat, his personal cash flow was pretty decent on the rise versus a lot of like startups, you know, you're you're you're kind of in poverty until you have a some type of liquid event. It seems like you guys have some type of

• 10:57Shaan Puri?

  Well, let's let's explain the structure, right? So so what is the what is the structure of a talent talent agency? So first, You basically, you recruit talent, you say, okay, I'm gonna help you with the business side of your operations, or get you brand deals, or get you things that you want. Now, in the world of YouTube, are those exclusive or non-exclusive? Like, for example, for an NBA player, their manager, their agent is their exclusive representative, or they could fire them. But like, no, you can't have multiple people bringing them deals. It all has to go through that person. They get a cut of everything. So is it usually exclusive or non-exclusive when it comes to YouTube?

• 11:32Speaker 04

  I think it depends on the type of management company. We've always kind of sat on the fence of exclusive. And I think the interesting thing about talent management businesses is they generate a lot of cash. And so, most of the management companies that you look at that have actually started to create things, like, when you look at just the big, let's just look at the big Hollywood agencies, like Three Arts, Entertainment 360, Brillstein, the ones that have built some of the, and launched some of the biggest shows, like It's Always Sunny, and Friends, and Seinfeld, and some of these things that they have backend on, that they will just have backend in perpetuity on, which those things are ending. But those businesses generate a lot of cash. I think the thing that they've struggled with is like, how do you build something much bigger than just this cash generating management company?

• 12:15Speaker 04

  And so, when I started Knight, the management company was really like the wedge of access into everything else. And that's really how I looked at it. Like, if you could represent the biggest, start with digital creators, because me, like, starting this business by myself outside of the Hollywood system, was very hard to say, I'm gonna go sign an actor, actress, musician, because that is very much dominated by the Hollywood sphere. And so, I knew that it would be much easier for me to build a wedge in digital, and go represent, you know, I started with Dude Perfect in 2013, but go represent digital creators, build that wedge, and then use that as the access point to either continue building a bigger management company in other verticals, or to go build, you know, something within a venture studio, have a venture capital firm.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  Like, the management company gives you access to everything else. And that's how I saw this in 2015. And I think that the managers that realize that, and there's some really good ones that have realized that, Matt Carter, I think, realized that pretty early on. It's like, the management business is kind of the means to the ends to build uninterrupted, and some of the other things that he's doing with LeBron. I think Scooter's probably... The best example of like what Ithaca became off the management company. And so that that's really how we've thought about it is like, you know, management is the core of our business, but it's really the like allows us to to have a wedge that gets us into everything else.

• 13:35Shaan Puri?

  So that kind of proves the point, right? Like if a business has to be a means to an end, it's probably in itself not the best business to stay at. You mentioned a couple of those. Those sound like pretty cool businesses. So Maverick Carter is LeBron's longtime friend. I think high school, I think he's is he one of part of the high school crew for LeBron? Or did he come a little later? I think one of them came later.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  I think he was, I don't know the full story. I think Rich Paul was was came came later after high school. I think Mav was actually a high school friend and then became his manager. And they went on to, you know, now have a production company and a few other things.

• 14:11Sam Parr?

  That seems like one of the few times that would work out well, by the way, like your high school buddy, like taking the reins. So good, good, good for them.

• 14:17Shaan Puri?

  And and so they have a they have a company that does, you know, basically production and maybe investing because I think they own a bunch of pizza, a bunch of like pizza chains and other things like that. So they do investing, they do production. You mentioned Scooter Braun and his business. And so what what is his business? Is that like, that sounds like that might be a fantastic business. What is it?

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Well, it's it started off, I mean, if everyone knows the story, probably that he met Justin or or found Justin on YouTube when he was really young, reached out, you know, the rest is kind of history there. But he ended up building a music management company that was really like, I think the the cash out of that business was more touring, right with Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, some of the other people. And then he sold it to Hive about, I want to say a year ago or 18 months ago. And they started either buying other management companies, they're buying music catalogs. They're doing a lot of different things right now. And he he did build quite a few things with some of the talent. I know Justin and him built, I can't remember what the clothing business is. And there are some other like auxiliary businesses that came out of Ithaca. And they also did a lot of investing, a lot of venture investing.

• 15:23Shaan Puri?

  And so I So he sold it for a billion dollars.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:26Shaan Puri?

  He so he's he sold his media company, Ithaca Holdings, to to Hive for one billion. And I think that's because it had those kind of like, like you said, like royalties on. On the, on the music itself, not just like the touring, which might, you know, stop tomorrow and who knows what happens. In the YouTube world, there's no like royalties structure, correct? Like if you're a talent manager for Twitch creators or for YouTubers, you get a cut of these brand deals, 10, 15%, whatever it is, but there's no like royalties. You have to like build other IP to get the royalties, right?

• 16:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, and there's, there's also no backend deals. Like I said earlier, where, you know, Brillstein or some management company in Hollywood maybe helped launch It's Always Sunny. And now they have these like residual checks coming in every single month or every single year. That also doesn't exist in the digital space. And so we had to figure out like what that packaging business was for us. And we ultimately landed on, we think it's business building. Like we think some of the biggest outcomes for celebrities over the last decade have been through products, right? Beats by Dre, probably the best example of something. I mean, like Vitamin Water was another one where it's like athletes and different people had equity in those businesses. So we think our packaging business is essentially this business building, which we called Night Labs, which a lot of different things have come

• 16:45Speaker 04

  out of now. But yeah, the, the management company has then allowed us to build these businesses with creators where we take equity. And we think that like that business is much more interesting long-term than just continuing to stack the management business, which some of these companies do very well. And, you know, they're 30, 40, 50 million EBITDA businesses a year. I think they're now trying to figure out like, what, what do we either build on top of this big cash generating business? Or do we just keep doing it because the partners every single year are making three, four, five million dollars a year?

• 17:16Shaan Puri?

  Do you, of, of your, of just the night, night media, night studios of your wholly own thing, how many staff do you have at the moment?

• 17:25Speaker 04

  I believe we're just over 60, so 63 full-time within the night ecosystem right now. And, and some of the teams are relatively lean. I would say our ventures team is, is lean. It's like three people. Our studio team is still, and that's like our venture studio is relatively lean with about six. And the majority of the company is talent managers and then individual like pod systems where a talent manager will have a junior manager, multiple coordinators, maybe an assistant under that pod. And then that pod will represent anywhere between, I would say, five to seven creators on average.

• 17:58Shaan Puri?

  And are you managing someone as well as running the 60-person operation?

• 18:04Speaker 04

  I just managed that happened about two years, two to three years ago, where I was like, this is taking up way too much of my time. And also, it's like, it's also the best use of my time. And this was really like when we had started, Feastables was an idea. We were, I was helping him produce creator games. There was just a lot going on while he was also growing, doing multi-language, all these other things. And so that's when I like fully just like kind of re-dedicated my time to everything that was going on on his end.

• 18:36Sam Parr?

  So you're able to get, you know, your cut from managing him as well as from owning the 60-person company?

• 18:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:43Sam Parr?

  So, so in that regard, it seems like things are pretty good, even though you want to go bigger.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  Management company. So yeah, things that I think are always a little hectic. And yeah, I'm, most of my focus right now is on Feastables. I think you guys have, you know, I'm sure you've seen the chocolate bars. That to us is like, and I are probably focusing the majority of our energy on that business right now, just because it's growing so quickly. And, you know, we just launched in the UK. We have other global launches that we want to do this year, and it's just building into 2024. And so I knew this would eventually happen, where you represent a creator and then the business that you're starting becomes a big opportunity that you really want to chase. And we think Feastables is really turning into that. And so I've directed a lot of my energy toward that business. And it's like slowly, slowly consuming my life at the moment.

• 19:33Sam Parr?

  Before you started Knight Media, what, what interested you? What were you going to start instead of that?

• 19:39Speaker 04

  Well, I grew up watching Jerry Maguire, probably like everyone else. And so I wanted to be a sports agent. Like, I wanted to represent Rod Tidwell. Like, I wanted to be that like bigger-than-life, you know, agent representing an NFL football player. And so that's what I wanted to do. And I knew that, like, because I played football in college. And freshman year of college, I realized that. Guys are built different. I one couldn't run a four, three. I wasn't a 225 pound wide receiver. That was five or six, five. And so I knew like playing in the NFL was going to be very, very difficult. Just seeing that the level of high school to division one football that I was at. And so, you know, I started seeing that a lot of the players that I was playing with were going

• 20:20Speaker 04

  to the NFL. Some of them were getting drafted. Some of them were going to have like NFL careers that lasted 10 years. And so I positioned myself to be a representative for those players. And that's really what I wanted to do. And then stumbled upon YouTube in 2013 and kind of just became obsessed with it. And in college, I didn't watch YouTube. Like I was so focused on football. Didn't really watch anything on the internet. And that changed the trajectory of my whole career.

• 20:48Shaan Puri?

  I saw this T-shirt on Instagram yesterday. It said, creatives are the new athletes. And somebody was wearing that. And I thought to myself, that's kind of a lame T-shirt, but I see where they're coming from. You know, I get what they're saying. You know, the, I don't know if you've seen Sam, these, these deals that creators are from Twitch are signing with Kick.

• 21:08Sam Parr?

  What's Kick? Like? I've heard you talk about it. What is it? It's just a Twitch alternative?

• 21:13Shaan Puri?

  So Kick is basically a Twitch alternative, but the kind of the interesting part is it started by this gambling company Stake. So we've talked about Stake before, remember? It's this company that just absolutely prints cash. And one of the main ways, the main way that Stake was growing, or one of the best growth mechanisms was they would pay streamers or give streamers money to gamble on Stake live on stream. And so people got to see.

• 21:37Sam Parr?

  Didn't they give Drake like a jet?

• 21:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they gave Drake like $20 million and whatever.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  But the, the issue was you couldn't do it in America, right? So a lot of the streamers and, and they would have to go to Mexico or Canada. And it's still very much like that. You can't do it in America.

• 21:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you got to like get on a boat, go to international waters and start your stream.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  Basically, yeah. And a lot of the guys were doing this in Mexico. And so now Kick basically came in, they started Kick as like a distribution, like taco funnel on top of this gambling business, which. Who knows if it's going to be legal in the US in two to three years? They actually have steak.us that you can play in America. It's just a lot of the games that you have on steak.com are not there. But yeah, a lot of controversy on, uh, on this topic because Twitch banned it. And that's why Kickstarter is because Twitch banned all gambling on their website.

• 22:30Shaan Puri?

  It's like, there's these stories sometimes in business where it's like, um, like I have a buddy who's like this, uh, the guys who bought Milk Road, uh, they own, uh, one of them started this thing called JM, uh, JM Bullion, which is like a gold, it's the biggest website for buying and selling gold online. And I was like, how'd you do it? What's the origin story? And he's telling me the origin story and, and really when he started, he was just trying to be a lead gen for, um, like somebody else would fulfill the orders. He didn't have any gold inventory. He wasn't shipping anything. He was like, dude, I'm an affiliate marketer. I just, I get the lead from Google. Somebody places the order. I go tell the, the, the company who actually does this thing to go sell it, to go send it to them. And what happened was that they were, they were kind of yanking them around, changing the rates. And eventually they just cut them off.

• 23:15Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, oh my God, they just killed my business. Like they don't want my customers. Like, what do I do? He's like, well, either I take this zero or I create the whole like distributed, I create the whole supply chain myself. I basically go, I get the physical inventory. I get the warehouses and we start shipping this ourselves. So that's what they did. They ended up becoming bigger than the other company. And I think they bought them along the way. They bought that other company that had rejected them and like went on to become the number one site for this. And it's kind of the same, um, the same thing that you're talking about here with like, Kick was using Twitch as like a distribution platform. And then when it didn't work, they're like, all right, we'll have to make our own Twitch, which is kind of like a huge endeavor.

• 23:55Shaan Puri?

  But what they're doing is they're giving streamers these contracts that, um, I kicked the tires on this to figure out if it was real because they gave XQC, who's one of the top, uh, Twitch streamers, like a reported two-year hundred million dollar contract. What? So that means that this guy's making more than LeBron James playing for the Lakers this year. Like per year, that, that would be the, the deal. And same thing, and, and crazier than that is that he doesn't have to, he doesn't have to stop streaming on Twitch. He could still stream on Twitch, right? And so when you first hear this, this sounds crazy. It's like you signed a non-exclusive hundred million dollar deal for some kid in his bedroom playing video games. That sounds insane. And then they did that with a bunch of other streamers. So a bunch of other streamers are also making,

• 24:37Shaan Puri?

  you know, 10 million, 20 million, 30 million dollars a year to stream on Kick right now. And the big question is, will this strategy work? You know, will Kick become a thing? Will it just die? Will this give steak a bunch of customers?

• 24:48Sam Parr?

  How new is the, is the website? Cause kick.com, according to SimilarWeb, has like 150 million monthly uniques already.

• 24:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So this has been going for how long? Like

• 24:57Sam Parr?

  six to eight months, maybe?

• 24:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like within this year, basically, they've been, they've been doing this.

• 25:03Sam Parr?

  How did they get that much traffic that fast? I mean, that's one of the faster growing websites out there.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, so what happened here was two, two Twitch streamers that when they banned gambling, couldn't stream on Twitch anymore because their brands were essentially built around steak, which one was Trainwrecks, who had a really loyal following on Twitch. And then they also then signed Aiden second. And so Trainwrecks and Aiden started streaming on Kick, which drove a lot of people over to that website. And then the XQC, the mid, like everyone else that they started signing was just driving more and more traffic. And it started to just become a thing of like anti Twitch, go to Kick. The also, the one thing to point out is ad revenue on Twitch, if you're, if you're a partner on Twitch, used to be 70, 30.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  They brought it down to 50, 50, which sparked outrage on the internet. And then Kick came out and said, we're going to do 90, 10 for everyone. Doesn't matter if you're a partner or not, we're going to lose an incredible amount of money on the content business. And just make sure that steak.com remains like the cash cow. And so that's like the, the big thing that they have against Twitch is like, they don't really care if they have a profitable streaming business or not.

• 26:10Sam Parr?

  But do they, how'd they find it? How'd they finance this entire thing? I thought, Sean, that we had talked about these guys. Was it, wasn't the founder of steak, is it like a 28 or back then, we're, I think we're talking about a year ago. It was like a 26 year old guy who bought like a $50 million mansion in Australia. Are the, is it still like a bunch of young guys doing this without financing?

• 26:28Shaan Puri?

  I mean, not without financing. The financing is steak.

• 26:30Sam Parr?

  I mean, outside financing.

• 26:32Shaan Puri?

  An 800, had like an $800 million dividend last year or something insane. Like that business is just ultra, ultra profitable. And so their competitive advantage is basically that. They they're like Reid said, their business model is not ads on kick or subscription cut. It's can we funnel these users to come gamble on our in our casino? And we have a casino, Twitch doesn't have a casino. That's the bet that they're making. The other thing that I, because I tweeted this out, I was like, I said, this thing is fishy. I said, they're paying X U C $100 million for two years of non-exclusive streaming. Are they A, lying? B, is this like incentive based or some like tiered, like, you know, some, some like stock deal, they're inflating the value of the stock or something like that to make the number

• 27:17Shaan Puri?

  set, the headline number sound really big? Are they just laundering money? Is that what this is? Like, what is going on here? And basically it was, here's the, here's what the, the, the answer was. Basically, it's a combination of cash and equity. So their equity part might go to zero. So that, that part of the deal might, might go to zero. Or it has incentives where it's like, it's based on the number of customers you bring over. And the second part is that the non-exclusive part is basically so that he could just like funnel traffic from Twitch to kick. So if he just turned off, like, this is like a big deal. Like when Microsoft poached Ninja from Twitch, he had to stop streaming on Twitch that day and like go stream on this other platform. And so most people on Twitch were just like, kind of like out of sight, out of mind.

• 28:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, some people followed him over there to check it out, but like ultimately their habit was still built on Twitch. What these guys are doing is different. He streams on Twitch and he says, all right, I'm going to finish my stream or I'm going to like play the big game over on kick. And then he just like, it's like a call to action. It just funnels a bunch of traffic over, over and over. When I was at Twitch, we did the same thing. When we were losing foothold in one market in Brazil, we acquired this huge YouTube streamer. And I was like, um, and they were, and it was an exclusive deal, but he started streaming on YouTube while he was streaming on Twitch. And I was like, and at first people in the company were like, yo, what the hell, man? You just spent all this money, millions of dollars, like signing this streamer. And he's still streaming on YouTube over there for free. Like, what's the deal? And I was like,

• 28:46Shaan Puri?

  Actually, wait, this is probably excellent because all we have to do is just get him to like block part of the screen or like end his like do a cliffhanger and be like, I'm finishing this over at Twitch. And he'll just keep bringing traffic over. And that's what he did. We just basically let him violate his deal because we realized, actually, he was smarter than us. That was a better funnel for us than than an exclusive deal would have been.

• 29:07Sam Parr?

  That's insane. Reed, what these, I imagine you've talked to these, you know, these steak guys well. Is this like a Sam Bankman Freed type of company where there are an FTX company where there's like a bunch of crazy young kids? Or is this like a dialed in thing? What are these guys like?

• 29:20Speaker 04

  I don't know them well enough, honestly, to know if it's like gonna become a problem. I would say that from my conversations with them, they seem like they have this thing under control. It's generating a lot of cash. FTX thing, I company wasn't generating any cash when Bitcoin went down. It was like just completely fell apart, but.

• 29:37Sam Parr?

  I don't mean, is it a scam? But I mean, like, young people just being wild. You know, like, imagine a 27 year old making $800 million dividend, just like a wild child type of setup.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  I haven't seen that from them, but it seems like they're a little bit more laid back in Australia. Don't really communicate with a lot of people. So I haven't seen that behavior. I mean, that could change. I'm just, I, and I know, I know way too much about the deal structures and everything else and how this stuff works. But I would, I'm pretty confident in Kik over at least in the next couple of years. We'll see where this goes if they continue to want to do that business. I would imagine steak is going to just continue to get so big that maybe Kik eventually becomes a distraction. I don't know. But I would say they'll double down on steak.us over the next like 18 months as like states open up and allow them to start doing this.

• 30:31Sam Parr?

  That's insane.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  There was also a secondary business called Rubet as well. That was essentially the steak.com competitor. I'm not 100% sure what happened to Rubet, but it's still around. And so there is other businesses like steak. Steak just completely won because they were able to sign the biggest creators like Train. They signed Drake, which you guys said. So at the moment, it's a runaway train. They're kind of taking all the market share.

• 30:55Sam Parr?

  In one of your other podcasts, you'd mentioned how you're like, well, a lot of creators, they think, well, I have an audience, I'm going to launch this product. And you're like, well, that can work for a couple of months, but if you do a good job, this turns into a proper company. And the real challenge, you were saying, the real challenge that I'm in is finding amazing executives to actually run the companies and build these into real companies. You said for Feasibles, I think you said you had the president of RXBAR to come and be the CEO for the burger business or the restaurant business. You partnered with someone and you also, it sounds like, had a president or CEO of that company. What type of deals are you striking with some of these CEOs to make it worth their while to do this?

• 31:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, thankfully, a lot of them realize the opportunity. When they come into these businesses, they know that there's an unfair advantage in go to market because the creator has hopefully built this massive platform already that gives them instant distribution and just consumers. And so a lot of the people that we interview for CEOs are actually incredibly excited about the opportunity and are willing to leave their big job at PepsiCo or wherever that is. And so how the deals are really structured is very similar to any other business. You have like a cash basis that you're paying them, and then you also negotiate some piece of equity over like a four-year vesting schedule. And so we've had a lot of success doing that. But for the most part, we usually don't have to explain the competitive advantage to the business.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  Like when we start meeting these individuals, they already know, they've seen it, they saw it with Prime, they're seeing the Feasibles, they've seen it with Happy Dad. A lot of the individuals that we're interviewing already know. And so it makes it a little bit easier for us to get them to leave that specific job. But it's structured very similar to like what a CEO would potentially make if they came in and ran a startup.

• 32:41Sam Parr?

  And are you funding the company with a bit?

• 32:43Speaker 04

  We fund up to a certain amount.

• 32:46Sam Parr?

  What's that amount usually?

• 32:47Speaker 04

  It honestly depends on the business. I would say it falls anywhere between the 250, 250 on the low end and a million on the high end. So Feastables, you fund that, that, that started with just a million bucks, you think? Yeah. The, the, the, the big issue with Feastables was, and this is the issue we're now having with some of our consumer products is retailers, instead of, so if you, if you started a chips business or whatever, and you didn't have a creator attached to it, or anyone attached to it that give you, gave you an unfair advantage on go to market, you would go to a retailer and they would say, we want to test you in a hundred stores, or we want to test you in 200 stores. And from a cost perspective, to, to fund the PO wouldn't be that, like,

• 33:28Speaker 04

  it wouldn't put that much strain on the business. The issue that we had with Feastables was Walmart was willing to put us in all 2,650 store, or 4,650 stores, um, right when we launched. And so that's becoming the issue with some of these businesses is that how do you fund the PO of six, seven, eight million dollars right out of the gate to meet that retail demand? And so that's the one that we've, we've had to either raise capital, uh, go beg a bank to give us the money as like a PO, as like a PO loan. And so that, that's kind of the issue that we've run into. And even with Feastables, like we raised a small amount of capital and it was really just to fund the four million chocolate bars that we ended

• 34:09Speaker 04

  up selling in season one that sold out in, I think it was 45 days. That was the biggest cash constraint to the business.

• 34:16Shaan Puri?

  Let's, let's talk a little bit about Prime. So Prime, um, seems to be just taking over. Um, it really, really impressive. I don't know, um, how much we've talked about it on here before, but can you just explain what's going on with Prime in a way that would, for somebody who's kind of out of the loop, or maybe, you know, vaguely heard of it, but doesn't really truly appreciate like the, the extent it's, it's. What it's doing?

• 34:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. So if you don't know what Prime is, Prime is a hydration drink that was started by Logan Paul, who many people are probably familiar with, and then KSI, who was based out of the UK. But I would say the most popular creator to ever come out of that region. And so, you know, they very notably like boxed against each other multiple times. They were enemies and the story was that I'm coming together to start this business. And the company that they partnered with actually made an energy drink called Alani New. That's actually, I mean, you see it next to Prime. I think in every grocery store, retail chain I go into, it's like Prime sits here. Alani New sits right next to it. And so the founders of Alani New basically created this drink that they then called Prime. And Logan Paul and KSI came in, really isn't just the marketing engine.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  They don't do anything operationally for the business. They really just market it and it, it became like a clout piece to hold a bottle of Prime. Like now these 10, 12, 13 year old kids have to have it. They have to drink it. And we've seen some of the, I mean, I saw an article about people saying the FDA needs to go regulate this business because it has too much caffeine in the energy drink. And so now, now there's just a lot of stuff going on about the company, but it's grown an incredible amount. I think, I, I can't remember what Logan said on one of his podcasts, but I think they did $45 million in revenue in January of this year. And that was, that was the last thing that I'd seen them say publicly about the business.

• 36:06Sam Parr?

  I think he said, if I remember correctly, Sean, we talked about it. It might've been six months ago. I think he said like 200 million for the year. Is that right?

• 36:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's the number, that's one number we had heard, but 45 million obviously would put them on a totally different trajectory than that. So yeah, it appears to be just an absolute monster.

• 36:25Shaan Puri?

  How did, who's the, who's Logan Paul's manager? Who's, who's his?

• 36:29Speaker 04

  His name's Jeff. He's, he's on the podcast. He's been his same manager for a long time. Logan talks about him quite a bit. And so if you, if you watch some Logan's older videos too, he would periodically show up. And so they've been together for a long time and Jeff put together that deal and it's been incredibly successful. We'll see how it ends up. I don't know. I would imagine they're going to want to continue to do this thing for another couple of years and then probably sell it.

• 36:52Shaan Puri?

  And those guys who created the drink, you said they created Alani New, but that wasn't that big. Like it seemed, I remember when Prime first came out, I was like, who are these guys? And it's, I think it's two dudes, right? Who are the founders of that? And they didn't really have a huge hit before that. How did they even secure that deal? And why, why did they partner with them over like, you know, some more established thing? Do you know?

• 37:17Speaker 04

  I honestly don't know. I've never had that conversation with Jeff of, of why did, why partner with this company instead of doing it yourself? I think, I would imagine what happened was this company presented them with the opportunity. And it was something that really resonated with Logan. And then I remember the story of him saying he called KSI and tried to get him on board, which he did. And so it probably is just right place, right time. Logan was ready to lean into something else. And Logan's had a lot of different business ventures over the last five years. I mean, this one obviously is far and beyond the most successful. But I, again, I would imagine right place, right time. They liked the products, liked the, got along with the individuals who are operating the business.

• 37:58Shaan Puri?

  And the, the partnering with KSI, were they just actually friends the whole time? And the whole boxing thing was just, you know, just a sort of frenemies thing? Or like, cause that's kind of a genius move, right? Like you kind of have to give credit to be like, you know, what will make this even bigger? Cause normally, let's say you're one of the biggest YouTubers. Those people tend to have like a bit of an ego. I am distribution. I don't need anybody else to do this. I don't need to split the pie, especially with my enemy. So that's kind of interesting. Well, what's going on there?

• 38:26Speaker 04

  No, totally. No, they did not like each other. The boxing beef was real. They were definitely enemies. And from my understanding of the story, and I've only heard Logan's side of this. I haven't heard KSI speak about it. It took a lot of convincing for Logan to get KSI on board because there was still a lot of animosity between their relationship there. I mean, a lot of stuff was said, a lot of personal things were said about girlfriends and parents. And I mean, it was a very personal beef that went on in this YouTube space for a while. And so I think that's why it was so surprising when those two came together to launch Prime. Because it was the last two individuals you would have ever thought to partner together on a hydration.

• 39:06Shaan Puri?

  Right. He said my Pokemon was a PSA eight. It was, it got ugly.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. But now it's like for, for us, it's, it's been helpful because you know, we, uh, they launched in Australia and it went incredibly well for them. They launched in the UK. It went very well. And so Feastables, like we're probably six to eight months behind because they, you know, had a product and launched a lot sooner than we did, but it's, it's allowed us to then go into those conversations in Australia, UK, Southeast Asia, where, and the retailers have already had massive success with Prime, where it's a, it's a much easier conversation for us to explain to them why they should take Feastables, where I think if we were the first ones coming into the, the industry, like into Woolies in Australia, probably a little harder conversation pre-Prime.

• 39:52Shaan Puri?

  That Prime seems like an amazing category, uh, like that, to me, uh, the drink, the hydration drink, water, basically, like fancy water is a better category than chocolate bars. Um, how do you think about categories that you're going to go into? Like, um, do you think that's a better category? And also like, how do you choose what category to, you could basically promote anything?

• 40:13Sam Parr?

  Dude, when we, we, we, we did the thing with Sean organized this thing and he brought a bunch of Feastables. I ate about eight of those things in one night. I was, I felt horrible the next day. I didn't eat dinner. I just ate all this chocolate. So at least for that night, it felt like a good category.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, okay. See, I have to back up to just explain how this all started. And so, you know, this started with, I, you know, in a parking lot, kind of brainstorming ideas while he was, it was in between him filming this video that never got posted, like most videos that like just got filmed and never, people never saw it. But anyway, we, we came up with this idea where we wanted to launch a snacks company and we wanted to build this content idea around launching the snacks company. And chocolate bars to us felt like the right category for a couple of reasons. Like one is it's a massive business. Like it's a $26 billion industry. It's, it's very holiday seasonal dependent, which with your parent going into

• 41:12Speaker 04

  a store for Halloween or for Easter or something like that. It's like Hershey's is sitting here and Feastables is sitting here and you have a eight, nine, 10, 12 year old son, daughter, like it's a no brainer. Like you're going to buy the Feastables chocolate. And so that, that was one reason. Another thing is, The 50th anniversary of Willy Wonka was in 2021. And so the initial idea was let's put golden tickets in chocolate bars and sell that and give away a chocolate factory, which became just a thing in itself of, you know, buying a warehouse and turning into a chocolate factory. It was no easy feat, but that that really kind of sparked the conversation of, okay, well, if we're going to build this on this chocolate factory giveaway with a chocolate bar, what are the other categories that we can eventually go into?

• 41:56Speaker 04

  The cookie really came because, you know, had this joke on his channel and it's been since the beginning is, you guys see it in the banner, it's like subscribe and I'll give you a cookie. And so we wanted to venture into cookies next. It's it's not, I would say, as big of a focus for us as chocolate. I think we're really trying to build out seasonality in chocolate. We're trying to build multi-pack in chocolate. I don't think people truly understand how big Hershey's actually is and how dominant they are in the space. Like they truly dominate chocolate because they also own Reese's, which is like, if you walk into Chocolate Island, Walmart, Target, Kroger, wherever, you see a giant wall of orange and a giant wall of bread. It's like you very clearly, those two businesses or those two brands dominate the chocolate aisle.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  And so we thought it was a good space for us to go at because it wasn't, it wasn't so oversaturated by 20, 30, 40 different companies. It's like, we really knew who we were competing against. We were like, we're competing against Hershey. We need to be more innovative. We need to build this gamification layer. We need to build a better product that has higher quality ingredients. We knew like what the roadmap looks like to compete with them. It's been a lot harder than we thought. Just global chocolate supply chain, I think, was something Jimmy and I knew nothing about. Thank God for our team that like understands this that we've been working with. But yeah, I think we'll, we'll definitely go. I don't know if Jimmy said anything to you guys when you were in Greenville, but I mean, there's a roadmap of products that we're going to do over the next like two to three years.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  We're trying to figure out like what the rollout strategy is going to be. But for 2023 and going into 2024, chocolate is the main priority in getting more space in retail.

• 43:34Shaan Puri?

  I gotta take back what I said. I think it's a great category. You convinced me I was wrong. That was great. Actually, I think what you guys are doing is really smart there. By the way, Hershey's makes like eight or nine billion a year in revenue off of their thing. And the reason I think it's a great category, actually, based on what you said, was the audience fit, but also just like how old that competition is. And like, you know, you didn't say this, but like if I'm Mars, or I'm Mondelez, or I'm Hershey's,

• 44:02Shaan Puri?

  you know, I look at my acquisition targets, my M and A targets, there's not many. And I think this is an opportunity where I don't think the business itself is going to generate a ton of profit just because physical goods and, you know, they're like, as you scale up, it's like, you know, it's not the thickest margins. But I do think this is like a business where you're going to look up and sell it for $500 million or something like that someday if you wanted to.

• 44:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:27Shaan Puri?

  So I take that back.

• 44:27Speaker 04

  It's, you'd actually be surprised. Chocolate actually is, it's a pretty good margin business for us. And I mean, Hershey is still, you know, they probably churn off six to $800 million in profit every single year and have been doing this for 50 plus years. And so we, yeah, it's, it's, it's been challenging for us, but we understand like what the roadmap is. We really think that, and we don't know how Hershey is going to compete with us seasonally. That's like one thing big for us. Like Halloween's going to be big for us this year. We're doing a lot of different sweepstakes and promotional things. And so, you know, for us, if we can win those months, like October then becomes 100 to 200 million dollars

• 45:08Speaker 04

  just in a single month, and we can put our full force into just October and then into holiday. And then you turn it around and you're like, okay, now like, what are we doing for Valentine's Day? What are we doing for Easter? And so these are all like the conversations that we've been having over the last year.

• 45:22Sam Parr?

  What number would kind of cross the threshold of, all right, we should take this acquisition seriously? If one of those guys came to you at the end of the year?

• 45:31Speaker 04

  I don't think he takes a multi-billion dollar acquisition right now. There's just too much upside in the business right now.

• 45:38Sam Parr?

  Just for feastables.

• 45:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's just, it's the amount of opportunity for us, not, not only, okay, let's just, just, I'm just talking domestically. So now let's just, let's talk about just the world, right? Chocolate is, is popular like globally and we haven't really talked about this yet, but I know he talked about it on your guys' podcasts is we launched all these multi-language channels. There's, there's really a method to the madness here is like, you know, we now dub in, I think, 16 different languages, including Japanese and French and Hindi. Those are all markets for us that we're pushing into over the next like 12 to 18 months. And so the opportunity for us is just way too big to even look at an acquisition at the moment because for us, like Asia is, is a huge market. The Middle East has actually become one of our

• 46:25Speaker 04

  highest growing markets at the moment, which we're now figuring out like, what are the points of distribution? And then we're eventually going to be able to just specifically market to those regions. Like, we're going to be able to put a video file up and it's going to be the Japanese dub. But instead of being like, hey, go to your local Walmart and Target, it's going to be like our, our, our dub artist in Japanese, which is the voice actor of Naruto, saying, oh, you can go buy it at your local 7-Eleven or other convenience stores available in Japan. And so we're going to make everything very localized. And so to us, like, we're like, haven't even rounded first base yet to what this business opportunity is. And so, I don't know, we haven't even had, like, acquisitions aren't like, isn't even a thing.

• 47:06Sam Parr?

  Well, when we, when we all hung out with him, he was talking about, he was talking to the same thing. I don't know if he was saying feastables, but just like his enterprise, you know, he threw around crazy ideas of like, maybe IPO, maybe sell for billions of dollars. I don't know, like, but he approached it in a This isn't an insult, but it was very naive. Like, he sounded like an innocent, like, oh, I'm just gonna do this, and then this, and then this. That's it. Like, it's gonna work. And I remember, but I, but I, but I found it to be like believable. A, like, I believe that he actually could potentially do that, which is crazy. But B, I felt like his ignorance a little bit about business was actually a massive

• 47:47Sam Parr?

  tool for him, a little bit, where, where I was like, man, that's like, you'd be one of the biggest things in the world. And in his brain, he's like, well, yeah, what do you, what do you expect? And I don't know if that's, maybe naive is not the right word, but there was almost an innocence about it that I really appreciated. Do you think you have that same kind of mindset with this? Or, or do, are half the things that you guys are working on, not just you and him, but your rest of your artists, or the rest of your folks on your team, are you like, I don't know if we can pull this off, but whatever, let's just try and get into it, and we'll see what happens?

• 48:17Speaker 04

  Uh, I, he's probably, we're, we're a little bit different in that regard. I think I'm a little bit more of a realist in terms of, you know, knowing how hard these things are to build, knowing how hard these things are to sell. I said, ultimately, it's gonna be his decision, you know, if he wants to sell this thing or not. But I, I think there, there is a level of, him and I are very naive to, to, at least when we entered the chocolate arena, we didn't really have a good understanding of what we needed to create, how we needed to compete. And I actually think that was an advantage for us, because we were just running as fast as possible, trying to get product out, and we made a lot of critical, I would say, decisions

• 48:57Speaker 04

  that were either big positives or big negatives, and we were able to go change the negatives very quickly. I think one is-

• 49:04Sam Parr?

  I think you said you, you didn't even have customer support the day you launched, or something like that.

• 49:08Speaker 04

  We didn't have customer support in ****, which we then learned in Feastables, like, okay. And a little different business, so we, we had a full customer social support team when we launched Feastables, thankfully.

• 49:19Shaan Puri?

  And you, you know, you've done a couple of these now, and I think I've always been amazed, like, some creators are much better promoters than others. And it's not just like, it matters like in a couple of different ways. Sometimes, if your brand is like-

• 49:35Shaan Puri?

  I'm super real and authentic. Anytime you say anything promotional, the audience is like, yo, sell out, you know, you can't do that. And other people whose brand is to be more of a spectacle, more interesting, they can get away with a little more. But there's also just the creator's motivation. So as brands throw money at creators to, you know, tell people, hey, swipe up and do this. Hey, swipe up and do this. You know, like, at some point, I think everybody becomes a little numb to it, the audience and the creator. What I've been impressed with is for something like Feastable, or I also felt this way with Prime. I felt like with Prime, Logan Paul is like the CMO, and he's like, he's looking for every edge he's got. It almost, you know, like, I don't think they own the majority of the

• 50:17Shaan Puri?

  company. I think they own a small minority of that company, but he almost treats it like a majority owner. I remember when he went to like, he goes to like, you know, the WWE thing or UFC fight, he's got his Prime bottle with him. And then he'll do something that he knows is gonna, he'll like embarrass himself. So he gets memed like a million times on Instagram. But he's like, yeah, I got mean, but I was holding, I was holding Prime, wasn't I? He's like, you know, basically, it was all intentional. He's like, looking for these little edges. And that's very different than, you know, the old days when, you know, an influencer holds up some detox tea and just says, you know, try this. What do you think is the difference in buying and that kind of like, that mindset of like, I'm going to use my engine to promote

• 50:59Shaan Puri?

  this like to level 100? What have you seen is the difference there? And how does that happen?

• 51:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there's also just a different level of excitement when you have ownership in the brand versus you don't. Whereas like, there's a cash exchange for you to promote audible.com. You're not going to be as excited. You're not going to put as much time creatively into this, let's just say, ad read that you will if you own the business. And so I actually first saw this when we did finger on the app. I'd seen him do a lot of like, we had done a lot of mobile. Integrations on the channel. And then when we did finger on the app, it was our thing. We owned it. It was like our competition.

• 51:38Shaan Puri?

  Explain what it is for somebody who doesn't know.

• 51:39Speaker 04

  Finger on the app was, we created this mobile game where a person puts their finger on their cellphone. And the last person to take the finger off the phone went 100 grand. And there's little bombs that would pop up. So you'd have to like move your thumb around to just avoid objects that would pop on your phone. It ended up lasting 72 hours and then someone won 100K, but level of excitement and level of promotion just went to the next level. He was, you know, telling people why they should download it. And he was, you know, messaging people back on Twitter. It was like, hey, I just downloaded. I'm ready for the game. He was responding. And so there's like a much, there's much more depth to the level of excitement on the creator side. And you really see that with Prime and too with Feastables. And you see it with also Happy Dad with Nelk.

• 52:25Speaker 04

  They're going all in on Happy Dad. The podcast is essentially built around, you know, Happy Dad is everywhere for each podcast episode. And I do think the future is creators starting businesses. The issue is like, most of the time, it's just going to happen at the top. Where, you know, we are seeing some interesting businesses for like a mid tier creator who maybe isn't to the level of Logan Paul or Nelk, but they're, you know, cars versus bids or something like that where it's, you know, the channel maybe has two, three million subscribers doing 500K video. And they're gaining a lot of traction on that type of business.

• 52:58Shaan Puri?

  What are some other examples like that?

• 53:01Speaker 04

  In the creator space?

• 53:02Shaan Puri?

  In the creator space. Cool creator businesses that are not just like, well, I'm the most famous guy on earth. So whatever I say works. You know, what are some, like, we had Doug DeMar on for Cars and Bids. What are some other examples like that?

• 53:15Speaker 04

  There's one called Rare Candy. It's with Leon Hart, who's, you know, he's a relatively large Pokemon style creator. And he has a marketplace where you can buy Pokemon cards and do Pokemon unboxing. So it's similar to whatnot and how it works. But it's, you know, Leon Hart owns a large piece of that business. I mean, to go back to the top, like Emma Chamberlain Coffee, I think is another one. It's like very organic to her. Talks a lot about coffee. And now I'm starting to see a lot of businesses pop up on the smaller end where it's maybe you have a channel that. Washes windows, right? So it's like a TikTok creator who maybe it does ASMR through like washing a house or washing windows and they use it as like this top of funnel in like a city where all

• 53:59Speaker 04

  these individual houses or all these people are now reaching out to them and be like, oh, this person's in Austin, I'll pay them $400 to come pressure.

• 54:06Sam Parr?

  Seen a lot of those for pressure washing. They're all over the place and the grass cutting, uh, like lawn mowing.

• 54:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, lawn mowing, vending machines, uh, seeing a lot of like little, small niche businesses getting built. But I, I think these businesses are much bigger than people think they are. Uh, they're, they're gaining like even in though the pressure washing, like I'm meeting creators and they're making like 20, $30,000 a month just from pressure washing homes. And then all of a sudden, you know, they hire two or three other people because the demand is so high for people, you know, booking them out to, to clean their home that they start to hire employees and then it becomes a real business that once just started as like one TikTok video of them pressure washing, pressure washing their own house.

• 54:49Sam Parr?

  Are you from the Midwest?

• 54:51Speaker 04

  I'm from North Dakota.

• 54:52Sam Parr?

  You're the first person on the pod that says, says the word wash like I do with an R.

• 54:57Speaker 04

  I, I grew up 40 miles from the Canadian border. So I'm probably just as Canadian as American at this point.

• 55:03Sam Parr?

  Uh, I get made fun of all the time for saying that word that way that I'm embarrassed to even say it, but I just heard you say it. Um, are there any companies, uh, or any creator businesses out there that are shockingly large that, uh, many people don't know about?

• 55:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. So one that I was wildly impressed by that was much bigger than I initially thought was Darman. So it's the largest scripted YouTube channel on the internet. And so it's, it's all like, it's daily uploading, but it's long form scripted storytelling. And so I really didn't understand like how big of an operation that was and how many, you know, people and how many sets and just the sheer volume of content coming out of that business. That, that was one I was pretty surprised by.

• 55:46Sam Parr?

  And if you don't know what it is, I remember when I first saw it, I was like, are people watching this? And then I just had been paying attention. It's slowly growing. It's almost like the Hallmark or Lifetime channel, but for like.

• 55:57Speaker 04

  How do you spell it? What is it?

• 55:59Sam Parr?

  Dar Man, D H A R, space, M A N, and he has 18.5 million subscribers. It's like, um, it's, there's like a lesson to be learned in like each episode. Is that right, Reed?

• 56:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. He used to do something completely different, right? Like Dar was doing something completely different and then he's, he pivoted into this.

• 56:20Speaker 04

  He did, yeah, found, found his footing in scripted storytelling on YouTube. Uh, more fast paced, a little bit more light on the scripted, uh, like storytelling aspect. Cause it's like more content and volume.

• 56:32Shaan Puri?

  I'm pretty sure this guy had a giant weed business before this.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  Makeup, actually.

• 56:37Shaan Puri?

  But I, I think he also had a weed business. Wife is also an influencer. I think she has a makeup business. I'm pretty sure this guy had a cannabis business. I don't know if I got that right, but that's funny.

• 56:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, We Grow. He started, uh, he started We Grow and sold hydro phonics and marketed for growing medical marijuana. That's funny. Why, uh, why is this guy impressive to you, Reed? What, what, what's the behind the scenes information?

• 56:58Speaker 04

  Just the sheer, like the sheer size of the production company. You know, people, people say it and like, oh, you can build, you know, production entities on top of YouTube and creators are hiring employees. And it's like, this is a good example of massive production entity built on YouTube. Cash flow positive, making money. And I think most people thought that, you know, you couldn't do scripted storytelling on YouTube and actually make it a profitable business just because it didn't make sense with how the ad revenue worked and how the splits worked. And he's really figured it out and it's, it's hard because you have to upload daily and you have to average two, three, four, five million views per video to start making significant amount of money. But they really figured it out on a large scale.

• 57:39Shaan Puri?

  Did they get the revenue up or did they get the expenses down? What did they do different than, uh, you would have expected? Or what did they, what, what was the trick?

• 57:46Speaker 04

  From what, from what I've seen in the scripted space on YouTube, and, and this is also like in the, in like the streaming services, scripted content is very expensive. You know, you're, you have writers on staff, like it's usually long timelines. They, they figured out how to create content on a scripted basis much quicker and much more cost efficient, where it's like Dar is doing a lot of the writing. Um, they have. A lot of just like part time talent that comes in periodically and acts. And then they also just like figured out how to do this with their own sets. So they're not renting space like they actually built their own sets in in in LA. And they're just just reusing the same sets. I mean, if you watch a lot of Darmann videos, you'll see the school, you'll see the movie theater.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  There's a there's like a gas station, there's a lot of like staple sets that just continue to show up. And they do a really good job just repurposing those sets.

• 58:39Sam Parr?

  That's amazing. I can't believe I remember seeing this guy when he was coming up. I never a million years would have bet that this would have been a good one. What are what are some other businesses out there that you've seen that are just shockingly interesting?

• 58:50Speaker 04

  So this wasn't it's not a channel that's a business yet, but I stumbled upon it a couple of weeks ago. It's called Ryan Hall Y'all. And he was a former meteorologist. And it's like a channel based on just what weather is happening across the country. Different things that you should know about like the hurricane season and how it's going to affect the like us, the southeast. And you know, I'd seen channels try and do this in the past. He's the first one that's gaining like tremendous traction and you can see it in the views per video. You know, it's like two, three million views per video, just on just talking about different weather patterns. And this is this is one that could, I think, become pretty interesting long term.

• 59:34Speaker 04

  Whether he decides to build something on top of that. And I'm guessing it's like a very minimal team. It's probably him plus an editor.

• 59:42Shaan Puri?

  What is he doing? Because weather is so local, people, you know, what do I care about the weather in Toledo, right? Unless it's a natural disaster, like, you know, what do I care? So how is he? How is he doing this? This is incredible.

• 59:53Speaker 04

  More of like the talking about just the whole the things that you should know about tornadoes. Or these are the most dangerous weather patterns of the year or of the month. So he talks more holistically about just the entire industry. It's not really localized. I mean, I'm sure he could start localizing channels, but that becomes a much smaller opportunity. You have to you have to make these videos appeal to everyone and he's done such a good job of that. But these type of like little These channels that start to pull a tremendous amount of views pop up every single month on YouTube. I mean, the vending machine one was something that I went down that rabbit hole and farming. I went down the farming rabbit hole.

• 1:00:29Sam Parr?

  What are the, what's the farming and vending machine ones?

• 1:00:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, so farming, Cole the Corn Star, I'll hit you with a few. And so Millennial Farmer is probably the one that I watch the most. And I grew up on a farm and so it wasn't that interesting to me because I know all the stuff that he's doing. But for a normal person on the coast to, as it doesn't know about, you know, cultivating or anything like that, I think it's really interesting to them. And so he's one that's, it's more, I think, appeals more to an older crowd. Cole the Corn Star is another one that probably appeals to a little bit younger demographic where it's a little bit more like

• 1:01:05Sam Parr?

  Best name.

• 1:01:05Speaker 04

  Franks and things like that on the farm. And then Lauren Farms, a female channel, also kind of showing like in the, in the daily aspect of just what do you do on a farm? And so there, there really is a space for all types of content on the internet now. That's why the, the argument of the internet is so oversaturated. It's hard to break through as a creator. Like I just have never bought that argument because on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, I'm seeing things that continue to break through on a weekly basis and then people are figuring out how to turn it into an actual channel that's profitable. And we're seeing it with people like Ryan Alliell, who, you know, nobody would have ever thought that a, a channel about the weather could pull three million views a video. But yet here he is doing it time and time again.

• 1:01:51Sam Parr?

  Well, that kind of makes sense. The, one of the comments on Ryan, Ryan Hall's videos that said, uh, man, the weather channel has really lost his way. I'm so excited that Ryan is, is doing it this way, which is funny that someone like, and that was actually the most upvoted comment, which means a lot of people pay attention to the weather channel enough so to actually like, wonder if it's lost its way or not. Uh, so it kind of makes sense where you can just look at like, what are like, for example, You could be like, well, Court TV, Court TV has been around or C-SPAN. Some of these things have been around forever. You could go and look at what their revenue is. You could see like what's interesting about them. What's not interesting about them, take a new spin. So Weather Channel is owned by, it's that, um, the guy in Hollywood, Byron Allen. I think he was an actor. Now he's like one of the richest black men in America. He owns Weather Channel. I think they still make like $500 million a year in revenue.

• 1:02:36Sam Parr?

  So like a great business. We had, um, we were friends with this guy named John, who, who was the president of BuzzFeed. And he told me, he was like, man, if you look at CSNBC, they only have like 50,000 concurrent visitors or viewers on their, on, on the channel, but they make this much in revenue. I'm going to create that, but for Facebook Live. And he ended up launching Cheddar and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars. And so like, this is like an interesting strategy of just like looking like which channels have lived for 50 years and are doing good, but they're just kind of like been doing the same thing over and over and over again for a while. So it's kind of an, actually an interesting strategy.

• 1:03:10Speaker 04

  Totally agree. Like building a new weather channel, I think is incredibly complex and complicated, but he definitely has the type of distribution that could start that business. I think then it's just like, you would need to find a partner to help him probably execute that. But yeah, that, that's I think why I found that the channel so interesting. It's like, I go to the weather channel. I even have a widget on my iPhone that like pops up from, it's like automated from the weather channel. It gives me the weather every single day. I was like, I would much rather download a Ryan Hall y'all widget that like gave me the weather. Much rather support that than the weather channel. And so, yeah, I think there's a much, it's a pretty interesting opportunity there for him.

• 1:03:47Sam Parr?

  You'd made a comment, you said something like you would bet that YouTube will be five times more valuable than any other platform combined in terms of value to, from a creator's point of view of the type of business you can build on top of it.

• 1:04:01Sam Parr?

  You know more than I do, but Sean and I had made this argument like a year and a half or two years ago, where we're like, Ben, Twitter's like happening in the tech field, but there's not really like a, a, uh, what's the Kardashian lady, uh, the Jenner, the, there's not like one of the Jenner persons who have like launched this like Instagram business that became a billion dollar company off of Twitter yet, but we think that there's going to be something there. And then Sean was Like, yeah, there's like the guys on the guy mafia on Twitter. There's like the strip mall guy. There's like the storage guy and they're actually like raising a significant amount of investor money to create some of these companies. Do you, have you been playing around with Twitter and seen like some of the micro influencers?

• 1:04:42Sam Parr?

  And the, the, the major differences instead of like, um, what you do, which is more pop culture. Uh, this is a little bit more B to B and, and much older. But have you paid attention to like Twitter and played around with the idea of one of these folks? Whether it's like a sweaty startup, our friend Nick Huber, who's got like a 400,000 following about them building like pretty big companies on the back of Twitter as opposed to YouTube.

• 1:05:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've seen it. I'm actually not surprised because I've, I've been pretty outspoken of social platform. Where do you build the most fan loyalty across social? And I've seen that Twitter is at the top of the pyramid in terms of fan loyalty. Like a, a Twitter follower that will comment on your tweets is much more valuable than a casual viewer on Tik Tok or Instagram. Because usually like they actually care. And so I think people are now starting to figure that out that, oh, Twitter is actually incredibly valuable. If you can start to gain traction and start to get people that, that really engage. It's also, it's an older demographic where I think the one thing that YouTube is really struggling with right now is, you know, yes, there's people like Ryan Hall. And there's people like millennial farmer who are appealing to maybe a 20 to 30 year old.

• 1:05:48Speaker 04

  But there it's, it's much more suited for an eight year old to watch content. Whereas Twitter to me is like, I spend most of my time on Twitter. Uh, the people that I meet on Twitter, like I would buy products from if, if they actually promoted something. And so I just think that Twitter for me has been really interesting from just a fan loyalty perspective. Uh, it's just the depth of the platform, whereas Instagram and Tik Tok to me have been more casual.

• 1:06:15Speaker 04

  I buy things on Instagram, but it's rare. And TikTok is like my mind shares. Like every single second I'm seeing a new video. I don't even remember the names of the channels that I see on TikTok. They just come and go. Like I, and when I'm at different events and I see a lot of TikTok creators, I recognize them because I've seen them on TikTok. I have no idea what their TikTok channels are, which is bad. But I will remember like someone's Twitter at that I see. And I'll be like, oh my gosh, that's at whatever it is. I, it's very rarely do I say that about TikTok. And so I just think that the depth of consumer is just much different on Twitter.

• 1:06:50Sam Parr?

  Who would you buy a product from? Which of the quote Twitter creators would you buy a product from? Or rather, who are some of your favorite follows?

• 1:06:58Speaker 04

  I mean, I met Blake Robbins, which we, you know, did a podcast together. I met him on Twitter. That was how we met. I thought his tweets were incredibly interesting. I thought as an investor, he was talking about a lot of things that interest me. And so if Blake would have sold anything three to four years ago before I knew him, I would have instantly bought it because he had, he had built up that, you know, loyalty. I had that loyalty of like, I not only agreed with a lot of things he was saying. I thought it was really interesting to the point where I would take time to comment or like that tweet. And I have a lot of those now, just that I follow on Twitter. And then you get to like the of it that are getting hundreds of thousands of likes. And I think, you know, now then you have the bots and you have a lot of internet trolls and stuff like that.

• 1:07:41Speaker 04

  But where Blake kind of sits is in the 30, 40,000 follower range. And a lot of those people care about what he's saying. And then the word of mouth becomes really interesting. Where someone says, hey, I use an eight sleep mattress. It's changed my life. If someone like Blake or you guys tweet that, I'm going to be like, what is an eight sleep mattress? I should probably figure out why they like this so much. But if someone on TikTok is like, oh, my eight sleep mattress, well, well, I probably just scroll past it and don't even think twice about it. So that, that to me is like something that I've noticed.

• 1:08:15Sam Parr?

  I tweeted out that I love Eight Sleep. Like, I don't have any affiliate issue with them. I just had one of their mattresses and I tweeted out how much I loved it. And then right away, their team reached out like, hey, can we do an affiliate deal? Or do you ever want to partner together? I'm like, no, man, I just, I'm just talking about cool shit that I like. And so, but they said, they, they said they, they sold a lot of mattresses from that tweet.

• 1:08:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, the people that follow you also can afford the product. They, you know, probably have been following you for a long time. They trust what you say because you guys aren't shilling a ton of stuff constantly. So when you authentically talk about a product, like people pay attention. It's like Tim Ferriss, right? Like, I, I, I used to pay a lot of attention to what Tim Ferriss was using and talking about on Twitter.

• 1:08:54Sam Parr?

  Are there any other good follows that you, that you have that you, you could see launching a business and succeeding?

• 1:09:00Speaker 04

  Um, I mean, you guys mentioned some really good ones. I, it's, it's not a platform that I pay a lot of attention to in terms of individuals like that could grow businesses. I think I'm, I'm much more suited for YouTube. I live in the depths of YouTube every single day. Twitter for me is like following people I know. You guys are my friends, like other people in the business sphere. But we'll see. I, I hope they're able to grow businesses on top of it. I, I have a lot of confidence in Twitter, just as a platform to grow fan loyalty.

• 1:09:28Shaan Puri?

  What, what about threads? We didn't ask you about threads.

• 1:09:32Speaker 04

  If you guys look at the Google Trends for threads, it's not looking good. I also saw a graph this morning on daily active users for threads that just like fell off a cliff.

• 1:09:39Sam Parr?

  It plummeted.

• 1:09:41Speaker 04

  It's, it's, I don't know. I didn't have a lot of faith in it, but we'll see.

• 1:09:46Shaan Puri?

  I don't think that, I, I saw a lot of people talking about that. And I think their takeaway is like, oh, it's not working or it failed. But like, that was always going to happen, even whether threads is going to succeed or not. If they got a hundred million people to download the app, any app, look at the Twitter app will do the same. If you get a hundred million people in a day to download the thing, you're going to churn, like, you know, 80% of them won't just start using the app regularly, habitually, right away. So, so to me, I see that and I'm like, this is completely normal. And like, to me, has no. Uh, like that was gonna happen either way. Uh, there was no chance that a hundred million people are gonna download it. And a hundred million people are gonna keep using it next week. That's the no app in the history of mankind ever has worked that way.

• 1:10:31Shaan Puri?

  And so the question is like, what happens? I don't know. Uh, three months from now, once they get their kind of core base of users, does that start growing or not? And what would like, you know, there's no way to know until, until then.

• 1:10:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I agree. Uh, I, I haven't logged on. I logged on the first day I downloaded it and haven't really been on since. So I, I, there's also like, you know,

• 1:10:52Shaan Puri?

  Do you tell your talent to like, keep an eye on it? Or what'd you tell your talent?

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  No, we honestly don't care. Uh, it's up to them. Most of them will download it and we'll post on it and see if they like it. I think we're, we'll wait. Like you said, it's gonna take months to figure out if this is gonna gain traction. I think most of them are just gonna patiently wait. I don't think any of our talents are gonna fully fit into threads. They're, they're better off putting their time into making amazing YouTube videos.

• 1:11:17Sam Parr?

  We did this video, Sean and I did this video like two weeks ago or a week ago, where we were talking about how we liked that Zuck did this and we were Team Zuck. And Sean, we, we officially have a new nickname. I don't know if you saw this in the comments of YouTube, but we are officially now Zuck's cuck.

• 1:11:34Shaan Puri?

  Plural, both of us.

• 1:11:35Sam Parr?

  Zuck's cocks. They call those Zuck's cocks.

• 1:11:39Shaan Puri?

  The T-shirts are getting printed. Uh, we should be all right.

• 1:11:41Sam Parr?

  I don't know, like how we are his cuck. Does that mean we are having sex with his wife? Or, or is he having sex with our wife?

• 1:11:48Shaan Puri?

  PG, it's more like the mighty, the mighty ducks. It's like, we're the, we're the mighty ducks. We're this, this, this, uh, the small group of people who really believe in this thing that everybody else kinda, uh, has written off or hates.

• 1:12:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but we're a cuck. So I don't know who's, who's having sex with who's wife, but something is happening there of which we are involved in. Uh, we are officially Zuck's cocks, which I'm okay with. I, I, yeah, I'm a Zuck cuck for sure.

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  Well, it, once, once they box or fight MMA, like I'll be in Elon's side of the, the octagon. So maybe it will, will.

• 1:12:21Sam Parr?

  Will you really? Bro, I will bet you a, a largest, a large sum of money that if that ever happens, that Zuck would crush him.

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  I, yeah, I guess I, in terms of who would win, I mean, just looking at the pictures that Mark posted with Israel Adesanya and Volkanovsky scares me a little bit if I'm Elon Musk, but I still like, I gotta support you. So, win or lose.

• 1:12:42Sam Parr?

  Do you um, last couple of questions, but what would you sell Knight Media for right now?

• 1:12:48Speaker 04

  I wouldn't. I created Knight because I really enjoy it. I, what would I do if I sold Knight Media? I'd become an investor. Like, I already get to do that. So I like-

• 1:12:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but, but there's, there's always, there's gotta be a number. What do you think it's worth?

• 1:13:03Speaker 04

  Um, man, I don't know, to be honest. Uh, it, it all depends on how you value the subsidiary labs businesses. I mean, I could probably, I know what the core management company is worth and what the subsidiary businesses are. I think is like where it could flex quite a bit, but I don't know. I enjoy it. I, I think if I, if I sold Knight, the acquiring business would have to make me the CEO. Like, if we sold it to an agency, like, they would, they would have to make me the, the CEO of that major agency or management company. Because I actually enjoy doing this. Like, it's not something like, I didn't start Knight Media to sell Knight Media. I started Knight Media because I was like, I really enjoy what I, I really want to do this.

• 1:13:46Speaker 04

  I, I find fulfillment in it. I have a venture capital fund. I get to invest. I get to start businesses. I get to be entrepreneurial. I get to be a manager. I get all the perks of being a manager. Uh, I, I don't want to do anything else right now. That might change in a few years. Who knows? Like, what time will do, but yeah, I don't know. I, I wouldn't sell it. We've had offers. Like, I just wouldn't sell it. So-

• 1:14:06Sam Parr?

  What, um, hundreds of millions of dollars, I would assume? Low, low-

• 1:14:10Speaker 04

  I wouldn't sell it for hundreds of millions of dollars. There's no chance in hell.

• 1:14:14Sam Parr?

  That's, that's wild. That's a good, you're in a good position to be in, right?

• 1:14:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, there's just, I feel like we're, I said this on Feastful, I, I feel this about the whole company in general. As we haven't even got started, it'd be hard for me to, to sell this thing with the amount of upside that I see over the next like five years. I, I could see a partnership of some sort. I don't think I could just fully sell it and walk away or have like an earn-out over multiple years right now. Not yet.

• 1:14:45Shaan Puri?

  Well, you raised $100 million or you received $100 million from Churnin in a separate fund to buy consumer businesses that you could then kind of like plug in YouTube distribution into something like that. I think that's the idea. Can you explain the big idea there and what if you've done anything with that yet?

• 1:15:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Labs will start a business zero one. Feastables was started, ground level, raise capital, hire the CEO. Knight Capital is more fixated on finding a business that's generating cash that maybe is doing five, 10, 15 million dollars a year. And we think we can come in, probably buy a majority stake in that business, roll some creators or a celebrity onto the cap table and expand what that business is doing, or just continue to grow that business. It's very similar to what Churnin does and is doing with Cars and Bids and did with Barstool and Hello Sunshine and all these other businesses.

• 1:15:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they've done that tons of times.

• 1:15:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, a massive opportunity for us to do it as well, but just because we understand this creator ecosystem and just internet pop culture so much better than anyone else. And so that ideally is like why we did Knight Capital. We're not in a hurry to do a deal. I think the economy's been something that scared us a little bit and everyone that did deals in 2022, I think is really regretting a lot of those. And so we're just patiently waiting for what that thing is going to be.

• 1:16:09Sam Parr?

  Well, dude, we appreciate you doing this. You're the man. It's always, I like just hearing like what you're tinkering with. You have a very interesting perspective on things. What do you think, Sean?

• 1:16:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this was fun. And I'm glad, I don't know how well we stuck to our mission, but I think

• 1:16:24Sam Parr?

  It was pretty good.

• 1:16:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Shaan Puri?

  It was pretty good. We'll bleep out every mention because this is the Zero Clout Podcast, Zero Clout Chasing Podcast, and we have a no clout policy. We did not, we did not want to do that.

• 1:16:39Sam Parr?

  Wait, but do we have to use his face on a thumbnail?

• 1:16:41Shaan Puri?

  No, we're gonna blur it out.

• 1:16:43Sam Parr?

  I think we have to put like his face and then Reed's face next to it and blur out Reed's face and the thumbnail is like the man behind the scenes or something ridiculous.

• 1:16:53Speaker 04

  I'll let you guys figure that one out. I mean, there's plenty of things that.

• 1:16:56Sam Parr?

  No, you gotta figure it out. We don't know how to do it. We suck at YouTube.

• 1:16:59Speaker 04

  You guys are killing it. So.

• 1:17:01Sam Parr?

  No, YouTube is, we have way more downloads on, on like the actual podcasts, you know, iTunes and stuff like that. We suck at YouTube.

• 1:17:10Speaker 04

  I mean, I would argue that a listener on iTunes or Spotify is probably way more valuable than a single listener on YouTube in the podcast genre. So I think what you guys are doing is incredible and I would continue to focus on listens across other platforms. I wouldn't like hedge too highly on YouTube at the moment.

• 1:17:26Sam Parr?

  I agree. We've, we've, we like went hard on YouTube for like the last 12 months and now it's like, oh man, actually the podcast number that just steadily grows every single week, whereas YouTube, it's a little, it's a little lumpy.

• 1:17:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:40Shaan Puri?

  I'm the opposite. I love YouTube. I think it's great. I think I just like the comments, I guess.

• 1:17:44Speaker 04

  I love it too, but I do think that I consume your guys' podcasts on Spotify. So.

• 1:17:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I guess that's what you get used to. Once, wherever you consume it, you're like, this is a good place for things. And so, yeah, that's where things go. All right, Reed, thanks for coming on, man. Where should people follow you or find you? Shout out wherever you want people to go.

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  I mean, we spoke a lot about Twitter, so it's just ReedJD on Twitter. And then I probably am the most active on Instagram in terms of like answering messages. So same thing, ReedJD on Instagram. So I appreciate you guys. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:18:16Shaan Puri?

  See ya.